BuzzMachine

BlogNetNews pointed me to the curmudgeonly ending way, way down in Jody Rosen’s rather obsessive dogging of some freesheet hack’s gross acts of plagiarism:

But perhaps the Bulletin is merely on-trend—or even ahead of its time. The Drudge Report, the Huffington Post, and Real Clear Politics have made names and money by sifting through RSS feeds; Tina Brown and Barry Diller are preparing the launch of their own news aggregator. Mike Ladyman and company may simply be bringing guerilla-style 21st-century content aggregation to 20th-century print media: publishing the Napster of newspapers.

So he equates wholesale plagiarism with linking. Whew, that’s somebody who sure doesn’t understand the link economy.

Jody, I confess to a brazen act of theft: I linked to you. Twice. Shame on me.

But here’s curmudgeonliness with a reverse twist Jonathan Isaby, outgoing political diarist of the Telegraph, complains to the Press Gazette that all this constant demand for news, news, news from the “ulta-pressured environment” of the 24-hour, multimedia newsroom means reporters just don’t have time to sift through the record of Parliament and find news. So his response: He’s leaving to go work for … a blog.

: UPDATE: I got email from Jody Rosen saying that he was being ironic, making a joke about the paper’s “unorthodox ‘aggregation’ practices.” Hmmm. I didn’t hear it. One of us needs to adjust our ironometer. I’ll tweak mine up a bit. And I’m relieved that Slate won’t be launching a jihad on Google News. I also got Rosen’s gender wrong, which really makes me look like the loser. So I’ll skulk off now, growling like a curmudgeon.

At the Star-Ledger’s new LedgerLive daily news show from the newsroom (unofficial motto: It’s not TV, damnit), we are watching a big, old paper fight for its survival as it announced buyouts and a possible sale. And the grand irony is that we’re watching this even as the paper reinvents itself in a new medium: online video. The new show and the momentous news about the newspaper came in the same week.

I was in the newsroom on Friday to watch LedgerLive being broadcast and I heard the staff talking about the paper’s and their future, of course. Some of these folks are going to be, well, independent in the fall if they elect to take the buyout and it comes off as announced.

But what struck me listening to them is that they are not prepared for that independent life. I was looking at this from the perspective of being both a former newspaperman who did find a new life in the academe and elsewhere and from the perspective of now being a journalism educator. It is vital that we prepare journalists for this new and independent life or we will lose their journalism. Preparation, to me, means both training - it’s a great thing that Ledger print people are making video in the Rosenblum Method - and setting up an infrastructure to help them create sustainable journalistic enterprises if at all possible. The first factor is why I’m trying to establish a continuing education program for professionals at CUNY. The second is why I’m holding a summit for new business models for news there. That’s my perspective.

I thought the journalists there would benefit from hearing from someone who found life after print and so I suggested to the Ledger’s digiczar, John Hassell, that they get hyperlocal postergirl Debbie Galant to make a video for an upcoming episode of LedgerLive. It didn’t turn out exactly as I’d predicted but it did turn out the start of an entertaining discussion that captures the life-and-death questions journalists across the country are facing now.

Debbie’s message aired on Tuesday from her (very nice) garden in metaphorical PJs:

On today’s LedgerLive, reporter Carol Ann Campbell responded in her PJs:

Unfortunately, this reprises an us-v-them, pro-v-am rivalry. Fine. Let’s get that out of our system.

And then I’ll challenge Deb to come back and now share her secrets with her still-ink-stained peers: How do you find life after print, Deb? What would you advise a print journalist in the post-print era to do? And I’ll challenge Carol to imagine a new world where she might operate independently. It’s hard but it may be very necessary.

Steve Smith, editor of the Spokesman-Review, writes an eloquent elegy for the newspaperman and his myth.

Something is coming, some turn in the media universe, a turn in the future of my newspaper. A turn that will mean the end of me, of us. There will be reporters. Editors. Something called online producers and multi-media coordinators. Mojos. Slojos and Nojos. Bloggers, froggers and twitters.

But there won’t be newspapermen. At 58, I am among the last of a dying race.

And what a race it was. An American archetype.

He goes on to recall the myth of the newsroom, a myth that attracted me, too: tough guys, bad dressers, smokers, drinkers, schmoozers, crusaders on a Hollywood set with a typewriter soundtrack. Ah, the romance of it.

