Stories on the run

Why are print newspapers losing readers to the internet? What does the internet offer you can’t get in print? Is it because people are so intrigued by multimedia they’re leaving the print product? A resounding no. Is it because they want to read 700 newspaper blogs ranging from the profound to the superfluous? No way.

It’s because, on the internet, they can get their news for free.

The daily print paper is, what, 50 cents? Twenty-five in some cities? The price is already telling people the daily paper really isn’t worth that much.

Just make it free.

Seriously. Think how much circulation would increase. Print readership would skyrocket. Think of the spike in advertising revenue versus how much you lose from individual sales. Maybe you still charge a small fee for home delivery (and make that operation — the paper boys — self-sustaining). And I don’t think I should even have to mention here that newspaper websites should be completely free.

Weeklies are already doing this. The Spokesman-Review’s most popular niche products, the Voice sections, are free. College newspapers are free and often make a profit, without a professional advertising staff. Heck, the other two largest news distributors — radio and broadcast TV — offer their product for free to the audience; the audience just needs the means (a receiver) to consume it.

So make the daily paper free. Then, when you have a product that actually offers more than the daily paper — I’m talking the Sunday edition — charge some money. Maybe charge more; show people it’s worth buying. Make it $4 instead of $2 — as long as the quality increases along with the price. Treat it more like a magazine, with more features and news analysis.

The old, stingy business model is gone. It’s dead.

Lisa (Waananen, a recent Washington State/Murrow College grad, for those of you who don’t know) has a thoughtful and in-plain-English post in which she attempts to bust the myths of the print-internet crossover. A short excerpt:

The fear is that people won’t realize the website has So Much More to Offer! unless we differentiate them. … That’s just the newest reincarnation of the old newsroom assumption that readers are complete morons. Unless they’ve been reading too much Harry Potter, most people know newspapers will never present video in print. Savvy consumers will come to expect video from newspapers anyway — and know where to find it.

The ideological battle is not to convince people the web offers more than print, but to convince them newspapers offer more than print.

Jose V. Heinert (though I’m honestly not sure who that is … sorry, Jose) posted an interesting comment on my entry about young people reinventing the newsroom.

I’m sure your group is smart, thoughtful and far-sighted. But to exclude people because of their age is ageism: Young people are more innovative. Women are more nuturing. Fat people are jolly. Old people, like Steve, can’t come up with fresh ideas. All bogus assumptions and all have no place in a modern workplace.

Jose raises a good point — just because we’re young doesn’t mean we know better about innovation than people who are older than us. In fact, there are times when we could be worse. I would argue, however, that young people are much more in tune with the internet community tham middle-aged folks.

The older journalists in any newsroom know how to use the internet. They use it for Google searches, for finding phone numbers, for using maps, for reading other newspaper websites. They use e-mail. Some of them blog for work.

But how many of them go home after work and immediately sit down on their personal computer because they want to check whether their friends have written any new blog posts? Are they checking Facebook daily? Are they Wikiwandering just because it’s fun?

For young people, the internet is a community. It’s a society. Jokes start on the internet and infiltrate our lives. Would a 50-year-old editor laugh if I busted out an “O RLY?” or mentioned the LOLrus? Would they have any idea what Monorail Cat is?

My point is, young people — in general — have a better idea of how the internet is used and constantly evolves. And it’s young folks only because we’re the people who spend the most time on the internet. I would argue that we would know better if a newspaper website looks great or horrible. I would argue that we would know better what people would like to see on a website. And, hence, I would argue that young people would know better how to most efficiently get content on the internet.

To return to Jose’s comment, about ageism, I’d like to let you know that we have opened up our meeting next Tuesday for anyone in the newsroom to come give us ideas. We don’t want to miss out on great input. Older people might — and will — have some great ideas. Our group of eight — Team Fix Newspapers for Ever and Ever, or the Young Turks, or whatever — is not proud, we are not trying to exclude people.

Of course, this all assumes that we’ve been charged solely with finding a way to better integrate online operations into the newsroom structure, which isn’t entirely the point. The way I see it, however, is the traditional newsroom structure has worked for 150 years; the only reason things need to change now is because the internet has been thrown into the mix.

Remember, we’re all in this together.

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Spokesman.com

On Tuesday, we had a discussion in the newsroom about whether redesigned website should have the Spokesman-Review flag on it. The prototype simply said “Spokesman.com” in simple type — nothing remotely fancy about it.

I believe a newspaper, these days, is a news organization and should be branding each of its products (print, online, radio, etc.) with its trusted logo. In fact, the online folks were actually arguing against using the flag, because they want to differentiate the products — which is beyond my comprehension. But I don’t really want to get into all of this, mostly because I’m not sure how much about it I can say.

So my question here is, do newspaper websites look better with or without their flag? The New York Times website, for instance, has the newspaper’s flag displayed prominently. The Washington Post’s site, however, does not. Likewise, the Seattle P-I does not have its flag (though it does have the recognizable globe), and The Seattle Times does.

