I don’t have strong feelings one way or another, but the decision by Craigslist.com to stop carrying “erotic” ads (read “prostitution”) is a sorta defining moment in the internet.

Have we (the internet) grown up? (Prostitution is illegal in the U.S.; why allow ads??)

Have we stifled free speech? (Why not go after Yellow Pages or alternative papers for the same ads???. Why is it bad/worse when it’s on the internet?) Update: 2009-05-23: Yeah, Craigslist has already fired back: An Apology Is In Order

I dunno, but it’s interesting. To me, it’s Craigslist saying that it’s not worth the hassle. They have States Attorneys all over them (legit or not).

Will this action slow prostitution? No.

Will this action slow prostitution ads on the web? No.

Will this action slow prostitution ads on the Craigslist? Nah – just shift them to other areas with code words.

Will this action make it harder for those who want to crack down on prostitution to find prostitutes advertising their services? Yes.

Our tax dollars at work…or, working the street…

And – sadly – we remove (or drive underground so it’s not easily accessible) this part of the zeitgeist. This is a part of sociology that is “poof – gone!”

And we seem to forget the Safe Harbor section (hosts not responsible for stuff folks upload, essentially) of the DMCA (or CDA – I fergit. Section 230??)

Thoughts?

This is the second in a series of articles (Step One) giving my two cents about how newspapers can dodge their obituary).

Simply put, newspapers – or any industry endangered by the internet (real estate, travel industry, booksellers, video-rental stores…and the list goes on) – need to understand two basic facts:

• Like it or not, the (near) future is online (after that, who knows?). It’s virtual, not physical.
• Embrace geeks (those technologically conversant).

I think most people (grudgingly, in many cases) understand the former, but the latter doesn’t register. Here are my thoughts on how geeks can help save newspapers.

Newspapers have to be willing to listen to – and follow – geeks.

What do I mean by this?

Example: Any outfit can take a print columnist and post that daily column on the newspaper’s/magazine’s website, but if (for example) comments are not enabled…well, that outfit missed what the web is all about.

The web is:

• Link-driven
• Community-driven
• A flat line – not an inverted pyramid. A commenter/blog author blasting one’s coverage can be as important as the original coverage.

Geeks – in this article’s content, I mean the web-savvy – get this.

And geeks get the limitations/connections. Not everyone needs to be on Twitter or FaceBook; in some cases, one or the other would be a good thing.

My advice to newspapers: Hire/listen to geeks. They will steer you away from that $5 zillion Microsoft software purchase by pointing out that X is open source and, uh, free. And it’s used by more Fortune 500 companies than the MS product blah blah.

More importantly, geeks’ll tell a company that this or that will drive more traffic (and sales/ad impressions). They’ll be wrong often; we all are. But they’ll give the non-geeks insight into what they have never even considered but is happening all around them on the web.

Dear Newspapers: Online is the current survival mode – so at least listen to the geeks, who grok the web.

Scott Rosenberg, a founder of Salon.com, had a great newspaper anecdote the other day, describing the Q&A; from a “save the newspapers!” forum:

A young journalist who’s started up a blog that focuses on the 2010 census. Today we call this a “niche site”; but it’s also what we used to [in newspaper lingo] call a beat.
— Coll, Kinsley, Bronstein kick newspapers around

Again, the geeks – this guy running this unknown site – is an expert on same. He’s a geek. He gets the web. He gets what he’s reporting on. He’s the “beat reporter.”

I think Rosenberg’s off-hand comment is brilliant and really hits home.

Newspapers: Getting a better idea of the future?

Update 5/12/2009: At least one journalism school is getting the message – Northwestern University’s Medill journalism school is hoping programmers can save newspapers (via TechCrunch).

Northwestern University’s journalism school is offering free scholarships to software developers so they can further hone their journalism skills and possibly integrate the two for a media company down the line (disclosure: I attended this journalism school). The idea of creating programmers who understand journalism is compelling and brings attention to an important trend taking place in the industry.

— Leena Rao, “Calling All Coders: Journalism Schools Want You To Save The News Industry”

Neko Case, the lead singer for the New Pornographers, has a new solo album (her second, I think) that I like the more I hear it. (Middle Cyclone)

I like the New Pornographers (name comes from some fundamentalist preacher who said “rock music is the new pornography” or something like that), and Case’s voice is an emphatic part of this group.

