News-Record.com

On a list of 167 countries around the world, where would you expect the U.S. to rank in terms of press freedom? Top 20? Maybe even Top 10?

Try 44th. And that's down steeply from 17th in 2002, says Reporters Without Borders, which has conducted the rankings annually since 2005.

Who ranks ahead of us? Several former Soviet client states, for starters, including the Baltic states and much of Eastern Europe. I wonder whether that's because they suffered so much, for so long, under government censorship that they are less tolerant of anything that might look like its return.

Even South Korea, governed mostly by authoritarians since the end of the Korean War, ranks 10 spots ahead of the U.S. One important reason why is the success there of the citizen-journalism effort OhMyNews.

Could the flowering of citizen journalism here help restore the U.S. to the upper reaches of the press-freedom rankings? (And, yes, I am aware that the question assumes that such a restoration would be a Good Thing.)

... as posed by CJR:

Take a look at the front page of your newspaper today. How many stories are on events that the average reader has already heard something about? The Metro section, is it riveting and creative? Or incremental and cramped? Does the paper have strong voices? Does it provide the kind of context that cuts through the fog of information? Does it have any fun? Does the photography speak volumes? Does the Web site offer more than digital newsprint? Can a reader get into the conversation? Do you want to read this newspaper?

If you don't have a copy handy, you can find today's front page here (probably near the top of the fourth set of pages).

So: How do you answer?

More than a decade ago, I had the privilege of leading the group of N&R folks -- both a formally designated group and some other folks who weren't officially part of the effort but were interested and had expertise -- who put together the newspaper's first Web site.

One of the people deeply involved in that effort was a very talented copy editor and page designer named Chris Clonts.

Not long after that effort, Chris and his then-girlfriend, now-wife, Kathleen Knauss, left us for jobs with the Detroit Free Press. Now, Chris has been hired away from the Free Press to become assistant design director for news at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, which just underwent a complex redesign and is continuing to experiment with design and in other ways, in print and online.

As a look at Chris' portfolio shows, he has a gift. The Star-Tribune is fortunate to get him.

Journalism is being held at gunpoint this morning.

The largest stockholder in Knight Ridder Inc., the nation's second-largest newspaper chain, has given the chain an ultimatum: put itself up for sale or auction off its "financially struggling" flagship publications (primarily, newspapers in Miami and Philadelphia). Otherwise, investor Private Capital Management said, it will pursue a hostile takeover of the company.

No one knows at this point who will win this dispute, but no matter who wins, readers of the chain's newspapers (including those in Charlotte, Columbia and Myrtle Beach) are going to lose, at least in the near term.

So does Terry Heaton, commenting after the recent Online News Association annual conference:

While I agree ... that there are individuals within the mainstream trying to innovate, I just cannot believe that real change will come from within. This is not some wild belief that I carry; it's based on my day-to-day experience in dealing with people in media companies, especially those in high places. The essential problem is that there just isn't time for the "story as old as business itself." We cannot play "business as usual" in the face of these types of disruptive technologies.

The constant anthem expressed in this blog is that collapse will come upon the mainstream like a thief in the night and that one day soon, these same high placed executives will wake up and everything will be gone. You may think I'm overstating that (because, after all, they're still making a lot of money), and that's fine. I think what's happening in our culture is far bigger than most people realize and that our economy is a lot weaker than most suspect. I would love to be proven wrong.

I have been guilty of flaming the fires that separate, and I accept any criticism that comes along about that. In real life, I'm much more into bringing people together than in dividing people. The anger and passion expressed here isn't intended to be personal. But mass media is dying, and I have a lot of friends embedded in the bowels of the ship who deserve a seat on the lifeboats. Every day that goes by in which legacy media companies refuse to invest time, energy and resources into new business models is another day with the lifeboats firmly attached.

Not just new content or new forms of content, but new business models. As the old fable has it, we can be the ant or the grasshopper, and if we choose to be the grasshopper, the ant will be neither able nor inclined to feed us when winter comes.

And winter is coming.

