Jeff Jarvis has posted an "utter bullshit" spreadsheet (for discussion only, not to be taken literally) outlining how a newsroom might reorganize to save money and focus on its strengths. One of the notable line items was reducing the number of copy editors (subs, for you Brits) from 15 to three. "Make writers edit," he declared.

It is a timely idea in a profession that just loves a three-point "trend." In London, the free sheet City AM is whacking its entire "subediting team." Down under, Australia's Fairfax Media is cutting 40 of 190 subeditors across the group. I'd mention a U.S. example as the third point, but I can't decide which of last week's layoff announcements to cite.

There will be consequences.

The dirty little secret of newspaper journalists is that a lot of them can't write very well. That's by no means universally true, but it's true enough. I was a copy editor for years at the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, where slot chief Vickie Kinney kicked my butt until I learned to be pretty good at it, and at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis. I didn't just write headlines and hook paragraphs. I transformed some real trash into publishable writing, saved my paper and some writers from professional embarrassment, and introduced relatively few errors on my own.

Newspapers historically have been able to support a great deal of specialization. At the Globe we had reporters who literally never set foot in the newsroom. Police reporters were one-third journalist and two-thirds cop. Some had grown up in Ben Hecht's world of "The Front Page," where a reporter burned shoe leather and occasionally called the switchboard: "Sweetheart, give me rewrite!" When computers came along (Teleram Portabubbles, for you technohistory buffs), those reporters suddenly were expected to not only report, but also write, and even type. What showed up in the newsroom's editing system was outright scary, unpublishable.

But as rewrite disappeared, reporters also took on the responsibility of writing. About the same time, editors began taking on responsibilities of the composing room -- a department that doesn't even exist at most newspapers today, but one that was at the heart of newspaper production for generations. Fewer people, fewer hands, less specialization, more responsibility.

And it continues.

If you're studying journalism, you'd better learn to rub your belly and pat your head at the same time, without making any mistakes, because there's not going to be anyone there to save you from your own shortcomings.

Whether you or I like these changes isn't particularly meaningful. The forces acting on the business of journalism are going to rewrite job descriptions, and the luxury of specialization will continue to disappear. Sweetheart, rewrite don't work here any more.

Some copy editors are going to lose their jobs. But so will some reporters.

Because without copy editors, the reporters who are weakest at writing, at attention to detail, at stepping out of their own heads and critically examining their work, are going to be subjected to the harshest editors of all: a readership that today is empowered to talk back.

Every time I'm asked to speak about citizen journalism, I have to spend part of my time explaining why I don't like the term, how "citizens" aren't trying to be "journalists," and how the emerging process may be so different from tradition that most journalists won't even recognize it.

So I like this comment from Stowe Boyd:

I predict a surge in hyperlocal writing and connecting -- I stop short of referring to it as 'news' or 'journalism' -- linked with various aspects of living locally. Since these various threads may not be mutually supportive, they won't add up to anything like the strange combination of things that we have in the modern newspaper, with its funnies, horoscopes, national news, local sports, classifieds, Sunday supplements, food coupons. I believe that hyperlocal = hypersocial and not just news within some zipcode, it will not just be 'about' people, it will be the means through which people connect locally, a social medium, not a news medium.

It's quite possible that we're about to see some more newspapers die.

I know what it's like. In my career I've been present for the deaths of several newspapers.

One was the Metro-East Journal in East St. Louis, Ill., the paper where my dad worked when I was a kid. Its sibling in Champaign-Urbana, a competitor of the paper where I worked at the time, also closed. People lost their jobs. Communities lost a voice.

The next one after that was the St. Louis Evening News, only a month old, where I was news editor. And finally the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, where I also was news editor, collapsed.

I've also been through layoffs on the dotcom side of the world, both as a witness, then later as a victim, at Cox Interactive Media.

I say this to illustrate that I'm under no illusions about the pain and suffering that people are experiencing as a result of the newspaper layoffs sweeping the country. I've seen it and I've lived it.

