Steve,

It takes real chutzpah to ask Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster of craigslist to help newspapers salvage their classifieds businesses and thus save democracy, or at least the part of it that newspapers presumably foster.

Your clever open letter to them, at the same time congratulating and blaming, misplaces responsibility. It assumes they have the authority to solve a problem that the news industry inflicted upon itself: how to replace a subsidy predicated on controlling and authoritarian business practices.

Steve, I can’t decide if your modest proposal is naive, self-serving or tragically poetic.

Craig Newmark never set out to disrupt the newspaper industry. Motivated only by helping people out, he created a simple list for his friends, initially distributed through email, and later on the Internet when one friend showed him how to create a Web page. Their trust in him, as well as a passion for serving others through technology, gave craigslist its authority.

You miss the magic of craigslist. It is Craig’s “friends” — a community that has grown to 40 million people a month in 500 U.S. cities and 50 countries (larger than all news sites combined by several factors) — who disrupted newspaper classifieds. Call them users, customers, an audience, a market, or marketplace, they discovered that through craigslist they could do for themselves what others charged excessively in order to handsomely subsidize their businesses.

Trust in Craig, still craigslist’s chief customer service representative, remains at the heart of it. So are democratic, open markets: the right of the people to conduct commerce and journalism among and between themselves.

Meantime, newspapers charged premium prices for access to an arcane classification system that published a few, annotated lines of shorthand in very small type at the back of a dense product with limited, daily distribution. The hard-to-find, hard-to-read, one-way advertisements were distributed to parts of a relatively small geographic region for sellers and buyers to discover, at least those who happened to buy the newspaper and read the classifieds section on the very day they were prepared to make a transaction.

For a lousy experience, newspapers in growth markets such as Dallas, Denver and San Jose made hundreds of millions of dollars that drove margins of 30 per cent or more with these high-yield liners.

The experience was not significantly improved by importing this business to the online version of the newspaper. What didn’t work in print didn’t work online.

Newspapers used their profits not to expand their social mission, but rather to drive the stock price of the companies that owned them, to finance acquisitions, to reward management, and to acquire additional wealth through cost-management: death by acquisition accelerated by cutting their way to profitability.

Financing news operations has never been much a part of it; ask any editor who has asked for budget increases or additional staff to cover a society growing increasingly complex and competitive. The moral imperative is a myth perpetuated by editors and journalists, not by the publishers you (Steve) are asking Craig and Jim to help.

Now, other forms and systems – a collaborative, more democratic Fifth Estate, if you will — are emerging to replace an institution that is broken. Almost anyone can deploy the simple technology that craiglist uses. Anyone can participate in its journalism and commerce.

Publishers would be better served by implementing enlightened business strategies with a passionate consumer connection at its core. Until then, they will continue to be cast in a survival drama of their own making.

Newspapers are like a broken satellite falling of orbit. The technology is failing; the mission may soon be scuttled. To stay in orbit, the engineers must repair and update the technology systems. More importantly, the flight controllers must restore trust in the mission and its results by relinquishing control. Otherwise, Satellite Newspaper – classifieds and all — will burn up in the atmosphere.

Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster may be talented astronauts, but they shouldn’t go down with the pilots of their competitors’ obsolete ships.

The site was designed for The Times by Roger Black Studio and DaniloBlack with consultation by the SEVEN26group. It is a visually-striking approach to news that is packed with content: pathways to 400,000 story topics, say Times editors. An impressive marriage of design and content, the site is notable for allowing users to control their experience and choose levels of engagement. A companion redesign of the newspaper relates it to its website and extends the “themes” approach.”

The stages of grief: Denial, Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance.

The latest Audit Bureau of Circulations report showed a 3.5 percent drop in circulation – to about 50 million — for the largest U.S. newspapers over the six-month period ending in March. That level is the lowest in more than 60 years. The population has more than doubled since that time, so the market share for the “mass” medium known as newspapers in the U.S. is now about 18 percent or less.