Oh, the danger of it. I think it is the tug of that romance that has held newspapermen back from changing, from seeing new opportunities in new challenges, from realizing that they weren’t about the myth but had a job to do.

So as much as I love what Smith wrote and how he wrote it, I disagree with him at the end when he says:

No instrument will ever serve the public interest so relentlessly as the daily newspaper. New media will successfully distribute data and information. “Communities of interest” will develop around niche products. And while print newspapers will survive to serve a small, elite audience, they never again will serve the larger geographic communities that gave them life and purpose. Democracy will have to find a new public square.

No instrument? Quite to the contrary, the instrument we have in the internet is quite promising. Its potential is not yet realized and may not be realized but it is there. What we need now are not nostalgic romantics but brave doers — aren’t newspapermen supposed to be brave? — who will recognize that potential.

Democracy has found its new public square. We’re in it. The question is: What is our role there? How can we help what happens there? What do we bring to the square?

In the fits of wishful thinking we hear about the fate of newspapers, one of the most common is that papers will go private and be taken off that mean and nasty stock market. But there are no white knights. Read this story about Avista Partners, buyer of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, trying to dump the goose before it’s cooked.

But observers said the effort by lenders to sell their debt could shift the strategic landscape for the highly leveraged Star Tribune. In the first place, it could be a sign that those lenders no longer believe the Star Tribune will be profitable enough to service their debt, despite all the cuts that have taken place at the newspaper in recent months.

Investors seem to share those doubts, bidding only 53 cents on the dollar this month for shares of the senior portions of that debt.

Observers also said that despite Lazard’s attempt to find a buyer locally, the likeliest candidates to buy the debt are distressed-debt hedge funds, whose traditional focus on returns could trigger demands for even faster cost-cutting at the newspaper.

The debt taken on in going private will kill some newspapers living under it. Journalism has to survive on the marketplace from sustainable enterprises and those enterprises must reinvent themselves. Or this will happen:

what is this?

Will a daily American newspaper (circulation 50k+) fold this year?

% chance over time

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Hubdub - The News Prediction Game

: SEE ALSO: Alan Mutter on the Strib. He also reports that Journal Register it technically defaulting.

My Guardian column this week reprises the discussion from my post about Google as the new pressroom and then adds some thoughts about news organizations sharing open-source platforms. Snippet:

The Guardian is spending a few years building its own platform, but can every news organisation afford this? No. And will technology ultimately differentiate one news provider from another? I doubt it. So why not share a platform with many sites, sources and voices? In the UK, I have suggested - naively, I know - that the BBC should provide that platform for all news efforts (professional and amateur). Isn’t that a proper definition of public-service publishing?

A shared platform for news organisations wouldn’t be anticompetitive: it would be pro-efficiency. If any paper, station or site could pluck software from the cloud and freely use and adapt it to perform essential functions then it could concentrate its resources on what matters - journalism.

At the Guardian’s seminar, I asked what the paper is if not a manufacturer, distributor or technology company. “Fundamentally, it’s courageous, independent, liberal journalism,” was one editor’s reply. “That’s the essence of the Guardian, or should be.”

Exactly right. But this also treats the Guardian as a product and I asked - in the spirit of Roussel’s effort to reimagine a paper - whether online it should be something else, with a different relationship to its public: a platform, a network, a community, a collaboration. Should the Guardian strive to be the world’s leading liberal voice - or voices?

Thanks again to Edward Roussel and Bob Wyman for inspiring the discussion.

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Yesterday, I was on a panel with Terry Heaton at the Public Radio News Directors’ annual confab in Washington. Topic: blogging. Terry and I were almost through with opening tap dances when a hotheaded curmudgeon in the third row interrupted — which is fine; we like conversation — to go on the attack and save the world from these horrible blog people. He spat out all the usual lines, including how terribly busy he is being a news director (his italics) and how this is such a nonsense and a bother. My favorite sputtering: “I have a job. Do you have jobs?”

To which the proper response should have been, “Go fug yourself.” But I didn’t say that. Nor did I complain about how rude it was of him to attack us when we took two days out of our lives and came to Washington — for free — to talk about this topic at their invitation. I’m tough. I can take it. This is hardly the first time I’ve heard everything he had to say (but he seemed so proud, as if he’d just thought it up himself; the only thing he didn’t say was that he didn’t want a citizen surgeon, either).

