News-Record.com

We got this e-mail as a letter to the editor:

Thank you for covering the murder of Satwinder Singh. I know there are difficult decisions involved with this sort of thing, but why this isn't front page news? Greensboro isn't a huge city, and we have a murderer on the loose, a man killed in front of his son, and this doesn't make the front page? If this were plastered on the front page, perhaps we would have a chance of smoking out this criminal before the case grows cold. This crime happened just across the street from me, and I was a "regular" at Satwinder's store. I saw him and his son just 40 minutes before this took place.

Greensboro has always seemed like a "big" small town to me, and I don't want to believe that this is being written off as "just another unlucky convenience store clerk" in the "bad part of town". Satwinder was always a kind fellow to me, and he was one of our own... I think he and his son deserve better. I saw last week's shooting in New York City made front page news the day after Satwinder was murdered, and his story was just a blurb in the B section. That just doesn't seem right. The community should come first.

A man was arrested and charged in the case late last night.

The writer raises a couple interesting questions:

Well, you just plumb got to love this: As we, along with every other thinking newspaper, reconsider the sorts of stories we're writing, it all leads back to the beats at the newspaper. Gangrey, which has this wonderful slogan: "Prolonging the slow death of newspapers," opens a discussion of what beats newspapers should have.

Lucas Grindley, from whom I found this, liked these:
Desperation. Or, the things people do when they are forced to do something (abandon morals, embrace new ones, kill others, kill themselves, learn things, beg, win, lose, ignore the problem, take risks, become the Wiggles)." - rlake
"Firsts and lasts -- first date, first kiss, first drink, first underage party, first baby, first house . . . first communion, first tooth, first lost tooth. last time you spoke with your grandma before she died, last day at a job, last day with a car before selling it, last day of school, last football game, last day in jail, last day in office." - Janine
"Night security guards and the stories they could tell." – Raja

Me, too. And

My newspaper column:

Original blog posts here and here.

We published two stories last week that got a lot of people talking. There's nothing unusual about that; we like people talking about our work.

But these two in particular reveal a bit about our thought processes on why, where, how and how much we're going to publish.

On Monday, the Life section featured a story about Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, a non-profit company that pairs bereaved parents with photographers for free photo sessions of their children who are born dead.

To illustrate the story, we had several beautiful, touching photos of a young boy cradling his infant brother. Just from looking at them, you would have thought that the baby boy, wrapped in a blanket, was sleeping. In fact, he was dead. That knowledge made the photos and story heart-breaking.

Larry Keech, who retired in 2004 after 36 years covering and editing sports for us, is back in the news. As a member of the Harris Interactive College Football Poll, Keech had a piece -- albeit a tiny, tiny piece -- in determining who went to the Bowl Championship Series. (Jim Caserta wisely suggests a better poll link here, which shows how individual members voted.)

Keech ranked Ohio State No. 1, like just about everyone else in the country. Then he went and put Boise State at No. 2. Keech ranked Florida, which is going to meet Ohio State in the BCS in January, at No. 5.

I know all this because I've started getting Keech hate mail at the blog post in which I announced that he was retiring. That was back on Sept. 15, 2004.

The headline of a post at Romenesko, wonders: "How should papers deal with staffers with personal blogs?"

That one's easy: Link to them.

And Gillmor's dead-on take.

The Associated Press wants to know what I think are the 10 biggest stories of the year for its year-end roundup. For the life of me, I don't know why, other than the possibility that what I think is important because I deal in big ideas.

Let's run down some of the advice the Readership Institute recommends that papers do to grow audience:

* Deliver exclusive, high impact, locally relevant content in optimal formats for each of our media.
* Connect with consumers through people-oriented stories that view the world through their eyes and provide rewarding experiences.
* Help consumers with the personally useful, "you-focused" information that enables them to navigate their daily lives.
* Differentiate ourselves through unique consumer values and vigorously promote the benefits of our content.
* Do more watchdog journalism, making sure it's clearly labeled, promoted and cross-promoted.

Oh. Well. Now I see. For a moment there I was thinking that a rehash of news that happened somewhere else some time ago might not add value to readers' lives.

That said, we'll probably run it later this month.

But why they want editors' opinions rather than, like, say, readers, I don't know. (Is there much doubt that we big-idea editors will select either the war or the U.S. elections as the No. 1 story?)