The news on the advertising front is worse. The downward trajectory of revenues and ad share for newspapers is so steep that Advertising Week, the bible of the advertising industry, initiated a front-page installment called “The Newspaper Death Watch.”

While some news enterprises are finally embracing digital media, albeit somewhat reluctantly, that window of opportunity seems to be slipping away, too. Revenues from online products are about 10 percent or less of the declining print pot. And for the first time, pure-plays dominate the local ad-revenue marketplace where newspapers once reigned.

None of this seems to phase the industry trade-group Newspaper Association of America, which has cranked out press releases about the “jump” in online newspaper advertising and audience, or the World Association of Newspapers which trumpets newspapers as “a multi-media growth business” in a promotion for its World Newspaper Congress in Sweden next month.

See Also: A Satellite Falling Out of Orbit

Publishers underestimated Craigslist once with devastating results. Newspapers, which derive nearly 80 of their revenue from classified advertising, lost half or more of their lucrative classified business over the past five years, a loss that now threatens the economic stability of the industry. So while, as my friend and former publisher John Greenman suggests, Craigslist may not be remarkable for the amount of money it takes from a single newspaper market, it is hardly inconsequential. Were it not for its mostly free approach Craigslist could do much greater damage.

Now the question is whether publishers will make another, perhaps fatal, mistake by missing the point of the Craigslist experience: shifting trust in the digital marketplace. Craig Newmark is a mensch, the trusted face of online classifieds, an always-on customer-service celebrity with the world’s biggest buddy list. “Trust is the new trust,” is how the enigmatic Newmark once explained it to me. What he means is that in an environment where anyone can do what he does, the authentic expression of trust is the key differentiator. That may not be entirely true, but it is enough true to crush a greedy, feudal business predicated on controlled distribution and an arcane classification system for categorizing commerce among and between people. It is the emergence of everyone as an online broker in an open, connected marketplace that warrants coverage, breathless as that may be.

But the despair of recent years seemed muted last week when about 1200 leaders from the news industry came to Washington at a joint conference of the Newspaper Association of America, American Society of Newspaper Editors and a newspaper production and technology exhibition.

Resignation filled the corridors of Washington’s drab and confusing convention center as publishers and editors contemplated the demise of the printed newspaper amid the emergence of digital media. The annual sessions with political leaders, as well as the opening of the industry’s $450 million museum, provided the only energy for a satellite falling out of orbit.

For that matter, there was little enthusiasm for the session on social media in which I participated. About 60 people attended our session. My slides are here.

The conference exposed troubled and turbulent times for newspapers. The technology hall was deserted, a stark contrast to the high-energy, shoulder-to-shoulder exhibitions that other sectors hold. One major publisher held a high-profile retirement party for a news exec getting out while the getting is still there. Editors shared painful stories about change, layoffs, finding news jobs, and dreams deferred. Some, already retired, returned to spin tales of better days gone by.

As with all their conferences, NAA and ASNE made and spun news. Highlights from a strange, sad week.

– At a luncheon for the editors hosted by the Associated Press, MediaNews founder and CEO Dean Singleton quizzed Sen. Barack Obama about whether he would send more troops to Afghanistan, where “Obama bin Laden is still at large?” “I think that was Osama bin Laden,” a somber Obama answered.

— Two reporters covering Sen. John McCain greeted their-favorite-senator-running-for-president with a box of Dunkin’ Donuts and sugar-coated questions that brought groans from fellow journalists. “We even brought you your favorite treat,” said AP’s Liz Sidoti. “Oh, yes, with sprinkles!” replied the candidate, who ate it up.

– A glass elevator in the Newseum stocked with colorful cocktails lifted news execs to seven floors of digital exhibits and sumptuous spreads prepared by Wolfgang Puck. In a city of free museums, the public must pay $20 for the privilege, drinks not included, of appreciating the Constitutional amendment that guarantees citizens free speech and a free press. Happily, the best of the Newseum is free: the daily, front pages of newspapers displayed as posters outside the building.