In many cases I may be able to legitimately point and say, "I told you so," but be clear: I take no joy from this.

I'm under no illusions about the temporary nature of all business undertakings, including the mighty local newspaper.

All things must pass. No one deserves perpetual success. It's something we have to go out and earn every day. When conditions change, we have to change. And there's no doubt that conditions are changing in a big way.

I feel better now. Thank you, Jessica DaSilva. You've restored at least some of my faith in the future.

I had a bad day yesterday: a series of depressing interactions with a few people who reminded me just how narrow-minded, corrosively negative, self-destructive and ultimately hypocritical some newspaper journalists can be.

It didn't help that I'd just had a tooth pulled. By the end of the day I was pretty well soured on the newspaper business.

But today I read this on your blog:

And frankly, I’m kind of sick of all the whining. A lot of journalists have been sitting around lamenting their losses instead of thinking up ways to fix their situation.

I understand that being innovative and adventurous is a scary and vulnerable move because no one really knows what the best way to deal with this, but what are the options? We can’t just let our industry crumble to pieces while we get booted from our jobs and move into cardboard boxes.

When I returned from the meeting, a few people made jokes about me changing my major. I don’t like these jokes, but typically, I casually laugh them off. Today I said, “Oh, it’s staying. I’m not dedicated to the medium so much as I’m dedicated to reporting news. I don’t care about the medium. I care about informing the people.”

It is, indeed, worth fighting for. And a can-do attitude is by far the most powerful ally you can have. Stick to it.

(Props to Jay Rosen for the pointer.)

From Variety comes this report that "the five broadcast nets' average live median age (in other words, not including delayed DVR viewing) was 50 last season." I'd love to know how much of that is due to a shift to Internet browsing, including video of course, and how much of it is a result of the networks driving us away with a barrage of painfully mislabeled "talent" contests mixed with out-of-control commercial clutter.

Either way, it's clear that most of us are taking a more active role in our own video experiences, either selecting when we want to see our preferred entertainment through PVRs, or watching video online. Simon Waldman points out that Youtube is bigger than the entire Internet of 2000 when measured by the amount of traffic it generates. Hulu, a joint venture of NBC Universal and News Corp., seems to be taking off, some networks have videos on their own websites, and of course iTunes is selling videos by the download.

This poses a challenge to those of us who still think of the net as a place driven primarily by the power of words. Clearly I need to get my video camera out of my bag and into my hand.

Well, this is a surprise: Dan Pacheco has just announced he's going to build Printcasting on the Drupal framework. Dan's done great work creating bespoke systems for the Bakersfield Californian. Switching to Drupal is a big step, but one that could help bring more participation in the project and better satisfaction of the Knight foundation's open-source objectives.

Mayhill Fowler, the non-journalist who has broken at least two major campaign stories this season by simply not playing the usual game by the usual rules, reflects on an interview with an Al-Jazeera reporter:

For the first time I realized what is most obvious about the work other OffTheBus correspondents and I do. We are citizens, first. As Americans, moreover, we have the right any time any day any year to step out of our homes to inquire and to investigate. The inclination to do so, which Meena found fascinating, is certainly not exclusively American; but it is quintessentially American. Sitting in the Reuters studio on Times Square, I was proud, most proud, to be a citizen journalist.

Mayhill Fowler: On The Road Again, With Begging Bowl And Stick - Off The Bus on The Huffington Post

It's been a horrible week at quite a few newspapers. At one point I found myself staring at my Twitter updates as if it were a train wreck in progress. Mark Potts has a good summary and this comment:

The whiners complaining about Zell's relatively minor changes in Tribune papers are missing the point that the entire industry is in freefall and needs to change radically.

Recovering Journalist: Death of Almost 1,000 Cuts

The net is all abuzz today about this angry memo from Bill Gates to a list of Microsoft bigwigs back in 2003. It's a classic: Gates tries to buy some Microsoft software, has a terrible user experience, and lets people know exactly what he thinks.