Let's cut to the chase: Vote here, early and often. I'll send in your choices. Suggested stories from the AP are below. You can add others. And don't stiff me as you did last year. (Belated thanks to David and Michele.)

With all the clamor about getting a lottery in North Carolina, we figured that we would add the N.C. lottery results on page A2 and drop the Virginia lottery results. Why, I thought, would anyone drive to Virginia when they could buy a ticket at a convenience store a mile or so away?

Stupid me.

Thanks for all your cards and letters. We've heard you. Beginning tomorrow, we're going to publish lottery results from both states. For space reasons, we're moving them to page B2.

Just remember: Your chance of winning the PowerBall is one in 146 million. You're about 1,000 times more likely to die in an earthquake.

FoxTrot, a comic strip we've been publishing for four or five years, is being cut back to Sunday only beginning Dec. 31.

"After spending close to half of my life writing and drawing FoxTrot cartoons, I think it's time I got out of the house and tried some new things," creator Bill Amend said. "I love cartooning and I absolutely want to continue doing the strip, just not at the current all-consuming pace."

Yeah, me too. But anyway, that means, gulp, we have the opportunity to add a new strip. Newspaper readers love their comics and editors mess with them at their own peril.

Want to make suggestions? Here are some options to spur your thinking.

Thursday update: OK, you pikers, Bob Gabordi of the Tallahassee Democrat asked his readers for the same advice yesterday and now has 97 comments. 97!

Quiet drum roll, please

After months of waiting, we're testing story comments. Slowly. Comments are enabled on two stories right now. More of them to come tomorrow.

Please. It's a work in progress.

Here's the deal: You have to register to leave a comment. The registration is light and takes about 30 seconds. We ask for your name, e-mail, whether you're a newspaper subscriber and whether you want some of our targeted news and advertising information. Other stuff -- gender, age and zip -- are helpful to us but optional.

Registration is just for those who interact with us by leaving comments. The site will remain open to all users. You can still be able to read stories, blogs, etc.

We're not collecting e-mails to spam you and the data we collect will not be sold. We will use the info to target news, information and advertising more surgically. And after some of the experiences we have had with the blogs, we want to have legitimate e-mail addresses for commenters.

The registration and the comments are beta. We'd like to test for bugs and eliminate obstacles. Help us, with both the registration process and the comments.

Friday update: Comment here, here, here, here and here.

A reporter with Editor & Publisher interviewed me yesterday about blogging. His thesis was unclear to me; it's not as if blogging newspaper editors are new. But he did ask me one question that stopped me. He had asked about the benefits of blogging, and I recited them -- the conversation, transparency, the learning -- you know.

Then he asked about the negatives.

Silence as I tried to think of some. Hmmm. It takes time, but that just means I change how I work. That's actually a positive. People bark at me, but that's not new to blogging. Responding to their concerns probably is, but again that's a positive. Readers correct my errors and the paper's, which is embarrassing but opening up another way to "get it right" is a benefit.

"Negatives? I can't think of any negatives," I said finally.

I probably wasn't a very good interview.

For those who are convinced that we have a deep inbred political bias and are out of step with our readership, there is an interesting report in the New York Times. Two University of Chicago economists have attempted to answer what drives the bias in media, according to an article written by a third University of Chicago economist. (The actual study is behind a pay wall here, and fiscal conservative that I am, I didn't buy it.) The economists came up with a statistical model and then analysed 417 newspapers. (Via Jarvis.)

But more important, once the authors had this measure, they showed that the main driver of any slant was the newspaper’s audience, not bias by the newspaper's owner.

and

So although politicians from both sides tend to accuse the news media of partisanship and negativity, the data suggests that they ought to blame the public. The papers basically reflect what their readers want to hear.

The article also suggests that newspapers are simply giving readers what they want to sell more papers.

You know me: I'm buying neither conclusion. Newspapers try to respect the interests of its readers, but not to pander to them. And we know what will sell newspapers, and it's not more photos of President Bush or Hillary Clinton. Or, because we're a local paper, of Skip Alston and Billy Yow.

For the record, in 2004, Kerry carried Guilford County, but he and Bush were separated by about 1,300 votes out of nearly 200,000 cast. Of course, the trouble is that we don't know how many of the voters of each candidate are newspaper readers.

