Chris Boese's Weblog

Dan Gillmor gives much-needed perspective on the journ-opoly's real market failures

Link: Dan Gillmor: Journalism monopoly was also a market failure - Advertising - Salon.com.

Dan lays it down tough, but he says some things that really needed saying, that needed amplifying.

I'm still pretty freaked over the general decline of the overall enterprise of public affairs reporting, investigative reporting, civic and civil society reporting and analysis, as these behemoth media monopolies falter like a single-species pine forest hit by the bark beetle.

But Dan is at least reminding us, reminding me, of something I knew, suffered with as the status quo, never quite reconciled myself to as the years rolled by, but found myself increasingly powerless to do anything about it to fight those monopolies, at least until the blog movement and the idea of citizen journalism came along.

Not that the pretty feeble but courageous citizen journalism and non-profit journalism efforts caused the massive monopolies to shiver in their boots. That mild contribution to the monopolies' death is just a thousand cuts, with the IDEA of the real masses, the huge reading publics accessing content for free online. Those readers were fed by an advertising-subsidized content machine, however, a machine created and delivered in an industrial, mindless assembly-line, tape-recorder-journalist-as-low-wage-line-worker model, not with a a critical thinking and analysis (even semantic parsing!) information age model (one could argue the Internet model is SEO-driven, nearly-bot-written content thinly scraped to follow trending topics... but that's a subject for another post!).

But the real death blow is being struck by the hand that fed the monopoly powers: advertisers cutting back in the face of the Great Recession.

A cautionary tale as social media sites and platforms inevitably rise and fall

Link:  FT.com / Reportage - The rise and fall of MySpace.

I've been around the social media block long enough (Geocities, Friendster, Tribe.net, anyone?), and this seems to apply to the seemingly "invincible" search engines as well (WebCrawler, AltaVista?): the one thing that seems as constant as death and taxes online is that the social sphere (the wisdom of crowds or mob rule) is fickle.

You may be up one day, but most surely, a day will come when you will be down (think about it, Blackboard!).

So while I never really got into MySpace, the larger story of the MySpace failure is a cautionary tale for any 800 pound gorilla entertaining dreams of invincible bigness.

This Financial Times article dissects the failures of the early leader dancing on the tensions between interactive communication models and mass media communication models, as News Corp tycoons demanded MySpace scale up to mass media audiences and oblivious mass media behaviors, effectively killing their own golden goose.

But is that what killed the MySpace social ecosystem?

(Note, it is not really dead, but it is acknowledged in this article that its 100M users are no longer contesting Facebook for leadership at 300M users.)

One could argue that as surely as MySpace rose, it would also fall, as surely as a small town church will split into two churches, as surely as Friendster begat Tribe begat MySpace begat Facebook (which will begat ???).

But back when this question of ascendancy between MySpace and Facebook was still in more open contention, I never once doubted Facebook would come out on top (and this wasn't just because MySpace often resembled the old Geocities pages either!).

But people argued with me. And I knew they were wrong, despite their very earnest and rational arguments, proofs, numbers.

It bugs me: How did I know they were wrong? I am wont to reflect on these things. I wouldn't just  cite my online research background in social ecosystems, user experience design work, or some other thing from my resume' (an argument based on authority or expertise, which seems to be a cheat in this instance, since I have never designed a site as successful as MySpace or Facebook).

So truisms and arguments from authority or expertise don't count, at least for this exercise.

So how did I just KNOW? How did all those other 300M users just know? What did we know?

This is neat: Ford named Brand of the Year for social media innovation

Link: Society for New Communications Research Announces 2009 Fellows` Choice Award Winners for Innovator, Visionary, Brand and Humanitarian of the Year | Reuters.

Neat write up below on Ford (I work for Ford at Razorfish).

Society for New Communications Research Announces 2009 Fellows` Choice Award Winners for Innovator, Visionary, Brand and Humanitarian of the Year

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(Business Wire)--The Society for New Communications Research (http://sncr.org), a global nonprofit research and education foundation and think tank focused on the latest developments in new media and communications and their impact on business, media, culture and society, today announced the Society`s Fellows` Choice Award winners for the Visionary of the Year, Innovator of the Year, Brand of the Year and Humanitarian of the Year as part of the SNCR Excellence in New Communications Awards program.

