The whole concept of paying for newspaper content is making its way around the journalism blogosphere again. Except this time it’s also had endorsements from print journalism celebs like Walter Isaacson, Mort Zuckerman and Steve Brill.  For the most part I’ve tried to ignore it all since I feel like I’ve been there, reputed the arguments and fought that battle and won before.  Of course this all stems from the fact that newspapers as we know it are dying and the old hands are pulling out all the stops to save the old way of doing things so they don’t have to change.

At times I’ve really had to admit that I’m not part of the old newspaper tradition and wonder if I’m even part of the new newspaper tradition because I really agree more with what the webbies/techies have had to say about the newspaper industry rather than the newspaper industry itself. For example, Techdirt responds to the claims that google devalues everything (ridicolous!)

This is wrong on so many levels it’s hard to know where to begin. Google doesn’t devalue things it touches. It increases their value by making them easier to find and access. Google increases your audience as a content creator, which is the most important asset you have. It takes a special kind of cluelessness to claim that something that increases your biggest asset “devalues” your business.

The PolySigh blog takes a look at what all reporters and editors know to be the hatchet they carry around in their back pocket– quoting their source verbatim and making them sound like an idiot. It’s common for reporters to clean up quotes by correcting grammar and removing verbal pauses (like uh), but at times reporters decide to let it slip to make a point.

It was common to see reports do this to President George W. Bush when they wanted him to be seen as a bumbling idiot, but PolySigh points out they have recently started including Caroline Kennedy’s repeated “You Knows” in her quotes.  Apparently, Kennedy annoyed the reporters by dismissing one of their questions: “Have you guys ever thought about writing for, like, a woman’s magazine or something?”

Polysigh also looks at an interview with President-elect Obama and compares the quotes in the article to an audio file of the interview.  Even thought Obama is a precise speaker, his quotes had to be cleaned up quite a bit, too.

Here’s a transcription below, with “cleaned-up” material in bold:

It is not clear that, uh, uh, an ongoing, open-ended presence has prompted political change in Iraq either. I mean, the fact of the matter is that we still don’t have an oil law. We still don’t have pro-, provincial elections. Uh, we haven’t dealt with Kirkuk, and the argument for staying is that we haven’t made sufficient political progress. So it, it strikes me that for us to deliver a message of clarity to the Iraqis, to the surrounding, uh, the surrounding countries that we are not looking at a permanent occupation, but we want to partner with you to structure, uh, a, uh, a stable, uh, and uh, secure Iraq — that actually will force the Iraqis to make some decisions that they would not otherwise make.

Within the first week of me moving to Little Rock an argument has broken out over the effectiveness of online media between a local tv reporter, Kristin Fisher, who has started a not necessarily innovative choose your news feature on the nightly news and curmudgeon newspaper columnist, John Brummett.

Print Is Dead!

Brummett started the argument with a couple columns that are syndicated in smaller newspapers throughout Arkansas by the Arkansas News Bureau. The first column challenged Choose Your News directly and the second column made fun of Fisher’s standing as a journalist and took on online media as a whole.

If you’ve read my blog, you’ll understand my position on the whole debate– I really don’t want to get into the middle of it either, since I have just spent the past 11 months living it.  I do believe it’s unfortunate that Brummett has taken such an abusive stand on this issue. You think he would have gotten the idea that print was dying when his very own newspaper collapsed beneath him in 1991.

Morris Interactive is launching a new drupal powered site for their Jacksonville Newspaper and have developed some great new features. My favorite feature extolled by Morris Interactive VP Steve Yelvington allows editors to design new home page and feature page layouts with no html knowledge– that’s right you heard me no html needed!

If you compare that to the Ellington/Django powered templating system that we ran with Scripps Newspapers it is light years ahead. In the Django system you had to not only be html and css proficient but able to sort out it’s python powered templating tags.

Here’s a hilarious promo for the Austin American Statesman newspaper breaking news as they rip TV for being slow about breaking news.

Seth Godin has a great post on his blog about the NY Times struggle to remain profitable (and if the Times is struggling so is everyone else) and some advice about where they missed the boat. He concludes with this point that is really relevant for any business to ask whether they are all about looking back and maintaining their position or moving forward to find their next business model.

I guess it’s about the difference between:

• senior management playing defense, supporting and protecting the status quo and avoiding offending the elders upstairs vs.
• using existing momentum and clout to build assets for the next business.

I admit that maintaining your current business model is important to maintaining profitability, but many times businesses fail to think of the future. Many newspapers owners lived high from their publications high profit margins and failed to reinvested and find the next business model and are suffering the consequences today.

Richard Prince from the Maynard Journalism institute called me last night to ask about commercialappeal.com’s coverage of Isaac Hayes death. He quoted me extensively on our breaking news coverage in his blog/column. It’s about half-way down the page.

We owned the breaking coverage of the Soul Man’s death, but everyone in the newsroom and online just followed the breaking news process we had set-up– from sending out breaking news emails, text messages and putting up our breaking news bar on every page to putting together a video package and writing the story from every angle.

“I was surprised that Time.com comes out in a paper copy”

-Brian Williams, Anchor of the NBC Nightly News (known for his comedy skills on SNL).

I guess Brian is just like me and gets all of his new online, too.

The 15k circulation Shelby Star has developed the Star Car to make provide their reporters with multimedia tools and make their online presence known. The $60,0000 SUV (lower on the page) features GPS tracking, wifi cloud, wifi camera, dash webcams, video cameras, scanners and multiple laptops. For some reason this doesn’t add up to $60k to me.

The Oklahoman newspaper in Oklahoma City, Okla. has reorganized it’s management structure moving Chris Reen, VP of Sales and Marketing, to Executive VP of the Oklahoma Publishing Group overseeing News & Information, Advertising and Marketing, Audience Development and Community Engagement.

“Harmonizing our business, editorial, Web and technical assets is key to our success as the media landscape undergoes unprecedented change and we morph into a more dynamic business,” said Reen.

The former VP of Multimedia, Kelly Fry, will now oversee the News and Information division combining both the newspaper and the newspaper website into a single department focusing on content development for where ever it may be published.