Talking Toilets, Intelligent Satire

Two important things to consider:

1. This is the funniest satire of American television news I have ever seen.
2. It's from a children's program.

Information-Free News!

This article is a little noodle-scratcher.

It’s supposed to be a news story. But it appears to be devoid of actual news.

Let me tell you’ I’ve been there. Spent ten years as a journalist covering small-town news. Spent a lot – and I mean a LOT – of time listening to city council deliberations, which should be filed under cruel and unusual punishment. And I’m sure if I went through the tons of articles I shoveled out, I could probably find a few nearly as information-free as this one. So I’m the pot calling the kettle black.

Still, damn.

So. The council wants to change the enforcement part of its nuisance ordinance. What those changes might be, well, that’s left to the imagination.

I get that there’s no draft. I get that there’s not even a deadline set to have a draft of what might be changed.

But news articles are meant to inform, not be vignettes of moments in time at a city council meeting. I want that, I’ll do this:

And I understand the journalist’s pain.

City Council don’t wanna say anything because the journalist is going to write it down and print it, and we all know what happens then:

"In my experience Miss Crisplock tends to write down exactly what one says," Vetinari observed. "It's a terrible thing when journalists do that. It spoils the fun. One feels instinctively that it's cheating somehow."

Same for the city employee. One word gets out to the public and KABOOM. What’s said becomes the OFFICIAL PUBLIC WORD ® and NOBODY – REPEAT NOBODY – will believe anything otherwise, even if angels descend from the clouds with a new version of the nuisance ordinance. So since there’s nothing of substance to write about, clearly this should be a news brief.

But . . .

The journalist writes an information-free article with a chiche in the headline. And dammit if he’s not going to get a byline. He sat in that city council meeting for HOURS. 

And an editor saw it, and it was good.

And the world goes on spinning because there’s another newspaper to FILL FILL FILL.

Again, can’t say I miss the newspaper business at all.

NOTE: I’m not saying every journalist out there does this. Frequently. But every journalist out there has done an article or two like this. And if they tell you otherwise . . .

News Genius! An Entirely NEW Way to Make Lame Comments Online

Because the Internet isn’t already awash with nasty, banal, nonsensical and otherwise useless comments on the nasty, banal, nonsensical and otherwise nonsensical stuff that is clogging the tubes, we now have News Genius, a new tool that allows the ordinary Joe or Jane the power to “annotate” the written word as it appears online.

They might be annotating this blog right now. Though to find out, well, I’m not sure. Notifying folks their stuff is being annotated doesn’t seem to be a feature of News Genius (probably you can find out if you’re being annotated by becoming a News Genius member, but I don’t know as their FAQ is a little on the sketchy side).

I applaud their goals as lofty. They include this in their brief FAQ on how to make a “Good” annotation:

The best annotations confront the underlying text in some way—whether it’s a fact check, a difference of opinion, or simply an updated look at an older piece of writing.

Highlight a strong word, phrase, or succinct idea. Then add your original take, coupled with:

• Meaty context with links to sources
• Rich imagery (i.e. interesting videos, photos, infographics, archived tweets, or gifs)
• A question or prompt for other readers/annotators to reply to

Nicely said. This is the kind of annotation I try to do myself (the old-fashioned way, with sticky notes and pencils or pecked out on my tablet) and what I encourage my English students to do as they read a text.

So let’s look at some of the examples (a link taken directly from the News Genius FAQ):

Don’t worry if you can’t actually see any of the annotations there. I couldn’t either. They appear to be missing, without explanation. Maybe you have to have a Genius account to see them. Although I could see riveting annotated Buzzfeed articles when the links are provided properly. Also missing are annotations from the other examples they provide. I don’t know why. I also don’t know why you’d want to annotate an article about Kim Kardashian, but then I am a stuck-in-the-mud fuddy-duddy who only encounters the Kardashian clan when looking up “Keeping Up Appearances” on YouTube. (Annotate this: I am a snob, yessir.)

Here’s what annotations are supposed to look like.

I’m not sure how I’m supposed to be enriched or enlightened by any of this (and this is offered by “Leah,” Managing News Editor at News Genius (in an era when anyone with any semblance of a website can declare themselves Managing News Editor, just as John Pinette can declare himself the Boss of Ham).

I see a lot of good potential here. But if anyone thinks News Genius is going to elevate discourse or whatever, snork, you’ve got another thing coming. The trolls will take over, as they have every other commenting platform – and that’s basically what this is, another commenting platform. Here’s what the Captains Obvious at Slate.com have to say:

One thing News Genius hasn’t taken into consideration: a very real potential for abuse.

No kidding. Because the Internet is rife with abuse and scorn, drowning out the useful in a wave of stupidity. In fact, I’ve even had to give up reading the comments on local news stories because even in this hick tub area, the trolls are dominant. And no matter how much hand-wringing goes on at News Genius about how they’re not all trolls, that the vast majority of annotators are wonderful, thoughtful people who contribute to web culture and commentary and love to pet furry kittens, trolls will come in and it’s the trolls that will get the notoriety and will stain the very webby fabric that makes up News Genius.

The only way to combat that is outright censorship – banning the worst of the trolls. But as soon as a site starts banning, well, you can guess what happens.

So I want to know:

When I read an annotated article, can I easily filter the banal from the constructive without spending more time curating the list of annotators than it would to read the article?

