newspapers

The net is all abuzz today about this angry memo from Bill Gates to a list of Microsoft bigwigs back in 2003. It's a classic: Gates tries to buy some Microsoft software, has a terrible user experience, and lets people know exactly what he thinks.

Funny, but here's a challenge. Assign yourself any random task on your newspaper's website, like trying to sell a car or give away a dog or maybe just find the forums. Take notes. And then write a Gates memo. Bet you can do it, with feeling.

A post from Howard Owens reminds me that a lot of people probably don't know how easy it is to get circulation information about U.S. newspapers. For papers that are members of the Audit Bureau of Circulation, basic numbers and some deeper data is available online in a searchable format.

I had dinner Friday night with Dean Mills and several other folks from the University of Missouri J-School. Not one word was said about the death of print, the crushing debt loads taken on by big publishing companies, or other depressing topics that tend to dominate journalism conversations (and blogs) these days.

It was an upbeat conversation about exciting possibilities, all hope and energy and yes, optimism. Mizzou has all sorts of fascinating projects in the works.

The official Old Media party line, among the few remaining true luddites not yet laid off by their newspaper employers, is that New Media is a cesspool of misinformation while print is a rock of traditional credibility.

But the progress of the crackpot story about China drilling for oil off the coast of Cuba -- repeated by no less than Vice President Dick Cheney -- should knock a few holes in that argument.

David Kurtz, who writes for Josh Marshall's great political blog Talking Points Memo, is at the International Press Institute congress in Belgrade and observes that the angst being felt by American newspapers isn't being felt everywhere:

I just posted something on Alan Mutter's blog -- an item about planned redesigns at Tribune Company newspapers -- and realized afterward that hardly anybody currently employed at an American newspaper will have any idea why I referred to "funereal column rules" in Peter Palozzo's design for the old Chicago Daily News.

Yet more evidence of the deepening ownership crisis at American newspapers: the Philadelphia Inquirer's owners are technically in default of their loan terms.