Funny, but here's a challenge. Assign yourself any random task on your newspaper's website, like trying to sell a car or give away a dog or maybe just find the forums. Take notes. And then write a Gates memo. Bet you can do it, with feeling.

After some behind-the-scenes testing on newspaper content and newspaper blogs, I've added OpenCalais tagging to my blog to see how it does in a live setting. 

OpenCalais is a free service of Thompson Reuters that scans unstructured (text) content and extracts named entities (people, places things), facts, and events. This can be used to support the so-called "semantic Web," leading eventually to smart applications that do our research for us.

The OpenCalais project has released quite a bit of supporting software, including a Drupal module that I'm using.

The immediate result is that the number of tags on my blog postings is going to grow rapidly. One of the things I want to understand better is how those tags can be used to generate smart "related items" links on websites.

With Semantic Journalism: Ideas, French media blogger Nicolas Kayser-Bril begins a series of posts in which he examines tools and ponders the future of semantic technologies applied to journalism. It looks to be well worth following, even if you're skeptical about the ability of machines to "understand" content.

A post from Howard Owens reminds me that a lot of people probably don't know how easy it is to get circulation information about U.S. newspapers. For papers that are members of the Audit Bureau of Circulation, basic numbers and some deeper data is available online in a searchable format.

I find the Reader Profile information useful in illustrating some of the demographic weaknesses facing print. Reader Profiles are the result of surveys commissioned voluntarily by the newspapers, conducted by third parties such as Scarborough Research, and audited by ABC. They attempt to measure readership, not circulation, and the information is broken down by a number of demographic measures.

Dig in.

I had dinner Friday night with Dean Mills and several other folks from the University of Missouri J-School. Not one word was said about the death of print, the crushing debt loads taken on by big publishing companies, or other depressing topics that tend to dominate journalism conversations (and blogs) these days.

It was an upbeat conversation about exciting possibilities, all hope and energy and yes, optimism. Mizzou has all sorts of fascinating projects in the works.

In the background, though, I was thinking about the  Columbia Missourian, for 99 years the keystone of the hands-on Missouri Method of teaching journalism.

The Missourian isn't a school newspaper -- it's a serious, professional, commercial daily newspaper that's operated as a teaching laboratory.

As the Number Two newspaper in a small town, it's having big financial difficulties. To be honest, hardly anybody on the "town" side of the "town vs. gown" divide reads it, and I don't think it's doing all that well on the "gown" side, either. You can't sell advertising in a paper that doesn't reach an audience that advertisers need.

Losses at the Missourian are running well over a million dollars a year, leading to talk of cutting the Missourian back from its daily publication cycle and focusing more on the Web.

Last year it spent $1.67 million on print-related expenses (composition, printing, mailroom, circulation) and only $93,722 on Web expenses, so it's not exactly been starving the past to feed the future. The daily paper reaches 7,400; a weekend free sheet reaches 43,000 homes, and the Web product claims 100,000 unique users. Think about that.

Maybe the Missourian becomes a Web-focused operation with a weekly print product, or more likely, an array of multiple targeted products. It already has a weekly free entertainment tab and a Hispanic-targeted product.

Or perhaps it might  buddy up with the competition: Hank Waters' Columbia Tribune, the "town" paper.

I've known for awhile that these ideas were simmering in Mizzou's pot. The path forward might seem pretty straightforward and obvious. But it's not simple, because of a risk of a potential backlash from donors.

Make no mistake about it: Higher education lives or dies on the largesse of donors, mostly alumni. The ones with the most to give tend to be older, which right now puts them on the opposite side of the digital revolution. Many fondly remember their college years on the staff of the Missourian, which until recently even operated its own presses.

These ideas about radically changing the Missourian are now in the open, and some people don't like it one bit. Dalton Wright, publisher of a small daily in Lebanon, Mo., and a member of the Missourian's board, already has been quoted: "I think Walter Williams would be turning over in his grave."

But I wonder how Williams really would react. What would make him roll over in his grave?

Walter Williams, for those who don't know the story, was the guy who founded both the Missouri School of Journalism and the Missourian, so you might think he'd have a sentimental attachment to the past.

