Media Nation on hiatus

I'm writing this from the newsroom of "Beat the Press," and will be running around for the rest of the day. Tomorrow I leave for a five-day backpacking trip. So don't look for any new posts until late next week.

I've turned on comment moderation, but I won't be here to moderate. In other words, you won't be able to post a new comment until I get back. So get outside, folks.

What's the matter with Cleveland?

In my commentary for the Guardian, I take on the latest bad idea to come out of the Cleveland Plain Dealer — reader representative Ted Diadiun's widely mocked claim that bloggers are "pipsqueaks" who steal content.

Commenting on comments with Keller

WBZ-TV (Channel 4) political analyst Jon Keller will be interviewing Doug Bailey and me about Bailey's column in today's Boston Globe, in which he argues that newspaper comments are worthless. (They are if you're going to do them the way the Globe and the Boston Herald do them. But we'll talk.)

The segment should pop up on the 11 p.m. news.

And by the way, has anyone yet figured out the identity of the anonymous blogger whom Bailey attacked?

Thursday update: Here's the link to Keller's story.

An anonymous straw man

Doug Bailey want you to know there's a local blog out there that's not as reliable as maybe it should be. (Imagine that.) But he doesn't want you to know what the blog is. Bailey, a former Boston Globe staffer-turned-media consultant, writes on the Globe's op-ed page:

I recently contacted a blog that has apparently gained a reputation as an "authoritative source" on local news to point out an outrageously inaccurate — and easily verifiable — item posted on the site, attributed to one of its many "insiders." The editor of the site conceded to me his "inside" information had actually come from an anonymous posting he saw on a newspaper website. If this wasn't outrageous enough, this site has developed a following among traditional media reporters who apparently believe this blogger is wired and who regularly republish his missives unaware that his "exclusive" sources come from anonymous comments on their own websites. The identities of the "insiders" are unknown even to the original blogger.

Without the name of the blog and its author, and a chance for him to respond, the value of Bailey's anecdote is approximately zero. Let's have it, Doug. And let's see the Globe give his target an opportunity to defend himself.

Global Voices and worldwide citizen media

My online-journalism video tour continues with Solana Larsen, managing editor of Global Voices Online, a project that tracks bloggers around the world. I interviewed Larsen on June 9 at her Brooklyn apartment.

On April 23 I interviewed Global Voices' Central Asia editor, Adil Nurmakov, while I was attending the Eurasian Media Forum in Almaty, Kazakhstan.

Railing against the tubes

Weekly chat with Reader Rep Ted Diadiun

If you haven't seen this yet, stop what you're doing and watch. It's 15 minutes long, but it's well worth your time.

Ted Diadiun, the reader representative — i.e., the ombudsman — for the Cleveland Plain Dealer has some things to say about bloggers, and he's not a damn bit happy about what's going on in them there tubes. The video has become an instant classic — the talk of Twitter and of posts like this one, by Salon's King Kaufman.

I've e-mailed Diadiun some questions that I hope he'll respond to, either in his column, on another webcast or to Media Nation. I'll keep you posted.

A new blog by John Carroll

I want to call your attention this morning to a terrific new local blog. Campaign Outsider is written by John Carroll, formerly a fellow panelist on "Beat the Press" on WGBH-TV (Channel 2) and now senior media analyst on WBUR Radio (90.9 FM).

John and I worked on the set-up outside Northeastern's Au Bon Pain a couple of weeks ago. He's off to a strong start, weighing in today with a tough piece on the Washington Post's pay-for-play scandal.

Currently a mass-communications professor at Boston University, Carroll has a long and distinguished career in print, radio and television. I've already plugged Campaign Outsider into Google Reader, and suggest you do the same.

