Printed Matters

I cannot be accused – not this time around, anyway – of being objective in this election. I have been rather public in throwing my hat in with the Green Party of Ontario, and in particular my local Green Party candidate Tim Grant. I’ve leaned toward environmentalism my whole life, and, having tired immensely of politics as usual and the lack of bold vision and change, I am determined to vote to build the party that most closely matches my ideals, come hell or high water.

I have no reason to keep it close to the chest. I am not the voice of any organization with political clout. I am not a journalist, expected against reason to be a political eunuch. I do not speak for vested interests, other than my own. I speak as one individual among many, and I am happy with my choice to expose as many people as I can, in my limited way, to the new ideas being brought forward by the Greens. Continue Reading »

Lately, we hear a lot of talk about strategic voting. That is the practise of voting for a less-than-ideal candidate in the hopes of blocking some other especially abhorrent choice from succeeding. In recent federal elections in Canada, for example, that has manifested as voters on the left pitching their weight behind the strongest left-leaning candidate in their riding to avoid vote-splitting on the left, and to thwart the Conservative.

But there are only two possible outcomes of any attempt to swing election results through strategic voting: success or failure. I will argue both outcomes are undesirable, that one is more likely than the other, and that the more likely outcome hurts the strategic voter. A sort of political Pascal’s Wager, if you will. Continue Reading »

I haven’t posted on my blog in over seven months, but I do not feel remiss.

I’ve been busy, to begin with. During my prolonged absence, I helped organize a workshop on the future of news keynoted by Jeff Jarvis and featuring many local Toronto media personalities. Then (actually, concurrently) I helped launch a web-only Toronto news site, designing its website, helping to organize its staff, trying to come up with a business plan, and involving myself in the editorial process.

Then I got a full-time job. And went through many of the personal trials and tribulations that bubble up while one tries to dig out of the huge financial hole that two years of school can leave you in.

Soon I will have a post about NewsFIX: how the project is going, where we’re at, the mistakes we’ve made, and the little victories along the way.

For now I will simply note that the Great Paywall Debate that was raging when I stopped blogging seven months ago is still raging – reaching, in fact, new levels of absurdity. I’m looking forward to catching up on all this as I make a measured return to bloggerdom over the Christmas season.

Peace be with you.

Just got back from a talk by Mathew Ingram (@mathewi on Twitter) where he spoke to a small group of students in Ted Fairhurst’s Journalism Law and Ethics course.

I’ve seen this talk before, at PodCamp 2009. He has a slideshow here. I’m not going to go over the whole talk again, but I will highlight some of the more interesting things he said.

When we did PolicyWiki, we didn’t pay a lot of attention to design. We wanted to get it out there and see what people did with it. Newspapers don’t do enough of that.

Normally, as a newspaper, we don’t get a lot of feedback from readers. Maybe we get a letter to the editor, or a phone call. These are all big experiments in getting feedback from readers.

[Newspapers] have traditionally not been part of the conversation that happens around news. That happens at home, in the office, on other sites. We’re having to learn how to be part of the conversation.

The most important thing about Twitter is that it allows us to connect with readers and sources.

At the Globe, when someone wants an answer to “Do you know anybody who…?” and you fill in the blank with anything “…owns a cat,” “…lives near propane storage tanks,” “…knows someone who was shot on a bus,” whatever, they send out an internal email to all staff asking the question. So a lot of stories tend to be about people Globe reporters know. Twitter expands that universe.

A reporter may only have 200 followers but his query may reach orders of magnitude more people, because the question can filter through their followers’ networks, and their followers’ networks, and so on.

Twitter is a just a tool. A tool with a stupid name, but just a tool. Like any tool, you can do stupid things with it if you want. Or you can use it to find out information that helps you do your job.

When people ask me what Twitter is useful for, I say “What is email for? What is the Internet for?” They’re tools. “What’s a pen for? Is typing journalism?“

A lot of people want to connect with our writers. Twitter helps that happen.