The 2009 SNCR Fellows Choice Award winners are:

* Visionary of the Year: David Plouffe, President Obama`s campaign adviser, for his successful use of social media communications tools and technologies in the 2008 U.S. presidential election campaign strategy

* Innovation of the Year: The Kindle, the popular software and hardware platform developed by Amazon.com subsidiary Lab126 for reading e-books and other digital media

* Brand of the Year: Ford for its innovative use of social media to improve the way the company communicates with its stakeholders

* Humanitarian of the Year: The Iranian Political Bloggers for their courageous use of blogging tools and Twitter to try share their experiences with the world and to try to effect political change in Iran

"The SNCR Fellows have chosen an incredibly impressive variety of individuals and organizations for this year`s award winners. These special award winners have the vision and success to provide a valuable example to others and we are honored to be able to acknowledge them through this awards program," commented Jen McClure, president, SNCR. 

[...]

The Society for New Communications Research is a global nonprofit 501(c)(3) research and education foundation and think tank focused on the advanced study of the latest developments in new media and communications, and their effect ontraditional media and business models, communications, culture and society. SNCR is dedicated to creating a bridge between the academic and theoretical pursuit of these topics and the pragmatic implementation of new media and communications tools and methodologies. The Society`s Fellows include a leading group offuturists, scholars, business leaders, professional communicators, members of the media and technologists from around the globe - all collaborating together on research initiatives, educational offerings, and the establishment ofstandards and best practices. For more information, email us at [email protected] or call +1 408.266.9658.

SNCR

Media: Jen McClure, 650-387-8590 [email protected]

What to think about the CNN.com redesign?

I've been checking out the screenshots and early weekend implementation of the new CNN.com redesign. Several of my journalist and non-journalist friends have been weighing in on links I've posted on Facebook (although my CNN buds have been keeping fairly quiet, as is proper. I did same in public forums when I worked there).

Disclaimer: I was a cyberculture columnist for CNN.com from 2002-2005, where I often had to advocate for certain "bloggish" types of discourse that were not generally permitted on the site because the online common wisdom or ways of knowing (crowd-sourced consensus on cyber-topics, usually) couldn't be traced to some important person quoted as saying "X" (an absolute requirement for CNN.com at the time), or because online "conventional" wisdom didn't necessarily jive with journalistic copyediting standards of "The Row" at that time.

Times have certainly changed, both in the network and with the site's embrace of citizen media (something I was also an early advocate for), and now, in its turn toward the site stylings of online "opinion writing" found at Huffington Post and The Daily Beast, among other blog and news aggregators (more on that below).

For what it's worth, a full archive of my CNN.com columns can be viewed here. I was employed by Turner Broadcasting from 2001 to the end of 2006, when I moved to NYC to take a position at Razorfish, ironically, the company responsible for the CNN.com 2007 redesign (UX and creative). I was not involved in the redesign at either company.

That should cover all necessary disclaimers. All I'm doing here is giving my impressions on the 2009 redesign (largely positive, I'll tell you why), in spite of my friends' initial reactions on Facebook (largely negative, I can speculate why), and what I think may have been lost from what I considered a visually stunning "liquid" (the gray modular look) redesign as proposed by Razorfish and executed by CNN.com in 2007.

What follows is my opinion and my opinion only, and in no way represents the views of any of my employers, past or present.

Rocky Mountain News Postmortem by John Temple, former editor/publisher

Link: TEMPLE TALK: Lessons from the Rocky Mountain News - Text and video of speech delivered at UC Berkeley Media Technology Summit at Google in Silicon Valley.

I couldn't resist pulling some really interesting and insightful quotations from the text of this speech by John Temple at the UC Berkeley Media Technology Summit. I'd noted the earthquake the closing of the Rocky Mountain News sent through the journalism world back when it happened, and this follow-up sort of gives it additional context.

Background on John Temple: (bio pulled from his blog)

"John Temple is the former editor, president and publisher of the Rocky Mountain News, which printed its final edition after almost 150 years on Feb. 27, 2009. Under his leadership, the paper won four Pulitzer Prizes and numerous other national awards for journalistic excellence. Temple also served the E.W. Scripps Co., owner of the Rocky, as vice president/news of the newspaper division."

