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Earlier I said we've reached the point at which we're ready to try creating real-world partnerships between the professional journalists on the N&R staff and people in the community who are interested in pursuing news stories that would appear both in print and online.

Both you and some of my co-workers had some questions, which could be summarized mainly as, "How will this work?"

As flexibly as possible, is my hope. On Thursday, I'm going to be meeting with my editor, Mike Grossman; City Editor Mark Sutter; Managing Editor Ann Morris and Editor John Robinson to discuss that big question.

Earlier this week, I threw together some specific questions that I think fall under that general heading and sent them to those four so they could be thinking about possible answers before our meeting. But of course, I also want to hear from you. The issues/questions on my list (followed, in some cases, by my comments to you in italics) were:

• How and by whom coverage ideas will be vetted. (I posted earlier that Mike and I would be deciding, with Mark backstopping us. So far as I know, that's still the case unless someone comes up with a compelling reason for us to change.)
• How and by whom the appropriate medium/media will be determined and assigned to particular ideas/stories.
(We want to take full advantage of the online medium, but our resources -- photojournalists, tech folks -- are not unlimited.)
• What the nature and extent of contributing readers' involvement will be. (I personally envision readers' playing as large or as small a role as they are comfortable with on any particular story -- everything from providing info for a photo caption to co-writing a lead Sunday story.)
• What the nature and extent of editing/supervising contributing readers will be, and who will be responsible.
(Credibility is paramount, so nobody works without a net.)
• What conditions we may wish to impose on contributing readers in advance of publication; what conditions we may wish to agree to in return. (For example, can the reader blog about the story before it's published, or publish it on his/her blog before we publish it in the paper and/or online?)
• How and to what extent we will make N&R resources -- photographers, artists, video/audio equipment, legal advice, etc. -- available to contributing readers.
• Whether and how we will credential contributing readers who are working in tandem with N&R staff. (For stories involving government documents or publicly accessible events this won't be an issue, of course.)
• Whether creating partnerships with contributing readers creates any legal jeopardy not already recognized as part of our day-to-day journalism.

I'm sure I've missed some important issues, but that's part of the reason why I'm posting this here before the meeting. Please give me your thoughts on these issues and tell me what I might have overlooked.

Thanks!

Maintenance guy (dealing with wiring problem in cramped storage closet): Here's your problem: You don't have enough junk in here.

Administrative assistant: That's not junk. That's stuff.

What's the difference? Is there a difference? And if so, what are the ramifications for such phrases as "junk in the trunk" or "too stuffed to eat another bite"?

Discuss amongst yourselves. I'll be back later today with a report on the meeting.

UPDATE: Another perspective here.

Well, I got tied up on stuff yesterday afternoon and tied up on more stuff this morning, so I'm only now getting around to blogging the meeting at which we were going to discuss how partnering N&R news staffers with interested readers to produce stories for print and online might work in the real world.

The meeting was called by my immediate supervisor, Mike Grossman, and also included the next three steps up the News Department food chain: City Editor Mark Sutter, Managing Editor Ann Morris and the department head, Editor John Robinson. We had a list of issues to discuss.

We didn't discuss them, much, however. We did a little, but the bulk of the meeting was a kind of free-flowing airing of our hopes and fears for this part of our Town Square initiative.

Some participants said their fears -- or, perhaps more accurately, their concerns -- about this experiment outweighed their hopes about the good it might do. (Interestingly, in the 15 or so months we've been pursuing the Town Square model, this is the first time I've heard someone say that.) And there are, for sure, some risks -- ranging from wasting staff time in an era of reduced staffing and resources to serious legal repercussions and damage to the paper's reputation. But the five of us ultimately agreed that this was an experiment worth pursuing.

You can't report well on a meeting you're an active part of, so I didn't really try. I did scribble some notes, some of which I reproduce below. Comments attributed to specific individuals should be understood as paraphrases, not necessarily direct quotes.

JR: Because we'll be working with people who may or may not come in understanding how we work, we'll need to be flexible and patient. But we'll also need to be steadfast enough to say "Let's back out" if something isn't working, or if someone is pushing us in a direction in which we can't ethically go.