Dan Gillmor had a famous line, “The people formerly known as the audience.” Meaning, the concept of a mass audience is being replaced by fragmented niche audiences that form around a topic.

Readers are a vast resource.

All media is effectively becoming social media. Increasingly, when media do not use these tools they are seen as less useful, disconnected, even broken. Links, comments, feedback: all add value for people.

We’re going to be trying more of everything. I don’t care if the tool has a stupid name. I don’t care if they leave Twitter and go to something with an even stupider name. I’m going to follow them there and try that as well.

On disintermediation, the sources going direct:

You still need someone to arbitrate things, to check facts. On the Internet, we can fact-check your ass. That goes for Christie Blatchford as much as it does for Mayor Miller. The functions of journalism are still required, regardless what you call yourself. If you have these skills, you’re effectively a journalist: you are fact-checking, filtering, aggregating.

In fact, today there is even more need for the functions of journalism – to filter out all the crap.

Before, you got a press release, you phoned a single source, you got a couple of facts to add. Boom, you had a story. But now everybody can Google and find out all kinds of information about what you’re writing about. If you’re not adding value to what they can find out on Google, why do they need you? You need to at least do as much research on Google as they can do, and then go farther.

The traditional view of journalism is that of investigative reporters who go with an idea, do some digging and turn up some facts. But that’s actually a tiny portion of journalism. Journalists have always been filters: taking huge amounts of information, sorting it out, organizing it, fact-checking it, and then putting it all in context.

If we don’t have the news – and we haven’t, really, since the advent of TV – then what do we have? As we have less and less a portion of the news, we have to add the context, the depth, the filtering, and the fact-checking.

Nobody knows if we’re liable if we pull in a libellous tweet into a CoverItLive widget. So the lawyers try to stop us from doing it. We’re all just waiting for the lawsuit, because there’s no law on it yet. I continually argue that we should be doing more things, and the lawyers continually argue that we shouldn’t.

If you’re like me, you say let’s have more comments and take the risk.

While the Internet is hugely exciting, and our overall readership is growing, the reality is that 85 per cent of our revenue comes from the paper. We’re trying to change the airplane while we’re flying it.

The more we think of ourselves as a news “paper,” the less we think of ourselves as a news distributor. We’re increasingly NOT in the business of selling stuff printed on dead trees.

Let’s face it, the newspaper is not a great news delivery mechanism. If you find out yesterday’s news tomorrow, then that’s not working any more.

If you’re flexible about the tools, if you can use a whole bunch of different tools to do your job, then you’re in demand.

I wrote a couple weeks ago of my desire to start a new, online-only news organization covering Toronto and the GTA. One that is nimble and debt-free.

Debt-free? How can this be done?

This is a response to Rohan Jayasekera, who commented on that post.

You’d pay your journalists (”for money”)? So much for the low costs you claimed. Unless you won’t pay them enough to live on, in which case you’ll be in the same territory as Torontoist and blogTO

But I think it can be done, even if only in theory.

Can we develop a news organization that can cover a metropolitan area, not just adequately, but exceptionally well, without borrowing any money?

Possibly, if we follow these five principles:

1. Online-only

Distributing news on the web is next to free. Making the organization online-only frees us from having a circulation department and a production department. Instead we just have a web department, which will build everything we need out of free, open source building blocks.

2. The distributed newsroom

Everyone can work from home, on their own phones and computers. This eliminates the need for a building, an office management team, and an IT department. We can all collaborate on gMail and Google Docs and other free office collaboration software.

Reporters can work their own hours, deciding how best to efficiently use their time to meet quotas.

3. Commission-only salespeople

Any news organization needs skilled, trained salespeople to sell advertising. We pay good commissions and pay for performance. Sales managers too. This eliminates the need to bankroll wages for the sales department.