Back in the day, newsrooms were messy, smoky, noisy places. Notorious packrats, reporters piled notepads, copy paper and newspapers on every available surface and sometimes on unavailable surfaces. Ashtrays were emptied only when something pushed them off a desk and onto the floor. In the day before computers, reporters and editors clacked out stories on Royal and Underwoods, creating the respectable din of work in progress. The air smelled of printer's ink and raw newsprint. Cubicles didn't exist. Desks lined up so that you could cross a room the size of a basketball court without touching the floor. The linoleum floor, by the way.

It was wonderful. And, aside from the occasional messy reporter, it's history.

Juan Antonio Giner of Innovations in Newspapers has posted photos of newsrooms around the world. For newspaper junkies, they're worth a look at how the fourth estate works.

My newspaper column

Original posts here, here, here and here.

AP top stories list here.
Comics list here.
Odds and ends at the newspaper:

Ever had the experience of reading a story and wanting to respond to it immediately? Perhaps you wanted to share how much you were moved by Tom Steadman's story on Victory Junction today. Or maybe you wanted to add some real-life information to Dick Barron's article on poverty. Or you had a question about veterans disability payments that you thought another reader could answer.

Now you can do more than mention it to the person across the breakfast table.

You can post your comment, question or opinion at the end of the story at News-Record.com.

There are 13 shopping days until Christmas. You have time. My journalistic Christmas list:

1. That a true participatory culture kicks in. We have many readers but few joiners. The conversation takes place among pretty much the same people. It feels all too insular when the whole point is to be profoundly inclusive. All you others out there reading the blogs and reading the stories online: Leave your thoughts. It helps build an informed, engaged community.

2. That the conversation becomes constructive and civil. Too often after one of two comments the discussion runs straight into the name-calling, finger-pointing ditch. I don't mind criticism so long as it's constructive. Add to the conversation. Imagine you're actually talking to people face-to-face. And you're unarmed. I said that last sentence to lead into this next one. Write with a smile.

3. That we get past the ultimately pointless debates: Are bloggers journalists? Is "citizen journalism" the right name? Subjectivity or objectivity? What does it matter? It distracts us from the challenges and opportunities waiting to be seized.

4. That we journalists lose the excuses. Yes, people are moving online. No, they aren't paying for it. Yes, blogging and vlogging takes time. Yes, it's not what we're used to. Yes, it's a jungle out there. But you didn't become a journalist to be afraid. What are you waiting for?

5. That we keep learning and experimenting. Every journalist ought to have a newsfeed that delivers innovative, dissenting and challenging information and opinion. I have 35 blogs in mine; they take 15 minutes each morning to scan through. I always learn something. They nourish me throughout the day. Continual learning is vital. Then put what we learn into action. Some work, some won't. We do that with the paper every day. Why not do the same with the new tools?

And five more!

Last month, in anticipation of Christmas shopping season, our features department borrowed an idea from The Washington Post and asked readers to design their own wrapping paper. We made it hard, too. The entries had to be handmade, not computer-generated, and couldn't use commercial characters.

Using my usual crack editorial insight, I thought to myself, "Oh, that's going to fall flat. Nobody is going to go to the trouble to do that."

Ninety-six entries later, I'm feeling like I felt when I once tried to wrap a squishy stuffed elephant: clueless.

"It was just different and it seemed like fun," said features editor Susan Ladd, who, with writer Katie Reetz, organized the project. "We know that people like to do artwork and some clearly spent a lot of time putting the entry together." The winner -- and selections of the wrapping paper -- will be featured Sunday.

Now the Central Library has asked -- and we've agreed -- if they could display the entries in a window, as they did for the poems about baseball readers submitted last year.

I write often about the value of interactivity, but I'm primarily writing about using online to create a sense of community. My mistake. Interactivity isn't defined by the medium. If the idea is good enough people will respond. They like to participate, show their creativity, share their talent. It's part of community. We're delighted to be able to help enable that.

The next Sunday, Christmas Eve, we're publishing some of the results of the photos of unhappy children with Santa. 245 entries, and if they don't bring a smile to your face, you may just have to see how the Whos down in Whoville are doing.

Innovation in College Media added to my Christmas wish list. (Thanks to Rebecca MacKinnon for the pointer.)