Solo, she’s different, and I’m sliding from “I like her better with the New Pornographers” to “Hmm…solo stuff…good.”

Either way, Neko Case – like Natalie Merchant (with or sans “10,000 Maniacs”) – is worth a listen.

Me likes both.

Listen; decide for yourself!

Beware of thoughts that come in the night. They aren’t turned properly; they come in askew, free of sense and restriction, deriving from the most remote of sources. Take the idea of February 17, a day of canceled expectations, the day I learned my job teaching English was finished because of declining enrollement at the college, the day I called my wife from whom I’d been separated for nine months to give her the news, the day she let slip about her “friend” — Rick or Dick or Chick. Something like that.

— William Least Heat Moon, “Blue Highways”

“You’re still in touch. I guess that’s the test.”

“Barely–barely.”

“A psychiatrist could help. There’s a good man in Albany.”

Finnerty shook his head. “He’d pull me back into the center, and I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.” He nodded, “Big, undreamed-of things — the people on the edge see them first.”

— Kurt Vonnegut, “Player Piano”

In a real dark night of the soul, it is always 3 o’clock in the morning.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack Up”

According to some documents in my possession, I’m now 50 years old.

Crap.

Does this this mean that I have to give some serious thought as to what I want to do when I grow up?

Newspapers have been struggling lately (see my Writing the Obit for Print Newspapers), and the industry has been flailing about looking for revenue.

One of the (many idiotic) ideas the industry has latched onto is to make Google pay to link to them.

Hit them with a cluestick – sure, Google will drop you, and your page views go down, as do ad revenues…yeah, that’s the plan.

But on April 7, 2009, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt addressed the attendees at the annual meeting of newspaper publishers, and he had some very basic, hard-to-ignore advice for the crowd:

I would encourage everybody, think in terms of what your reader wants. These are ultimately consumer businesses and if you piss off enough of them, you will not have any more.
— via paidcontent.org

Yet the newspaper industry still doesn’t see this – it’s more of a, “well, we do real journalism, so pay us for stuff.” It doesn’t look at the customer – it looks at the bottom line. It assumes that what they produce is the shit from the Golden Goose: We’ll all gravitate toward this golden fertilizer…

(Full disclosure: I’ve worked at many trade publications and for a large newspaper group; reader surveys – if done – were an exercise in how to get more blood out of the turnip. Overall [a gross generalization that I stand behind], content was about the $$, not a good customer [reader] experience.)

Craigslist does provides a great customer experience – ugly, but fast and free (for all but a small subset of paid content postings). And Craig Newmark keeps turning down bazillion-dollar offers for this ugly little site(s).

Why can’t newspapers get that customers have changed; that online is different from print? I guess that’s partly because newspapers can’t get away from “papers” – can’t divorce themselves of print and the insanely high profits newspapers enjoyed until about a decade ago.

This is a very basic first step that publications will have to embrace before they can do anything in the new journalism – online – world. The audience and expectations have changed – whatever: Keep them happy.

Webster’s Third New World Dictionary in print: bad. Dictionary.com: good.

Life magazine in print: bad (gone). Flickr: good.

The first rule is to keep the customer satisfied. Newspapers, today, don’t seem to really give a rat’s ass about that.

The debate of the merits of Life vs. Flickr etc can come later. Or newspapers can build the better Dictionary.com. Why not?

Newspapers: Fix this, and then we’ll discuss ways to make money. Because you could have the coolest 3D, community-driven, paradigm-breaking, AJAX-outfitted [fill in more buzz phrases] web site, but if you piss off your customers (in whatever way), well, they’re gone. As is your potential revenue.

Really. Think about it.

Collection of the Art Institute of Chicago

About 10 days ago, we took the train into Chicago to see the Edvard Munch exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago. (Yes, it is Edvard, with a “v,” not a “w.”)

While it was the institute’s current big exhibition, it was thinner than some blockbusters the museum has had in the past. However, for Munch, this worked out really well.

Munch is not one of those prolific artists like Picasso, who would crank out drawings and paintings until they filled his apartment…and then he’d move.

Since there are not as many “big” paintings of Munch, the museum curated an exhibition that highlighted some of Munch’s influences, including some Impressionist-era paintings from the Art Institute’s private collection (Monet, Seurat).

Munch really was a sponge; you could see examples of him almost directly ripping off another painting, but putting his own twist on things.