However, I also did not patiently respond to all his cliches. I have decided I’m not going to waste my time anymore with lazy, rude, self-important, self-delusional, intellectually dishonest, closed-minded curmudgeons who bark against the full moon of change. It has all been said before. I see no reason to waste my time, nor that of everyone else in the room. My new policy has been that I’m going to fight curmudgeonliness with curmudgeonliness. I told this fool that f he didn’t want to see the opportunities to do things in new ways, fine.

And then we proceeded with a very nice discussion of practical questions about blogging in news organizations, a discussion that continued later in the day. Everyone else I heard wanted to explore these new opportunities and had plenty of questions and doubts to deal with — as well they should — as well as experience to share; they welcomed change or at least know they couldn’t scare it away.

Meanwhile, the curmudgeon acted like a child sent to the corner and refused to look forward at the panel for the rest of the event. My goal was to get us past the growling as soon as possible and onto a substantive discussion. That is, I think, how to deal with curmudgeons. You can always find reasons not to do things. Then fine, don’t do them. Far more interesting and useful is to explore what might happen if you do them.

I did the same thing a week ago when I was called by a couple of consultants and one of them issued the usual yes-buts, such as, “Well, have you looked at the home page of YouTube, huh?” I said he was wasting my time — especially since I was, again, talking for free.

You see, the problem with curmudgeons and complainers is that its so easy for them hijack any discussion. For not to deal with their very grave concerns is to make you look careless. That’s the rhetorical trick: “You could be wrong, it could go wrong, answer me that!” And if you don’t? “Aha!”

Well, the hour is far too late and the state of the industry far, far too desperate to waste time with these sideshows. They had their time and the objections needed to be addressed in that time. But I haven’t heard fresh objections in a few years. What I want to hear instead is fresh ideas; we must have more of those.

So my advice is to set the ground rules for events and conversations such as these and stick to them. It might have helped the recent Australian-American Future of Media Summit that apparently descended into curmudgeonliness and “endless bloody whinging. Whinging about how journalism has standards and bloggers are all ‘just’ writing whatever they think.” Stilgherrian complains and then journalist Jonathan Este complains about the complaining. And then here’s one more. [links via a Jay Rosen tweet].

What a waste of time, of which there is so little to waste.

: LATER: Jay Rosen declared the war over in 2005 but he tweets: “I’ve since realized that they are each other’s ideal ‘other.’”

: MORE: I’m bringing this exchange with Jay Rosen out from the comments. He wrote:

Personally, I think the campaign to discredit and marginalize the curmudgeons is going just fine; and I do not intend to stop writing about them. As I’ve said before, the curmudgeon is a newsroom type, and the newsroom’s romance with this type has been a disaster. It is within the power of any living breathing thinking journalist not to conform to this type, not to “be” a curmudgeon. But when people do step into that role and go high curmudgeon on you, the performance should be discredited in any way that works. Could be smiling politely and reciting facts, or arguing back, or ignoring the provocation and moving on.

You have to persist, not only through the encounters like the one you write about here, but also through all the mini-lectures from all the well-meaning and usually quite intelligent, informed people who do the he said she said can’t we all get along the truth must be somewhere in the middle what extremists on both sides overlook we need to be more civil can’t we get beyond this now what a tired debate thing at you.

And I responded:

But, Jay, I’m not sure I do have to persist.

In campaign terms, Obama stopped arguing with Clinton when he knew she was vanquished. The question is: are the curmudgeon’s vanquished? Well, not while they’re in charge, perhaps. But they’re in charge of sinking ships and they’re helping sink them.

I suppose what you’re saying is that we should — we even have a duty to — grab their hands off the wheel and save the boat. What I’m saying is that I’m not at all sure that is worth the time and effort (and frustration) anymore.

Personally, this is why I left the corporation and went to teach and why I started a class in entrepreneurial journalism — to effect change outside these curmudgeon-run organizations. I also talk with and help organizations that are past the rule of the curmudgeons (starting with the Guardian). I find that more productive and ultimately helpful to the cause we’re both trying to serve than still taking the time to deal with the curmudgeons.