But Williams was a change agent. He was a guy with a high school education who talked the Missouri General Assembly into creating the world's first journalism school at a time when reporters served trade apprenticeships rather than getting formal educations. Williams was a guy who never attended college, yet got himself appointed dean of that radical new school, then rose to become president of the University of Missouri.

It's easy when you walk through an ivy-covered campus, looking at statues and portraits of great men and women who were founders and builders and creators of empires, to drift into nostalgic fantasies about tradition and past glories. We all do it.

But those people in the portraits were pioneers, risk-takers, change agents. We don't honor their memory by clinging to what they built, but rather by understanding why they did what they did and finding new ways to apply those principles in modern contexts. Embracing the future requires learning from the past, but also letting go of it.

We need our universities to not merely churn out qualified job applicants. We need universities to take a constructive role in research, analysis, ideation and experimentation. We need help to figure out the new forms of journalism -- and the business models to support it -- that will serve society in the digital future. I hope potential donors will see and honor the needs of the future and not get stuck on preservation of the past.

At lunch Saturday, Gary Kebbel told me about a new Knight Foundation project:  a five-year, $24 million challenge grant program targeted at local information needs.

It's not handing money to projects to save newspapers. It's looking to persuade local community foundations to adopt the cause of "creative uses of media and technology to help keep communities informed and their citizens engaged."

It's open-ended and forward-looking, and likely to lead to some projects that many might not recognize as "journalism." But isn't keeping "communities informed and citizens engaged" what drew people like Walter Williams into newspapering in the first place?

From Wired.com:

Romenesko quickly found himself living a lonely-guy existence. "I was basically stuck in my apartment," he says. “I would find myself at 3 or 4 in the afternoon, still in my bathrobe." This way of life grew from his hunch about the future of social interaction. "The first time I really sampled the internet, in 1989," he says, "I knew this would be a culture-changing force, and I wanted to be part of it."

Romenesko and the Dawning of Gossip Journalism

I first met Jim Romenesko when we were both on some sort of a discussion panel at the University of Minnesota back when he was a reporter for the St. Paul Pioneer Press and I was online editor at the Enemy Newspaper. He was wearing clothes back then, but of course it was Minnesota so we all wore extra.

Tags: poynter, romenesko

We should know by now that professional sporting events are not sporting events at all, but rather commercial entertainment masquerading as athletics. Sadly, the same can be said of the Olympics, which have become dominated by commercial interests that dwarf the actual sports.

Here's one example. Staci Kramer points to a Sports Business Journal report that says:

"Credentialing rules issued through several national governing bodies for upcoming Olympic trials require that all audio and video files contain a link back to nbcolympics.com. The rules also heavily restrict all forms of multimedia in and around the fields of play, including athlete interviews, and require that all audio and video be removed from media sites by Aug. 7, the day before the start of the Beijing Olympics."

Tags: sports, new media, internet, NBC

If there's one idea that's stuck in my head after the Future of Journalism conference at Harvard's Shorenstein Center, it's the notion of elitism.

Elitism is high political insult these days, if you believe what you hear from the babbleonians on cable TV's "news" channels. Various anti-Obama forces are painting him as elitist. Personally I'd much rather have a smart self-made elitist as president than an American aristocrat who's as dumb as a bucket of hair. Does that make me an elitist? Is elitism such a bad thing?

(For the record, I too went to Harvard. Three times! But I was just visiting!)

But I'm specificially interested in how elitism applies to journalism. Once again, I hear the prescient voice of Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson: "...a print-only newsletter for the elite and the elderly."

At the conference, Phil Meyer described one evolutionary path for newspaper journalism that leads to a specialized focus on the elite -- the layer of society that actually follows and cares about civic news. Such a niche might be narrow, and an elitist publication with an elitist business model might be more like a magazine, publishing infrequently, presenting thoughtful long-form journalism, but powerful nonetheless if you follow Meyer's theory that influence is a primary product of newspapers.