– The Newspaper Association of America issued a press release boasting that newspaper-owned web sites earned more revenue than all local media companies combined. Reason to celebrate, I suppose, if you ignore the pure-play Web sites that now have a 44 percent share of the local online ad market, eclipsing the share held by newspaper sites, currently about 27 percent and sinking. Which is like saying that Sen. Clinton is the leading the Democratic candidate if you don’t count Sen. Obama.

– The American Society of Newspaper’s annual census showed that the number of full-time journalists working at America’s daily newspapers shrank by 4.4 percent in the past year, the largest decrease in the past 30 years. Given the performance of newspaper moderators at the candidates’ sessions, it appeared as if the best journalists had either left their jobs, were laid off, or didn’t attend the newspaper conference.

See Also: The Burn

On April 19 he’s ripping a page from the tech world and organizing an “unconference” to help the San Jose Mercury News talk with and learn from, well, anyone. He’s calling the effort CopyCamp, an homage to BarCamp and FooCamp, events for software developers and techies without a fixed agenda. They set an agenda, then try to come up with brilliant ideas, new code or at least new friends.

What brilliant ideas, new code or new friends might CopyCampers come up with?

Should the owners of the big newspaper in Silicon Valley give up and shut it down now? Or stay the current course – and painfully plunge from relevance, ever hopeful that there’s a bottom down there somewhere? Or does the San Jose Mercury News, in any form, have a future, a place in the heartland of U.S. technology innovation and investment – and a place in the cultural fabric of community life there? Might Silicon Valley’s best and brightest have anything to contribute to the conversation?

How about the newspaper where you live? Or newsANYTHING – TV, radio, web, mobile, whatever. Who’s producing the journalism you need to inform and influence life in your community?

Even if you don’t care about the future of the San Jose Mercury News you can consider these broad and generic questions about the future of news from a variety of angles. Here’s a new set of essays on the subject from Britannica.com (now a blog!), with contributions from Jay Rosen, Clay Shirky and others. Here’s a new report from the World Association of Newspapers that reviews the many ways newspaper companies can “maximize the Content Value Chain for efficiencies and revenue-making.”

In the U.S., at least, the business outlook for newspapers is grim. Earnings are down, share prices are down, and investment analysts are bleak on what comes next. Eric Alterman wrote last month in The New Yorker:

Few believe that newspapers in their current printed form will survive. Newspaper companies are losing advertisers, readers, market value, and, in some cases, their sense of mission at a pace that would have been barely imaginable just four years ago.

Actually, it was imagined. And anticipated.

The trends are similar in the UK – and we’re even seeing signs of declines in traditional media usage in China, which now has the world’s biggest Internet audience.

Perhaps less obvious, or less interesting to those interested only in maximizing revenue, is the corresponding social urgency revealed by the decline of newspapers. Our research finds Americans deeply dissatisfied with their traditional sources of news, but also deeply mindful of the importance of journalism in their communities.

So there’s a gap to be filled – an opportunity to provide better journalism for people who believe it’s important. This is the We Media News Gap.

But what, exactly, does that mean? What does better journalism look like in the culture of We Media – the mediascape of free, networked, digital everything, news unbundled from advertising, ubiquitous, always-on creation, distribution, recommendation, sharing and information overload?

From the CopyCamp web site:

CopyCamp is a one day un-conference that brings community members into the newsroom to meet and discuss important issues with local journalists. After an initial meet and greet, reporters from the San Jose Mercury News and active members of the San Jose community will suggest topics they believe will benefit through an open dialogue in the hopes of improving the quality of journalism in the Bay Area and figuring out how the SJMN can better cover under represented communities.

Several editors and reporters from the newspaper have signed up to attend, including the newspaper’s influential designer/business development director, Matt Mansfield – but he’s also on his way out the door via the newspaper’s most recent round of layoffs/voluntary “departures.” Here’s the CopyCamp participant list.

