Seattle P-I goes online only

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is moving entirely online. 

This story says it will shut down print production and keep only about 20 staff members who will move to its online-only product. How does a news-gathering organization cover the northwestern U.S., or even a city the size of Seattle, with only 20 people? 

If someone's willing to buy ad space on its web site, how much will they be willing to pay? And if they've got only 20 staffers, what kind of reporting are they going to be able to do? Among the 20 staffers, there would surely be a handful of editors who oversee news gathering, but don't actively engage in it themselves. 

It's not clear whether those 20 staffers also include advertising sales staff, but it sounds like it. How many reporters does that leave? Five or six? Maybe 10?

I hope I'm wrong, but it would seem the quality of coverage would suffer from serious understaffing and lead to a serious decline in online traffic. 

Hearst apparently has some sort of new type of media site in mind for the Post-Intelligencer that would rely heavily on news from city hall and the courts, blogs from residents, columns and photo galleries. Newspapers have been increasingly relying on diversions like amateur neighborhood blogs and photo galleries to jazz up their online product, but I'm not sure how these things fit into the mission of a news-gathering organization. 

Maybe I'm biased, but photo galleries of people's pets dressed in silly costumes don't seem to me to be a compelling reason to visit a newspaper's web site. I also question the value of news digests mixed with opinion in the form of amateur blog posts. 

Let us hope this is not the future of American newspapers. 

Isaacson's modest proposal

A couple of nights ago, on my way out of a convenience store, I noticed the headline "How to Save Your Newspaper: A  Modest Proposal" above an illustration of a fish wrapped in a copy of The New York Times on the cover of the Feb. 16 edition of TIME magazine. 

Being that the news rack was displayed toward the going-out side of customer traffic, near the entrance/exit, I didn't notice it until I had already made my purchases and reached the door. I suspect this has happened to a lot of folks at this particular store. No doubt at many others. I wonder who buys things off a rack you don't see until you're on your way out. 

Having already made my purchases, I pondered whether to pull out my debit card again and buy this magazine. Remembering that TIME also has an online edition, I decided to forgo the purchase and read the article at home, on the computer, for free. 

Ironic as it is, the piece, by former TIME Managing Editor Walter Isaacson, describes how newspapers, and news magazines, have become their own worst enemies by posting their most precious product, their reporting, online and making it available for free. 

It discusses how the only folks who've made money off this model are those who run search engines and news aggregators like Yahoo!, who collect and post links to news stories on their own Web sites. Without having to pay a staff of reporters to bring back the news, they have all the content with none of the cost.

Isaacson argues, and I tend to agree, that when you offer your reporting for free, and rely solely on advertising for revenue, you devalue that reporting and lose sight of your audience. A newsman's audience is readers, not advertisers. Perhaps I'm showing my bias, but while reporting has historically been supported to a degree by advertising, the point at which journalists' work is supported solely by advertising is the point at which they cease to first and foremost serve readers. 

I would also posit that devaluing the part of the product that drives readership discourages advertising. If a publication doesn’t value itself enough to charge readers for content, readers don’t value that content.  If I’m a shop owner, do I really want to pay money to advertise in a publication to which readers have little or no attachment? And one where the editorial content is arguably intended to please advertisers, not subscribers?

In arguing that newspapers and newsmagazines stand up on a three-legged revenue stool of subscriptions, rack sales and advertising, Isaacson correctly notes that a one-legged stool provides little support. 

But in arguing for an online pay-for-content system that would charge in small increments, perhaps by the week, the day or the article, I think he may be walking a somewhat dangerous path -- especially if charging by the article. 

I may be wrong, but it seems to me that the sort of business model that charges per article would encourage inflammatory, outrageous and possibly inaccurate headline writing for the purpose of generating traffic. Under such a system, newspaper owners could single out reporters who produce the most popular stories, identify the characteristics of the headlines drawing readers to those stories, and encourage a style that accentuates whatever characteristic seems to be most popular among content-buyers. 

That's not to say newspapers don't already do that, to a degree, with focus groups, but the burden would be much more immediate and much more direct for reporters to get their individual readership numbers up. Reporters would be encouraged not to produce a product that served the reader in the best, most intellectually honest way, but to attract the most hits to their story. And they would compete against their own colleagues for page views. 

Isaacson argues such a system may bring journalism back to its roots, wherein journalists, serving readers, produce content valuable to their audience. 

My fear, though, is that because attention spans are short, and information has already become so fast and cheap, that expediency is more than ever valued over thoroughness.

Perhaps I'm nostalgic, but I'd rather get it right than first. I think it was probably Peter Jennings who lamented that television news has a bad habit of delivering the latest news, sometimes at the sacrifice of the most important news.

And for the record, I went back to the store the next day and bought the hard copy of the magazine. 

The Inaugural

President-elect Barack Obama takes the oath of office today in Washington, D.C. The event is rife with significance -- historical, political, racial, social and likely economic and military -- and being the 21st Century, most folks with an opinion about its significance have no qualms about sharing that opinion online.

