Howard Owens talks about The Batavian

My spring-and-summer video tour of innovative online news organizations continues with Howard Owens, publisher of The Batavian, a for-profit news site in western New York state that he founded when he was director of digital publishing for GateHouse Media.

Owens left GateHouse earlier this year and took The Batavian with him. I visited him in late June and spent a few days interviewing him and other folks in Batavia. Owens, though, is the only one I captured on video.

Here are links to my earlier video interviews:

• Christine Stuart, editor and publisher of CT News Junkie, which covers political and governmental news from the Connecticut State House, in Hartford.
• Adil Nurmakov, Central Asia editor for Global Voices Online, whom I interviewed in Almaty, Kazakhstan.
• Solana Larsen, managing editor of Global Voices.
• Paul Bass, editor and publisher of the New Haven Independent, a non-profit news site.
• Debbie Galant, co-founder of Baristanet, a for-profit community news site in Montclair, N.J.

Aggravation over aggregation

In my latest for the Guardian, I take a look at the increasingly contentious issue of aggregation, and at what constitutes good and bad linking practices.

Where it all went wrong

I'm no advertising expert, but Steve Buttry's post on newspapers' original sin strikes me as being exactly right:

The disastrous error that newspapers made early in our digital lives was treating online advertising as a throw-in or upsell for their print advertisers. Helping businesses connect with customers was always our business. We were facing new technology and new opportunities and we did next to nothing to explore how we might use this new technology to help businesses connect with customers.

We just offered businesses the same old solutions that we offered in print, but pop-up ads and web banners somehow didn't work as well as display ads. Which was just as well, because we told our business customers the ads weren’t worth much by the way we treated them.

Having blown the online-advertising business, newspaper executives are now going to make up for it by charging for online content — likely with miserable results. (Via Steve Yelvington.)

Monetizing the link economy (not)

PaidContent.org has posted an important analysis by media consultant Arnon Mishkin showing that aggregator sites derive far more value by compiling headlines, ledes and links than do the news organizations that actually produce the journalism.

This isn't exactly counterintuitive, but it does run counter to what a lot of us had hoped was true. Jeff Jarvis, more than anyone, has popularized the idea of the "link economy." Trouble is, it may not exist. At the very least, it's likely a lot more complicated than simply a matter of posting links and assuming the linkee will benefit at least as much as the linker.

Here is Mishkin's key insight:

Actually, it shouldn't be surprising to anyone who's thought about how people have historically read a newspaper: They've scanned the headlines and then turned to the sports, movie listings or recipe pages, depending on their real interest. As the saying goes, "People don't check the news to read about the fire, they check it to learn that there wasn't a fire."

Historically, the value of those casual browsers was captured by the newspaper because the readers would have to buy a copy. Now all the value gets captured by the aggregator that scrapes the copy and creates a front page that a set of readers choose to scan. And because creating content costs much more scraping it, there is little rational economic reason to create content.

Mishkin's post comes at a time when news organizations from the Associated Press to News Corp. to the Boston Globe are dipping their toes in the water with respect to charging for their content. That's fraught with difficulties, too, although I'm slightly more bullish about the idea of per-click micropayments than I was even a few months ago.

In the long run, we're going to have to differentiate between good and bad linking. Blogging is the classic example of good linking, since the blogger adds value through analysis and reinterpretation.

But aggregating in a way that removes nearly all incentives to click through to the original news site defines bad linking. The Huffington Post is one example. Newser is an even more egregious example: when you first access the site, you get photos with headlines; click on one and you get a Newser-supplied summary (with more ads); and, finally, with a second click, you jump to the original. Link economy? More like piracy.

No one really knows what the answer is. Mishkin offers some unsatisfying ideas at the end of his post. My own sense is that newspapers need to try a variety of strategies:

• Charging as much as the market will bear for the print edition.
• Developing paid online editions for e-readers, cell phones and laptops (i.e., Times Reader and GlobeReader).
• Removing the "today's paper" feature from their free Web sites. (I would continue to offer all or most of the content for free, but not in the form of an exact substitute.)

The search for a business model continues. Mishkin has punched one more hole in a fantasy a lot of people, including me, had believed in for as long as we could.

(Via Howard Owens' Twitter feed. Owens, you may recall, was a top official at GateHouse Media during that company's legal battle with the New York Times Co. over the Boston Globe's aggregation practices.)

