The opportunity, and pain, of local online news

I've always been convinced that local news is where the action (and money) is for online journalism. Low start-up costs, an attentive (but small) audience and relatively low overhead.

The Washington Post reports on the challenges facing Backfence. It's not the only such venture facing such hurdles. American Town Networks, based in Connecticut, had similar troubles.

My sense is that if you try to create a local site and only rely on local residents to post information you're making a mistake. You still need someone to "seed" the site -- someone called an editor or reporter. Sort of the old fashioned way of doing things. There's no reason you won't get a lot of residents contributing but you still need the strong foundation of someone making sure the critical news and events are posted.

Being funny isn't so easy

I've always been a fan of the New Yorker and its cartoons and always thought it would be an easy way to make a living. However, when they started the caption contest at the back of the book I realized how hard it can be. Isn't that always the case -- an end product that is concise, well constructed is often incredibly difficult to achieve.

(Reminds me of a conversation in college when we were all sitting around marveling at how much money was made over such simple things such as Post-It Notes, etc. Someone then challenged the group to come up with an equally simple, and profitable, idea by the end of the night. Suffice to say I'm still thinking.)

Here's a fascinating look at the selection process for New Yorker cartoons from the Washington Post. An excerpt:

Picking cartoons isn't as easy as it looks. "The funniest cartoon is not
necessarily the best cartoon," says Mankoff. "Funnier means that you laugh
harder, and everybody's gonna laugh harder at more aggressive cartoons, more
obscene cartoons. It's a Freudian thing. It gives more relief. But is it a
better joke? To me, better means having more truth in it, having both the humor
and the pain and therefore having more meaning and more, uh, uh . . . " He
searches for a word, then finds it: "poetry."

Rules for reading the newspaper

I won't tell you how many of the seven I do but it's more than one. From Garrison Keillor in Salon.

It seems to me, observing the young in coffee shops, that something is missing
from their lives: the fine art of holding a newspaper. They sit staring at
computer screens, sometimes with wires coming out of their ears, life passing
them by as they drift through MySpace, that encyclopedia of the pathetic, and
check out a video of a dog dancing the Macarena. It is so lumpen, so sad that
nobody has shown them that opening up a newspaper is the key to looking classy
and smart.

Can someone truly be objective?

I grew up thinking that by presenting both sides of a story an author is being objective. The longer I think about it the more I realize that it's not the case. Everyone has a point of view on a subject and even if an author does his best to present both points of view, the reader will come out with his own conclusion. It is also nearly impossible, I contend, for a human being to not introduce his or her bias into a news report. Witness the New York Times which adheres to the highest of journalist standards but is constantly accused of being biased by both sides of the aisle.

Recently I've grown more and more intrigued by The Economist which long ago realized that "point of view journalism" is the wave of the future and is one way to distinguish themselves from the pack. From a recent profile of John Micklethwait, editor of The Economist, in The Independent:

It is unashamedly opinionated and when Rupert Pennant-Rea (editor from 1986 to
1993) described it as a "Friday viewspaper" he was perhaps ahead of his time in
recognising the public appetite for such a forthright product.

Full text of profile here.

Today's New York Times profiles the "new" Time and its decision to present more points of view. Seems the idea is not as new as some people think it is.

Society's need for newspapers

Malcolm Gladwell writes about the Enron scandal and makes an interesting point: that those with the most at stake (investors and Wall Street experts) missed the signs of problems at Enron. However, those with the least at stake financially (newspaper, magazine reporters) uncovered the whole mess.

His observation:

All of which, of course, points out the irony of what’s happening in the newspaper business right now. We are dismantling the institution of newspaper journalism precisely at the moment when it seems to be of greatest social value.

Two points:

1. As long as newspapers/magazines are privately owned by those who wish to make a profit off of them and as long as the people working for them want to get paid they will not exist because of their social value.

2. Malcolm credits the WSJ with breaking the story. I always thought it was Bethany McLean of Fortune (March 5, 2001) when she asked the questions everyone else was afraid to ask: Why was Enron so overpriced?

Keep it local

I've always thought the newspapers that have the greatest chance of surviving the shift in platforms (paper to digital) are the large and the small. The large (NYT, WSJ, FT) are their own institutions and must reads by a small, but influential, group of people. They won't go away.

Small papers (dailies under 100,000 and weeklies) have an equally good chance. With digital platforms where it doesn't cost much to add material (no paper cost) they can cover a small area in incredible detail. The simplest tool -- making sure everyone in town is mentioned.

Danny Westneat of the Seattle Times agrees.
I think intensely local, professionally gathered news is due for a comeback. It's the one thing you can't get anywhere else.

However, if you're in the middle, watch out.

Taking a simple idea and making it complicated

An interesting piece on how professional service firms can do a better job of expressing their most important product -- their ideas.

Besides failing to communicate clearly what they do, poor writing makes firms' prodcuts -- the expertise of their professionals -- appear inferior. Bad writing even plageus professional services firms with the deepest expertise and most effective approaches, making it difficult for prospective clients to see the quality beneath the unattractive packaging.

Don't write Joel Stein

Joel Stein's rant on why he doesn't want to hear from readers.
An excerpt:

A lot of e-mail screeds argue that, in return for the privilege of broadcasting my opinion, I have the responsibility to listen to you. I don't. No more than you have a responsibility to read me. I'm not an elected servant. I'm an arrogant, solipsistic, attention-needy freak who pretends to have an opinion about everything. I don't have time to listen to you. I barely have time to listen to me.

Why the explanation?

Seems odd that the editors of the WSJ devoted an entire section, place space on its editorial page, explaining its new format today, almost an admission of failure. If it takes that much to explain the concept then perhaps it's flawed.

They didn't need to bother. I read the special section first and came away completely confused. But then I read the paper as I normally do and came away quite satisfied, as usually happens.