Two I have added to my own list:

3. That every reporter become multimedia literate. Whether it's handling a digital still camera, capturing audio with a digital audio recorder or shooting video, the cub reporters need this training when they start their careers in student media. And we can also show them how to put those multimedia bits into digital stories that extend their printed words.

4. That college newspapers become college news communities. Connected with a move away from shovelware, I'd like to see a commitment to beefing up the community aspects of the news site. It's hard to build a community with a piece of paper. While it may not be easy to do so with an online news site, it's worth a shot. What a great thing it would be if student newspapers became one of the few sites students automatically visited every day to see what's going on and participate in the conversation about their campuses. (I'd apply this to newspapers, period.)

Dustin Long, who writes about racin' for us and hosts NASCAR chase, is imagining new ways to use online to convey the sights, sounds, smells and news about racing.

He asked me for help, which was his first mistake.

But it's an intriguing question because what I've heard from every racing fan is: "Just come to one race and you'll be hooked."

What can we do to capture that experience in words, photography, audio and video to share?

Guilford County lost two good ones this week. I write about them because they were longtime friends of this newspaper.

Dr. John Bumgarner, a cardiologist, was a regular letter-to-the-editor writer for years. (He really didn't like the Clintons.) He was, of course, much more than that. As a prisoner of war in WWII, he treated survivors of the Bataan death march. He wrote a memoir on that experience and other non-fiction books.

Stanley Shavitz wrote fewer letters but he worked the phones like mad. It wasn't unusual for me to come in on Monday morning with a voice message from Stanley, discussing something in the paper over the weekend. He had similar relationships with several people at the paper.

I knew both men and hate to lose them as friends. They were the kind of people Guilford County needs more of: civically engaged, constructive, opinionated, and of good heart. We'll miss them.

We steal ideas. We look at papers across the state to compare ourselves and to see if there's anything we can use ourselves. We scan Web sites and blogs for the same reasons. Magazines? TV shows? Movies? Yep, yep and yep.

This is no great revelation in the newspaper world. Every journalist I've met does the same thing. It's not plagiarism. We take an idea, adapt it to our needs and to our reader needs, and make it our own.

I mention it now, after reading about the latest Andrew Baron-Amanda Congdon dustup, because we're about to publish some content that has been done elsewhere.

Sunday, we're publishing the wrapping paper contributions, sparked by the same reader participation contest as The Washington Post Magazine. Next Sunday, we're publishing reader-submitted photos of crying children on Santa's lap. Been done other places, including Ft. Lauderdale and Phoenix. Early next year, we're copying and localizing The New Yorker's backpage cartoon caption feature, using our own cartoonist, Tim Rickard.

In each case, the idea is the same; what we've done with it is different. Let's call it learning from others.

My newspaper column

Time to face facts: Newspapers, including this one, are fun-challenged.

We fill our pages with news about murder, war and corruption. To leaven that, we add in a healthy mix of "good" news stories about progress, achievement and community.

Still, outside of the occasional story like last week's champion bed maker of Guilford County or the factoid on how to make lighted Christmas tree balls, we see ourselves as an information provider, rather than as a home of good times.

The world isn't all business. People have fun, too, and newspapers should reflect more of that.

One thing we're learning is that you, dear reader, know how to have fun.

Leger Meyland, our Harley-ridin', jean-wearin', hair-flowin' photo assignment editor, has decided to retire at the end of the year. That hurts. Leger signed on with us in 1989 as a photographer, working for our People & Places section in High Point. Even though we eventually promoted him into a management job, he remained a shooter at heart. Photos of last year's Cedar Street fire are his.

And he was one of the newsroom's characters, and I mean that in the fondest way. As Photo Director Rob Brown said in the staff announcement of his retirement: "Some of the jobs you may have noticed him doing include: Staff Meteorologist, Carolina Basketball Prognosticator, Irving Park Society Expert, Foremost Authority on The Farmer's Almanac, Solar Flare Alert Team Leader, Right Hand (or is it left?) of Fidel Castro and Chairman Mao, and Friend to All. We will miss him dearly around here."

So I wrote this column Sunday about readers having fun. Today's mail brought this note:

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

We sure do! At age 87 and a N&R reader for 65 years, I am still cutting out paper dolls and smiling while sending out greeting cards for all occasions (also, saving N.C. trees!)