Keeping the local conversation alive

The next stop on my online-journalism video tour is Montclair, N.J., where I recently interviewed Debbie Galant, co-founder of Baristanet, and Mark Porter, editor of the weekly Montclair Times.

Baristanet, founded five years ago, was among the first local blogs — and certainly one of the very first to be started by professional journalists with the goal of turning a profit.

Galant and I met at a local Panera; I interviewed Porter at his office.

Earlier:

• Solana Larsen, managing editor of Global Voices Online
• Paul Bass, editor and founder of the New Haven Independent
• Adil Nurmakov, Central Asia editor for Global Voices Online
• Christine Stuart, editor and publisher of CT News Junkie
  

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.

Non-profit journalism in New Haven

Last month I took two reporting trips for my book-in-progress about online journalism and community participation. I took advantage of the opportunity to shoot several video interviews, which I am now editing and posting on YouTube.

My first stop was in New Haven, where I spent some time with Paul Bass, the founder and editor of the New Haven Independent. I also interviewed his managing editor, Melissa Bailey, and Mark Brackenbury, managing editor of the daily New Haven Register. If you don't see my video (above), click here. I apologize for the sound quality; I should have interviewed Bass somewhere other than a loud coffee-and-bagel shop, but he's a busy guy.

The Independent is a non-profit community news site that's similar to Voices of San Diego and MinnPost. Bass, an award-winning New Haven journalist and former editor of the alternative New Haven Advocate, tools around the city on his bicycle with a notebook and a small video camera.

In March I interviewed Christine Stuart, whose state political site, CT News Junkie, serves as the Independent's Statehouse bureau.

A crowdsourced documentary

No one spoke the word "crowdsourcing." But that was the theme of a presentation Thursday evening by "Frontline" producer Rachel Dretzin, whose next documentary, "Digital Nation," will be a collaborative effort between her team and visitors to the "Digital Nation" Web site. "Digital Nation" is an attempt to explain how our dependence on — and obsession with — the Internet is changing our culture for better and for worse.

Dretzin is putting all of her footage and interviews online. There's a blog tracking progress of the documentary. A series of interactive chats is under way. And folks are encouraged to submit their own video and audio commentaries about the good, the bad and the ugly aspects of online existence. There's even a recommended "Digital Nation" hashtag (#dig_nat) for Twitter users.

"There is absolutely no way to be an expert. This is all of our story," said Dretzin in an appearance at WGBH-TV (Channel 2), where "Frontline" is based. (Disclosure: I am a paid contributor to another WGBH program, "Beat the Press.")

The idea, she added, is that rather than making the film in isolation and then getting reaction from the audience, the reaction would come first, followed by the documentary, which will come out sometime in 2010. "It's an experiment for all of us," she said.

Dretzin's last "Frontline" film was 2008's "Growing Up Online." As was the case with that film, the author Douglas Rushkoff will be the on-camera correspondent in "Digital Nation."

Collaborative journalism that combines the efforts of professionals and amateurs — sometimes called "crowdsourcing" — is one of the more promising developments to arise from Internet-based news ventures. New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen, a leading new-media thinker, refers to such amateurs as "the people formerly known as the audience."

The challenge for Dretzin is to integrate what the former audience has to say into her film, rather than merely featuring it as an online adjunct.

Building an online news business

Steve Outing has a smart piece in Editor & Publisher on why newspapers can't charge for access to their Web sites. His arguments are familiar, but he's pulled them together nicely. Three points he makes are especially worth thinking about:

1. Newspapers that attempt to charge for Web access are opening themselves up to local competition. Outing specifically mentions local television stations. But most large cities have an even more logical candidate: a news-oriented public radio station, such as Boston's WBUR (90.9 FM).

2. Information does not want to be free. News Web sites may have lost the paid-content war, but there's no reason news organizations can't charge for other forms of digital delivery, such as cellphone applications, Kindle and the like.

3. It's the community, not the content, that has real monetary value. Outing says he's particularly interested to see what New York Times executive editor Bill Keller has in mind, as Keller is talking about various benefits that would accrue to those with NYTimes.com memberships.

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.

