Four in the afternoon

1. After turning Minnesota Public Radio into a powerhouse, Bill Kling looks for what's next. Citypages

2. NPR ombudsman Alicia Shepard says goodbye, and remembers an ugly final year. NPR

3. Iraq and Somalia are the first and second most dangerous places in the world for journalists. CJR

4. Nikki Finke continues to rattle her keyboard at Mediabistro's Pandora Young. The Daily

Four in the afternoon

1. NPR is looking for an ombudsman (or woman). NPR

2. NBC News is building newsroom in Conan O'Brien's old studio. LAT

3. The Washington Post on the downward side of the arc. CJR

4. Irony blushes as a judge bars "reporters" from a public auction of two Philadelphia newspapers. WSJ

News Corp's English coverup

The UK-based tabloid "News of the World" is mixed up in a juicy scandal of its own making, one that involves hacking celebrity and government phones, payoffs, jailed journalists, a curiously stalled investigation, and conveniently forgetful executives. Ryan Chittum at Columbia Journalism Review offers a fascinating recount of the affair, which raises serious question about the ethics of Rubert Murdoch's UK media empire.

Four today

1. We are what we measure. CJR

2. Freakonomics is headed for radio. WNYC

3. The law and online aggregation. Nieman Journalism Lab

4. LA>FWD, a collaboration by Radio Bilingue and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, is scheduled to launch Sept. 16. LA Observed

Every tar ball is an opportunity

It's hard to find inspiration in the oily muck washing around the Gulf of Mexico, but BP is trying. The company has hired a pair of writers, dubbed "BP journalists," to find, as the New Orleans Times-Picayune puts it, the "silvery sheen in the dark cloud of oil."

Unlike most journalists, these "reporters" are not allergic to positive news when it comes to spinning a tragic event. Instead, BP's Paula Kolmar and Tom Seslar have removed the blinders of cynicism and honesty to wax poetic about the cleanup effort. Here's Kolmar on the gift the oil spill has given her:

I saw the skimmers. I saw the relief well drill ships. I saw the support vessels circling the incident site. It was indeed a sobering privilege.

Indeed, she goes on to talk about the "ballet at sea as mesmerising as any performance in a concert hall, and worthy of an audience in its own right." It's enough to make one wonder why Louisianans are having all the fun.

In his travels, Seslar has discovered that Gulf residents see their plight as merely a reflection of what BP is going through:

Paul, a well-spoken man supplementing his Social Security income by driving a Houston taxi, sees BP’s current image challenges as similar to what he faces all day long.

Haven't we all suffered the proverbial failure of our blowout preventer?

Ryan Chittum at Columbia Journalism Review has compiled even more of these paeans to gushing crude.

Crazy, mixed up world

The downturn in newspapers has been so prolonged and pervasive that Dean Singleton, once derided as "Lean Dean" for his gut-and-consolidate strategy, has become spirit raiser.

From a story that ran yesterday CJR:

And the mood of the writers rose—briefly, at least—when Dean Singleton, whose MediaNews Group owns both The Salt Lake Tribune and The Denver Post, recounted the conclusions that his top executives reached following a three-day planning session at his Colorado ranch: Instead of continuing to provide free of charge all the contents of its newspapers on their Web sites, the group’s papers would provide breaking news online for free, but reserve many of the newspapers’ in-depth and analytical stories for paid subscribers. In three to five years, he predicted, the newspaper business will be a combination of “print, online, wireless mobile and niche products.” The business “will be better than it is today, although not as good as it was yesterday.”

I think many reporters at Singleton papers would welcome such a plan, as long as it meant investing in newsrooms so that they could produce sufficient in-depth and analytical stories to justify the charge.

Four in the evening

1. Inflating balloon boy: The Heene family in Colorado seem to be getting the attention they craved as the media continues to cover the boy who wasn't in the balloon. Denver Post

2. Around the bases: Michael Massing takes on Howard Kurtz for taking on the Obama administration for taking on Fox. CJR

3. Poor information diet: Howard Weaver warns us about the troubling trend of "infobesity". Etaoin Shrdlu

4. Words, words, words (dot com): A software engineer leaves the New York Times to build the "dictionary of the future." NYO

Outside the bubble

Many more people spend much more time time reading a physical newspaper than reading the news on a paper's website, CJR reports:

For those of us of a certain small-but-growing subset—the blogging, commenting, techno-savvy, early-adopting, extreme-news consumers—it’s sometimes easy to forget that most people don’t live like we do. They don’t use RSS. They don’t Twitter. They don’t read twenty blogs a day. They (some 100 million or so) still actually pick up the newspaper and read it.

In a rough estimate of online versus print reading, CJR found:

Of the top five newspaper websites the average reading time online is 12.1 percent to print’s 87.9 percent. That widens to 8 percent online, 92 percent print when considering that more than one person reads each print copy.

The disparity illustrates why most publishers haven't heeded calls to junk the presses in favor of an online only presence. Such advice only makes sense if one doesn't own a press and wants to see the playing field leveled.

These numbers also show us why most of the advertising dollars still flow to print.