Me: (I think it was around here that I said that what little research there is on this subject suggests that a lot of people want to contribute to the journalism of their community but don't necessarily want, or feel able, to report and write a story on their own. So I would hope we'd be flexible and open enough to meet would-be contributors at whatever their individual comfort points might be and work from there.)

Ann Morris suggested that there might be some initiatives already ongoing in the community -- not necessarily journalistic initiatives, as journalism is commonly understood, but efforts aimed at gaining knowledge -- that we could form partnerships with, rather than just waiting for ideas to come in over the transom from individuals.

I questioned whether such efforts would be understood by the community as "open-source journalism" -- i.e., something driven by the community rather than by the N&R. I pointed out that to the extent our efforts have been welcomed thus far by the online community, it has been because we have tried to be, and to appear, respectful of that community and have not tried to bigfoot it. But I also said I thought that that question was separate from the question of whether such stories would be worth pursuing.

JR suggested another hypothetical example: Suppose we knew that some professors at N.C. A&T had done some research on the conditions of North Carolina's highways and we approached them to work with us on an examination of that issue.

JR pitched a question to the group: Do we cast a net (for stories suggested by readers) or choose our own? Both, Ann said -- let's cast a net AND pick out one or two to experiment.

We agreed that Mike, Mark and I would compile some ideas and meet next Thursday. So if you have an idea, you're interested in working with the N&R to get that story reported and written and published, get in touch with me so we can get your idea on the list that will be discussed at that meeting.

UPDATE (5:05 p.m. Friday): After a conversation with JR this afternoon and an e-mailed comment from a reader, I realized this post might unintentionally be understating our commitment to this experiment. Short version: He was saying yesterday that he, too, understands the risks, some sizable, that we will be taking -- but that at his point, his attitude is "no guts, no glory."

So to the extent that this post might have led anyone to think we were having second thoughts, that'd be a big ol' "no." We're charging boldly into the fog. Come join us.

Beer fights heart disease. Yay, beer!

I am not a lawyer. But if I'd gotten paid market consulting rates for every lesson in open-records law I've had to give public officials in the course of 22 years of newspaper journalism, I could party like one seven nights a week and still have enough left over to feed my family.

I've said many times in many venues that to adapt fully to the Web, newspapers have got to find a new business model ... probably one with a profit margin much smaller than those enjoyed by the industry even today.

Related to that, there's an interesting article on the Ad Age Web site that asks: How can news stay free online when it's so expensive offline?

Yahoo, Google and other portals essentially set up a business model that pointed people to work that was done -- and paid for -- by a lot of other companies. Until very recently, Yahoo and Google didn't employ news staffs, or writers, or directors. During the early years of phenomenal growth, they were essentially soaring off the backs of companies still tied down to paying printing costs and employing large staffs of people who made phone calls and asked questions to find out what was actually going on.

Yahoo last year began to add some original content to its site under entertainment czar Lloyd Braun, but that has yet to pay off. What the giants of the Web are starting to realize is that creating all this content is hard and expensive. It's also a lot more time consuming than just setting up browsers to let surfers know what's out there.

Information wants to be free, as they say on the Web, and because it's essentially a commodity, it often can be free, or nearly so.

But news -- a special subset of information -- can be expensive. It takes people, training, time and money even when powerful interests are NOT trying to suppress it, which is not always the case. I say that not to argue pro-newspaper or anti-blogger but to illustrate that from an economic standpoint, we're talking about two different models ... and we don't yet know what the online business model for news is going to look like, or even if one can be found.

But the report mentioned in the article suggests that we're going to have to grow online readership much more quickly than our print readership is shrinking if we're to remain profitable, and that's true even if our ultimate business model reaches equilibrium at a profit margin well below the ones newspapers enjoy today, which I suspect will be the case. How we get there with a minimum of pain for us and a maximum of relevant, useful, enjoyable content for you is the question we continue to wrestle with.

True story: I almost majored in physics rather than English ... not only because I was thinking about astronomy as a career, but also because of cool stuff like this:

Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories' Z machine -- the former dark horse among accelerators meant to produce conditions required for nuclear fusion -- have increased the machine's X-ray power output by nearly 10 times in the last two years.