EveryBlock in Boston

The New York Times today has a too-brief story on hyperlocal Web sites that attempt to aggregate local news down to the neighborhood level. The focus is on EveryBlock, founded by the noted programmer-journalist Adrian Holovaty, best known for creating ChicagoCrime.org and the Washington Post's Congress Votes Database.

The EveryBlock site for Boston is down at the moment. (Noon update: Now up.) When I've checked it out in the past, it has struck me as intriguing, but not ready for prime time. Enter a zip code and you get a pastiche of blogger, media and government information that doesn't add up to a whole lot. But it's easy to imagine its growing into something pretty useful.

A business model of sorts

Is this promising? Several alert readers sent me the link to Walter Mossberg's column on True/Slant, which is a nascent community aimed at bringing journalists and non-journalists together.

I didn't have time to spend more than a few minutes on the site, and I couldn't really make heads or tails of it. Not good. I should be able to get it immediately.

As best as I can tell, True/Slant is a way for journalists to set up their own sites, do reporting, point to good stuff, interact with readers and sell advertising. In other words, it's a way for them to start blogs. Am I missing something? How is this significantly different from Blogger or WordPress.org?

True/Slant founder Lewis Dvorkin writes:

As digital journalism rapidly evolves, this is top most on my mind: How can True/Slant combine the values and standards of the great news organizations that served the public interest so well for so long with the dynamic nature and interactivity of the digital world?

How indeed. Anyway, True/Slant is in "alpha" mode, so maybe it will become more interesting as it evolves.

Update: Dan Frommer of Silicon Alley Insider is unimpressed. (Via Romenesko.)

John Yemma on open-source news

Christian Science Monitor editor John Yemma has some sharp observations about the demise of Encarta, the struggles of Encyclopedia Britannica and the dominance of Wikipedia. And he argues that there's a cautionary tale for the news media therein:

If all the big newspapers at once adopted a pay model, some upstart would come along and use a small group of journalists and a larger group of Wikipedia-like amateurs to build a multimedia newspaper. Like Wikipedia, it would be the butt of countless jokes about unreliability.

Maybe it would even report on its own unreliability. But it would grow stronger because it would be organically constituted on the World Wide Web. That’s the power of open-source knowledge.

And that's the challenge the news media face as they dive into the Internet.

This, of course, is week one of the Monitor's Web-mostly existence, as the daily print edition has given way to a 24/7 Web site and a weekly magazine. (Via Jeff Jarvis.)

From unemployed to entrepreneur

Jenn Lord Paluzzi, laid off recently by GateHouse Media's MetroWest Daily News, is now the editor of a new community Web site called GraftonTimes.com. The publisher is Jack Schofield, a Grafton resident who specializes in online advertising.

The Seattle experiment

Let's begin with the obvious. It's a damn shame that about 145 newsroom folks are losing their jobs, as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer becomes the largest newspaper in the country to move to an online-only platform. Only about 20 people will cover the news at seattlepi.com.

That said, I think 20 people could do a lot of useful damage if they're focused on the right things — covering local news that really matters and offering intelligent aggregation of other content, including local bloggers. Given that the Post-Intelligencer was the number-two paper in Seattle, I can think of no better place to try such an experiment. Too bad the dominant paper, the Seattle Times, is in such tough shape, too. But that's the case pretty much everywhere.

I was interested in see in Ken Doctor's analysis that Lincoln Millstein, the head of Hearst News Digital, will have an indirect hand in the Seattle experiment. Way back when, Millstein was editor of what was then the Boston Globe's Living/Arts section, and a good one.

That said, I'm skeptical of the online-only model. Maybe if seattlepi.com enjoys some initial success, the Hearst folks might consider a free daily tabloid consisting of the best of what's online. As long as advertising remains more lucrative in print than on the Web, that might be the way to go.

Some sort of print presence would also help to distinguish it from Crosscut, a non-profit community news site that serves the Seattle area.

A visit with CT News Junkie editor Christine Stuart

Find more videos like this on Wired Journalists


I spent last Wednesday with Christine Stuart, the editor of CT News Junkie, which covers Connecticut politics. Stuart, who's based at the Statehouse in Hartford, posts two to four times a day, often covering hearings on important but secondary stories that the mainstream media ignore.