On the inside of the folded construction paper card was this:

A month ago, when the Charlotte Observer was unable to publish because of a power failure, I almost posted an item here headlined, "There but for the grace of God."

This morning we came close. A computer network problem prevented us from getting most pages and stories out of our publishing system. We were able to cobble together an eight-page news, sports and editorial section late last night. The Life section and classifieds were printed early so readers will get their features, comics and bridge fix.

On the bright side, virtually all of the eight-page section is local, posing an inadvertent but interesting pilot program of a paper without significant national and world news. We've been emphasizing local more and more these days, and this is the logical extension of doing away with the commodity wire news. Yes, I'm stretching here.

On the dark side -- and it's dark, indeed -- we were unable to get the obits out of the computer, and they aren't in the paper. You youngsters may not care much, but newspaper editors know that, given the age of our most devoted readers, this is bad. I mean, bad. And of course, most ads are missing.

Go here for all the news, local sports and today's obituaries.

We hope to be back to normal tomorrow. At 3 a.m. today, our IT department had the network back up and working. Thank you for your forbearance.

Update: My favorite reader comment so far: Thank you for this morning's newspaper! It was nearly perfect:

Keep up the good work

This morning we launched a mega-monster arts and entertainment site. Called Scene, it's a partnership with GoTriad.com, the United Arts Council and the Convention & Visitor's Bureau. It's searchable by keyword, and includes show information, artist profiles and reviews, and information about workshops, recreation, health events, festivals and activities for families. There are so many tabs -- 13 -- that we couldn't fit them all on one line.

Organizations can add listings, and artists can add profiles and samples of their work. Some profiles are already there, so, Jay, get your buds on the site! We're enabling user reviews, too, so leave your comments on the artists' work.

It has many more features than I list here. Check it out.

If you aren't in the holiday spirit yet, perhaps this photo of Macyn Clark of Greensboro will help. It, and others, will be published in the Guilford Record on Sunday.

One more item I've learned as a result of our computer crash. I wrote this mini-explanation, mini-apology that we published on the front page.

As a result, I've been hearing from readers all day, about the computer problems, about unrelated features in the paper, about items not in the paper, about delivery problems. It's been delightful in the way that my colleague Doug Clark described yesterday.

I ascribe it to being on the front page. My e-mail and phone number are right there and I'm easy to reach. You know, there may be something to that listening-to-readers thing. :)

How can I help? I believe, based on years of anecdotal experience, that that is the first question most people ask when confronted by someone in need.

Any publication -- a newspaper, a Web site -- derives its power from its readers. The case of Sara Lenna is but the most recent example. And that power should be put to good use. Help us do that.

Steve Rushin of Sport Illustrated reports this week on the results of a column he wrote two years ago about a 14-year-old with cancer whose dad was taking him to every NFL stadium for a game. After the column appeared the boy, Ty Kessler, got free football tickets from readers all the country and face time with pro players everywhere. It is moving. It is inspiring. (It is not available online unless you are a subscriber.)

Here's a taste, though.

Last season, Ty got a tour of the Seahawks' facility from kicker Josh Brown, who beat the Cowboys the next day as time expired. When Ty and Brown met up again hours later at Seattle's Metropolitan Grill, the kicker signed a football, "Game-winning 50-yarder for my buddy Ty."

In October, in an Arizona hotel lobby, Ty told Bears linebacker Brian Urlacher all about his travels. Instead of looking for the nearest elevator, Urlacher listened for 10 minutes. As the Kesslers were heading out to the parking lot, a man stopped them and handed Bob his business card. It read, "George McCaskey, director of ticket operations, Chicago Bears." Three weeks after that, as a guest of the Bears, Ty had a front row seat at Soldier Field for a game against Miami. When Dolphins receiver Marty Booker caught a touchdown pass, he beelined for the boy in the Bethlehem Catholic sweatshirt. "I froze," say Ty. Booker flipped him the football. The two have never met.

Here's the deal: We can do the same thing. You know people. You know stories. Is there a genuine need? Are someone struggling against odds to achieve something, to make a difference, to have a great life?" Send us your suggestions or your stories about people doing extraordinary things for themselves and for others. Between the reach of the paper and the Web, we can make a difference.

Emily Harris, who has been a copy editor here for five years, has resigned to take a full-time job at A&T, teaching journalism and serving as advisor for the campus paper.