Here are some links to places you can read or catch the entire speech, online:

Lessons from the Rocky Mountain News - Text and video of speech delivered at UC Berkeley Media Technology Summit at Google in Silicon Valley

The death of the Rocky Mountain News in February rippled around the world. Many want to understand what happened and what we can learn from the loss of Colorado's oldest newspaper.

Today I kicked off the UC Berkeley Media Technology Summit at Googleplex (the company's headquarters) in Silicon Valley.

The following is the text (The link takes you to Scribd, where you can print out the speech. I have also attached it below. I apologize for any inconvenience people have had trying to access my presentation) of my speech. You can also see a video of my presentation (the keynote slides, with my voiceover) at  Vimeo. Here is a link to the keynote slides themselves.

But here are the bits of the speech that jumped out at me (and has been gathering steam around Twitter too, I think). It is a tremendous look at something, a moment, I think, that will be seen as a key turning point in media history. Forgive me for taking the bits out of context (indicated by elipses . . .). Also, all indications of emphasis are mine.

[...]

Recently, when I asked my former colleagues at the paper for reflections on their experience since its closure, Bernie Lincicome, a fine sports columnist, wrote me back: “I feel like the cadaver being asked by the funeral director, how did you like the flowers?” I’m not sure what that makes this talk. Maybe the funeral director being asked to perform his own autopsy and offer guidance from the other side on how to save the lives of others suffering the same malady.

[...]

So some pretty smart people were at the top of the company that owned the Rocky Mountain News. Yet none of that was enough for the Rocky to survive in the Internet era. The Rocky published its final edition on Feb. 27 of this year, the first major paper to shut its doors after the economic crash of the fall of 2008.

On the day the closure was announced, Scripps CEO Rich Boehne told the staff assembled in the newsroom: "You are the model of what a great newspaper should be. It's a tragedy for the industry that you disappear."

[...]

 As one former Scripps executive told me in talking about what has happened to the newspaper industry, words that I think apply to the Rocky, “We had all the advantages and let it slip away. We couldn’t give up the idea that we were newspaper companies.”

Well, Scripps isn’t a newspaper company anymore in what was its biggest market. And today I’m going to walk you through the lessons I think might be taken from its largest paper’s failure. While this is going to be a newspaper-centric talk, I believe you’ll find that the lessons apply broadly across radio, TV, magazines and other media, too.

But before I subject the past to scrutiny, you need to know I don’t exempt myself from criticism. I was the top editorial person for the Rocky’s final 11 years and part of the business leadership team. I bear my own share of responsibility. It’s easy when looking back to see things that might seem obvious to us today, but it was a lot more difficult when we were in the thick of the fight, and most of the revenue growth and almost the total revenue pie came from the main newspaper product.

That said, the first lesson I hope people who care about the future of local news take from the Rocky’s experience is this: Being a “great newspaper” isn’t enough in the Internet era. You have to know what business you’re in. We thought we were in the newspaper business. Working on the Web, you need to think of now and forever. At a newspaper, people largely think about tomorrow. Thinking about tomorrow isn’t enough anymore. Consumers today want services when, where and how they want them, and they want to be able to participate, not just receive.

Is this what happens when too many journalists and copyeditors are laid off?

Link: The Public Editor - How Did This Happen? - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com.

So the story below runs a little something like this: The NYTimes ombudsman (Public Editor) is asked to look into a problem with the Walter Cronkite obituaries that ran in the paper, obits that turned out to be pretty riddled with errors.

The public editor asks: How did this happen? But in asking that question, he came up with a lot of technical answers, while still avoiding the elephant in the room (or rather, missing from the room, the way so many reporters, copyeditors, etc. are now missing from newsrooms across the country).

By CLARK HOYT  Published: August 1, 2009

THE TIMES published an especially embarrassing correction on July 22, fixing seven errors in a single article — an appraisal of Walter Cronkite, the CBS anchorman famed for his meticulous reporting. The newspaper had wrong dates for historic events; gave incorrect information about Cronkite’s work, his colleagues and his program’s ratings; misstated the name of a news agency, and misspelled the name of a satellite.

“Wow,” said Arthur Cooper, a reader from Manhattan. “How did this happen?”