Analysis: If chatting with members of the community you purport to serve is a novel idea for a newspaper company then CopyCamp is too little and too late to help. But making such conversations a priority, and re-imagining the relationship between a news organization and its community, is a big idea – and taking it more seriously would be a smart step for anyone who wants to meet the We Media News Gap.

You can find more details about CopyCamp and register to attend here.

Location: Storer Auditorium at 4:15 pm

Session Chair: Hal Straus, Interactivity and Communities Editor, Washingtonpost.com

Robin Miller, Editor, Slashdot/SourceForge

Slashdot has a multilayered moderation system for ranking comments. “If you ever get into a content rating system, do *not* call it ‘karma’.” Slashdot moderators are selected at random, and these moderators can rank comments up or down. If you’ve posted a comment, you can’t moderate. To control for group-think, Slash-Dot has “meta-moderators” a small, selected, voluntary group of “super moderators.”

Must haves:

1. Users must be able to rate things up and down.

2. Should, below a certain threshold, should comments be visible?

3. Many users doing few moderations–spread the love.

Steve Arend, Vice President Digital media Services, CMP Technology

I saw opportunities to take “noise” away from what other people want. We are producing a virtual trade show, 2nd life, where you can go in and interact with those who create the products you’re interested in. We have had cases in 2nd life, where we’ve had semi-unanimous interruptions, where we allow interactions to happen, but with the knowledge I can literally throw them off the (2nd Life) island.

There’s noise from the sales side, the engineering side, and from consumers. In the virtual world, that’s the closest I’d seen to real life. Because you can interrupt the audio portion, just like in real life. (View video clip 1.)

Links:

http://life20.net http://howmachineswork.com

Mark Jones, Global Community Editor for Reuters

Question: What’s the worst that can happen?

We try and pull in the best of the rest of the web, what other sites are saying on various topics. Global Voices-Voices without Votes. We cover what major nations around the world are doing around elections, bringing in bloggers from around the world. For instance, you can see what global bloggers are saying about US elections. However, this skews content if the blogosphere is skewed all on its own.

How do you make it clear to users that there is a difference between blogger comments and stories, and Reuters itself? Our single biggest compliant from the public is on neutrality. We get these from users, and also our network of journalists. They feel a little hurt that we’re putting resources towards other’s work. But the last thing we want is for our journalists to feel “dissed.”

Handling comments….For an organization like Reuters, which is keen on neutrality, we have all sorts of problems with comments on blogs. We haven’t cracked the burden of moderation back to the audience. I naively thought, when I started editor’s started blogs, that when we were attacked, that our supporters would ride in and save us–and they did the first few times. But then, there turned to be some mob-rule and our cheerleaders sort of got scared away.

Finally, I really want to get the two sides–journalists and commenters–to enrich the discussion. But until we have a civil discourse, the journalists just aren’t going to engage.

www.blogs.reuters.com

Chris Tolles, CEO, Topix

The real promise of the internet is interactivity. A system that gets more people engaged (even if there are inappropriate comments), is better than a system than doesn’t get people engaged. We’re trying to get the highest number of people engaged. We have over 400,000 topics, all across the globe.

When the cartoons about the Prophet Mohamed appeared on the net, we got over 2,000 comments, when we geo-located where these comments were coming from, we found most of the comments were coming from Scandinavia and the Middle East. Over time, middle ground developed. “We look at it as, are we getting an increasing amount of people, and it’s a Darwinian product, and the one that has the most people wins”.

http://blog.topix.com

General Conversation

About journalists interacting with and within the comments:

“They’re highly skeptical about this. Getting bothered with questions from users, but they’re kinda intrigued by it. They see their job as to talk to policy makers and heads of companies.” -Mark Jones

“The San Francisco Chronicle, uses the public as a club to make a point and support what they’re saying–to use it against the people who are against them. …I think a year or two from now, I will bet you a lot of money, that journalists will take comments and publish them in their stories. ” -Chris Tolles