Can web sites opt out of Genius annotations? (A corollary: Should they? (And if you answer YES or NO, than it’s clear you don’t realize the answer is best given as “is grey area”.)

Will News Genius do anything to bring us out of our news bubbles (given that we can probably opt to technologically follow or ignore people we want to see or would rather not)?

Can I declare myself the Boss of Pizza?

Does News Genius really think your garden-variety commenter/annotator want to be “accountable for the things we say and the sensitivity behind them”?

How to Get in the Local News: A Primer

A friend of mine found himself in the middle of a do-gooder kerfuffle this week when the promoter of one event that dovetailed with an event he promoted felt slighted because her event didn’t receive the media adulation that his event did.

Needless to say, words were said, accusations were launched, toes were stepped on and pretty much everyone lived up to what Molly of Fibber McGee and Molly said about such kerfuffles: Don’t everybody bow at once or you’ll bump heads.

As a disgraced former local newspaper reporter* I’ve got a thing or two to say on the situation.

How do you get your do-gooder event in the newspaper (or, conversely, on local television)?

DO make it a photogenic event. In the afore-mentioned kerfuffle, the event that got the ink and video tape happened to involve a string of more than 400 motorcycle enthusiasts, complete with gobs of facial hair, black leather, do rags and other motorcyclish accoutrements, compared to a baked potato dinner fundraiser. No matter that it was the fundraiser that brought in $6,000 for the distressed family, it was the motorcycle parade featuring the seven-year-old cancer survivor grinning ear to ear that got the play.

So, DON’T get bent out of shape if your well-meaning but unphotogenic potato bar fundraiser doesn’t get as prominent play as the motorcycle parade. Cameras, reporters – and readers – like the motorcycles and the grinning kid. Not to belittle the effort of the potato bar, but nobody is interested in photos of people eating or a story about people eating, unless they’re eating bugs, Rocky Mountain oysters, or other such delicacies.

As you pick a photogenic event, DO make sure it’s unique. My experience in newspaper reporting will tell you that a principal jumping into a vat of macaroni and cheese is photogenic, a cow wandering around a field as a crowd waits nearby waiting for it to poop on the coordinates they bought in the raffle is not. Costumes are good. I’ve yet to see an event headed by someone in a gorilla suit not make the paper. Speeches, big checks, ribbon cuttings, and people standing around in suits (unless they’re in the proximity of someone in a gorilla suit) are not good.

I only know of one non-costume wearing guy who got himself into the news consistently, and that's Paul Yarrow, News Raider.




DO plan on making your own media of the event. With Facebook YouTube, blogs and the vastness of the Internet available at your fingertips, counting on some hack (I include myself in this hackitude) to get the word out as you see fit is silly. Get the word out yourself. Provide a link to your whatsit to the media and generally insist it get included somewhere. As long as it’s not overtly commercial, you’re bound to get the link – and the publicity – you want as you want it done.

DON’T, however, refer the news media to your web page as they call you or approach you for information. Be affable. Answer their questions. Be courteous, kind, and forgiving. They’re there to talk to you.

DO have an official spokesman at your event, someone the media can contact and talk to. If you’re not the official spokesman and don’t want to be quoted as such, SHUT the HELL up and get the media to the official spokesman, then wander off. Nothing, repeat, NOTHING looks worse than having a bunch of lookie-loos hanging about as the media does its thing. Don’t get in the way.

DO ensure there is cross-coordination between events meant to help the same cause. Part of the above kerfuffle arose – and I’m getting this second-hand – is because the news reporters who inevitably flocked to the motorcycle parade, assumed that organizers there knew everything there was to know about the other event. That wasn’t so, and it appears – again, this is all second-hand, but I know how this works through experience with sloppy reporting – the journalists were looking for one-stop information and when it wasn’t forthcoming (not out of malice or negligence, but because the organizers of Event A simply didn’t know enough about Event B to be helpful) they didn’t pursue it further.

So, if you want your event in the paper, DO get in the face of the reporters and editors as much as you can. Make yourself a nuisance. Don’t wait for them to call you; call them yourself and force as much information on them as you can. This way, even if your event isn’t the photogenic one, you’ll at least rate (hopefully, if the reporter is worth his or her sauce) bigger mention in the main story or at least a sidebar (a secondary story that accompanies the main one).

DO get to know your local reporters, well in advance of your event, so you know who's most likely to pick up on an event.

DO keep your expectations in check. Not everyone who waltzes into the local paper or TV news station with a tip is going to get top-billed coverage. Or coverage at all.

But DON’T be surprised if your particular event is relegated to a sideline in the story detailing another event, or sent to the purgatory of the community calendar due to its lack of overall photogenics. See the first DO, because the first DO trumps all.

Also, if your event doesn’t end up getting the coverage you felt it deserved, DON’T spread lies about the organizer of the competing event, get all whiny with the media outlet or otherwise make yourself look like a fool. Content yourself with your unsung good-deed-doing and keep your eye out for the next do-good opportunity. Otherwise, you’re going to sound like an attention whore trying to drag the name of your business (strictly for promotional reasons) into the media limelight.

If you DO organize a “competing” event that you know is going to be more photogenic, make sure you’ve got contact information for the people organizing the other event and foist it upon the media. The media are so used to being blamed for passing on stories that it doesn’t faze them, so do your best to shift the blame.

