On the day of 60 "early retirements" from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, columnist Bill McClellan feels like a dinosaur witnessing the end of his era, and he points to two meteoric events. One is the arrival of the Internet. The other is corporate ownership.
That's probably a popular viewpoint in most newsrooms these days. And there is some truth to it. But in the big picture it's wrong.
I've been repeating myself a lot lately: "It's not about technology. It's not about technology." Nevertheless, I find myself being drawn back into the technology frequently, and last week I spent a day at the Barcelona Drupalcon, surrounded by a bunch of really smart guys (mostly guys, anyway) half my age.
I was "in the neighborhood" because BDZV, the German federation of newspaper publishers, had asked me to speak at an annual meeting. I hopped a cheap flight to BCN and slipped in a day at the four-day Drupal conference.
This pretty much sums up the last few years:
The new accord between Google and the wire services -- Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, Press Association (UK) and Canadian Press -- has been met with a range of reaction from ho-hum to what-were-they-thinking.
In July I ranted about Microsoft Vista, sparked by my elderly mother's acquisition of a laptop computer that came infested with it. I vowed to replace it with Linux, and the result was a prominent link on Google searches for "I hate Vista," a steady stream of comments from irritated Vista users, and a couple of angry rants from Microsoft fanboys.
For the last couple of days I've been playing with my latest tech toy, the Nokia "please don't call it a phone" N800.
This and similar devices, including the iPhone, have world-changing implications for newsgathering as well as publishing and distribution.
I'll get to those points shortly, but first a few words about why I went with the N800.
The other day, when commenting on the MinnPost.com announcement, I said "we may be heading for a world in which nothing is dominant."
Joel Kramer has unveiled -- sort of -- MinnPost.com, the Twin Cities web project he's been working on for months. Today's announcement tells us at least the major sources of funding (including former Cowles Media chiefs John Cowles and David Cox, and the Knight Foundation), and lists some stellar names among the journalists who will be writing for the site.
In an op-ed for the big paper on the left coast, journalism professor Michael Skube complains that "the blogosphere is the loudest corner of the Internet, noisy with disputation, manifesto-like postings and an unbecoming hatred of enemies real and imagined."
"One gets the uneasy sense that the blogosphere is a potpourri of opinion and little more," he writes.
The badly flawed Shorenstein report arguing that local newspapers are the most seriously threatened by the Internet already has been properly shredded by Jeff Jarvis, but there's another angle that strikes me: sloppy use of the word "local."
I believe that "local" is a powerful asset, not a liability, and that the Shorenstein report has tripped over a lack of precision in the use of that word.