Much more than just “The Scream.”

We picked a bad Friday to go, however (3/27/2009) – it was spring break, and the museum was lousy with packs of students doing just about anything other than looking at art.

Yeah, “those damn kids!” [shakes fist….].

The photography exhibit going on was “Yousuf Karsh: Regarding Heroes”. Karsh is one of the best portrait photographers ever, but his images are almost sometimes too iconic. Yes, shows the man (think Churchill or Hemingway), but rarely broke through the idealized image of the individual like Arnold Neumann or Irving Penn did.

I think one of my favorite Karsh portraits was his very un-Karsh take of cellist Pablo Casals. Instead of a giant head – an icon – filling the frame, it’s taken from the back, shows the player small in the frame…just lost in the music.

That’s nice.

That’s one of the benefits of living in/near a big city that I appreciate: Hey, that was two major exhibitions we saw in one day, same building. This is going to only happen in a handful of cities across the world, to be honest.

Even though I haven’t been to many of the Chicagoland area’s major (or minor) museums in decades – Shedd Aquarium, Adler Planetarium for just two examples – they are right there if I do suddenly wake up some morning with an itch to see some fish or stars.

It is an embarrassment of riches, and one I should take advantage of more often than I do.

There has been a lot of hand-wringing and some thought-provoking articles on the web lately dealing with what is, essentially, the beginning of the end for print newspapers (ditto for magazines, but they may fare a little better). This has moved from a “yeah, we can see that coming…” to, well, it’s here.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer went web only this past week; the Rocky Mountain News printed its last edition Feb. 27, 2009. This leaves both towns (Seattle and Denver) with only one paper. The San Francisco Chronicle is close to folding; its parent company (Hearst) has indicated that it wants to sell the paper, and – if it gets no takers – it may well shut down the print edition.

In Chicago, both dailies are in trouble – the Chicago Tribune has filed for bankruptcy protection, and the Sun-Times has endured large layoffs and its parent company is currently on the selling block. (UPDATE 3/31/2009 – The Sun-Time’s parent company has filed for bankruptcy.)

Print newspapers are, to put it mildly, looking at that light at the end of the tunnel. And it ‘taint sunshine.

So there are a lot of people trying to figure out what comes next for news: Dave Winer, Steve Johnson and Scott Rosenberg all have excellent posts. Read them. (Update 3/23/2009 – I forgot Clay Shirky’s excellent piece.)

Let’s condense down some of the points from these gifted writers (Winer is a technologist, but he is also the first/among the first bloggers. And he’s a bright guy who knows how technology can be disruptive):

• Print newspapers are on their way out. This writing’s been on the wall ever since Craig Newmark launched his little community site, but – much like the music and movies industries – newspapers could not reconcile themselves to not having massive profits (and all the control), so they missed virtually all opportunities to leverage the internet.
• The underlying cause for this death spiral is the internet. Different parties may have different opinions on how the internet is hurting print newspapers, but I think everyone agrees with this as the cause.
• Newspapers equate newspapers with journalism. As in, if print newspapers go under, there won’t be any more journalism. This is bunk.
• Newspapers don’t want to admit they are legacy. They keep trying to get the traditional models ported to the web – funded by Google, taxes on laptop batteries (i.e. a blogger tax) or subscriptions/some other pay-for-content model. Again, bunk.
• We’re still in the midst of this massive change. No one really has a clue as to what happens next.

I agree with what’s summarized above, and I’d like to add a bunch of my own thoughts.

The idea that print controls the news is over. This ideal started to fail when Ted Turner made the move to have a 24-hour news channel. Good or bad (depends on your point of view), CNN has forever changed news coverage, and – in some ways (mainly up-to-the-minute news) – presaged the impact the web/blogs have had on print news.

While TV news has hurt newspapers, it was CNN that really landed a body blow. Take, for example, financial news. Local/network news will only report big financial news (IBM lays off 1,000 workers or news about a large local company). For info about how your Acme Explosives stock is doing, you used the business section to view stock rates and see some analysis. CNN – with a running ticker and financial segments throughout the day – cut into the need for perusing the business section.

And that’s just one example. The internet took this “all info, all the time” CNN example to a whole new level.

With blogs – or wikis or community-driven sites – the barrier to entry is gone. Anyone with access to a computer can open a free Blogger account and be, essentially, a publisher.