DO realize that if you spend a lot of time thanking people for participating that this information is going to be the first thing cut out of any news report. That information may be important to you and important in keeping the peace, but if it’s going to compete with a cute kid getting to ride with a motorcycle gang through town, it’s going to get cut because space is limited. Keep your thanks to a minimum, start with the big hitters AND the organizers of the less-photogenic event. Have a printed list of people you want to thank ready to hand to the news people and suggest the put it up as a sidebar to the story on their web pages. It’s not going to get into print with the initial story, in full. Then follow up with a letter to the editor of the local paper with a list of people you’d like to thank. Your thanks are much more likely to be published that way. If you’ve got a long list, buy an ad. Or approach the paper (especially the smaller ones) with articles in hand expressing the goodwill their coverage elicited in the community and suggest that they provide, free of change, some small advertising space that you can use for your thanks. Remember, you don’t get what you don’t ask for.

And if all else fails, of course, call on Chuck Norris for the defense.**

*Rightfully disgraced for screwing up on some law-and-order stories. Quit my job and went through more than a year of underemployment hell as penance, so if there’s anyone still out there who still wants blood over the incident, they’ll have to come take it out of my nose.

**Not really. DO NOT do this. Ever. Unless you want jail time.

Just in Case You Forgot the Visual Metaphor

Thought this was kind of funny. Watch out for the saucy NSFW naughty word in the first bit.

And to be fair, just about every journalist does this kind of thing. I don't think it's necessarily bad -- any journalist worth his or her salt will work hard to find people who can make good points and actually have something to say to add to the story but it is true that for many people (myself included when I was in the industry) this bland, rote approach is the norm.

It's a reminder to me that it's the substance, not the form, that helps make for vivid writing.

The Little Demigods of TV

‎"I'm concerned about the little demigods of TV who make an instant analysis of complicated events. There should be bounds on what TV men do, so much of which is delivered with flippant abandon." Douglas Cater, special assistant to President Lyndon Baines Johnson, in 1968, recorded in Victor Lasky's "It Didn't Start With Watergate."

To say Faux News did it first and still does it best skirts the issue that especially in politics, the news media of any stripe has been up to these shenanigans for years.

"You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war." William Randolph Hearst, 1898.

As entertaining as Jon Stewart and Co. are, it's shameful that we have sunk to the point that only on a non-news entertainment show does anyone say what Stewart and Colbert say and are believed. I don't believe in the bounds that Cater mentions, but I do worry about the "little demigods" of TV, whether they mix a little tiny bit of news with commentary or throw entertainment into the mix to take the curse off it.

I AM PRESSING THE BUTT'N!

Facebook may be on to something here.

And I may be on to something, concerning Facebook.

Well, beyond “may be.” They’re zeroing in on what could be bigger than Facebook: Becoming the web’s validator.

That’s the scary Orwellian (Okay, truthfully, it’s probably Huxleian) nugget in Wired.com’s story on Facebook’s new offering to its old media cousins: Let us host your comments.

Here’s the paragraph:

It also builds on what’s becoming Facebook’s most important function: being the identity provider and validator for the wider net. The system opens the door for what’s likely inevitable: having news sites rely on Facebook to identify its users and eventually to serve ads to its readers based on their individual Facebook pages.

The whole story is here.

What Facebook offers, as Wired points out, is an escape from the anonymity of most commenting systems in which the lowest common denominator tends to rule and which Godwinning comment threads seems to be the goal of just about every yellow-bellied troglodyte looking to stir the pot. Commenters might think twice if, instead of anonymity, their trolling comment on a news story led the righteous back to their Facebook pages. And it might spur those few weenies on the planet who haven’t yet become part of Facebook’s evil empire to give up the fight.

But for old media, it presents a problem: Sure, you might end up with more links on Facebook – you know, the place on the Internet where lots and lots and lots of people hang out – but that won’t necessarily drive eyeballs to your site and your advertisers. Just Facebook’s.

But it’s a temptation. Over the weekend at our Uncharted retreat for instance, we contemplated posting stuff to our Uncharted Facebook page while we struggle to get our own site working. Temporary measure, you know. Though perhaps a tease or two on Facebook would work just fine. And then another. And another. Until we’ve abandoned our website entirely and become just another minor subset of the whole Facebook hairball. Which might not be a bad thing, given that our advertising revenue has ranked near zero . . .

Wait. This could work. And save us money. Yeah, we lose a bit on the whole individuality thing, but maybe we’ve been looking at this from an old media standpoint: Old media: You are our customers and you will go where we tell you and read what we tell you where we tell you. And you know what, for the most part that isn’t working. Maybe taking our content to where the people are – Facebook, you see where I’m going – would open up opportunities to us. We can still make money through our nascent gear store, podcasts, workshops, et cetera. But is that worth subsuming our identity into the Facebook collective?

Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.

Used under the fair use doctrine for commentary purposes. You stupid eediot.

Maybe we ought to beta test pressing that button.

Seven and A Half Cents . . .

Used here under the fair use doctrine for commentary purposes.

Add this to the number of reasons I’m neither in a hurry to get a tablet computer nor for Uncharted to get too deeply into the mobile app business:

Apple’s going evil.