The quick survey does not, however, provide any details about whether online readership is increasing - and at what pace. Nor does it give us a sense of how many people have left print and online newspaper sites for alternative sources.

Four today

1. Marketing-department journalism is on the upswing. CJR

2. Newspaper profits are down, but nowhere near out. RofaN

3. Dan Froomkin goes from Post to Post. Salon

4. The website gave them the name, but it's print that makes Politico profitable. Vanity Fair

Four in the evening

Armenian community in Glendale suspicious of warming diplomatic relations between Armenia and Turkey. WSJ

Book festivals can be dangerous. LAT

If you can find a single practical idea in here, you win a coke. CJR

8,484 and counting. Paper Cuts

Fixing a hole before it forms

Former Washington Post editor Marsha Hamilton offers an instructive analysis of the news media's failure to adequately signal the severity of the coming economic crisis (it's certainly more informative than the hyperventilation found here).

Hamilton writes:

But even in hindsight, I think it would have taken a miracle for business journalists to have foreseen the current crisis in its magnitude and depth. Beat reporters saw the pieces of it, and columnists who took a broader view warned about the buildup of risk. But even those who predicted disaster, I think it’s fair to say, didn’t know how widespread it would become or how unprecedented the government’s reaction would be...

Nonetheless, there are certainly lessons to be learned about how to change some structural and cultural biases that might have gotten in the way—including the segregated silos we sometimes fall into in our beats, and a bias against speculative “this trend could be dangerous” stories. It’s not as sexy to prevent disasters as it is to cover them, but maybe we should rethink that, and learn to view warnings and prevention as one of the most important parts of our jobs.

One of the biggest obstacles to understanding, however, was out of our control: it was the decision to let major financial markets full of new types of housing-related investments expand with little or no federal oversight. No regulation means no transparency. Reporters and investors alike were kept from seeing what was going on behind the curtain.

The article, which Hamilton wrote for Columbia Journalism Review, contains this wise observation:

...there isn’t much appetite for speculative stories about complicated issues in most newsrooms. Once the crisis occurs, once you can quote government officials referring to credit-derivative obligations and credit-default swaps as “toxic assets,” it gets easier.

The truth is, there isn't much appetite for these kinds of stories outside the newsroom either. It makes me think of the film "Jaws" and the difficulty Roy Scheider's character had convincing people to get out of the water before they saw the shark fin for themselves.

Also, speculation can be dangerous. Just ask Judy Miller. In hindsight, we often assume that the newspaper warnings would have pointed to the danger that came to pass - but speculation can just as often warn of false dangers, and in the process embolden bad decision-making.

(CJR vis LA Biz Observed)

What's it worth?

There's a deadline fast approaching in Denver and a domino falling in Seattle; little in the way of good news out of Minneapolis and a couple Horsemen on their way to Los Angeles; mandatory and unpaid furloughs for Gannett employees and yet more advertisers slipping into bankruptcy; the layoffs that were and the layoffs that could be...

So it's time to break out Occam's razor to cut through the foggy notions of new business models and instead apply the most straightforward model we can think of to keep newsrooms running. Rather than twisting ourselves in knots trying to invent exotic ways to extract value from secondary or even tertiary transactions (we saw how that shit played on Wall Street), shouldn't we try a more straightforward approach?

Ryan Chittum at CJR is the latest (that I've read) to say news organizations need to charge for the news if they want to survive.

I agree - and not only because newsrooms need money. Rightly or wrongly, we value things more when we get them at a cost. When something costs us nothing, we generally assign it the same value.

But money is not the only way to measure cost. There's blood, sweat, tears, etc. The key here is that a transaction needs to take place - a transaction that both sustains the newsroom and imbues value to the reader.

The transaction might not save newspapers in their present form - although I think our innovators would do well to reconsider the benefits of the newspaper form - and the transaction might look different from our present subscription system. There are multiple ways to extract/imbue value. Nonprofits, cooperatives, foundations and grants will all have a place, I'm sure.

On the for-profit side, one idea floating about is called "micropayments." It seems to follow the logic of Apple's iTunes, which is alluring on one level and disturbing on another. My concern is that it rewards popularity above all else and encourages hit-count lust. Perhaps there are ways to guard against this, perhaps not.

All of this being said, I do worry about a scarcity of links available to bloggers, aggregators and various online communities once "cost" is reapplied to the information economy. But I think this is the place where we need to exert our inventiveness, rather than get stuck working the financial Rubik's cube as the ship sinks.

Humor

CJR's layoff mad libs, via Romenesko:

As you may have heard (in the newsroom; at Caribou Coffee; on somebody’s blog), John P. Zenger will be leaving his role as (chief investigative reporter; TV critic; ombudsman) at this newspaper.

-snip-

John has what all the truly great newspaper folk possess – (low self esteem; deep-seated class resentments; a cluster of unfinished screenplays), and a passionate desire to (stay out of the line of fire; crib good stories from colleagues; have the Salisbury steak at the Royal three times a week). Many’s the time I’ve strolled through the newsroom on the way to a meeting with the marketing department and heard John (sobbing quietly; screaming at his accountant; talking about the time he had a beer with Mike Royko).