“At the Post, we have the need to be objective, and we’ve had a lot of our opinion writers who have gotten into the ring with our commenters. For one thing, they worry about this because they’re ‘working without a net.’ -Where they’re not editorialized.” -Hal Straus

Interaction from the audience (not all who participated, but the closest person to me that I could get info from):

Jean-Baptiste, with Le Liberation.fr, where there is a web-comment page within the hardcopy newspaper. These comments are edited and selected before being printed. http://liberation.fr/actualite/media/2293555.fr.php

Other sites mentioned as having interesting interactivity features:

http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/thebigblog/

http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/thebigblog/

PS Video of this event will be posted to this blog today, it was not available immediately.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Two thirds of Americans – 67% – believe traditional journalism is out of touch with what Americans want from their news, a new We Media/Zogby Interactive poll shows.

The survey also found that while most Americans (70%) think journalism is important to the quality of life in their communities, two thirds (64%) are dissatisfied with the quality of journalism in their communities.

Meanwhile, the online survey documented the shift away from traditional sources of news, such as newspapers and TV, to the Internet – most dramatically among so-called digital natives – people under 30 years old.

Nearly half of respondents (48%) said their primary source of news and information is the Internet, an increase from 40% who said the same a year ago. Younger adults were most likely to name the Internet as their top source – 55% of those age 18 to 29 say they get most of their news and information online, compared to 35% of those age 65 and older.

These oldest adults are the only age group to favor a primary news source other than the Internet, with 38% of these seniors who said they get most of their news from television. Overall, 29% said television is their main source of news, while fewer said they turn to radio (11%) and newspapers (10%) for most of their news and information. Just 7% of those age 18 to 29 said they get most of their news from newspapers, while more than twice as many (17%) of those age 65 and older list newspapers as their top source of news and information.

Web sites are regarded as a more important source of news and information than traditional media outlets – 86% of Americans said Web sites were an important source of news, with more than half (56%) who view these sites as very important. Most also view television (77%), radio (74%), and newspapers (70%) as important sources of news, although fewer than say the same about blogs (38%).

The Zogby Interactive survey of 1,979 adults nationwide was conducted Feb. 20-21, 2008, and carries a margin of error of +/- 2.2 percentage points. The survey results were announced at this week’s fourth-annual We Media Forum and Festival in Miami, hosted by the University of Miami School of Communication and organized and produced by iFOCOS, a Reston, Va.-based media think tank (www.ifocos.org). This is the second year of the survey.

“For the second year in a row we have documented a crisis in American journalism that is far more serious than the industry’s business challenges – or maybe a consequence of them,” said Andrew Nachison, co-founder of iFOCOS. “Americans recognize the value of journalism for their communities, and they are unsatisfied with what they see. While the U.S. news industry sheds expenses and frets about its future, Americans are dismayed by its present.

“Meanwhile, we see clearly the generational shift of digital natives from traditional to online news – so the challenge for traditional news companies is complex. They need to invest in new products and services – and they have. But they’ve also got to invest in quality, influence and impact. They need to invest in journalism that makes a difference in people’s lives. That’s a moral and leadership challenge – and a business opportunity for whoever can meet it.”

The survey finds the Internet not only outweighs television, radio, and newspapers as the most frequently used and important source for news and information, but Web sites were also cited as more trustworthy than more traditional media sources – nearly a third (32%) said Internet sites are their most trusted source for news and information, followed by newspapers (22%), television (21%) and radio (15%).

Other findings from the survey include:

• Although the vast majority of Americans are dissatisfied with the quality of journalism (64%), overall satisfaction with journalism has increased to 35% in this survey from 27% who said the same in 2007.
• Both traditional and new media are viewed as important for the future of journalism – 87% believe professional journalism has a vital role to play in journalism’s future, although citizen journalism (77%) and blogging (59%) are also seen as significant by most Americans.
• Very few Americans (1%) consider blogs their most trusted source of news, or their primary source of news (1%).
• Three in four (75%) believe the Internet has had a positive impact on the overall quality of journalism.
• 69% believe media companies are becoming too large and powerful to allow for competition, while 17% believe they are the right size to adequately compete.