The short answer is that a television critic with a history of errors wrote hastily and failed to double-check her work, and editors who should have been vigilant were not.

But a more nuanced answer is that even a newspaper like The Times, with layers of editing to ensure accuracy, can go off the rails when communication is poor, individuals do not bear down hard enough, and they make assumptions about what others have done. Five editors read the article at different times, but none subjected it to rigorous fact-checking, even after catching two other errors in it. And three editors combined to cause one of the errors themselves.

[...]

We're losing the forest for the trees here. I actually feel sorry for the journalist, at least as she emerges in this story (and I've heard other folks speak up on her behalf on Twitter as a very talented person). I know very little about her, but I feel like I have a sense of her in my mind's eye, because I've worked in newsrooms with others I would describe in the same way she is described in this story.

Yes, she's gotten some great bylines at the most incredible newspaper in the country. She's got a wonderful career that many out-of-work veteran journalists would give their eye-teeth for (and yes, I know many of those out-of-work vets are probably male, cuz it is far easier to pick on error-prone journalists if they are women... the cultural sexist baggage kicks in, just another variation of the same idiotic crap that was spouted in the Senate hearings of Judge Sotomayor, and just as wrong).

So don't lump me in with THAT crowd, as I am not piling on that narrow-minded bandwagon. Doors of opportunity have to open somehow, and there's nothing worse than feeling certain spaces (like prominent journalism jobs) are so exclusive and elite, the only non-smarmy-prep-school-buddy types who get jobs in those places got in with the same odds as winning the lottery.

I know people who work at the New York Times, and I know that is not true. Or that it is and it isn't, because my friends are not smarmy-prep-school-types and they didn't win the lottery, or maybe they did, but it's a pretty easy lottery.  (My jury is out on that score, because I've inadvertently won some lower-level lotteries myself, at least in my own mind)

BUT BY THE SAME TOKEN... I am also owning up to having worked with some ridiculously inexperienced and/or bad journalists, people of both genders, in newsrooms which I thought were better than that.

It's one thing to work with and mentor interns and entry-level folks. It's another thing when people without much journalism experience are promoted REALLY quickly and seem to have an effortless rise to newsroom gatekeeper roles or plumb assignments. It does leave one gasping, especially in an environ of almost constant layoffs of newsroom veterans (who generally happen to have been around long enough to have gotten into more expensive pay grades), not just for the loss of beat knowledge over time, but even knowledge of basic things, like knowing the capitals of states and countries, or times of moon landings, or having enough knowledge of WWII events to place a reporter in the correct setting.

[...]

What Sam Sifton, the culture editor, ruefully called “a disaster, the equivalent of a car crash,” started nearly a month before Cronkite died, when news began circulating that he was gravely ill. On June 19, Alessandra Stanley, a prolific writer much admired by editors for the intellectual heft of her coverage of television, wrote a sum-up of the Cronkite career, to be published after his death.

Stanley said she was writing another article on deadline at the same time and hurriedly produced the appraisal, sending it to her editor with the intention of fact-checking it later. She never did.

“This is my fault,” she said. “There are no excuses.”

In her haste, she said, she looked up the dates for two big stories that Cronkite covered — the assassination of Martin Luther King and the moment Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon — and copied them incorrectly. She wrote that Cronkite stormed the beaches on D-Day when he actually covered the invasion from a B-17 bomber. She never meant that literally, she said. “I didn’t reread it carefully enough to see people would think he was on the sands of Omaha Beach.”

[...]

A telling smackdown for those who blame the "Great Wall" of Journalism for the field's decline

LINK: Andrew Alexander - The Stumbles That Led to an Ethics Blunder - washingtonpost.com.

The upshot of the Washington Post's ongoing influence-peddling (influence for sale) debacle is that some tone-deaf business managers and execs with some kind of distant understanding of journalism walked into this nightmare with their unthinking eyes open, somehow ignoring warnings (or hiding documents that would lead to the warnings) from the editors and beat reporters whose influence was being peddled, at pay-to-play dinners at the publisher's house, no less!

But what if that isn't the story at all?

With the rampant decline of journalism, there has been no lack of voices calling out blame for why newspapers are dying (duh, ad revenue is down in a Great Recession, people!), some of them claiming that the "Great Wall" that was erected in the interest of journalism ethics between a private company's business interests and the editorial integrity of its product was the REASON for the decline, and they've claimed journalists are not doing "enough" to contribute to the bottom line of the company that kept them fed.