That doesn’t mean that most of them will be solid journalistic endeavors, but so what? If they fulfill a need, so be it. If they don’t, they won’t really matter.

On the other hand, some blogs will offer solid journalism. Josh Marshall and his team at talkingpointsmemo.com, for example, have done some brilliant work over the past few years – Marshall even won a prestigious Polk Award.

So don’t tell me “blogger” necessarily equals “lack of journalism chops.” (And Marshall makes a living off his blogs – as do many of his employees. It can be a sustainable business model.)

Yet old-time newspaper editors – the ones today clinging to the outdated medium – equate bloggers with lack of experience, lack of investigate skills and so on. It reminds me of how the right wing tried to paint President Obama’s stimulus bill as socialist, with “socialist” loaded with very negative connotations.

Get it? Capitalism is good; socialism is bad. Guess we better ditch Social Security, the FDIC, Medicare and Medicaid, disband the government tools like, uh, the Army, Navy, fire departments and so on.

The blogger=bad journalism is painting with the same wide brush. As though all bloggers are living in their parents’ basement and think The Chicago Manual of Style is put out by Vogue.

As for the argument that only print does real investigative work, well, I have two responses:

• How much investigative journalism are newspapers today really doing? Lots of AP & Reuters stories, covering the latest celebrity melt-down, and recipes. Not exactly All the President’s Men….
• Why can’t an online site – single person or not – do investigative journalism? A lot of this work is just a lot of legwork; putting the pieces together. Why does someone in front of a computer do less of this than a person at a news desk? And – online – there’s the community effect. Have all your readers call their representative to ask about X and report what he/she said. Powerful.

But the ink-stained masses continue to cling to the belief that only print journalists can do real journalism – and so when these workers move online, the copy they produce should be paid for, not free. Newsprinters who tout this idea generally support this concept with one of two arguments:

• The Wall Street Journal charges for subs!
• The micropayment model works on iTunes!

To the first, I say: Financial data/analysis is one of the few things people will pay for, and – more importantly – people aren’t paying for the subscriptions: They expense it. Their companies are paying for it. This model won’t extend to charging for recipes…

As far as the iTunes argument goes, well, it doesn’t hold any water.

I want “Born to Run” sung by Bruce Springsteen, not by anyone else. So that has value. And I’ll listen to the song over and over – again, value.

But news? I just want to know what blew up in Iraq today. If I can’t get it for free at one spot, I’ll go somewhere where it is free. I’ll read the article and never return to it again. With the rise of no barrier to publishing, there are a zillion places I can get that info. Many will write up said news, some will charge, but there’s going to be a lot of people publishing the news, doing it well, and doing it for free. It’s the law of large numbers.

And I say all of this as someone who has a degree in English, has worked in publishing as a writer/editor, and who until last year had never been without a daily newspaper. In college and when I was first working and making crap, I always had the daily newspaper. Required reading.

I still get the Sunday paper (Chicago Tribune), but I just skim it (if that). Just nothing of worth there, for the most part.

It saddens me, but it’s a reality: print is at the end of the road. Newspapers are too expensive to produce, and – with the rise of the internet – just not nimble enough to compete.

And just about everyone knows it – except many of those working at newspapers.

So, what comes next?

I have some thoughts on that for a future entry.

Well, it’s officially Spring (sometime today), but it’s still winter here. Currently 36 degrees.

We had temps in the 70s earlier this week, so it make the near-freezing readings feel that much colder.

Oh well, let’s look ahead to generally warming weather…

WATCHING:
Roger and Me
Director: Michael Moore

Powerful, painful, funny, not really going anywhere.

But – today (2009) resonates even more.

All movies

This is the first Michael Moore film I saw, and that was back in the late 80s, when GM was bailing out of Flint, MI (Moore’s whole story).

Was funny/sad then.

Today – with GM poised on the brink of bankruptcy for the entire company – not just Flint – it’s sobering.

Yes, the “Roger” in the title (GM CEO Roger Smith) gave himself a big raise (2 million) while plants were closing (moving to Mexico). Ouch, but whatever.

Today, we have the auto execs in front of congress to beg for bailout money, and no one can raise their hand and say, “Yes, I flew here commercial.”

Nope. Private planes.

Yes, we have private jets, but please give us money….

Michael Moore – like him or hate him – needs to revisit this subject. Born in Flint; first major film there; big (current) disasters there.

Time for a Roger Redux….