The most recent advance resulted in an output X-ray power of about 290 trillion watts -- for billionths of a second, about 80 times the entire world's output of electricity.

The figure represents almost a 40 percent increase over the 210 trillion watts -- itself a world record -- reported last summer.

Strangely, the power used in each trial is only enough to provide electricity to about 100 houses for two minutes. Electricity is provided by ordinary wall current from a local utility company. ...

In a different series of experiments, the accelerator achieved a temperature of approximately 1.6 million degrees Celsius (140 electron volts) in a container the size of a spool of thread. [Just for comparison purposes the surface temp of the sun is around 6,000 degrees Celsius -- Lex]

Wordsworth was cool, but if he ever talked about holding a thimbleful of sunlight in his hand, he probably was only speaking metaphorically. And sometimes, metaphors just ain't enough.

UPDATE: Biology and its derivatives, on the other hand, never appealed to me as a vocation. This thread gives you an idea of why. (NSFW: language)

This is National Sunshine Week, a promotion intended to impress upon Americans the importance of open government. I had my say on the subject last week. Now, Al Tompkins of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies has pulled together an impressive list of related stories and editorials on the subject.

Coincidentally, there's also an interesting debate on open records and the news media's role in distributing and/or reporting on them, based on the N&R's reporting on the consultant's report on former police chief David Wray, going on over at JR's blog.

UPDATE: Just to show you that I'm not completely nutso on this topic, here's a case in which a little more government secrecy definitely would be in order.

... are doing it right -- multimedia, that is.

Occasionally I have to remind readers of this blog that I am not a lawyer, but I don't have to do it the way Ezra Klein's guest-poster does. And that's a good thing.

After Hurricane Katrina, the story was told far and wide of how a Cat-5 hurricane striking New Orleans was the second of three catastrophic disaster scenarios considered "likely" within the next couple of decades. A terrorist attack on New York was one, also, and as we all know, that, too, has come to pass.

The third? A major Bay Area earthquake ... and the experts say the fault along which such a quake would occur is locked and loaded (link contains links to news story and other related online resources). Oh, goody.

Red wine can help prevent tooth decay.

So the McClatchy chain is buying the Knight Ridder newspaper chain, making McClatchy the nation's second-largest chain (behind Gannett). For those of us in the Carolinas, this deal affects The Charlotte Observer, The State in Columbia and The Sun News in Myrtle Beach, among other properties. (The News & Observer in Raleigh was purchased by McClatchy several years ago.)

On the surface, this was, I guess you could say, the least-bad outcome for many of the 32 Knight Ridder properties involved: McClatchy is a publicly traded corporation, but it has a reputation for journalistic excellence and for not being absolutely bloodthirsty about its profit margins. It also is saying, at least for now, that while it will be looking for efficiencies, it will not be laying anyone off. I talked to a longtime acquaintance of mine in The Charlotte Observer's newsroom yesterday, and he said the newsroom was the happiest he had seen it in a long time.

But 12 of the KR papers will be resold -- primarily papers in markets such as Philadelphia that McClatchy doesn't see as growing fast enough to suit it. The St. Paul, Minn., Pioneer Press will be sold because of antitrust concerns related to McClatchy's ownership of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. (McClatchy probably would have preferred simply to close it so that it could enjoy an effective monopoly in the Twin Cities and boost its ad rates, but those same antitrust concerns probably would preclude doing so.) But also going on the block is the San Jose Mercury News, the erstwhile Knight Ridder flagship, as well as the Contra Costa, Calif., paper. It's not clear to me why the Merc is being resold. True, ad revenue took a hard hit during the dot-com bust and its current margins now hover around 8% -- low for the industry. But, as analyst John Morton points out, it serves some of the wealthiest demographics in the country and a market that almost certainly will grow vigorously in the long term. Perhaps it has to do with McClatchy's already owning papers in Modesto and Sacramento. I don't know.

I'm no expert analyst, but if I had to guess, I'd say the future is both cloudier and, probably, grimmer for staffers at the 12 papers being resold. Those papers are going to have to fetch a premium to satisfy McClatchy (and help it pay down some of its debt, including $2 billion in Knight Ridder debt it assumed as part of the takeover). Thus it is likely that anyone who buys those papers will be cutting expenses big-time to make his own deal work, unless they take those papers private to avoid the kind of market pressures that undid Knight Ridder. But even going private likely would require a ton of debt. I think the best a lot of folks at those papers can hope for is a generous buyout offer, and I see no particular reason to think even that is in the offing.