Journalists though, who are traditionally discouraged from announcing opinions -- political or otherwise -- are still grappling with how to navigate the online world and participate fully in social networks where MySpace and Facebook friends routinely discuss political leanings. 

It's one thing for journalists to discuss their opinions in a newsroom, or with a small group of friends, but it's entirely different when that opinion is posted on a social networking site. 

An article on the Poynter Institutes's Web site takes a crack at dissecting the opinions of journalists who have let their leanings be known in the public-private world of Facebook. 

He does not like The Doors

The homeless man who sifts through the Dumpsters outside my apartment found a pile this morning of records someone threw out.

 

Someone in one of the apartment buildings in my neighborhood, apparently expecting he might be by soon, left a couple of bags of clothes next to the container, on the ground. One of the bags had a Macy’s logo, and both seemed to be filled mostly with old blue jeans. Some were black.

After the man, who was wearing blue jeans with a very fashionable white belt , combed through the bag, holding every pair up to his waist to see if it was long enough and separating them by size, began busting open trash bags to see what was inside. Not satisfied, he went to the neighboring trash bin, which put him out of my sight, and found the LPs.

 

Since I moved into this apartment last July, I’ve noticed a handful of vagrants sifting through the containers, seemingly on their way from somewhere, to somewhere else, making their normal rounds. It all seems very routine, and I have to wonder if there are any territorial squabbles that erupt if one man digs around in another’s Dumpster. All of the men seem to take their time and do a thorough job, so I doubt they are on the look-out for competition. And they seem to have no shame about it.

 

The man I saw this morning, is white, about 45-ish, with very grayed but full curly hair. He’s always carrying a backpack and this morning he had a second bag, a black duffel like the kind people carry to the gym.

 

When he found the records, he brought them back over to the side of the first Dumpster where he’d laid his bags. His back was to my kitchen window, which is on the second floor of my building, on the end. From this vantage point I’ve watched the homeless men for the past six months as they rifle through the trash. The curly-haired man put the stack of albums down near the jeans he’d gone through and went back to the other trash bin.

 

After a few minutes, he reappeared and packed up the jeans he wanted and picked up his bags before noticing the pile of records. I’ll probably never know why, but he began pulling each vinyl disc from its paper sleeve in the cardboard album cover and inspecting both sides, I assume looking for scratches. I couldn’t tell what the first record was, but under it in the pile were two Doors albums, “L.A. Woman” and “The Doors.”

 

I watched for a long time as the man eye-balled each record and put it down in a not-at-all-neat pile. After a while, a brunette woman walking a large brown dog approached him and they had a little chat about something or other before she walked off with her dog. The man continued inspecting the records. One of them looked like the Rolling Stones’ greatest-hits record “Hot Rocks” but when I got a clearer view, it wasn’t.

When the man finished looking at the records, he picked up a pile and made room for them in his duffel bag, picked up his things and walked off leaving another pile of records behind on the ground.

 

Several things occurred to me as the man walked away, probably on his way to the next trash bin on his route. It can be assumed that he will do one of two things with the records he took: sell or barter them, or, if he’s not quite as homeless as his foraging would suggest, go home and listen to them.

 

If he plans to sell them, the discards are probably damaged and of little value. This, of course, means that someone in my neighborhood threw out all of their records, some damaged, some not. I don’t buy that. If you have a collection of LPs, you don’t toss out the good with the bad. Perhaps you toss out the bad ones, but not the good ones too. That is, unless you are getting rid of all your records. And who would do that? This leads me to wonder why someone would keep damaged records around. Perhaps they were all scratched.

 

Whether that’s the case, or whether the man is going to listen the ones he left with, it means he simply does not like The Doors.

                                                                 

As I stand at my kitchen window, I can see the unmistakable red and yellow cover of “L.A. Woman” on top of but only partially obscuring the group’s first album.  There are other records scattered around next to the Dumpster, but I can’t make out what they are.

 

I’m struck by this subtle expression of preference, of taste. And I wonder, if the man doesn’t consider two records by one of the 1960s most defining rock groups worth pilfering out of a trash heap, just what the hell was it he did walk off with. 

FRANKENstein's monster

I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggonit I'm a senator!!

Al Franken wins a senate seat and the universe turns upside down. In all likelihood Norm Coleman will continue the fight in Al Gore fashion by appealing to the courts, but the funny man-turned-politician's win in Minnesota puts Democrats one seat closer to a filibuster-proof majority. 

That won't be attainable because of Saxby Chambliss' Georgia win, but it may be enough to cancel the effects of a potential Illinois special election, where the criminally-charged governor has made a thorny appointment to fill Barack Obama's empty seat. 

If Rod's appointment isn't seated -- and it looks like he won't be -- that could set the stage for a special election and the scandal surrounding the governor's pay-to-play schemes could be enough ammunition for the GOP to steal a line from Obama's campaign and demand change. Ironic, ain't it.