CT News Junkie is a media partner with the New Haven Independent, one of the more interesting experiments in non-profit, Web-based community journalism. Projects such as these are crucial as we seek to grope our way forward through the economic crisis that has befallen the news business. (CT News Junkie is technically a for-profit company, but Stuart is looking into ways of taking it non-profit.)

I visited Stuart as part of a long-range project. But while I was there, I shot some video and put together a six-minute documentary. I hope you'll take a few moments and have a look.

Some technical notes. After spending about an hour trying to edit my video with iMovie '08, I gave up and used iMovie 6 instead. The lack of precision for coordinating audio and B-roll with iMovie '08 is a source of constant frustration, and I've finally given up. I can't believe I subjected my students to it last semester. Maybe iMovie '09 will be a better solution.

I also was unable to post the result to YouTube, even though the format (MP4), the length (well under 10 minutes) and the file size (under 100 MB) all meet YouTube's guidlines. Vimeo didn't work, either. I finally posted it successfully to Wired Journalists, which uses the Ning platform designed by Netscape founder Marc Andreesen.

If anyone out there has some thoughts as to why this proved to be YouTube-unfriendly, please drop me a line or post a comment. I'd still like to get this up on YouTube.

Journalism about journalism on NewsTrust

My reading and blogging habits will be substantially different this week, as I am hosting the journalism topic area for NewsTrust.

NewsTrust is a social-networking tool that enables community members to submit and rate news stories on qualities such as fairness, sourcing and importance. If you've never tried it before, I encourage you to sign up and give it a whirl. I'll keep you posted on what I'm submitting this week in the hopes that you'll pitch in.

Here is what I submitted this morning. The links will take you not directly to the story but, rather, to a NewsTrust review page. From there you can go to the story and review it for yourself.

• Ex-WaPo Editor Jim Brady to News Sites: Experiment More, Now by Steve Myers, Poynter.org
• Paid Content: You Can't Tell the Players Without a Scorecard by Ken Doctor, Content Bridges
• The Future of The New Republic by Paul Waldman, The Daily Beast
• United, Newspapers May Stand by David Carr, The New York Times
• Where Were the Media as Wall Street Imploded? by David Folkenflik, National Public Radio

Hope you'll consider taking part.

On the road again

I'm heading to Hartford, Conn., later this morning to interview and follow around Christine Stuart, the editor of CT News Junkie, which covers the Connecticut politics at a time when mainstream news organizations are cutting back. Her site is affiliated with a better-known community site, the New Haven Independent.

Stuart is not waiting for a new business model — she's just doing it.

Howard Owens has left the building

Howard Owens, GateHouse Media's director of digital publishing, has left the company, according to an internal memo by GateHouse president Kirk Davis that was obtained by Media Nation.

"Beginning today, Brad Dennison, VP News, will assume the additional responsibilities inherent in overseeing our online news operations and support," Davis wrote in the memo, dated Friday. "Brad will be incorporating Howard Owens' duties, as Howard has left the company. Howard did volumes to advance our digital strategy and leaves GateHouse with our deep appreciation."

As you will see, I am missing point #2 of Davis' memo. [Not anymore. Added at 11:46 a.m.] If anyone would like to pass it along, I will give you a free lifetime subscription to Media Nation.

GateHouse Media is a national chain that owns nearly 400 community newspapers, including 125 in Eastern Massachusetts. Though most of those papers are weeklies, some are among the best-known dailies in the state, including the Patriot Ledger of Quincy, the Enterprise of Brockton and the Framingham-based MetroWest Daily News.

Within journalism new-media circles, Owens is a highly respected thinker. Before joining GateHouse in September 2006, he helped launch pioneering new-media ventures at the Bakersfield Californian and, before that, the Ventura County Star, according to his LinkedIn profile.

At GateHouse, Owens pushed a strategy of Web-first journalism, exhorting reporters and editors to post breaking news stories on the company's Wicked Local sites before running them in their print editions. He was also a strong advocate of quick-and-dirty video for the Wicked Local sites. In addition, he's a co-founder of the Wired Journalists social network.

Owens' blog, HowardOwens.com, appears to have gone dark, although a "whois" search reveals that he's still the owner. Worth keeping an eye on, I'd say. He continues posting to Twitter.

Owens possesses one of the more interesting minds I know in new-media journalism, combining vision and practical experience. Yet his blunt, occasionally caustic manner has not played well with many of GateHouse's reporters and editors, who work long hours for short money.