Republicans (79%) and political independents (75%) are most likely to feel disenchanted with conventional journalism, but the online survey found 50% of Democrats also expressed similar concerns. Those who identify themselves as “very conservative” were among the most dissatisfied, with 89% who view traditional journalism as out of touch.

Further Details: Zogby Methodological statement

A consortium of publishers now plans to launch a long-delayed assault – a kind of D-Day for the Allies. The plan, a search standard called Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP), would give them more say in what search engines are permitted to do with the content published on news sites. Associated Press CEO Tom Curley said the standard could block sites from distributing content without permission. “If you want our content, we expect to be paid for it,” Curley told paidcontent’s Rafat Ali. “This nonsense that you can just take the first paragraph or use the picture small doesn’t really fly with us. People die trying to take those pictures.” Sounds like war.

News companies could suffer costly casualties in such a war. By attempting to drive news consumers to their sites by blocking search engines from linking to content, they put at risk the largest conduits of traffic to their sites: the search engines and networks that steer people to news and information online. Those users are likely to exercise brand promiscuity – their reliance on multiple brands and supplemental sourcing – as they discover additional alternatives to content. The publishers would also face a formidable backlash from a marketplace that expects open access, as well as from advertisers who require it.

Publishers already have the ability to tag stories so search engines can’t index them. So why change the standard? A smarter tactic would be to beat the enemy at its own game by creating a superior value proposition – an engine that returns results based on context and relevance, rather than popularity.

Retirees Tom and Bill were at their usual table talking leisurely over cheese Danish. Each wore their Redskins baseball caps, maroon faded by years of sunlight and memories. Young men trickled in wearing Redskins football jerseys, the number 21 and name “Taylor” emblazoned on their backs, waiting for the neighborhood barber-shop-and-discussion-forum next door to open. A group of mothers gathered in the cramped seating room for their pre-school coffee klatch, wheeling their children in cushy strollers, one bearing a young passenger bundled for the chill morning with Redskins stocking hat and matching booties.

The talk was of the life and death of Sean Taylor. Everyone in our small corner of Reston knew the story at 8:15 a.m. on Tuesday, November 27, 2007.

Entering the coffee shop I spotted the stack of newspapers by the front entrance. One story dominated the front page of The Washington Post under this headline: “Redskins’ Taylor Critically Hurt In Shooting at His Home in Fla.”

My reaction was that of an old friend who had to deliver bad news to the uninformed.

Everyone in the coffee shop — well, maybe not the pre-schoolers — knew the sad truth, which partially explains why so many newspapers were still on the rack. They had learned about Taylor’s death, which occurred about 5:30 a.m., from television and radio reports, from Internet sites on which they were following developments, and word-of-mouth from friends, family, colleagues and contacts during the early-morning round of their daily lives.

The Post, which went to press the night before, was hopelessly dated.

What’s a newspaper to do? It takes time for reporters to report, editors to edit, designers to design, presses to print, trucks to transport, and carriers to deliver to households throughout metropolitan Washington. The process, formerly known as “the daily miracle,” takes at least a day. To get newspapers on doorsteps by 7 a.m. deadlines start at least a half-day before delivery. So the news in the morning papers occurs a day or more before you get a chance to read about it. Or to put it another way, yesterday’s news tomorrow.

That’s a big problem for newspapers like The Post. The times demand immediacy. Consumers want news from a variety of trusted sources and platforms across media and society.

Steve Klein, journalism professor at George Mason University and a former sports editor, learned about Taylor’s death at 5:55 a.m. by watching the local NBC affiliate WRC News4. About ten minutes later he received an email update on his computer from washingtonpost.com. Klein remained glued to the screens and a variety of sources throughout the day for the latest developments, communicating with his network of friends and colleagues as he learned and shared information.