We're happy to help A&T out, but we are sort of getting tired of this. :) Emily is the second to leave us to teach at A&T in the past couple of years. Like Val before her, Emily has been teaching part-time there.

Emily is a fine editor, and obviously she is a fine teacher. Our loss is education's gain.

In a post headlined "The New Digital Divide," Steve Rubel notes that 78% of American homes have broadband access, but that most of them are passive when it comes to the tools of publishing, aggregation and, generally speaking, letting their voices be heard:

In 2007 our challenge is to bridge the digital divide that exists between the technophiles and the technophobes. It's staring us right in the face wherever we go. Consider how many of your friends blog or post to Flickr or even know what the heck del.icio.us is.

The Web may feel democratic. After all, if we're all connected by broadband the same tools are available to everyone. However, there's a chasm growing and my wish for 2007 is we bridge it.

When I ran across this post, I thought of my request for stories about people in need. My hope was that we might get a few stories about a sick child with a special wish or a family scraping by. Seven comments there, but none of them on the point.

You can't beat this list for either truth or a guide to online behavior. It comes from Bob Sutton, Stanford professor. (Thanks to Rex for pointer.)

My favorites, and my resolution for 2007:

4. Learning how to say smart things and give smart answers is important. Learning to listen to others and to ask smart questions is more important.

9. Err on the side of optimism and positive energy in all things.

We used to publish a consumer "Action-Line" column. When I came to the paper 20+ years ago, it was written by the future City Council member Sallie Clotfelter. (My favorite question came during one of those cold spells when the temperature didn't get above freezing for a couple weeks. "Where do the ducks at Country Park go when the lake is frozen solid?") For some reason I've long ago forgotten, we killed the column, which turned out to be short-sighted, given what we know about serving readers.

Next month, we're going to remedy that. Tom Taylor, currently one of our assignment editors, is taking on the job.

I'll be telling you things such as how to not get burned by scams, how to shop for items as different as shoes and insurance, and what to do when you get in a fender bender in a parking lot. The concept of "consumer issues" works both ways -- you may be a customer feeling you've been treated unfairly or a small-business owner trying to protect yourself.

Send him your questions here.

The Christmas Day newspaper is always a tough one to plan for. You know that most people are focused on other things, yet you want the paper to be special because the day is special.

Isn't there a way we can skip the last-minute-shopper story and the busy-travel-day cliche? In retrospect, the answer seems obvious. One of the best known American Christmas stories was written by a Greensboro native. Why not publish O. Henry's "The Gift of the Magi"? And we complemented it with a Jim Schlosser article about the writing of the short story.

For me, though, the nicest part of the package was the artistry of Doug Cox, who drew the rendering of Della and designed the entire page around it.

A special paper, indeed.

Seventeen years ago, Robert Fulghum wrote a thin self-help book, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, that rode the top of the bestseller lists for weeks.

I am working on a speech in which I use his book as the outline. The working title: "Everything I really need to know about the Web, I learned in that book." But I can't make every rule fit, and some I stretch a bit. Help me out.

Fulghum's list, with my updating:

* "Share everything" -- Transparency is the key. Be open, helpful and say what you know. Plus, make sure you actually have something to say; if what you're going to say seems obvious to you, it may be obvious to everyone else. If that's so, then why bother?

* "Play fair" -- Readers have a good BS meter. You can't fake it. Be honest and sincere. Besides, if you misquote or misinterpret, you can be sure that someone will call you on it. Besides, what do you have to gain?

* "Don't hit people" -- Snark-fests may be fun, but they don't invite people to share or actively engage. And without the active interaction, you're not getting the full benefit of the Web. But you don't have to take the crap -- if you're being misinterpreted or misquoted, correct it.

* "Put things back where you found them" -- Not that it will matter much online. The uses of the Internet are expanding faster than you imagine. Be a pioneer. Experiment and learn something new. Know how to surf the Web? Get a blog. Already blog? Try audio or video. Do that, too? Then figure out how to make money online. Or make search even cleaner. Or to bridge the digital divide.

Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post is an astute observer of all things news media. But he whiffs at a pitch in his most recent column in which he kvetches about the Web.

But isn't something lost if you can wall yourself off from views and information that challenge what you already believe? If everything is ordered a la carte? If -- and this really dates me as an ink-stained wretch -- you like turning the pages of a newspaper because you might bump into an unexpected story you would never have found online? If you and your family and your co-workers are plugged into parallel media universes? (Via Romenesko.)