I interviewed Owens for a feature on GateHouse Media last fall for CommonWealth Magazine, a time when finances for GateHouse were perilous, but before the economy had gone off a cliff. Owens was particularly proud of the Batavian, a Web-only "paper" he had launched for GateHouse in Batavia, N.Y. (not far from GateHouse's corporate headquarters, in Fairport), which he hoped could serve as something of a model.

"The overall revenue would be less than what you would get from a print newspaper," he said, but added that by eliminating the cost of printing and distribution, he hoped the project could break even relatively quickly.

But Owens put his foot in his mouth when I asked him about complaints within the company that people didn't have time to devote much energy to executing the company's online strategy while also putting out quality print editions.

"There are some incredibly talented hardworking people in New England who are asked to do an incredible amount of work," he said. "There are also slackers, and at some point you have to hold them accountable." The "slackers" comment reportedly got him in some hot water with his superiors.

More recently, an internal e-mail Owens wrote became an issue in the legal dispute between GateHouse and the New York Times Co. GateHouse sued over Boston.com's Your Town sites, charging that Boston.com's practice of automatically "scraping" Wicked Local sites for headlines and ledes violated its copyright. (The suit was settled before it could go to trial.)

But though it might look as though Owens was endorsing the sort of copying and linking practices that Boston.com was engaged in on its Your Town sites, the issues were different in subtle and important ways. If you're interested in learning more, here's an overview I wrote for the Guardian.

What could be motivating Owens' departure? Perhaps he left entirely on his own. If not, my guess is that Davis and chief executive Michael Reed have decided to run as lean an operation as possible in order to get through the recession.

In any case, Media Nation extends its best wishes to Owens, one of the good guys in the ongoing struggle to reinvent journalism. Davis' memo follows.

DATE: February 20, 2009
TO: GateHouse Media Publishers
Regional Managers
GateHouse Media News Employees
Online Operations Employees
Fairport Employees

FROM: Kirk Davis
RE: GateHouse News Division

As we adjust to the challenges confronting us, it is critically important that we remain positive and determined to emerge from this economic turmoil stronger than ever. As you know, the decisions we make must balance many needs ranging from controlling costs, maximizing our resources, evolving our print and online strategies and demonstrating to our employees that we'll move swiftly and communicate often as we navigate this recession.

Today, I'd like to outline some important changes with the aforementioned context in mind.

I'm pleased to announce an expansion of the services provided to you and our employees through the GateHouse News Division. Beginning today, Brad Dennison, VP News, will assume the additional responsibilities inherent in overseeing our online news operations and support. Brad will be incorporating Howard Owens' duties, as Howard has left the company. Howard did volumes to advance our digital strategy and leaves GateHouse with our deep appreciation.

In his expanded role, Brad will oversee and foster a stronger alignment of our print and online strategy, organizational structure, training and support. In turn, this will enable Bill Blevins to focus more on accelerating our online revenue performance, but more importantly, devote more time to strategic planning, identifying new digital opportunities and developing business models to support them. While there are many other benefits we’ll realize, I'm particularly excited due to:

1) The confidence I have in Brad and Bill, working closely with me, to bring greater clarity, responsiveness, support and service from a "field" perspective.

2) The opportunity we have to bring greater continuity to our overall content strategy and product development on all platforms, with a premium on scalability. This will allow us to make big plays when we want, where we want. In other words, we'll benefit from simplified implementation of next-generation products en masse.

3) Our company's ability to step back and appreciate what we've all accomplished together, but to welcome a fresh approach by bringing our vast corporate talent in online development and support together with our premiere news division and its contagious enthusiasm and culture.

4) Our company's increased capacity as a result of these changes to make a greater commitment to long-term and strategic planning so that we can all feel increasingly inspired about where our hard work can lead us. The possibilities are endless.

As Brad and Bill meet with staff and focus on this transition, I've asked them to be prepared to share their plans with us within the next month, which will no doubt allow them to take into consideration any suggestions they receive from you, our digital staff and our outside consulting firm (FTI).

Thank you!

Update: Owens writes on Twitter, "For those who asked: It's not quite true that I'm out of a job. I'm just no longer employed by GHM. Details in a week or two."