Meantime, Post beat reporter Jason La Canfora started reporting Taylor’s death at 6:02 a.m. on his Redskins Insider blog, which he updated throughout the day. Hundreds of networked journalists did the same, stirred by affinity with the Redskins, media coverage, networking with other fans, and sheer emotion.

La Canfora was arguably the best of the bunch. In frequent updates he referred to Taylor, a player known to distrust reporters, as “Sean.” La Canfora also expressed personal feelings in his blog, a reporting practice that is generally discouraged in newspapers. He even took time to do something that most reporters avoid: he communicated with readers as the story unfolded, responding to hundreds of emails.

All of which begs the question: What were The Post’s newspaper editors thinking?

One answer comes from newsroom culture, a cultish ecosystem of knowledge processing of which I was part for about thirty years. Most of the news that goes around between reporters and editors is based on the assumption that they know more about the news than the audience.

The assumption is almost always wrong. Audiences in today’s connected society are incredibly informed, sometimes incorrectly, through dozens of sources including the original ones that were once exclusive to journalists. News tumbles through the mediascape, changing as it goes. What is not known at a publishing deadline will certainly be exposed through additional information and sourcing later.

On Tuesday, The Post had a web site with immediate, impressive reach and continuous updates. It had a dedicated, tireless reporter wired into sources and developments. It had an entire community connected emotionally to a story of enormous local interest. But on the day Sean Taylor died, readers of the local newspaper got this: “Redskins’ Taylor Critically Hurt In Shooting at His Home in Fla.”

Jason La Canfora’s byline appeared on the story, but the immediacy and emotional connection he brought to it through his blog were edited out.

The Post has one of the most comprehensive Internet operations in news media. Yet the newspaper marginalized it with a throwback approach on newsprint. The day’s newspaper barely referenced exceptional, developing coverage online. It made the crucial mistake of looking back at a story that events were certain to overtake. And it deleted a vital connection it desperately needs to enhance: the emotional connection between stories and storytellers. There are ways to do that, even in print.

It could be that newspapers will one day cover breaking news on digital screens but not on printed pages. It could be that a new kind of journalism will emerge to inform society, set a civil agenda for civic discourse, and handsomely reward its best practitioners. It could be that news companies will flourish on the Internet. But for now I am certain of only one thing: on Tuesday, a newspaper became less relevant in yet another part of daily life.

Dale Peskin is a former editor and news executive who currently serves as managing director of iFOCOS.

The outcomes were as predictable as they were quick. Flip-chart wisdom validated pre-planned outcomes including (1) research and education agendas sustaining journalism; (2) “breakthroughs across silos of thought and practice;” and (3) a framework for launching the Next Newsroom, a business with margins that appeal to the low financial expectations of civic-supportive, community investors.

While its agenda is earnest, JTM suffers from dated, naïve assumptions about the ongoing transitions in journalism, community and civic life. And then there are JTM’s breezy rules of engagement: “whoever comes is the right people/whatever happens is the right thing ….” That’s just silly. Serious plans require rigor, talent and scrutiny.

We’re all for journalism that matters. Who isn’t? As far as we can tell there’s nothing stopping journalism-that-matters from happening. Better reporting from the very people who seek better reporting is a good place to start. So would the inclusion of the fairly brilliant innovators outside of journalism’s tortured and clubby network. With so many inspiring innovations, enabling technologies, fresh investment and creative ideas emerging from a media-savvy society it’s hard to embrace a woe-is-journalism agenda. The wind blows forward.

The situation reminds me of the fertilizer problem at my golf course. We hire an enterprising service called Birds-B-Gone to chase away the flock of geese that summers by the lake on the 16th Hole. Trained dogs cause the geese to fly off to a nearby course. That course then hires the same service to chase them back to ours. Birds-B-Gone gets good both ways.

Though they share terminology, the two Next projects come from different parts of the goose: JTM from the heart, Newspaper Next from the, ah, wallet. The competing initiatives, both aimed in some way at saving newspapers, exacerbate the rift among journalists and publishers about solving a common problem. Only the goose-chasers make out.