That that journalistic integrity actually produced the product being offered for sale (and/or ad-subsidized giveaway) was little remarked upon, except as an object of derision.

They've claimed that journalists are not DOING ENOUGH to be INNOVATIVE in thinking about ways that they can PAIR their work with SALES AND MARKETING opportunities (as if those total sell-out Back to School "editorial" vehicles and their seasonal and non-seasonal ilk are not enough!).

So media critic pundits, many of them online media promoters, sprang up overnight, touting entrepreneurial journalism and more INNOVATION in the "creative" partnerships between the editorial side and the business side as the next big thing, the thing journalists have to be a part of, have to embrace, have to stop saying "No" to, because their always citing the Great Wall, the ethical divide between the reporter's eye and the business interest (always already being undermined, going back 25 years) had become a tired anachronism, something that was an overworn tradition, HOLDING THE BUSINESS INTERESTS BACK.

Oh boo hoo! Those poor business interests. They want to compromise the thing they presume to sell so they can sell it better. Are they just oblivious to the fact that turning their product into pure influence-peddled SHITE also makes it harder to sell? How frakking "innovative" is that?!

[Creative Commons image by Steve Webel]

Well, I could make that point until I'm blue in the face, but I don't have to, because the enlightened publisher and executive (and some editorial) staff at the Washington Post appear to have done it for me.

The greatest scolds as this scandal has unfolded have been some bloggers and many of those these media pundits who are also blaming journalists for not being "entrepreneurial" enough in their thinking about innovation in journalism.

And the scolds are all bandwagon-ish in their disapproval, as if this idea of an "innovation imperative" that would tear down the Great Wall had nothing to do with it. Why isn't anyone pointing out that the WashPo was trying to be "innovative" with their business model?

Probably because the Great Wall still means something, you suppose? Perhaps they would argue that the issue is one of degree. Erode the Great Wall by bits in the name of innovation, but, oh my, this goes too far!

But tell me, how far is too far?

LINK: Andrew Alexander - The Stumbles That Led to an Ethics Blunder - washingtonpost.com.

A Sponsorship Scandal at The Post

By Andrew Alexander
Sunday, July 12, 2009

The Washington Post's ill-fated plan to sell sponsorships of off-the-record "salons" was an ethical lapse of monumental proportions.

Publisher Katharine Weymouth and Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli have now taken full responsibility for what was envisioned as a series of 11 intimate dinners to discuss public policy issues. For a fee of up to $25,000, underwriters were guaranteed a seat at the table with lawmakers, administration officials, think tank experts, business leaders and the heads of associations. Promotional materials said Weymouth, Brauchli and at least one Post reporter would serve as "Hosts and Discussion Leaders" for an evening of spirited but civil dialogue.

I love what Dan Froomkin is laying out here...

Link: Dan Froomkin: Why “playing it safe” is killing American newspapers | Nieman Journalism Lab.

It is outrageous that this man was just let go from the Washington Post, and I am expecting further outrage to continue to roll around the Nets on this topic.

But in the meantime, this series he did for the Nieman Journalism Lab is just pure gold, and I want to think hard about it.

For now, here's just a few quotes that grabbed me from part one (emphasis below is mine).

I hope to add more on this and his other topics in the next few days, including perhaps some reflections on my own journey to these same conclusions in a year that for some reason kept popping up in my mind today: 1989. Geez, was that really 20 years ago? It was when I had my own personal moment of truth about how I would continue to practice journalism in my life, as a quest, a mission, an avocation, nearly a religion, as Froomkin describes in the paragraph I have bolded below.

Series:Dan Froomkin on news’ future

Dan Froomkin: Why “playing it safe” is killing American newspapers

By Dan Froomkin /  May 26  /  8 a.m. 

We’re all in a state of despair these days over our inability to monetize our journalism online the way we’ve been used to doing in print.

[...]

Our reporters and editors are curious, passionate, and voracious discoverers and devourers of information; talented storytellers; and smart people with excellent bullshit detectors. As long as human beings are curious about each other and clamor for trusted information, there’s a place for us out there. The Internet hasn’t changed that. In fact it’s increased the market for what we’ve got: The Internet highly values people who know things, who can find things out, who can distinguish between what’s important and what’s not, who can distinguish between what’s true and what’s not, and who can communicate succinctly and effectively.