Yet it's striking that this is opposite to the course being taken today by struggling metropolitan newspapers as their debt-laden owners desperately seek for a way to stay afloat.

Let's watch as the Tribune Company recasts its sagging metros. My prediction is that they'll go for shorter, punchier, more populist themes, aping USA Today circa 1982 in an attempt to hold onto the one-size-fits-all business of the past. Faced with a fork in the road, they'll choose not to emulate the Economist. And they're going to be savaged by critics who will say they're "dumbing down" the newspaper.

Is that the right path for a marketplace that's shattering into a thousand specialties? Is it the right path for print, a medium that's optimized for discovery yet handicapped by always being 18 hours behind the times? I suspect it may lead to short-term gains only, if at all. The marketplace will be the judge, and it can be far more cruel than media critics.

I don't mean to bury print as a medium for populism. The free subway tabs show that it still works -- quite well, in fact -- for short attention span journalism. And "one product for everyone" still works if you zero in on a geographic niche with hyperlocal journalism.

But I think the clock is running out for super-regional, super-general newspapers.

Tags: newspapers, elitism, journalism

At dinner the other night in Cambridge several of my Mizzou buds were gushing about Flock, the "social browser" built on the Firefox platform. I played around with Flock in a very early state when one of the Drupal developers got me a pass to the private test, but I had pretty much forgotten about it.

So I've added the beta Flock 2 with Firefox 3 inside to my browser collection. It aims to be a Bloomberg terminal for modern life, integrating all your social networks, media sharing sites and news sources into a fairly seamless. This is beyond "Daily Me." It's up-to-the-second "Me and My Tribe." And it aims to hide all of the geekish details and buzzwords like "RSS" and "Atom." I can post directly to my blog through Drupal's XML-RPC interface, and Flock figured that out for me without asking for anything more than my blog's address and my username/password. Slick.

The jury is still out on whether I really want a Bloomberg terminal for my life. My brain often asks me to turn off all the multitasking. We'll see how this works out.
Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: flock, browser, social networking

Bob Cox has written a clear dissection of the AP vs. Cadenhead uproar that everyone should read carefully. It's not the case of Evil Giant versus the Blogosphere that some of the more hysterical responses have assumed. More like bumbling giant versus bumbling aggregator.

I don't "liveblog" very well, but at this week's "The Future of Journalism" conference at the Joan Shorenstein Center at Harvard University, I will be posting a few items today and tomorrow. I'm on a "citizen journalism" panel in the afternoon.

The first session focused on "working journalists and the changing news environment" included some provocative thoughts, particularly from Carl Sessions Stepp of the University of Maryland and Phil Meyer of the University of North Carolina.

Stepp argues that individuals matter, pointing to a history of innovation from Benjamin Day and William Randolph Hearst (who revolutionized the business model of journalism) up through Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg (who invented Facebook and is revolutionizing the way people connect with each other -- and information). And he says journalism needs entrepreneurial action from individuals.

Meyer painted a picture of professional journalism evolving toward an exclusive, specialized focus on serving the "elites of the community," with printed newspapers surviving in a form more similar to that of a magazine, and perhaps with lower frequency.

I think the obvious problem is that if you build an elitist journalism model, it's going to have to be coupled with an elitist business model. That's not going to work if your company owes a few billion dollars to an assortment of angry bondholders, bankers and stockholders.

Meyer has an answer for that, though: "The future of journalism is going to lie with 'bad competitors.'" In business school language a bad competitor is someone who doesn't fit the normal profit-driven model. In other words, elitist journalism will belong to those who care more about public service (or perhaps influence, depending on your point of view) than about profit.

You can already see this unfolding in some cities, and I'd point especially to the online-only Minnpost, an elitist effort if there ever was one.

If Minnpost survives, it will be on the largesse of contributors, both financial and in-kind, whose motivations are not purely commercial. In other words, "bad competitors." Foundations and individuals who pitch in, and especially in the case of Minnpost, some prematurely retired professional journalists who are willing to work for a pittance that they never would have accepted in the old, capitalist, pre-elitist era.