Not enough lesbian sex, apparently:

Now a day into the story [this piece was posted Tuesday -- Lex], the media has even begun covering the media blitz itself as news. "Panthers' cheerleader sex scandal creating major buzz," headlines another San Jose Mercury News story, which goes on to report that this cheerleader incident "ranked among the top three most-viewed in Charlotte.com's [the Charlotte Observer's Web site] nine-year history. On ESPN.com, more people e-mailed it to friends Monday than any other story. The Panthers' Web site, which features photos of its cheerleaders, bent under so many hits that it was shut down."

This is a cautionary tale: When people tell us we should give readers what they want, they sometimes need to be careful what they wish for.

So some MIT students have determined not only that aluminum-foil hats do not ward off government radio signals aimed at controlling the wearer's mind, they actually amplify some radio signals, leading to speculation that the suggestion that "tinfoil hats" will protect the wearer might actually have been a myth propagated by the government.

I thought so.

Of course, my own hat is made of lead foil, painstakingly gathered from oh, so many bottles of wine. Ain't nothin' gettin' through that.

Lisa Williams, the blogger/citizen-journalist who started the community-journalism site H2otown in Watertown, Mass., has a guest post up on Jay Rosen's PressThink blog, describing how she began doing what she does, how and why she does it now, and what lessons she thinks might be applicable to other communities.

It's a fairly lengthy essay even by PressThink standards. But she gets at a lot of good stuff -- from nuts and bolts to the psychology behind what she does -- and she's an excellent writer, so it's time well spent. She mentions the N&R, but she doesn't talk about YourNews, as you might expect; the part of our little experiment that she likes best is our Letters to the Editor blog.

Go read what she has to say, whether you want to write the first Pulitzer Prize-winning citizen-journalism expose or just post a snapshot from your cell-phone camera. You'll be glad you did.

(A modified version of this post I left at MediaCenter's Morph blog)

If you don't work in the newspaper business you might not have heard, but we haven't exactly been having a good year from the standpoint of circulation, and next year might well be worse.

One of the tidbits from this news that deserves a bit of amplification and discussion is the fact, mentioned by several newspaper executives, that papers are, and/or should be, intentionally reducing circulation in some areas by dropping "marginal" circulation -- circulation in areas they find unprofitable or that advertisers find unattractive.

This isn't new. The News & Record stopped selling papers at the beach a long time ago, for example, for the simple reason that it couldn't make money on them.

But newspapers face increasing competition from more tightly targeted media, and online advertising that values actual click-throughs over theoretical readers. To compete, newspapers must target the readers that advertisers really want, not just anyone who might subscribe to or pick up a paper.

Looking at things strictly from a business standpoint, I find these decisions perfectly rational. But looking at things strictly from a journalism standpoint, I find these decisions worrisome, the more so when I hear other people in the industry talking about the need to write stories that appeal more to the people our advertisers are trying to reach -- people, primarily young people, with lots of disposable income.

Here's a real life example. Last week, we published an article on applying for help with your heating bills. A friend with a background in marketing said to me that we shouldn't have reported and written that story: "The people who need that information aren't reading the paper." Or, put another way, the people advertisers are trying to reach aren't interested in that story.

I question whether that's consistently the case either way, but for the purposes of this discussion let's assume it's true. What are the moral ramifications of a decision not to report such stories? Does, or does not, the paper have an obligation to look after the needs of the poorest and weakest in our society, even if those folks aren't subscribers and/or are of no use to advertisers? And if not, who will?

What do you think?

Someone named Amy Alexander, to whom I dearly hope I'm not related, went on NPR recently and said some uncomplimentary things about blogging, some of which were constitutionally protected opinion I happen to disagree with, some of which were just flat wrong and some of which were missing some significant context.

Fortunately, Steve Gilliard and the people who live in his comments box (I stopped by) are there to put the smackdown on her. Some of the language is a tad rough, but it's a good read.

Knight Ridder, the nation's second-largest news chain, has retained an investment bank to start the bidding after its largest shareholder pressured the company to sell itself or sell off papers to boost its stock price.