But we’re hiding much of our newsrooms’ value behind a terribly anachronistic format: voiceless, incremental news stories that neither get much traffic nor make our sites compelling destinations. While the dispassionate, what-happened-yesterday, inverted-pyramid daily news story still has some marginal utility, it’s mostly a throwback at this point — a relic of a daily product delivered on paper to a geographically limited community. (For instance, it’s the daily delivery cycle of our print product that led us to focus on yesterday’s news. And it’s the focus on maximizing newspaper circulation that drove us to create the notion of “objectivity” — thereby removing opinion and voice from news stories — for fear of alienating any segment of potential subscribers.)

The Internet doesn’t work on a daily schedule. But even more importantly, it abhors the absence of voice. There’s a reason why opinion writing tends to dominate the most-read lists on our “news” sites. Indeed, what we’ve seen is that Internet communities tend to form around voices — informed, passionate, authoritative voices in particular. (No one wants to read a bored blogger, I always say.)

[...]

The right way to reinvent ourselves online would be to do precisely what journalists were put on this green earth to do: Seek the truth, hold the powerful accountable, expose the B.S., explain how things really work, introduce people to each other, and tell compelling stories. And we should do all those things passionately and courageously — not hiding who we are, but rather engaging in a very public expression of our journalistic values.

[...]

Photo by J.D. Lasica used under a Creative Commons license.

Steve Yelvington frames a tale of two audiences (and beatblogging and topics pages)

Link: A tale of two audiences (and beatblogging and topics pages) | yelvington.com.

Great post here, and an interesting frame for thinking about these issues. Not many mention the CNN.com topic pages (which came out with the redesign launched in 2007)... maybe folks aren't thinking about them because they are less well executed (I don't know if they are or are not, this is a newer genre that owes more to blog "carnivals" than anything else), or because they appeared BEFORE all this talk about topic pages caught fire...)

Anyway, it means approaching the informational side of journalism from OUTSIDE the frame of the inverted pyramid and more actually as technical writers. Isn't that interesting?! Summaries that give context. Unbound, decontextualized content that assumes the hypertextual link is the norm, rather than linear thinking and reading and linking. Fascinating!

What I think we may really, finally be seeing is the true modification of journalism and journalistic discourse for the Web medium, rather than doing the horseless carriage jive, the way early TV looked so much like an old time radio program, only with pictures.

Marshall McLuhan would be proud.

A tale of two audiences (and beatblogging and topics pages)

May 18, 2009 - 12:59pm — yelvington

Everybody is different from everybody else, and there are lots of ways to group people. But when looking at the audience of a newspaper website, there's one way that I continue to find compelling -- and troubling.

When we group users by frequency, we get something like this:

Our news websites tend to have a huge reach. This is the cumulative monthly unique-user count that we all like to brag about. It's the number newspapers tout when they claim they've grown total audience when print and web users are combined.

But this big reach is made up mostly of occasional users -- once, twice a month. Many come from search engines. Many aren't in the target market at all. And since advertising requires repetition to be effective, these folks don't constitute a very attractive audience from an economic perspective.

There's a much, much smaller component that's radically different from the big group. These are the loyal users, the people who come not once or twice, but 20, 30, 50 or even hundreds of times a month.

[...]

Many people still read home-delivered print (more than you might think). Print readership isn't directly measurable, but there are plenty of research tools that all report a decline in frequency -- and along with it, engagement with civic life.

On the Web, there's no home delivery -- you have to take an action to visit a website. The results are directly measurable, and painful to look at.

This isn't 1956, but we still typically write like Dwight Eisenhower is president.

That isn't a bad thing for everybody, but it fails for many.

[Heh. Great line!]

For the people in the small "loyal user" circle, it actually works pretty well. News stories tend to report incremental advances in an underlying tale that unfolds slowly, over time. If you're following along, the incremental story makes perfect sense. You might want more depth, more detail, but you won't want to be told what you already know. You won't want the background.

The problem is with the occasional user, for whom the incremental story may seem to be just so much monkey screech.