No, I think the time has come to abandon them to die. I’ll turn the hose and its precious water away from them to plants, new or old, that have a chance to survive. It’s triage time. Curmudgeons get tags on their toes.

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Jay Rosen has been worrying about curmudgeons. I’ve developed a different attitude. I try to just ignore them and if I can’t, I yell at them. The other day, I was on the phone with a few consultants who were getting free advice, gladly given, but when I heard the fourth curmudgeons’ cry — this one: “Well, look at what’s on the home page of YouTube” — I finally had it and replied: You’re wasting my time. If you use that as your excuse to ignore the power and potential of YouTube and video then that’s your fault. Grrr. I do believe that the day of the curmudgeons is over. Their stewardship of the future has failed. Get out of the way.

But curmudgeons still do damage, of course. Vickey Williams at Medill’s Readership Institute says the force out young people, who take their new ways and innovations with them.

My work on changing culture in newsrooms shows that young journalists intend to leave because the pace of change is too slow. (Report here). They are turned off by the tendency of veteran journalists to argue down new ideas, cling to old ways, and avoid risks. As Readership Institute research has shown, those are outcomes of newspaper people’s tendencies to be oppositional, perfectionist and conventional.

I’ve seen the generational friction play out dozens of times as younger voices get shut down by veterans who fall back on ingrained behaviors. In one case, younger staff worked for weeks to develop and launch a blog on the paper’s Web site with a youthful perspective on the local scene. At the next staff meeting, most veterans said they hadn’t noticed and a few admitted never having looked at the paper’s Web site at all.

I’ll quibble on one point: It’s not about age. I’ve also seen plenty of young people who, having arrived in the castle, want to pull up the draw bridge behind them. I know lots of fellow graybeards who are eager bomb-throwers. I will also disagree with some of her advice, telling the veterans to help young people: “Offer cues on things like the importance of appropriate dress and that one well-considered memo can be more valuable than numerous emails.” You wouldn’t say that at Google.

I agree heartily with Williams that these institutions should teach innovators — I’ll call them that instead of young people — business “so they can make the business case for their ideas.” That’s why I teach entrepreneurial journalism. But I shuddered at this: “Engage them in meaningful ways — in problem-solving sessions, cross-departmental task forces, high-profile projects, post-mortems.” Those are the places where ideas go to die. Maybe instead they should be given the rope and resources to start new businesses.

Williams’ overall point is right and important: Curmudgeons do damage by killing change and those who bring it.

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In a comment on Ryan Sholin’s blog, Howard Owens said that when the economy comes back (God, Fannie Mae, and OPEC willing) so will newspaper revenue. I agree. But I was just thinking that I fear this may lull some companies into thinking they don’t have to change. (And for the record, Howard and Ryan’s company Gatehouse, whose stock is suffering right now, is nonetheless making lots of changes thanks to the efforts of those two guys.) So I decided to challenge Howard and all of you to a wager, which I just put up on Hubdub. Do you think a daily American newspaper (circulation 50K+) will fold this year?

what is this?

Will a daily American newspaper (circulation 50+) fold this year?

% chance over time

Get this widget

Hubdub - The News Prediction Game

(For those seeing this as it starts, the line starts at 75 percent likelihood because that’s what I said. I’m now eager to see the predictive wisdom of the crowd: you.)

[Full disclosure: I am an adviser to Hubdub and I work with companies that do business with Gatehouse.]

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The other day (and again in my upcoming Guardian column) I quoted Telegraph digital head Edward Roussel speculating about shifting his paper’s platforms — business, sales, distribution — to Google.

Now here’s Paul Cheesbrough, the CIO of the Telegraph Media Group, making a first step in that direction. He tells CIO that he’s not updating Microsoft Office licenses and has opened up Google Apps for the entire newsroom.

“[As a pilot] we put 10 per cent of our 1400 user seat estate and allowed them to use Google Apps alongside their Office and Exchange infrastructure. Overwhelmingly, the feedback was positive and there would have been uproar if we had said we were turning it off. We were faced with the decision of whether we pursued the same [Microsoft] path and paid the price for that or put more and more internal solutions in the cloud.