I said at the time that the likeliest outcome from a journalistic standpoint would be enormous damage to the quality of news coverage in the 31 communities served by Knight Ridder papers (Philadelphia has two).

I still think that. But Jay "Pressthink" Rosen, taking time from finishing a book to guest-post over at Arianna Huffington's group blog, says it doesn't have to be that way:

Here is my own solution: a community buyback plan, explained in these eleven points. I am told it's impossible and will never happen. And that's probably true. But no one has any better ideas, so here goes...

* Knight-Ridder announces that rather than sell to another big company or get bought, it has another plan: to break itself up. It will sell all 32 newspapers it owns to local buyers who will pay a premium for the opportunity to own the local daily. If no such buyers are found to exist, there is no transaction. The plan is called the Main Street Strategy to distinguish it from Wall Street thinking.

* The goal of the plan is to maximize shareholder value. That means a total price equal to or better than what shareholders could be expected to realize from any of the options commonly talked about today in the industry and the press: takeover by another newspaper company, purchase by a private equity firm, or cutting quality further in order to halt the erosion in market share (the current strategy.) A second goal is to improve the probability that quality journalism will happen in the future in the 31 towns where Knight-Ridder operates newspapers.

He further elaborates on this plan in the nine remaining points. (Mark Fitzgerald, editor-at-large for the trade magazine Editor & Publisher, comments on the plan here.)

The truth? This isn't the way the business of newspapers normally works. But it would come closer to maximizing shareholder value than the status quo does, and it might even outperform the "normal" business transactions likely being envisioned by KR and its largest shareholders. Besides, what has "normal" gotten us except declining circulation, declining quality and a whole bunch of lost jobs?

If you have friends in Charlotte, Columbia or Myrtle Beach who care about quality local journalism and have some capital to invest, you might want to send them a link to Rosen's post. Even if Rosen's plan has zero chance of being implemented, I think it's long overdue that we had a national conversation about the benefits and costs of quality local journalism. The 31 Knight Ridder communities seem as good a group of places as any to start.

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis offers a variation on Jay's plan here. While "tougher" from a business standpoint than the Rosen plan, it strikes me as even less likely to take place. And given that I give the Rosen plan roughly zero percent chance of taking place, that's saying something.

One of the major steps we need to take in turning our Web site into the kind of virtual town square we envision is making our Web site more robust, taking more advantage of the capabilities of the medium. Up to now, we've been hindered in News by a lack of hardware and software with which to create and edit audio, video and Flash presentations. What we've done, we've done by borrowing equipment from our tech folks (or, in a few cases, working with personal equipment).

But I'm delighted to say that's changing. We'll soon be getting computer equipment that will enable us to create and edit multimedia presentations here in the newsroom, without having to hit up our friends across the hall for their equipment. It's not as much as we need or want, but at least it'll be ours and it'll be here. And we hope to begin posting the fruits of our new resource very soon.

For the past couple of days, my home Internet access has been out. I mention this because, when I accessed my personal e-mail via the Web from work earlier this morning, I had five e-mails waiting for me, claiming to be from the FBI or CIA and claiming I had visited more than 30 "illegal Web sites" within the past day. The letters demanded that I answer questions they had sent along in an attachment.

Yeah.

Sure.

Right.

As if I hadn't already guessed, my Internet service provider's e-mail server already had flagged two of the attachments as viruses.

Eleven years into the Web era, we're still dealing with scriptkiddies who think it's just the height of kewl to write viruses and try to trick people into spreading them. I'm not sure whether we should send these people to prison for the rest of their lives or just let the rest of us slap them around in the public square with mahogany clue sticks.

Also? What, exactly, is an "illegal Web site"? The people who trade in child pornography generally don't post their wares on the Web for just anyone to stumble upon; that'd be one of the fastest trips possible to a remarkably unpleasant correctional experience.

And, for those of you who were wondering, if the feds need to ask you questions, they generally do it in person, not via e-mail.

Don't ask me how I know that. My lawyer says I don't have to tell you.