The Knight Ridder sale was put into motion in November, when KR's largest shareholder, Private Capital Management, demanded that KR do something about its stock price, then $52 a share. Under the terms of the McClatchy deal, PCM will be getting $67.50 a share -- a 30% profit for four months of other people's work.

It would be nice to think PCM head Bruce Sherman will be satisfied with that. But, as The Blogging Journalist points out, Sherman also is McClatchy's largest shareholder, at 35.6%. McClatchy's price dropped about 3%, down $1.51 to $51.55, on Monday, and has lost almost 13% so far this year. Might Sherman make McClatchy the same "offer" he made KR?

UPDATE: Here's a roundup of other people's takes on all this, including some pure speculation that, if it came to pass, would be really interesting.

UPDATE: Wow. Former Philly ad exec Brian Tierney says he has commitments "in excess of $100 million" in an effort to buy Philadelphia's Inquirer and Daily News from McClatchey. The plan would be "a sort of Green Bay Packers kind of ownership," he says -- that National Football League franchise is owned by shareholders, almost all of them Green Bay residents, while other franchises are owned by individuals or small partnerships -- and would even partner with the Newspaper Guild, the union, to make it happen. I could spend a day listing the obstacles in the path of this plan, but if Tierney's group can pull it off, I think a lot of people in and around Philly would be very, very happy.

Hilzoy at the blog Obsidian Wings has an interesting essay up on morality. There's a lot to chew on (and you might not agree with all of it), but it's expressed in clear language. So go give your brain a treat.

Starbucks is giving away free cups of coffee between 10 a.m. and noon tomorrow at 7,500 stores nationwide. I don't have any info at this late hour on whether Greensboro outlets are participating. But then, if I'm blogging at this late hour, I don't have a life, either, and that's probably a bigger concern.

I'll be at the Piedmont Triad Bloggers' March Meetup at 7 p.m. tonight at the Panera Bread, 2645 Lawndale Drive in Greensboro. Come out and say hi. We can talk about partnerships between N&R staff and people like you in reporting and writing stories. Or we can just talk basketball. Whichever.

According to this story, the fact that the NCAA is broadcasting basketball games online will cost corporate America $4 billion.

Corporate America can get over itself. Anyone with a lick of sense knows that these two days should be national holidays, anyway.

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, that city's Times-Picayune newspaper began publishing only online. It had to. Its offices and printing plant were flooded. The city's streets were largely under water, preventing delivery even if a paper could have been printed. So out of necessity, the TP became the first American newspaper to become a purely Web-based operation, even if involuntarily and temporarily.

Two unrelated observers of the newspaper bidness have come to much the same conclusion regarding the McClatchy purchase of the Knight Ridder chain and the looming reselling of 12 of the KR properties.

Jay Rosen of PressThink wonders whether those 12 properties ought to take advantage of the fact that no one really owns them right now to transform themselves, quickly and permanently, into something that can survive, even thrive, in this era.

And Paul Chesser, a contributor to our religion pages a decade or so ago and now a writer for the John Locke foundation, has a piece up at The American Spectator's Web site suggesting that McClatchy use its monopoly position in some of the nation's more desirable markets to ditch print entirely, on the assumption that an educated readership will follow the product online if it isn't already there.

Could we be reaching a tipping point?

The Federal Communications Commission wants to fine CBS and its affiliates $3.6 million for airing an episode of "Without a Trace" that supposedly depicted "teenage boys and girls participating in a sexual orgy." (I say "supposedly" only because I didn't see the episode.) That's several multiples of the $550,000 fine it levied against the same network and some of its stations for the Janet Jackson "wardrobe malfunction" incident during the Super Bowl two years ago.

That figure compares with a total of about $125,000 in fines levied by the government against the company that owns the West Virginia coal mine where 12 workers died in January.