It’s very fun these days to obsess over various Web 2.0 technologies and how to integrate them into your existing site. But keeping up with the items listed below can do a lot to help companies grow and maintain readership.

Here goes nothing:

Improper copyright year in the footer – If the reader thinks you don’t know what year it is, it doesn’t do much to help credibility. I subsequently found this in a lot of places. When this extends into the second quarter of the year (as it now does as of this posting), it looks much worse than seeing it in Jan. and Feb.

Contact info without a means of communicating via the web — The site listed a collection of phone numbers for News tips, Classifieds, Display advertising, and Subscriptions. But there was no link to pages for these departments or Web-based email forms. This can frustrate the reader and cost your company a good chunk of change in the man hours needed to answer all those phone calls.

Articles with no comment functionality – I had the chance to integrate Topix.net into the iFocos site and was impressed with how easy the integration was. Such a service, or others like it integrated into the bottom of each article, could both enable reader feedback and expose the article to a wider audience. Also this wasn’t a matter of the site not encouraging any comments, as it’s blog had them fully enabled.

Registration requirement — I think the ESPN.com’s Insider approach is much better than preventing a user from seeing anything at all. If you’re going to require registration, I feel you should give the reader a tease of the first two or three grafs.

Hiding back-door views of your site — I’m a view-source kind of guy. I deleted some of the URL for a blog post, down to http://www.DOMAIN.com/CATEGORY/ and found a “test page” was exposed. This should probably be an inventory of all the company’s blogs. I also noticed that it said “Powered by Movable Type 3.16″ Much has happened to Movable Type since version 3.16. Keeping on such an upgrade path can sometimes uncover new publishing, revenue and social networking opportunities for your company.

Make your headlines clickable – Not everyone instinctively knows to click on a “permalink.” Having both the word “permalink” and the headline clickable could result in increased page vews.

OK, I lied. I am now meandering into some more Web 2.0 territory. But don’t worry, none of this requires a computer science degree or anything …

Google maps indexing – I started playing with integrating Google maps into Movable Type recently for a client. I think this is an amazing opportunity for companies to explore. What I envision is a Google map that, when you click on a specific region, your last X number of articles, blog posts etc. that relate to that area show up.

Very targeted advertising could be integrated as well in the pop-up windows in the map. When users mouse over one of the markers on the map. Constructing such a map is no more complicated than creating specialized RSS feeds.

Go where the high school kids are — Why not create an account on MySpace that features links to your latest content? You could get thousands of potential young readers to be your paper’s “friend” and communicate with them on a level newspaper execs haven’t even let themselves ever dream about.

Recruit and host guest bloggers, and make them a real part of your publishing effort – Several news sites are warming up to the idea of “guest bloggers” as part of a citizen journalism effort. However, the areas these fine folks often post into is not always fully utilized by the newspaper company. Including small widgets showcasing “Latest headlines” or articles and features related to what the guest is blogging about seems to be a natural fit that would enhance the user’s experience with the guest blog and the company’s ability to reach a larger audience.

Speaking of reaching a larger audience … claim your blog on Technorati! – Once you’ve created these blogs for guests, take the next step and get them on Technorati’s radar. Make sure the ping settings in your publishing system are correct, and embed the little bit of HTML that enables visitors to make that blog one of their favorites on Technorati.

This is obviously just a small snapshot of opportunities and mistakes out there. We’d love to hear other from you. Comment below and get those gripes off your chest!

Chad Capellman is an occasional contributor and site constructor for iFocos. His LinkedIn profile can be viewed at http://www.linkedin.com/in/capellman

From Alan’s Nov. 13, 2006 post:

What’s happened, I think, is that newspapers have stopped asking the right questions. They’ve stopped provoking public conversation about the great issues of our time. They’ve stopped seeing themselves as provocateurs of public discourse. … Why do movies, the Web, TV, get to have all the fun? Ask all the good questions? Carry all the inspirational, challenging, provocative answers?

Good questions.

Alan was the founder of Fast Company magazine.