Situation No. 1: Nobody in the publishing industry right now is paying anybody 30 percent of their subscription revenue to an outside party to distribute their goods. This is why newspapers, for example, handle their own bulk delivery and contract out individual delivery to children. So for Apple to tell publishers that they want 30 percent of “all sales” generated through mobile apps via Apple just to say hello is a bit of a shock.

Seven and a half cents may not mean a thing in this world, but 30 percent, now, that’s something worth woofing over.

And, per CNN, some folks are woofing:

Online music provider Rhapsody, which currently makes its streaming service available on Apple's iPhones and iPads, fired off a scathing statement to several tech blogs.

"Our philosophy is simple too -- an Apple-imposed arrangement that requires us to pay 30 percent of our revenue to Apple ... is economically untenable," the company said. "We will be collaborating with our market peers in determining an appropriate legal and business response to this latest development."

Apple’s also souring the e-book market, per CNN:

Earlier this month, the company spooked e-reader makers when it refused to greenlight Sony's Reader app. Sony's sin: It routed users who wished to buy books through a Web app, which cut Apple out of the revenue stream.

CNET writes that it’s as yet unclear how companies such as Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and Netflix will react to Apple’s cash grab:

For iPad-centric publications like the recently launched The Daily, Apple's 30 percent is baked into the business plan. But this probably doesn't work for many content sellers that can't afford to have those percentages skimmed off sales. Whether there's a viable workaround for companies or whether this is a negotiating tactic by Apple is unclear. But eventually this may develop into a game of chicken, with companies threatening to pull their apps from the App Store and initiate legal action while Apple continues to flex its muscles and demand what it feels is its proper due for creating a huge market. According to law professors interviewed for a Wall Street Journal article, Apple's new subscription service could draw antitrust scrutiny.

So if, for example, Uncharted were to create a mobile app – which we’re working on – that included the option to buy books, photographs, swag and gear, then Apple gets a 30 percent cut of all the sales we make. And if we decide we’re better off simply using our app to provide links to our web site for purchases, Apple can shut our app down.

Folks, this would be like Microsoft getting a cut from all the companies we buy stuff from via the internet, simply because we’re using a Windows-based PC to do our shopping. Nobody would be happy with that, right?

Yes, Apple is doing a wonderful thing by creating an app-based market where companies can reach out to people and offer them things for sale. But Apple, not content with selling the hardware and making a healthy profit off of it, now wants to dip its fingers in other pots of money, simply because it has the muscle to do so. This smacks of the horizontal or vertical integration many industries indulged in more than a century ago, leading to the trust-busting of Teddy Roosevelt.

Apple, the publishers you’re trying to woo have figured it out.

Search Engine Boobization

I follow a fellow on Twitter who goes by the monicker “Seaslug of Doom.” One of Seaslug's Twitter schticks is to, once and a while, post a tweet featuring three words that are “unlikely to get auto-followers.” Some of his word lists have included:

angelet, annelid, and anthropogeny

andrology, anemotropism, and anenterous

For a while after I started following him, and after I started laughing at his tweets – because I've noticed that when I used some trigger tweet terms, I'd get followers that would quickly disappear when they realized I wasn't tweeting constantly on their pet subject – I pondered setting up a string of fake Twitter accounts to indeed follow him for his extended vocabulary. But I'm generally a lazy soul, and gave up on it.

But that brought to the fore the interesting world of search engine optimization. Learning to seach engine optimize is, of course, the wave of the future for the Internet. Search engine optimization, (SEO), when you get right down to it, helps optimize your Internet searches so when people search the Internet for topics that interest them, say, from search engine optimization to optimizing their website for search engines, they find you.

That paragraph is, of coure, my poor attempt at emulating the stilted language you find in articles that are search engine optimized. Farhad Manjoo over at Slate.com does a much better job of it than I. (So good, in fact, his article shows up on Page 1 when I searched for "Search Engine Optimization" in Google. But more on that, and my penchant for Slate.com articles, later.)

At Uncharted, we don't officially use SEO in our articles. I frown upon it, because of the stilted, silly way it makes articles sound. About the closest we get to such shenanigans is in the title or subhead to our articles, we try to include the name of the place we're writing about. I think that's fair and natural.

And, hopefully, so does Google. Because as Manjoo points out, there may be sites who know SEO, but if the writing isn't there to back up what the searchers are searching for, they won't stay at a site long. I can look at the Google Analytics for my own stable of blogs and see how many new visitors simply bounce out of my site when they realize that their search has led them to the infantile backwaters my blogs inhabit.

Anyway, on to Manjoo:

Search engines' algorithms are getting better at detecting keyword gaming, they're beginning to learn searchers' preferences, and they're using social-networking signals to figure out what you, personally, might consider a good or bad article. The other problem for the new AOL-HuffPo is the rise of social networks as a replacement for search engines. Did you go to Google to search for a story about the Huffington Post's purchase, or did you see the news on Facebook or Twitter? Those social networking links are becoming a bigger share of every news site's traffic; as one of my Slate colleagues pointed out, in the Twitter age, "optimizing for Google results is a little like going out and buying the best VCR on the market."

I'm not quite to the search engine stage in finding trigger material – I do tend to go to Twitter, Facebook, and the bigger news sites (and to aggregators) to find what interests me. I will do searches, however, to find similar information, or articles on a similar topic by a number of authors. And like the bouncers from my blog, I'll bail quickly on a site that isn't offering the information I want.
What's even more frustrating are the sites that use SEO in a way that's hidden. They want to show up in any search, so their SEO data is embedded somewhere the average Internet idiot like me can't see, so when I click on a page that's supposed to be helpful according to Google, the term I'm searching for doesn't even show up on the clicked page.