“We made a conscious decision not to refresh any of [the Microsoft infrastructure]. We’re not going to remove it but we won’t upgrade it. . . . Google Apps is good enough and rich enough for us to do what we need to do. Collaboration has been very powerful [in Google Apps] and as people use Google Mail and Calendar they’ll naturally stray to use Google Docs. . . .

I think it might be time to sell my Microsoft stock.

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Alan Mutter runs the numbers to see which newspaper companies could be taken private and Mark Potts fears they could be taken private by private-equity blood/cash-suckers. A few examples: Mutter says the Times Company would need to borrow $2 billion to go private, Gannett $4.5 billion, and McClatchy a K-Mart flashing blue-light special of only $467 million.

But what are you buying when you buy a newspaper? And in a buy-or-build debate, which is the better bet? And if you just wait, will some of the giants just topple, leaving holes in the ground that’d be easier to fill from scratch?

Well, to start with, you’re buying cash flow, but that is only going to diminish and as too many private buyers of newspapers are finding, it’s getting tougher and tougher to cover debt expenses. You’re buying physical plants but — unlike, say, retail or fast food — they tend not to be in desirable areas. You’re buying union agreements; whoopie. You’re buying huge physical costs: presses, trucks, and other fast-depreciating assets. You’re buying shut-down costs galore.

Oh, but why be so gloomy? You’re also buying advertiser relationships, but those tend to be with the diminishing arenas of retail, jobs, auto, and homes — while Google is grabbing the growth by finally serving the mass of underserved small advertisers… and you’re not buying any expertise in how to compete. You’re buying reader relationships, but that, too, is shrinking and after witnessing the shrug that has met the killing of newspaper sections, one wonders how firm that relationship is. You’re buying a newsroom and though it has expertise in the locale, it is generally not prepared for the future and getting it retrained is a cost and a risk (lots of buyout expense there). And you’re buying a brand, but I fear that most of the equity there is in familiarity over affection (or, in some markets, trust). (I’d say the Times brand is worth proportionately more than a local brand.)

So I wonder whether even at bargain prices it’s any bargain to buy a newspaper.

Or would it be better to build? We’d need to look at a business plan to see what it would take to create a meaningful local news-and-advertising network (note that I said network, not product).

Or would it be better to find a perch and wait for the roadkill? I think that’s what HuffingtonPost is doing by installing an editor in Chicago. As we said the other day, one can also use Google and other technical, sales, and distribution platforms to build with little cost or risk.

I’d take those bets in reverse order. Knowing that carnage is inevitable, I’d figure out how to position myself to swoop into these markets. Then I’d start at least one strong local network so I had a proven template to take to other markets. And I wouldn’t invest a dime in an old newspaper company, no matter how cheap. That, of course, is why they’re getting cheaper and cheaper.

The always witless World Association of Newspapers really does it this time. In their desire to defend print — over updating and preserving journalism — they came out with a new ad campaign that says:

Which says: We will continue to give you a one-way product that doesn’t listen to you and lets you do just one thing: turn the damned page.

Another ad makes fun of dumb things people say and adds this quote from the Economist: “Newspapers are an endangered species.” Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Yes, that’s a good one. Newspaper companies? Health as can be.

Twits.

Alan Mutter compiles the bad news for news and media stocks. What’s worse than bad news? Really bad news?

The shares of five newspaper publishers plunged to new lows in early trading today, including the shares of GateHouse Media, which fell to $1 per share, threatening its ability to remain listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

Tumbling to new lows alongside GHS were Gannett (GCI at $16.43 per share), McClatchy (MNI, $4.58), News Corp. (NWS, $13.96) and New York Times Co. (NYT, $12.61). The companies sank to new historic lows on Friday, as reported here.

Media General (MEG) hit a new all-time low of $10.23 per share on Monday.

The only one of those I’d consider buying is NWS. But then again, buying any media stock today is surely foolishness.

Mutter also reported the bad news that online ad rates slid 14 percent in January. So much for that great hope.

No, it’s time for drastic and fast action. The clock is ticking. Or is that the sword above I hear?

: LATER (THAN YOU THINK): Mutter updates after the market close with the even-more depressing stats on the loss of market cap in the newspaper business. They’ve lost $4 billion in value since June 30. “At today’s close, the total decline in value of the dozen newspaper shares trading since the first of the year was nearly $27.7 billion, a plunge of 35.7% in 6½ months.”