I think that the kindest thing that can be said about this is that the government really needs to revisit the structure of its fines and civil penalties so that the most important violations carry the highest cost. By "most important," I mean the ones that address risks to human life. And it would be nice to think that that's what the government means by "most important," too.

Back during our e-mail server problems, a frequent correspondent wrote to ask, "What else could go wrong for y'all?"

Argh. Never ask that question. Because if you do, you will always find out.

In this case, the main sewer line here in the building began having problems this afternoon, so no one could flush for a couple of hours. To our collective relief, to so speak, the problem appears to have been fixed now.

Apparently, supporting the wrong football team could mean you're trying to commit vote fraud:

Could showing up to the polls in your Emmitt Smith jersey or sending in your mail-in ballot with a stamp promoting testing for sickle-cell disease get you in hot water?

Some watchdog groups claim it could, depending on who's interpreting training materials on voter fraud provided by the [Texas] state attorney general's office.

Common Cause Texas, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and some state Democrats highlighted the concerns after obtaining copies of a PowerPoint presentation used to train law officers to monitor the primary elections for fraud. ...

"They (the examples) reflect the current law in the state of Texas regarding the conduct of elections, and they're geared toward law enforcement officials," Kelley said. ...

One of the controversial issues is this summary of section 61.010: "Other than election officials and peace officers, a person shall not wear a badge, insignia, emblem, etc. ... relating to (a) candidate, measure or political party on the ballot."

As an example, the materials list the Dallas Cowboys emblem as an item that should not be worn at the polls, and offers photos of a T-shirt of the Cowboys, the Cowboys team logo, and a cap with "Cowboys Football" on it. Violating this section of the election code is a class C misdemeanor, the training materials said.

I, for one, welcome the support of Texas law enforcement in the battle to keep people from wearing Dallas Cowboys paraphernalia to vote ... or, for that matter, anywhere else.

Moreover, I believe I have the perfect pattern to use as a basis for designing clothing appropriate for wearing to the polls:

Sorry I'm only now getting around to blogging this, but I was delighted to see both familiar and (to me) new faces at this past Wednesday night's blogger meetup. One of the side benefits of events such as this is getting to add links to "Bloggers I know in real life," such as PotatoStew and Cara Michele.

For those of you who weren't there, I repeated my standing invitation to members of the community to partner with N&R staff on stories that interest you, and I took several good questions in response to that invitation. I also had a good talk with Sue about how to build up a group of people interested in this kind of work, along the lines of the old Triad Internet Users Group. And I had a brief conversation, definitely to be continued, with man-about-Web 2.0 Sean Coon, who, unbeknown to me, moved to Greensboro a few months back.

More -- much more, I hope -- to come.

Remember the bad old days when we saw communists under every rock? They're back.

... the Web 2.0 movement ... fuses '60s radicalism with the utopian eschatology of digital technology. The ideological outcome may be trouble for all of us. ...

The consequences of Web 2.0 are inherently dangerous for the vitality of culture and the arts. Its empowering promises play upon that legacy of the '60s--the creeping narcissism that Christopher Lasch described so presciently, with its obsessive focus on the realization of the self.

Another word for narcissism is "personalization." Web 2.0 technology personalizes culture so that it reflects ourselves rather than the world around us. Blogs personalize media content so that all we read are our own thoughts. Online stores personalize our preferences, thus feeding back to us our own taste. Google personalizes searches so that all we see are advertisements for products and services we already use.

Instead of Mozart, Van Gogh, or Hitchcock, all we get with the Web 2.0 revolution is more of ourselves.

To which I think the most appropriate response is: Huh??

More specifically, Keen seems to think that in a Web 2.0 world there would be, to use his example, no more Bonos. But as someone who actually spent years in various facets of the music bidness, I can assure Keen, and you, that the emergence of a Bono from that bidness is not much more than happy accident. Moreover, what of the musician who does not aspire to Bonohood (in either creative or economic terms) but would simply like to be able to make a decent living doing what she loves while maintaining control of both her art and her career? That's still a tough row to hoe, but prior to the Web it was pretty much impossible. And the comparison applies to any number of other artistic and/or entrepreneurial endeavors, as well.

Keen can't knock the Web on its merits, so he creates a straw man. And while he's knocking that straw man down and screaming about how noble it is to do so, people who get it will go merrily on their way.