I used to worry about this, too, that the wonderful serendipity of discovery would be lost online. But I was wrong. In my case, it was arrogant, ignorant newspaperman thinking. In fact, there's more of a sense of discovery of things I didn't know -- and things I didn't know I wanted to know -- when I allow myself a few minutes of wandering online.

I learned this concept a couple years ago when Ed Cone explained the Long Tail to me. He used Amazon as an example of one facet of the Long Tail. When you search for a book on Amazon, the site takes you to the book, and also tells you what other people with seemingly similar tastes are buying. So that if I'm buying Chris Anderson's "The Long Tail," I might like books by Scoble, Battelle, Kim, Godin and Surowiecki.

To me, that's serendipitous discovery. And, presuming I buy one, or, better yet, read some of their work online, I'm learning new things. If I'm reading a newspaper, presumably, I'm interested in news. Virtually every news Website also captures the serendipity that is news: Much variety and some surprise.

The Web may play to our innate desire to affirm our biases -- frankly, so does the newspaper -- but it is absolutely easier to be a serendipitous reader/learner online.

Lucas Grindley makes the same points, first.

A year ago, I changed my column mug so I hear this lament. I know you all were having fun with me, though, right?

Via Romenesko.

Peter Haggert, editor of The Daily Gleaner in New Brunswick, Canada, posted this question on a listserv: "Is there any trepidation over running a photo of a hanged Saddam Hussein?"

Naturally, debate ensues. Our practice is not to publish photos of corpses, although we have done it on occasion when we thought the story merited it. Past experience indicates that some readers would complain that seeing a dead body hanging from a rope isn't how they want to start their breakfast. Still, a strong case can be made that the hanging will be historically significant and that it deserves full coverage.

Finally, someone had the sense to suggest we ask readers. Based on what you can imagine the photo will be, would you publish? On the front page? Large or small?

Hurry. It could happen within hours.

(The headline on this post is just a test to see your limits.)

Howard Owens, Lucas Grindley and Terry Heaton are all posting about the evolution of the news business over the past day or two and they are all worth reading.

Owens and Grindley are debating the veracity of Wired's 2007 prediction that a major newspaper will give up printing on paper to publish on the Web. Owens thinks it's not going to happen in 07; Grindley says it well could. Read them yourself; they're short.

Meanwhile, Heaton tells of watching 20/20 last night when it was interrupted with the Saddam Hussein hanging bulletin. But rather than returning to the regularly scheduled program, ABC preempted the 20/20 special to provide us with 40 minutes of canned historical crap and pre-produced "reaction" that caused me to change the channel.

I realize it's heresy to suggest that the news division of a broadcast network NOT interrupt programming for such, but what ABC did last night was to further alienate viewers who are increasingly able to make their own viewing choices. Hello! This is the new world of media, not the broadcasting days of old when networks had to be all things to all people.

I think of that, too, as I enjoy the discussion here about whether and how to publish photos of a hanged Saddam in the printed paper. As "the new world of media" expands and evolves, the new audience is expanding and evolving, too. Both are occurring much faster than "old media" types like me expect, and, often, know how to serve.

So, we have discussions -- more and more openly, I hope -- about how to do it. Personally, I doubt we'll see a major newspaper drop its print edition in 2007. But I wouldn't be surprised to see it happen by 2010. (Depends on the definition of "major," too.)

Kevin Anderson at Corante posts "Why can't I be passionate about journalism and technology." He writes eloquently of a student who "lost her "print privileges" after working for her newspaper's website" and of his own experience as an online journalist pioneer.

But I know this old media snobbery all too well from personal experience (fortunately, not recent) and from too many stories like this from bright, ambitious journalists who see the future and aren't stuck in the past. They still see the internet as some digital trifle, a plaything, not as a forum for serious journalism.

The ironic thing is that the industry is alienating exactly the kind of people who will help them transform to meet the changing needs of the market. It is ironic that they are also alienating many parts of their digitally literate audience.

Last summer, we hired an intern, Feilding Cage, who had just graduated from college, to help us build more web-based journalism projects. He was so good that after about 6 weeks, we hired him full-time. Now, five months later, he has taken a job with Time to help them with the same thing.

There is hope.