"Cluetrain," 10 years on

Weinberger (left) and Searls

Last night I had a chance to see David Weinberger and Doc Searls, two of the co-authors of "The Cluetrain Manifesto," speak at Harvard Law School. The conversation was moderated by law-school professor Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of the school's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

The sound was not great, so I missed a lot. VisiCalc founder Dan Bricklin, credited with the invention of the spreadsheet, finally became frustrated enough that he got out of his seat and ran around with a little handheld microphone. But I did get a chance to score a signed (by Searls) copy of "Cluetrain," which has been reissued on the occasion of its 10th anniversary.

I read "Cluetrain" online a couple of years ago as research for this. I anticipate getting a lot more out of it this time around, now that I have a print edition. A computer screen is still no way to read a book.

The future of anonymous comments

From time to time I've considered instituting a real-names policy for Media Nation commenters. Take a look at this exchange and you'll see why.

I know I would end up with many fewer commenters than I have now. Some folks who use regular pseudonyms add value, and I know there's a good chance I would lose them.

But, too often, Media Nation — like most other Internet forums — has become a place where people come to say things behind a mask of anonymity that they would never say if they had to attach their names.

Thoughts?

Counting blogs: One, two, many

Four years ago, Jay Rosen dropped in on a media-criticism class I was teaching at Northeastern University for a discussion about blogging.

One point he made I thought was particularly salient: the 97 bazillion blogs Technorati claims to be tracking are often used by critics as a way to discredit blogging. After all, how could anything so common be of much value?

Still, it's hard to quantify the number of blogs that matter to news folks — that is, blogs doing some type of journalism, even if it's just commenting intelligently on the news. When asked, I generally respond that it's certainly in the hundreds, or even the thousands, but definitely not the millions.

So I was interested to see more useful Technorati numbers appear in a New York Times story today about bloggers who quit because they quickly learn that it's hard work, or that it's no way to make money, or that they decide revealing personal details about themselves isn't such a good idea. (Not that that has anything inherently to do with blogging.) To wit:

• Of the 133 million blogs that Technorati was following in 2008, only 7.4 million had been updated in the past four months.
• The vast majority of traffic is generated by 50,000 to 100,000 blogs.

Those numbers make far more sense, and show that blogging is something that a small subset of dedicated amateurs (and a few professionals) take seriously. As Rosen suggested, the Golden Arches approach is a way of marginalizing rather than elucidating.

Dubious allies

In my latest for the Guardian, I review Eric Boehlert's new book, "Bloggers on the Bus," which introduces us to the liberal bloggers who've redefined Democratic politics in recent years — and who helped Barack Obama win the presidency even as he, wisely, kept his distance from them.

New site covers arts on the North Shore

Check out Art Throb, a new online project covering the arts on the North Shore. Looks pretty ambitious. The lead Throbette is Dinah Cardin, among other things the former arts writer for GateHouse Media's North Shore Sunday. According to the mission statement:

Art Throb is an independent publication and a collaboration of many talented writers and photographers. Our funding comes from a combination of sponsors, donors and grants.

Joel Brown said hello to Art Throb last Friday.

More evidence that the post-newspaper era will not lack for journalism of all kinds, whether there's a financial model or not.

Platform angst

I'm seriously thinking of switching to WordPress.org so that I can bring my various Web sites under one roof — Media Nation, "Little People" and DanKennedy.net.

Pros:

• WordPress has nicer templates than Blogger, so I should easily be able to come up with a better look than I've got now.
• I'll be able to use my own domain name.
• I can set up static pages so that each of my different online projects will be in one spot.

Cons:

• I'll have to pay $6 to $10 a month for Web hosting. Not bad, but free is free. (I can't use the free WordPress.com service because it forbids advertising.)
• I can use dankennedy.net or media-nation.org as my main domain name, but the one I really want — medianation.org — is already taken.
  
• I'll need to put in some time getting up to speed technologically, and I really could put that time to better use.

So I don't know. If you were me, what would you do?

Tweaking Media Nation's appearance

I've made some minor changes to the look and feel of Media Nation, mainly to accommodate the newish, extreme-vertical ad that takes up the top of the right-hand column.