4. Internology

Borrowing a term from Rob Curley, we use internology to fill databases, correct business listings, and gather news. Every professional reporter gets teamed up with at least one intern, and they use them how they wish: to get quotes, attend meetings, copy edit, whatever the case may be.

Maybe they work a bit like Extreme Programmers, i.e. work in pairs, publish early and often.

This reduces the payroll requirement for professional news staff and increases our ability to cover the Metro area thoroughly. It also contributes to the future of journalism, as we train people to work as journalists one-on-one with professionals.

5. Sweat Equity

How do we pay the people we cannot do without? This gets to the nut of Rohan’s objection. And the only way I can think of to do it is via sweat equity. Reporters, editors, web developers and other essential staff work for some period of time – a year, say – in exchange for shares in the company.

After a year, the company issues shares accordingly, and the company’s profits are meted out in the form of dividends, and we move to a more traditional compensation scheme.

I should add that a sixth pillar has been proposed. After I tweeted these five pillars yesterday, Vaughan Citizen editor Kim Champion tweeted back:

Don’t forget the sixth … mythology.

Fair enough. I realize this is fairly pie-in-the-sky. But what are the actual arguments against? How can we make something like this work? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Yes, the title of this post paraphrases the title of an article by one David Carr, the NYT writer rapidly becoming the favourite whipping-boy of the pro-web, anti-paywall crowd.

But I’m not here to pan paywalls. I did that already. Steve Yelvington did it again the other day, with much panache. Jeff Jarvis kindly emitted the appropriate edict against Carr’s cartel confabulations.

No, I write today to start a plan to harness all the journalistic talent left lying idly about as mainstream media organizations begin to crumble.

I counted at least 520 media layoffs in Toronto and GTA in the last 10 months. I predicted it will get worse – which doesn’t exactly make me a skilled futurist, since the surprise will be if it doesn’t get worse. In addition, there are scores of j-students filtering their way through the system right now, who just may have squandered all that tuition money.

I say we organize and start a new media company. Nimble, debt-free, unsullied by corporate concerns, online-only, web-centric, dedicated to journalistic principles, tightly focused on one geographic area. Our prime goal will be to utterly dominate the local web space of our local communities.

The cost? Nothing but time. Because we go online-only and web-centric right from the start, our only overhead cost is hosting.

I’m willing to dedicate my time and web skills to the cause. Anybody have any ideas on how to organize?

A post by Yelvington yesterday sparked a little bit of a debate about what it is that newspapers actually sell.

Yelvington claimed it is not print and not news. It’s readership.

“Your core product is a commercially relevant audience,” he said in bold type.

I chimed in on the comments at his blog:

…your product is not newspapers, or news or information. It is readership.

Another commenter said he totally agrees.

But then two other commenters had differing opinions. One agreed that newspapers sell readership to advertisers, but “for our readers, the news is the product.”

Another made a distinction between core product and core business, saying “our core *product* is news (or more accurately “news and information”), our core *business* is using that core product to deliver a commercially relevant audience…”

I was intrigued enough by these differences in the understanding of what the core product of a newspaper is to conduct a Twitter survey. I asked, what is the core product of newspapers? Discuss.

Now, this is by no means scientific. I got four respondents. (I’m not Scoble; my Twitterverse is small.) And I was interested in who gave the answers, and how what they do for their livings relates to the answers they gave.

Here’s the list, starting with Steve Yelvington and the commenters on his blog.

1. Steve Yelvington, news website developer: audience.
2. Tim Burden (that’s me), news website developer: audience.
3. Dan Thornton, marketer: audience
4. Chip Kaye, news website developer (papertrane): news for readers, audience for advertisers.
5. Marc Matteo, news website developer (SacBee): news is the product, audience is the business.
6. Dave Coleman, marketer (Spreed): brand
7. Gary Hilson, freelance writer and PR: news with context.
8. Kim Champion, newspaper editor: audience.
9. Stanislav Bender, j-school prof: it’s an ecosystem.
10. Zac Echola, news website developer: audience.

