Earlier this week I was in St. Petersburg for a meeting of AP's Digital Advisory Committee. I'm not going to blog what transpired there, because it's a forum for discussing some confidential strategic issues, but I heard one thing that's such a good idea I just have to pass it along.
It always happens this way, and it's always my own darn fault: travel comes in unreasonable bursts.
I've done little blogging lately because I've been on the road, and I rarely have the combination of quiet thinking time and a good Internet connection that I need to construct a meaningful blog post.
So far this year I've been in Los Angeles, Memphis, St. Petersburg (Florida, not the colder one) and now Jacksonville, where I'm doing some work with one of our newspapers that I'll be able to discuss once the project is made public.
A belief that "it's all Wall Street's fault" continues to persist in some newspaper circles. It's not.
Writing for the Winter issue of Nieman Reports, economist Robert Picard says:
Howard Weaver points to a Washpost piece on newspapers and video, and suggests a "good enough" approach:
"... we don't need to be creating 60 Minutes quality television to get in the game. In fact, you might well argue that the opposite is true. I'd love to see us using cinéma vérité video to add value to all kinds of reporting. In Fresno, they've had good success using little digital video cameras that sell for less than $200."
William Powers, writing for the National Journal:
"A dozen years ago, at the start of the digital-news era, a lot of media outlets assumed that the way to thrive in this new landscape of news was to be agnostic as to medium. ...
"That philosophy gave us, among other things, those baggy newspaper Web sites that try to be one-stop destinations for every kind of content .... By being all things to all consumers, they lack the identity that builds loyalty. ...
I was on the road all last week, and I didn't live-blog a remarkable seminar in Los Angeles for two reasons. One: the usual annoyingly bad hotel wifi connection in the conference rooms. Two: I didn't want to invade the privacy of the participants. In the prep work, one of the editors quipped that he was reluctant to document his vision because these days his memo would immediately wind up on Romenesko. Sometimes we need to talk privately in order to work publicly.
I just wrote a note to an NAA mailing list on the topic of organizational structure that is a bit more radical than positions I've previously taken.
Like pretty much everybody who's spent a lot of time on the New Media side of the Great Divide, I've been leery of organizational integration. Why? Because Luddite values are deeply ingrained in traditional newspaper operational groups, and those values will lead us to defeat. Equally deeply ingrained: Utter denial that those Luddite characteristics exist. It's a dangerous combination.
Worth noting: The dopey DOPA legislation, which I previously described as a "war on social networking," is dying in a refreshed Congress.
Lines from the past occasionally float to the surface. Here's one I have been thinking about lately: "OK open systems beat great closed systems every time."
That one came from Scott Kurnit around 1994-95, when he was VP/marketing for Prodigy. His company, originally a joint venture of CBS, Sears and IBM, had built a closed system (great in its day) that was in the process of getting its tail kicked by a bunch of little startup companies that run by people who had no clear idea where they were going.
These startups were pushing open standards: TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML.