And I'm not a big fan of the content farms that are using SEO to clutter Google with poorly written information. If I want poorly written stuff, I read my own blog, thank you very much. But places like eHow and About.com just drive me nuts. I'd rather use Wikipedia.

Good news is, according to Manjoo, search engines may quickly be able to learn what sites I prefer and thus not show me results from sites I don't frequent:

The answer is … it depends. All Google results are personalized—that is, links you see in response to a specific query may be different from the ones I see for the same query. They differ according to a number of variables—what sites I favor, where I'm located, what device I'm using, and other secret factors. At the moment, search engines' personalization algorithms aren't fine-grained enough to give everyone their ideal article in response to a query like "worst cell phone on earth," but there's no reason to believe they won't get there: In the future, Google will know whether you favor Slate over HuffPo, or whether you like original articles versus summaries, or whether you're a fan of slide shows more than text, and it will serve you the article that's most appropriate for you. And as this happens, Google will surely diminish the weight it now gives to the keywords HuffPo jams in its articles.

That's both good and bad. Good in providing me better information, per my point of view. Bad as in it proved me information per my point of view, perhaps limiting my perspective on the subject (especially in topics that tend to have a slant such as politics, climate change, et cetera). So maybe getting the raw results of a search is better than a personalized result. Which is why Seaslug of Doom's tweets just entertain me so: He probably piques the interest of at least one twit per word.

The AOL No Way

This photo (of urban blight in Camden, New Jersey, is used under a Creative Commons license.

Okay, so the AOL Way really is all about the numbers.

It can’t be about hiring more writers and encouraging current employees to write more original content, because if it were, AOL wouldn’t be buying the Huffington Post for $315 million, as announced today.

The Post is, at best, a news aggregator. An aggregator which, in more simple terms, is Internet parlance for a site that copies the work of other sites on its own to generate hits, eyeballs, ad revenues and whatnot. The Post does create some original content, but the vast majority of it is simply rebroadcasted material.

The AOL Way, a leaked document which purported to show how AOL was going to put the fear in its own writers and editors to squeeze every last drop of revenue-generation out of each piece produced – and to produce between 5 to 10 pieces a day, concentrated a lot on numbers. AOL wants to see the average unique visitor number to each of its pieces of content climb to 7,000 a month – an astronomical number.

Huffington has this to say about the deal, per CNN Money:

Huffington said that among her goals for the deal is "to do so much more in the living space especially for women, (and) to do more and more original reporting telling the stories of our time and putting flesh and blood on the economic data."

AOL and the Post are obviously planning some synergistic explosion of buttery Internet goodness, per the New York Times:

One of The Huffington Post’s strengths has been creating an online community of readers with tens of millions of people. Their ability to leave comments on Huffington Post news articles and blog posts and to share them on Twitter and Facebook been a major reason the site attracts so many readers. It is routine for articles to draw thousands of comments each and be cross-linked across multiple social networks.

Mr. Armstrong and Ms. Huffington say that AOL’s local news initiative, Patch, and its citizen journalist venture, Seed, stand to thrive when paired with the reader engagement tools of The Huffington Post.

This shows, obviously, that AOL doesn’t want to take the time to generate such synergy on its own, but rather wants to buy an already-existing network of folks with whom they can buddy up with.

Problem is, the Internet is really, really cliquey. The Post, which sags heavily to the left, may not really like the idea of an AOL corporate partner barging into the room and ordering drinks. But it’s obvious AOL hopes the Post’s ability to generate commentary and a loyal following – not necessarily its original writing prowess – will spread into AOL’s products, from Patch to Seed to whatever else. Again, this says more about getting eyeballs and page hits than writing original quality content that people will want to read.

Says the New York Times:

While AOL has invested heavily in creating content through enterprises like Patch, the initiative meant to fill the void in areas where struggling local newspapers have cut back on reporting, much of their writing and news gathering is not up to the standards of what consumers get from their traditional news sources.

The Huffington Post, too, has faced criticism over its content, much of which is aggregated from other news sources. But it has started to invest more in original reporting and writing, hiring experienced journalists from The New York Times, Newsweek, and other traditional media outlets. By acquiring The Huffington Post’s reporting resources, AOL hopes to counter the perception that it is a farm for subpar content.

As readers of the subpar content of this blog know, having a lot of subpar content really doesn’t drive the eyeballs. Improved content is better, but AOL shrewdly knows that buying into an already existing and vibrant network is the way to get people coming. Of course, now they run the risk of people coming to their other properties and ventures and seeing a Detroit-style urban blight.

The AOL Way

“Double the taxes! Triple the taxes! Squeeze every last drop out of those insolent – musical – peasants!”
Prince John, from Disney’s Robin Hood

What I find interesting about all the Internet blather about “The AOL Way,” a leaked document that outlines how the gigantic content company plans to increase the amount of content it produces while optimizing its use and discoverability through search engine optimization is that the reactions to it are pretty much summed up in one paragraph written by Anthony Ha over at venturebeat.com:

Not surprisingly, this document has provoked a lot of comments from the VentureBeat editorial team. A couple of writers are dancing a happy dance that we’re not working at AOL or an organization with similarly straitlaced guidelines. But my boss Owen Thomas reports that he’s taking copious notes.