Zac wasn’t part of my Twitter survey, but he wrote a post a short time ago making the claim:

The newspaper business has never been in the journalism business. Journalism is a means to an end (an end that unfortunately may no longer support the luxury of “wasteful” spending on bureaus and months long investigations that turn up little to no news). The true core business is not newspaper production and distribution, it’s advertising.

If this were a vote, audience wins. The core business of a newspaper (or any other news organization) is selling eyeballs to advertisers.

What do you think? What’s the core product of a newspaper? And why does it matter? (Hint: it’s crucial.)

I generally applaud efforts by news organizations to get seriously jiggy with the web. In particular, when news companies make APIs available for their content, it represents a real willingness by that company to make the ultimate sacrifice: to give up control of their content and their data and let others see what they can make of it.

Take a look at the cool work of Vancouver artist Jer Thorp. He plays with visualizations based on the word frequency in the huge data sets made available through these APIs.

And visualizations are great, but they don’t reflect the best thing about APIs: as people use a news company’s data in various mashups, it gets more people looking at its content. The company gets more of a chance to engage a community of interested news consumers. They get more readership. We get a better web.

So what’s my beef?

The Guardian API is different from the other API offerings from the NYT and the BBC in that it provides the full content of stories. And the proposition is that you can use the full text of stories on other websites, as long as you display Guardian advertising alongside it.

So why is that bad? It’s not, per se. Aggregators can do a better job of aggregating, and semantic taggers can do a better job of semantic tagging, if they have the full dataset. And that’s the point of the exercise, after all: to increase the overall utility of the web for everyone’s benefit.

What I specifically don’t like is that the Guardian is explicitly saying it’s OK to duplicate their content on other sites. How then do aggregators decide which are duplicates? How does the semantic web figure out what the “canonical” address for the story is? It is specifically disutilitarian to have identical (or even similar, for that matter) content strewn around the web. Or worse, woven “into the fabric of the Internet,” as the Guardian announcement put it.

So they’re right to provide the full data: that’s a plus for web utility. But they’re wrong to condone outright duplication of content, which is of negative utility.

Shafqat Islam of Newscred says he hopes people will realize this problem and not duplicate full content feeds. But the Guardian could fix this problem easily by continuing to provide the full dataset, but putting a clause in the otherwise rather strict Terms and Conditions stating that outright duplication of the material is forbidden.

The Terms and Conditions already stipulate that a link must be provided back to the original article on the Guardian site. Which begs the question: why not just link back to the Guardian site? Why does anyone need to publish the full story, and duplicate that content, on their own site?

The Toronto Star has been doing some good work since I panned their website a year ago.

Now they have comments, which is great (but why do they have “Alert a moderator” when all comments have to be approved by a moderator? And why don’t they mention that a comment won’t appear right away?), and they’ve been doing some cool things with Google Maps.

The latest effort is a map of all the named neighbourhoods in Toronto, which (and I’m sure this is true as well in other cities as well) can be a great source of pride and emotional attachment.

It’s fairly well done, though I’d like to see a bit more information in the bubbles that pop up when you click a neighbourhood.

It could be the beginning of an actual hyperlocal news effort. If they geolocate the GTA stories that go in their database, they could offer a collection of news stories (and other info they have in their toronto.com databases) and then you could select your neighbourhood and see all those stories. Preferably with an RSS feed just for your neighbourhood, OK guys, if you’re thinking this way?

Conversely you could see all those stories plotted on your neighbourhood’s map.

One question for the hyperlocal effort, though, is what they will do with all those grey areas on the map. Stories that occur in those zones should be linked to some kind of named entity, I suppose, even if it’s just the nearest intersection.

Here’s a link to the shapefile they are using. As they say, it’s a work in progress. They’re letting people quibble about neighbourhood names and boundaries in the comments, which is a great idea. It’ll become an important resource for Torontonians.