[...]

The topics page is the piece that offers the greatest opportunity to connect with the big circle.

[...]

Done well, the topics page provides the casual, occasional user with a gentle, almost encyclopedic introduction to the topic (public issue, person, place, thing). But the regular, loyal user benefits too.

Done poorly -- and I've looked recently at some topics pages that would curl my hair, if I had enough left to curl -- a topics page leaves both loyal and occasional users with one of those "WTF" moments.

The biggest dangers come from these sources:

1. 1.  Lack of a synopis that makes sense. Some sites don't even both writing a synopsis. Others seem to have assigned the work to interns from the marketing department.
2. 2.  Misplaced trust in automation. I found a USA Today topics page about the BBC. A bot had assembled it. Every oblique mention of the BBC was churned up. The page made no sense at all. If I want to run a search, I'll go to Google, thank you.
3. 3.  Inflexible formatting. A format or template should be a starting point, not an ending point. If your community has an awesome hip-hop culture, your hip-hop page should be awesome and hip-hop.

Arizona's 'Tucson Citizen' Reporters: Seeking answers to the paper's closure

Link: Our Opinion: Seeking answers? | Editorial.

You know it's bad when things get this grim. The losses of more than five dozen well-paying journalism jobs sort of pale in comparison to what a community loses in the form of its collective memory of itself and its history.

And as The Wire's David Simon has been pointing out to the Senate and to anyone else who will listen (Bill Moyers, Bill Maher), we are about to enter an inglorious boom-time for corruption, from the small town petty kind (how big the automatic kickback for the building permit or zoning change?) to the massive scale Enron- and Maddoff-style fleecing of civil society on a level folks right now probably can't begin to imagine.

Simon is also refreshing for pointing out (as I would also) that this gutting, this hollowing out of the journalistic endeavor began in the late 1980s and reached a kind of height in the flush, 30% corporate journalism profit days of the 1990s, when the corporate coffers were overflowing with carpet-bagger cash, and journalists still faced low salaries and almost constant rounds of layoffs. As they have since. You can set your watch by them.

Apparently the corporate media monopolies have deliberately set out to kill their journalistic audience/community-voice host.

 I've stopped posting on the topic as much because there is really little left to say, beyond rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic or "Thinking the Unthinkable" with Clay Shirky. Once you get there, you can rage, rage against the dying of the light all you want, but journalism as we know it is going going going into that good night.

Maybe I still have a little rage left in me, for the Kabuki Play of public relations material winkingly packaged as "journalism" that the hollowed out remnants of newspapers and other supposedly fourth estate enterprises will become, or perhaps have already become.

Chris Stomps Her Foot and Shakes Fist!

There. I feel better. For about 10 minutes.

Link: Our Opinion: Seeking answers? | Editorial.

Editorial

Our Opinion: Seeking answers?

Published: 05.16.2009

For those of you looking to this space for perspective on the Citizen's demise, for those looking for What It All Means - you are looking in the wrong place.

Excuse us, but we're a little too close to the situation right now.

Do you ask someone how it feels when a relative dies after a long bout with cancer? After all, we knew the end was coming for months.

But here's a revelation: When death comes, even if it's not supposed to be a shock . . . it's still a shock.

[...]

Those of us who have explored Tucson's, uh, challenging employment environment know we won't be making anywhere near the money we make now. Bottom line for Tucson: More than five dozen well-paying jobs lost.

But a newspaper isn't just any company. It's a repository of the city's collective memory and of our aspirations and hopes.

Healthy journalism equates with a vibrant city. A dead paper is analogous to the city's libraries closing - a chilling prospect.

• To all those bloggers and "citizen journalists" who, if you believe the Internet, are this close to reinventing the industry, here's your opportunity.

Now is your chance to cover never-ending board meetings, make Freedom of Information Act requests to dislodge facts from public officials, call sources - you have cultivated sources, right? - and otherwise do what we in our dying industry like to call "reporting."

To do it right, you'll have to work eight to 10 hours a day, five to six days a week.

If it sounds like a job, not a hobby, it is. But don't expect to get paid; apparently, that business model has been discredited.

We're rooting for you. Public officials need vigilant scrutiny if our dollars are to be wisely spent and public policies are to be sane and progressive. So good luck with that.

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