Both reactions are easily understandable and demonstrate some of the difficulties that many media companies are facing as they either try to shift their focus from print to online, or are trying to build a profitable online enterprise in conjunction with or independent from any print operation.

In a nutshell, AOL’s “way” includes increasing the number of articles their in-house writers write, from what number I don’t know to 5 to ten “quality” posts per day. Find me any newspaper or magazine writer willing to churn through that much copy in a day and you’ll be presenting me with a very short list – and thus the exultation on the part of Ha and his cohorts that they’re not currently employed by AOL.

But looking at how AOL wants to optimize its content and ensure profitability for whatever is produced – to the point that they won’t authorize an article that’ll cost $250 to produce if it can’t produce at least $500 in income – combined with a drive to push in-house writers and freelancers to think more along the lines of current topics, revenue potential with each story, and the potential to drag in more eyeballs with each and every story and you can see why Ha’s boss is taking “copious notes” from the document.

All of this number-crunching, of course, is going to scare the hell out of the average writer. When a story has to be pitched – and pitched quickly – with not only editorial considerations in mind but also revenue considerations and a ballpark estimate on how many eyeballs the story will attract – and it can’t be just a number pulled out of a hat; AOL has fancy algorithms they’ll churn any story idea through to ensure the numbers are right – writers are going to be thrust out of their zones of comfort and, likely, zones of ability. They’ll regard such efforts – well, most of them, some might rise to the challenge – as akin to Disney’s Prince John squeezing the peasants for more money just because he can.

Dan Mitchell, writing at fortune.com, has a more scathing assessment of “The AOL Way”:

[T]he company seems to care far more about appealing to search engines than it cares about appealing to readers, and that it is desperate. So desperate that it's instructing editorial managers to increase traffic by eye-popping amounts in a very short period of time.

"The AOL Way" sounds a lot like "The Bloomberg Way" – the set of heuristics the business-news service has operated from for years. But the similarities stop with the title. While Bloomberg has a reputation for its highly disciplined and demanding (some would say despotic) approach, "The Bloomberg Way" is mainly aimed at producing high-quality business journalism. "The AOL Way" is mainly about ramping up volume and, largely through technological manipulation, squeezing out as much profit as possible from each "piece of content," regardless of its quality.

His criticism may be a little harsh, focusing too much on the drive for numbers and not for the “quality/integrity” that AOL also mentions in the document. He points out that Bloomberg uses a similar approach, albeit one that focuses on quality business journalism. There’s nothing to say AOL couldn’t take a similar approach. Then again, he quotes a New Yorker piece by Ken Auletta that criticizes AOL’s current content as “piffle.” Then again, AOL is investing heavily in citizen journalism, at the same time the crown prince and the court jester of our new anyone-can-publish Internet Age.

But consider what most people go to their local papers for: chicken-dinner journalism. That means they want the basics, they want to know when the fire department is holding their chicken-dinner fundraiser, what the scores were from the local high school games, who is dead, who crossed lines with the police, and such. A lot of the rest of what goes into your average paper goes through a story pitch, but it’s hit and miss as to whether readers will read any of it at all. I’m reminded of the “megaturds” that Dave Barry writes about: the stories that editors and publishers love because they win journalism awards, not because their readers love them.

So the idea of inventing a successful process that gauges the expected profitability and appeal of each story pitched in balance with the writer’s desire to do the story has got to be attractive to editors. Editors can immediately turn to the numbers to show writers that they’ve got to do what they’re being asked, because what they’re being asked to do is going to help them earn their paychecks.

As both a writer and an editor, I can see the advantages and disadvantages to what AOL wants to do.

The Daily -- The Future of Tablet News?

(Borrowed from Electronista.)

Here's how one of my tech-happy, Apple-centric cohorts put it:

We are witness to history.

Watch and learn as Apple DOES what everyone's been talking about for years: Making big money selling digital fishwrappers (Also known as online news).

At 99 cents/week, there are more than 15 million iPad users out there who will be able to view The Daily.

If 10% of iPadders subscribe for one year, that's $700 Million. More than enough to pay the bills. And then there's ad revenue... Should be at least a $1Billion/yr business.

It's projected there will be 30 million more iPad users by year's end. I'll be one of them, so I see this working out well.

It will be fascinating to watch what happens. Every online news organization will be watching closely and taking notes.

I'm not sure, personally, how much of this will pan out, not knowing the specifics beyond what's been blabbed online, and not having an iPad – nor the inclination to subscribe for 99 cents a week for that matter. But what my friend says in his last sentence is absolutely true: This'll be interesting to see how it all plays out.

We've all seen how newspapers and magazines have struggled in transitioning their products to the online realm, so I'm not really holding my breath on this one.

What may be the saving grace of this effort is that by targeting iPad users through Apple's App Store, they're hitting an online, mobile community that is -- and this is very important -- warmed already to the idea of paying for online content.

But there are lots and lots of questions.

Will this be cross-platform? If I buy a non-Apple tablet, can I subscribe? And given that Rupert Murdoch's News Corp is behind this effort, that right there will scare off some potential subscribers. But then again with News Corp behind all this, this is one company with extremely deep pockets and lots of reporterial resources. I'm not sure they can count on brand loyalty as we've seen with the online-only versions of the Christian Science Monitor and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer with the iPad's current audience, but they've certainly got the journalistic chops to pull it off.

