News-Record.com

Mercy. While I was on vacation, things have heated up in the discussion about newspaper chain Knight Ridder's financial and journalistic future.

Tim Beyers at The Motley Fool has a perfectly practical solution: Knight Ridder should take itself private.

That wouldn't create a perfect world, of course. The company has about $2 billion in long-term debt outstanding (against $4.5 billion in assets) and going private would certainly involve additional debt. And those bond payments would have to be made somehow ... probably by shedding some assets and laying off more employees, albeit fewer than a public takeover would cost.

But going private, even by incurring more debt, would give the company (and its struggling large newspapers) a bit more breathing room in terms of profit margin, which in turn would buy its papers a bit more time to make up for the company's overall slowness to respond to the challenges of the Internet. That, in turn, would make layoffs less likely in the future.

The News & Record is owned by privately held Landmark Communications. I don't own stock, so I'm not privy to our financials. And Landmark certainly is a for-profit business. But my sense is that its margins aren't quite as high as the 20 percent or more that is common in publicly held papers. My gauge is this: We've now been through two recessions in my 18 years here without laying off any News Department employees, and with only one round of buyouts, in 1993. I don't know many publicly held newspapers that can say that. Indeed, particularly at KR and Tribune Co. papers, buyouts are continuing as we speak.

If there's a real-world "least bad" scenario for the nation's second-largest newspaper chain (and employer of some of my friends and relatives), perhaps this is it.

... even though it's Friday.

Good news! Our second Hometown Hub, for the Rock Creek area, goes live tomorrow! As an interim step, some of the content from the free-distribution Rock Creek Record will be republished here. Community Editor Betsi Robinson and her reporting team will be out in the community recruiting columnists and correspondents after the holidays, but we didn't want to wait any longer on launching the site, so up it goes. (Props to RCR editor Jeff Hahne for helping us out.) And we're already accepting reader content -- news, opinion, images, whatever you've got. Thanks also to Herb Everett in News and Charlie Stafford and the indefatigible Stephen Paschall in Interactive for working their technical magic once again.

OK, now on to the Friday fun: If you like pretty pictures, you'll want to check out the Smithsonian Institution's American Art Museum blog, called Eye Level.

Have a great weekend.

Yesterday I spent a fair bit of time with newsroom technology maven Herb Everett, figuring out how we can use Publicus, our online publishing program, to blog. The N&R Interactive folks (Charlie Stafford and Stephen Paschall, primarily) have asked us to do this because they want all our bloggers to be using our Web-publishing program, Publicus (a/k/a Saxotech Online), rather than our current blogging tool, Movable Type, within the next few months.

The main reason is that we want to get all our content into a single, searchable database, which will make searching easier and more productive for us and you alike. (That, in turn, will make the site more attractive to the advertisers whose money pays my salary.) Also, because the blogs currently are hosted in a separate environment that requires time and money to maintain, using Publicus to blog will save us both. The change also will free at least a small amount of money (for software licensing) to be better spent elsewhere and reduce the number of page templates that have to be maintained and upgraded as we tweak our designs.

If we want to do something online, we can have no tool at all, the wrong tool, a tool that will do the job but isn't perfect and the perfect (perfect in the sense of "best mix of 'available' and 'appropriate'") tool. For blogging, Publicus falls into the third category, and I think our bloggers can work with that.

Preparing for the change is not sexy, and it's certainly not something we can point to online and say, "Hey, look what we're doing!" and be able to impress you on the spot. Also, it's kind of a mind-numbing time-suck if, like me, you're not a programmer. (Actually, the programmers may feel the same way.) But it's essential to making life easier down the road for both you and us as we work together to build the kind of online presence we all want.

The company that makes the raw material for 90% of the nation's surfboards has wiped out. (Via Poynter)

Maybe it's because we play pirate as kids (at least here in North Carolina, we do), or maybe we just like holding a piece of paper with all the answers, but people really seem to love maps. Perhaps if I ever get around to reading "Longitude" or "The Island of Lost Maps," which has been sitting on my night table for about a year now, I'd have more insight into this phenomenon. All I know is that it's out there and it's real.

And what with Google Earth, Yahoo! Maps and more traditional forms of computerized mapping, maps are proliferating on the Internet. People are even creating "mashups," combinations of mapping applications and other data such as satellite photos, to create new, interesting content.

Duke Power has gotten into the game with this map showing where its power outages from Thursday's ice storm are located. I'm sure it's very helpful ... if you have power.

Everyone has his/her own ideas, including the pseudonymous Athenae at the group blog First Draft, who takes a couple of items from Jim Romenesko's newspaper-industry blog at Poynter and whips them into a to-do list for the industry:

[Many newspapers' efforts to attract young readers are] like desperate parents dyeing their hair pink and listening to their kids' CDs in a futile and sad attempt to get their kids to like them. Personally? ... I don't want my parents to be just like me. I want my parents to be my parents, to do things I need parents to do, like set a good example, provide food and shelter, and teach me about the world.

Here's some resolutions: Stop sucking. Stop running front-page features on flip-flops and the Sopranos and The Passion of the Christ. Stop cutting your newsrooms in half because you only pulled a 20 percent profit last year. Stop acting irritated that your readership isn't what it used to be. Nothing's what it used to be. Stop saying you have no money for journalism and sending your ad sales execs to Jamaica as a reward for meeting quota. Learn to wiki? How about learning to FOIA? Do the little things: Local official giving you a hard time? Request his travel reimbursement records. Tell the story you don't think is a story because it's always been that way, or because everybody does it. Stand up to power and when [politicians] whine that you're mean, buy yourself a beer and send me the bill, because that kind of mean is defined in the real world as your job. ... No fear or favor. No backing down. Not. One. Inch.

So, which of these items, if any, should we put on our action plan for 2006?

In the comments to my previous post, Roch Smith suggests that the N&R would gain readers if it would stop ignoring important stories. (For the record, not being involved right now in day-to-day journalism, I'm not in a position to do anything one way or the other about coverage of the issues he raises.)

It sounds simple. But how do you define "important," and who decides?

I raise those cautionary questions after reading this column by Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat:

As I look back at the year in news, it's clear I should have focused more on people having sex with horses.

That's the conclusion I reach after reviewing a new list of the year's top local news stories [as determined by counting Web-site hits]. ...

The story last summer about the man who died from a perforated colon while having sex with a horse in Enumclaw was by far the year's most read article.

What's more, four more of the year's 20 most clicked-upon local news stories were about the same horse-sex incident. We don't publish our Web-traffic numbers, but take it from me — the total readership on these stories was huge.

So much so, a case can be made that the articles on horse sex are the most widely read material this paper has published in its 109-year history.

I don't know whether to ignore this alarming factoid or to embrace it.

Wow. So that's the secret.

We here at the N&R embraced the notion, sort of, in today's year-end roundup of the idiotic, the ironic and the just plain weird, taking note of antiabortion activist Neal Horsley's public confession that he once had sex with a mule. The Washington-state horse-sex item was in the original version of our roundup but got cut for space. (The draft I started with this year was about four times as long as the version we published, which is par for the course -- there's never any lasting shortage of weird news.)

Westneat continues:

There's not much on the so-called "issues" we're always implored to focus on, such as transportation or education. Nothing on the big campaign topics of the year, such as the monorail or gas tax. And nothing on this paper's major investigations or in-depth series.

So there's the thing: Do we give readers what they say they want? Or do we give them what they actually click on? And are the lists the same in print and online, or do online readers go for the weird and fluffy while print readers go for the substantive?

And how, short of monitoring your eyeballs, can we tell?

Nah. Apparently we're going to run out of year before we run out of storms.