Revolution is in the air.

No, I don’t mean blood in the streets, anarchy, or a government coup. Or at least, I hope not. I mean wholesale changes are coming to the system that brings the news to your eyes and ears. Not just in Denver, or Seattle, or San Francisco. I mean right here in Toronto.

I’m talking about journalists. More specifically, I’m talking about unemployed journalists, the people formally known as professional reporters. And those about to be unemployed. And those who have yet to be employed.

It has been a terrifying past year for Canadian media outlets, and layoffs hit the Toronto and GTA journalism community fairly hard. Let’s recap:

• April 17, 2008: The Toronto Star announces it will cut 160 jobs from its newspaper division as it copes with a declining newspaper market .
• June 30, 2008: Toronto Life pulls the plug on a bunch of blogs. Five jobs gone.
• Nov 12, 2008: Canwest, which publishes the National Post, announces 560 job cuts Canada-wide. I don’t know whether any of them were in Toronto.
• Nov 14, 2008: Twenty jobs lost as Toronto publisher closes two magazines.
• Nov 18, 2008: CTV announces 105 layoffs, all in Toronto.
• Nov 28, 2008: Metroland Media Group lays off 17. Not sure why reporting on this has been so scant.
• Dec 17, 2008: SunMedia gives employees an early Christmas present by telling 600 of them to go home, including 27 at the Toronto Sun.
• Feb 4, 2009: The Globe and Mail lays off 30 after 60 volunteer to go. Half of those let go were from the newsroom.
• Feb 9, 2009: Vaughan Today cuts a handful of staff and remaining workers have their benefits cut, says an industry source. No word on whether jobs were affected at the Town Crier papers, also owned by parent Multimedia Nova.
• Feb 26, 2009: CHUM Radio (a unit of CTV) lays off 17, and won’t fill another 23 vacancies.
• March 4, 2009: TorStar lays off another 60, mainly in the advertising department at the Toronto Star. Union condemnation ensues.
• March 5, 2009: TorStar lays off yet another 60 workers, this time at its printing plant in Vaughan.

That, boys and girls, represents every major daily, community paper publisher, and broadcaster that employs in the Toronto region. The exception in the list is Crown-owned CBC, which is by no means above the fray.

But my spidey senses have been tingling. I think there are going to be a whole bunch more layoffs, coming soon to a news outlet near you. I mean soon, like this month.

TorStar reported a $180 million dollar loss in 2008, and sources say so far this year has been even worse. It’s possible TorStar and its community paper subsidiary Metroland will wait until the first quarter report comes out in June, but I doubt it. They will announce further cuts soon, I’ll wager.

And staff at the National Post must be a little on edge. It was rumoured that reporters had been called in from assignment last Friday when parent company Canwest was up against a debt deadline. Turns out they were given another 12 days – until next Wednesday – to stave off a potential bankruptcy.

I find it unlikely the National Post will emerge unscathed from its parent company’s turmoils, given that it has apparently never made money. There’s something else, too, that I can’t divulge at the moment, but it has to do with this line from that Toronto Star report:

Some reports have said the Asper family may have to surrender control of Canwest in return for new financing.

The sky is falling.

But I think there’s hope. I have a suggestion.

The layoffs listed above, plus those to come, represent a whole lot of journalistic talent. Would it not be possible to bring those people together to form a new journalistic entity? One unfettered by corporate debt and bureaucracy?

This has already begun to happen in some cities in the States.

And I’m not the only one to think this way. Robert Niles, writing at the Knight Digital Media Centre, says “Someone’s going to get rich in Denver next week…”

And journalists in Seattle, San Francisco and those other newspapers on the brink – ask yourselves this, looking ahead to the day when your paper might close: Why can’t *I* be the one to get a piece of those ad dollars in my community?

And why not here, in Toronto? Rise up, j-people!

For those about to rock, I salute you.