How advertising-intense will the product be, and will users support the advertising? Yes, they don't have the overhead of printing presses, paper, and such -- but staffing and salaries have always been the most expensive parts of news production. To pay one staffer a salary of $60,000 (admittedly high in the journalism biz) will take 60,000 subscribers if the $1 a week is their only income.

One great challenge will be to ensure that content produced for The Daily is unique to The Daily – because it's been proven time and again that if readers can find what they want online for free, they're not going to go behind any paywall, no matter how flashy the content behind that paywall may be. The presser says a companion site will offer about 10 percent of The Daily's content for free, but will retain the rest for its paying customers. That's well and good. But for this to work, The Daily not only will need unique content, but content that's valuable enough to its readers to make them fork over the 99 cents a week. That sounds odd in an industry where people already fork over for subscriptions, but we've seen how well subscriptions have done online. There's so much free stuff out there, the reasoning is why pay for stuff?

Lots of questions. It WILL be fascinating to see what happens.

Where's That Tide Schedule?

Nobody likes to make mistakes, least of all newspaper people.

Mistakes I made led me to exit the industry butt-first in 2005. I regret the mistakes still. But the corrections were handled as they should have been: Swiftly and prominently.

So I read with great interest a debate on Scott Rosenberg’s blog Wordyard about whether news organizations (and by extension, anyone looking to keep a reputation of accuracy in any kind of social media) should delete erroneous tweets as part of a corrective action or leave the tweets to hang in the twittersphere as part of the overall public record.

This goes far beyond the typical newsroom correction debate, parodied in an unforgettable Bloom County comic strip in which Ace Reporter Milo Bloom approaches editor Vanderbeek to proclaim that the sensational child-stealing epidemic the paper wrote about never actually happened.

“Yeek!” replies Vanderbeek. “Run a correction beneath the tide schedules on page 39!”

So where do I stand on the whole bald versus shaved debate?

Don’t delete.

First of all, deleting from your Twitter or Facebook account doesn’t really delete anything because you don’t know who else out there has cached the page or done some other kind of public-access archiving to preserve for posterity the terrible things that you’ve said. Appending a correction to the tweet, or as some posters on Rosenberg’s blog has suggested, adding a “correction” function to Twitter’s options make more sense, as it’s clear – and likely traceable back to the original post or tweet – what is being corrected. The additional function of retweeting the correction to everyone who retweeted the original tweet seems essential, and not outside the realm of technology.

Still, it seems easier to avoid putting out bad information in the first place.

In other words, don’t rush to post.

What I find most intriguing about this discussion are responses from the Associated Press and Dan Rather, as reported by the AP’s David Bauder:

Former CBS News anchor Dan Rather said that if he were covering the story in the 1970s and 1980s, he would not likely have gone with the NPR report. But if he were in the anchor chair in 2011, he probably would have.

"The pressure is immediate and almost crushing on you and your news organization to match that," he said. "Mostly what you hear are sets all over the world going to your competition and computers, handheld or otherwise, going to a different site."

NPR's reputation as a news organization would carry weight, particularly since television news organization knew NPR was more likely to have people close to the scene.

To blame the urgent drive for expediency seems dubious to me. Why rush to be the first with bad information that hasn’t been substantiated by at least two sources? Yes, there is much more instant media today than there was in the 1970s, but, frankly, we’re talking only in a matter of seconds versus a manner of minutes. If, in the 1970s, Rather would take an extra few minutes to find a second source, knowing he could get on the air within minutes with the corroborated information, why not take the time now? The pressure may be “immediate and crushing,” now, but tell me, truthfully, is it any more immediate and crushing than it was 40 years ago?

Additionally, whatever has happened to the old newsroom axiom: If your mother says she loves you, verify it? That certainly would have saved me some embarrassment in 2005, surely, as it would have many news outlets this weekend as their erroneous reports went out and were retweeted across the universe.

It also seems essential, in reading the National Public Radio ombudsman’s column on the incorrect Gabrielle Giffords information the network sent out Saturday, that reporters and social media wonks at any news organization not exist in walled gardens:

The Twittersphere exploded with scores retweeting Giffords’ supposed death, exemplifying how news travels in a nanosecond in today’s media world before anyone has time to process it.

“Within a few minutes, I started seeing other news orgs either holding back on reporting it as well as people on Twitter asking me about it,” wrote Carvin in an excellent post on Lostremote.com explaining what happened with Twitter. "About 25 minutes later, I saw that the NPR site had changed the headline from saying she had been killed to that she had been shot.”

While it’s a good thing he was watching the newsline, he shouldn’t have had to – those on the news end and the social media end ought to be talking to one another, especially in frenetic situations like these.

Know Thy Audience

Daniel Lyons, in writing “Digg This: A Cautionary Tale for Web 2.0 Companies” at Newsweek this week, writes this gem:

The basic problem is that these new-media companies don’t really have customers; they have audiences. Starting a company like Digg is less like building a traditional tech company (think Apple or HP) and more like launching a TV show. And perhaps, like TV shows, these companies are ephemeral in nature. People flock in for a while, then get bored and move on.

So, really, new media are just like old media, except without the profits.