I'm also thinking about switching to WordPress.org so that I can have a little more control as well as multiple static pages. But this should do for the time being.

Pessimistic Weisberg criticizes paid content

Like most people thinking about the ailing news business these days, Jacob Weisberg is better at describing the problem than at prescribing solutions.

"I do think people approach it in the wrong way when they think about it as a business problem," Weisberg, editor-in-chief and chairman of the Slate Group, said earlier today. "It is more fundamentally a problem of democracy. And it is a problem of democracy because our system of government is predicated on a free press and an independent media, which allow us to have an informed public and a check on government."

Weisberg spoke at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, part of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. A former editor of the politics-and-culture webzine Slate, Weisberg is now in charge of developing new products affiliated with Slate, such as The Root, aimed at African-American readers, and The Big Money, a financial Web site.

Weisberg expressed pessimism that anything like the newspaper as we have come to know it can survive in the digital age — especially papers smaller than the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. (Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.) Still, he refused to join the likes of Walter Isaacson, Steven Brill and Gordon Krovitz, all of whom have argued in recent weeks that newspapers should charge for their online content.

Asked by Shorenstein's director, Alex Jones, how many subscribers he thought the New York Times would lose if it started charging $20 a year for online access, Weisberg replied, "90 percent." He added he'd rather donate $100 a year to the Times than pay a $20 subscription fee, since a paid-subscription model would necessitate walling off content from the larger Internet, and especially from bloggers.

"The political debate exists online, and if you're behind a pay wall, you're not part of it," Weisberg said, adding that Slate's own 1997 experiment in charging for content is widely seen as having failed.

Though Weisberg would not rule out a role for non-profit, endowment supported projects such as the investigative Web site ProPublica, he said he prefers profit-driven ventures because they are not dependent on the whims and agendas of philanthropies.

"America's contribution to the news media isn't the free press, it's the independent press," he said. "Countries are better off with an independent media. That's what we’re at risk of losing."

The audio of Weisberg's presentation is online here.

Photo of Weisberg (cc) by Dan Kennedy. For details, see Creative Commons license elsewhere on this blog.

Four months later, InstaPundit checks in

Last October, I wrote an item chastising the InstaPundit, Glenn Reynolds, for writing that opponents of a ballot measure to eliminate the Massachusetts state income tax were "pledging a campaign of 'massive resistance.'"

The problem was that Reynolds had put massive resistance in quotation marks, yet appeared to be quoting no one other than himself.

On Saturday, believe it or not, Reynolds responded — and it appears that he still doesn't understand how to use quotation marks. He points to a statement by then-House Speaker Sal DiMasi vowing not to implement Question One if it were to pass (it didn't). But DiMasi never used the phrase "massive resistance."

I would say that Reynolds concocted a quote, except that he doesn't even seem to realize that's what he did. For good measure, he tells me that the reason he appears to post constantly throughout the day is that he's set up some sort timing mechanism that posts automatically. In other words, many of his time-stamps are faked. Ethical? I don't know. I'll have to get back to you on that.

By the way, if the Glenn (or "Glenn") who posted a comment to Media Nation isn't really Reynolds, my apologies. I'm making an assumption that it is, mainly because there's nothing particularly weird or over-the-top about his comment.

And these people really know how to mangle quotation marks.

Health journalist Tinker Ready launches blog

Longtime health journalist (and Northeastern colleague) Tinker Ready announces that she's started a health-care blog, Boston Health News. She writes:

I hope to write and link on topics including research, personal health, business and international news. I'm especially looking forward to following the latest attempt at health reform. I've covered at least two runs at it — the Medicare reforms of the late 80s and the Clinton proposal. A lot needs to be explained and a million good stories wait to be told.

Ready will be a welcome addition to the local blogging scene.

The trouble with Brill's not-so-secret memo

My apologies for not being right on top of this earlier in the week. I just had a chance to read Steven Brill's no-longer-confidential memo, "Turning Around the Times — and Journalism," posted on Romenesko, and I've got a few observations.