We're finally in the process of moving a bunch of things on our site, such as our blogs, to new hosting. Once the move is finished, we'll be better off from a number of standpoints. And with any luck, you'll never notice anything wrong during the move.

But as we know, "any luck" is too much luck to count on when matters technical are at play.

So: If you spot anything wrong on the site -- graphical weirdness, busted links, whatever -- let me know.

Not only did Tucker Carlson behave unethically, when he got caught, instead of 'fessing up and apologizing, he whined like Pete Rose.

And he deserves about as much credence.

The American Press Institute, in its desperation wisdom, has invited me to speak next month at its "Citizen Media: Engaging an Empowered Audience" seminar for editors at various levels from newspapers of varying size. The organizers are asking me to speak on the subject "Town Square: Lessons Learned."

So I've got my own list of lessons learned, and I've asked several colleagues who have been deeply involved with this project what they think we've learned. But I also need to ask you: What do you think we've learned? E-mail me or hit the comments link.

Thanks!

Home sick today, and with a bit of time on my hands for once, I came across something both interesting and entertaining.

One would think that the poet Geoffrey Chaucer would find the Internet a bit troublesome, given that he has been dead for close to three-quarters of a millennium and all.

And one would be wrong.

Not only is he online, not only is he blogging, he is making up his own text-messaging abbreviations, such as:

• OTPBRB: Offe to parliamente, be ryghte back
• AOMSHJDOTBD: anothere of myne servauntes hath just dyede of the blacke death. (Yeah, I hate it when that happens, too.)

So, hey, if Geoffrey can adapt to the world of blogs, what's keeping you?

I had lunch yesterday with veteran local blogger and Internet maven Sue Polinsky and with information architect/user-interface designer/general Internet genius Sean Coon, who moved here about seven months ago and is up to some interesting things online both professionally (he's redesigning that site) and personally. (An aside: Anyone whose job it is to lure smart young professionals to Greensboro and keep them here needs to talk to Sean.)

Sean already has blogged the luncheon and elegantly summarizes our discussion. Some good things came out of it (although I'm up against a deadline and probably won't be able to begin acting on some of this stuff until week after next), and this conversation will continue. As always, you're welcome to join in.

In Sean's defense, I need to point out that although many people in town probably could offer reasons why his photography should portray Sue as the Princess of Light and me as the Prince of Darkness, that isn't what Sean did. We had a window table, and that's just how the light happened to fall.

Not to say that I don't gravitate toward the shadows ....

In the tradition of rock band Van Halen's insistence on backstage bowls of M&Ms with all the brown M&Ms removed, The Smoking Gun is proud to present Vice President Dick Cheney's "concert rider".

For context, there's nothing outrageous here, particularly compared to some contract riders I've seen for some pop-music performers. When one early-1980s pop flash-in-the-pan played at my college, for example, their contract rider specified that we would provide a certain minimum number of condoms. I'm pretty sure we ignored that.

The all-TVs-tuned-to-Fox-News part doesn't surprise me. What does is the specific insistence upon caffeine-free Diet Sprite. I thought all Sprite was caffeine-free. But then, the vice president and I, for some odd reason, do not travel in the same circles, so I could be mistaken.

Apparently I missed it when I was out sick Wednesday, but the N&R main building's plumbing problems aren't over. In fact, we're now once again under a do-not-flush order until further notice. (If we get desperate, we can walk across the parking lot to the building that once housed Triad Style magazine. It has a separate sewer hookup.)

If they don't get this issue resolved today, I swear I may come back in this weekend with a Roto-Rooter(tm) setup that would make Godzilla feel inadequate, because this is getting old.

Bacon: the new salmon?

Now don't ever let me hear you say we only publish bad news.

Oh, this rocks: Mash up Google Maps with weather, traffic and other cameras and weather-data recording stations and you get: Weather Bonk! Here's a link to the weather at 200 E. Market St., which, as we know, is the center of the universe.

Ed wonders whether we've been devoting too much coverage to the lottery. I don't know. But what I do know is that just a few minutes ago, I overheard someone in the newsroom say, "No, I haven't had time to get lunch. I've been too busy playing the lottery."