Because old media also have an audience, not customers. That audience pays a nonexistent (for broadcast TV) or minimal (50 cents an issue for the newspapers) entrance fee, and, for their investment of time and/or money, they get the product they want. Old media audiences – think the core, not the fringe – are rabidly dedicated to their product, and detest even the most minute change. I worked for a regional daily and the most common controversies that arose there were when the features editor tweaked the comics page. We learned this: The paper will not be able to kill “Alley Oop” until at least another local generation passes into the grave.

There were, of course, other problematic areas: a Democratic-leaning paper in a conservative-leaning city; a series of articles that cast the Boy Scouts of America (correctly) in a bad light.

But those things, media old and new media can recover from. If, however, any media’s audience finds someone else offering the same or similar product in a way that’s more attractive to their line of thinking, they will flee their old reliable for the new thing.

Part of this ephemeral nature may be, perhaps, that fame is fleeting. Take Chatroulette. (Given that overexposed male genitalia killed Chatroulette, consider this link educational but not necessarily something you’d read to your grandmother. Safe for work, but the writer is a libertine.)

The Digg (and, for the most part, old media) chapter may be that listening to your audience is the smart thing to do, even if you think your audience is overempowered, juvenile, and perhaps a bit too egotistical.

For Uncharted – you knew I was leading up to this – the challenge is to stay fresh and relevant and responsive to our audiences, and to be prepared with plans of action when the competition comes along. And that competition is the most ephemeral element of all, as Lyons quotes Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as saying “the biggest competitor for us is someone we haven’t heard of yet.”

I spent part of my weekend looking over National Geographic Adventure, which we have considered as competition. Nat Geo certainly has name recognition, and has writers and photographers that are peerless as far as taking photos of nature and writing about nature.

You’d think an outfit like Uncharted – where amateur photographers and writers are invited to mix and mingle with professionals in providing information on where they’ve been and where others can go – would be a natural niche for Nat Geo to explore. But through National Geographic Adventure, they’re leaving the amateurs out of it, aside from buried suggested places where the unwashed like us can submit, say, hiking photos. They’re leaving a tremendous audience on the table. If they suddenly offered an Uncharted-like experience, we’d be bead because they beat us in the name recognition and actual money to spend on things categories. But they’re not. So we’re here.

And we can’t overlook the amateurs – because that’s what we all are. Sure, some of us have professional writing and photography experience, but not to the tune of National Geographic. We’re as Clay Shirky describes photo submitters to Flickr: We’re not necessarily the top dog, but we’re there. And we’re not going to scare away (at least I hope we’re not) the Psycho Milts out there.

So our competition isn’t Nat Geo Adventures. It’s somebody we don’t even know yet.

Side note: Psycho Milt probably has no idea how influential his Flickr presence is, given that he's become a rather potent Internet meme.

Words Less Valuable Than Spreadable Cheese

Uh-oh.

When I signed up for Scribd about a month and a half ago, I had no idea that, two months from when I uploaded material to the document-sharing site, that it would be “archived” and that I’d have to pay to see it again.

Oh, I’m sure in the esoteric license agreement or other such mumbo-jumbo that I didn’t read but agreed to anyway that the paywall after two months was mentioned. But really, my first inkling of any such paywall comes from this cnnmoney.com article.

I have to admit I’m not willing to pay to read my own stuff.

That’s terribly worrying, because it’s probably a sign that nobody else will want to pay, either.

Has it come to this? Have we really entered a world where the written word has less value than, as Stanley Bing puts it so eloquently, a roll of paper towels?

There are circumstances under which I'm more than willing to pay for a commodity. Paper towels.  Spreadable cheese. A piece of research I can get nowhere else on the dangers of not changing your socks. But the idea of registering myself and logging in every time I want to get the weather or a recipe or the random musings of somebody like me... I don't think so.

Yes, there’s the popular cow analogy, as put succinctly by one of Bing’s commenters:

Why buy a cow? 'Cause you can make nice steak and 'burgers out of it. It's the bovine final product, a.k.a. "bullsh...t" that is free of charge. And since there are [sic] plenty of that around, just go to the place that will shovel it to you for free. No need to huff and puff, even if you do hate selling that product you are selling. Just keep repeating in your mind: "exceed the quota - get the bonus".

In other words: A lot of the stuff on the web is free for a reason. There’s a reason I don’t charge for reading the drivel on this blog.

But there are business decisions to be made. I’d much rather be a WordPress blogger, as that system has the added features and flexibility I’d like to use in a blog. But since you have to pay for your own hosting with WordPress, I’ll stick with Blogger. It’s free. If I suddenly had to pay per blog, you’d certainly see me bid a quick goodbye to my ancillary sites and, if the cost were too dear, this blog as well.

It’s a business conundrum. Hosting all of this garbage isn’t cheap. Over at Uncharted, for example, it’s a problem for us, and we’ve got next to nothing stored on our servers (for which we pay monthly) compared to the big dogs on the social media spectrum. Maybe it costs Scribd less than a nickel a month to store my 187-page manuscript, but you know what, multiply that by tens of thousands of people storing their documents, and you can see why Scribd wants and needs to charge for its services in order to stay afloat. They’re in the business of business, though the pity is most web users out there think businesses ought to be in the business of charity, passing over everything they produce for free, simply because it’s on the web.

Please pass the Cheez Whiz. For free, preferably.