First, a bit of praise for Brill, who, near the beginning of his career, wrote one of the bravest books I've ever read — "The Teamsters," about an organization that, at the time of publication (1979), was more a criminal enterprise than it was a union. I don't know how Brill found the courage to start his car in the morning.

And though I've weighed in several times (here and here) on why it doesn't make sense to think that newspapers will be able to charge a fee to their online customers, I understand the problem. Even though what you pay for a print edition doesn't even cover the cost of manufacturing and distributing it, the fact — and the problem — is that print advertising is far more lucrative than online advertising. Never is a long time, but it's beginning to look like Web advertising may never support the public-interest journalism on which a healthy, self-governing society depends.

So I'm sympathetic to, though not supportive of, Brill's ideas for charging online customers. It's possible that it might even work for the Times because of its unique appeal. There are probably quite a few people who'd pay for access to the Times, but not for anything else. And therein lies one of problems with his plan, though by no means the only one.

Here's the biggest drawback I see in Brill's proposal: it would end blogging, as valuable a journalistic form as has been developed since the inverted pyramid. A really good blog post might link to three, four or five news stories — maybe more. A really good blogger might skim through 10, 15 or 20 stories in the course of synthesizing them into that post. Finally, that blogger might look at many dozens of news sources on a regular or semi-regular basis.

Obviously, bloggers — most of whom are doing it for no money — cannot afford to subscribe to dozens of online newspapers and magazines. Even if they could, they want to know that when they link to particular stories, their readers will be able to follow the links and read those stories as well. How many online news sources is a typical blog reader supposed to subscribe to?

Micropayments, which Brill also mentions, get around this. Properly implemented, they're deducted automatically. But though 10 cents an article might seem reasonable, do you really want to pay $1 to read a well-constructed blog post and follow all the links? Of course you don't. No one is going to do such a thing.

Brill says that if the Times charges $1 per month to each of its 20 million unique monthly visitor, that would generate $240 million a year. I'll withhold my sarcasm, because this is math, and experience tells me that I could be wrong. But it strikes me that Brill has convinced himself that the Times could get a buck out of every person who, at some point during the course of a month, clicks on a link to a Times story that he found via a search engine. Intuitively, it seems to me that they're not going to do that, and I'm pretty sure Brill would concede the point if he'd think about it.

The only folks who are going to pay $1 a month are the journalism geeks like me, who actually prop open their laptops at breakfast and read a good chunk of the Times online. And I suspect the number of people who actually read the paper that way is far, far smaller than 20 million.

Case in point: Christian Science Monitor editor John Yemma told me last fall that 84 percent of visitors to the paper's Web site come in via search engines, aggregators and blogs. Let's say it's the same for the Times. Let's say you could get every one of the 16 percent who come in through the front door to pay $1 a month. That's $38.4 million for the year, not $240 million.

I realize that my critique would appear to leave no way out of the dilemma in which the Times and other newspapers find themselves. I happen to think there may be more life left in the print edition than we all imagined a couple of years ago. I'd raise the price by quite a bit, maybe offer some premium, print-only features (heresy, I know, but worth thinking about) and perhaps offer those well-heeled customers access to some special services.

A solution? No. But it might work as a holding action until we can figure out what's next.

Media Nation on citizen journalism

Christian Avard of iBrattleboro and the Deerfield Valley News interviewed me at the New England Press Association convention last week. The topic: the role of citizen journalism in the changing news-media landscape.

See you at the NEPA convention

Social Media for Journalists

View more presentations from Dan Kennedy. (tags: northeasternuniversity nepa)

I'll be at the annual New England Press Association convention this afternoon, leading a workshop on blogging and social media for journalists. Thanks for the help many of you gave me, and I hope to see some of you there.

Above is the slideshow I'll be using. My goal is to move through it quickly and get into idea-sharing, since I expect many of the participants will have at least as much to offer as I do.