If you look around, you’ll notice that most of the newspapers that do not display their flag say something like “tricityherald.com” or “HeraldNet.” There are some newspapers that make a hybrid of their flag plus “.com,” such as at The News Tribune of Tacoma.

Lisa and I were talking about how putting “.com” or “online” or something in your website is just plain redundant. “Oh look, we’re on the internet!” Websites these days are referred to by their name, not their URL. We no longer say “facebook.com,” we say “Facebook.” It’s never been “youtube.com,” it’s always been “YouTube.” Why in the world would we put “Spokesman.com”?

What do you think?

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I have a job for you: Reinvent how a newspaper functions.

Sound easy? Maybe you already have ideas on how to restructure a newsroom and streamline the work flow. Can you come up with a complete proposal in 11 days?

That’s what my editor, Steve Smith, has asked me and seven other young journalists to do. We are charged to take a blank sheet of paper and come up with a way to make the Spokesman newsroom efficient while completing all if its objectives. The eight of us are meeting every day, often for several hours at a time, to work through this process.

It’s more complicated than you might think. We have a few limitations — we can’t eliminate the print product, we can’t eliminate the new radio initiative, we can’t eliminate the community-oriented Voice sections, we can’t suggest layoffs. And so far, after two days of two-hour meetings, we have made it through just three departments (photo, news and sports) simply to see how the process currently works and identify problem areas (which are basically everywhere).

Our goal, as I understand it, is to come to Steve with a report by 5 p.m. July 10. He may or may not eventually implement our recommendations (we can have many), but he has promised to take them seriously.

There is skepticism and fear in the newsroom, of course. Many veteran Spokesman employees don’t like that Steve has selected eight young journalists and put some responsibility of the future of the newspaper into our hands. We don’t have the experience, they say. Steve sees it the opposite: We don’t have a stake in how newspapers have operated for 150 years, we don’t have a stake in who is in what editor position, we don’t really even have a stake in how the newsroom is currently structured.

As Steve has said, the current structure no longer works. A strengthening focus on the web coupled with layoffs in the fall has put the traditional newsroom in disarray.

Colin Mulvany, our multimedia director, has a post on his blog about Steve’s announcement yesterday of this initiative — along with what else Steve said about the future of the Spokesman. (In short, things are bad but, relatively, not as bad as other newspapers in the country. Layoffs are not needed now but might be come fall, when the company budgets for 2009.)

Until we submit our ideas, I can’t talk much about the project. It’s not a secret, by any means, but we are asked to keep our actual recommendations to ourselves. Until then, the Young Turks, as we have called ourselves — or Team Fix Newspapers for Ever and Ever, or the Great Eight — will be plugging along drafting the future of The Spokesman-Review.

I’ve been bounced around so much this past year that I’m somehow reminiscing about a beat I never even had. How does that work?

Lisa posted about running into Aron Baynes and Caleb Forrest at Hoopfest, so I won’t delve into that, though it was cool to talk to those guys again. I was once again reminded that I’m not tall.

The big Cougars news this week, of course, was the Charlotte Bobcats drafting Kyle Weaver. Here’s a press conference video from The Charlotte Observer in which we see Weaver all dressed up (something I’ve never seen before), holding a No. 25 Bobcats uniform and smiling that smile we all know. It’s great to see someone who’s worked so hard be recognized in such a huge way as playing in the NBA.

I posted a few days ago about the sprint boat races Lisa and I went to Saturday. Well, I was planning to edit the video Tuesday and have it online this morning, but that didn’t work out. The editing was not going well Tuesday.

So today I finished it up. Enjoy.

Just the other day, I was driving around listening to George Carlin on my iPod, and I thought, “Man, it will suck the day he dies.”

It sucks.

Carlin, 71, died yesterday of heart failure. The counterculture comedian was a hero of many generations, from the Boomers to X to Y to the Millennials. He got my friends and me through our “angry” private high school years, and I have all his books. I have mentioned before that I have been known to listen to his books on tape (disc? mp3?) while going to sleep. As raspy and invasive as his voice can be, it’s surprisingly soothing. A real radio voice (which is how he got his start).

When I was in Denver, I saw a promo for an upcoming performance by Carlin there. I’ve always wanted to see him in person. I think he came to Seattle a few times when I lived there. I’d be surprised if he ever came to Spokane. But now it’s disappointing to know I’ll never see him in concert. The closest I’ll ever come, now, is his famous HBO specials.

I guess he swallowed too much of his own saliva.

RIP, George.

A little mud never hurt anyone.

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The Spokane Indians started their baseball season Tuesday, which means for the next three months — at least while the team is in town — I will be at the ballpark every evening. For those of you who aren’t privy to the Indians, they are a short-season Class-A minor league team for the Texas Rangers. If you don’t know what that means … well, simply put, the Indians are pro baseball players, but play four levels below major leaguers.

I sit up in the press box at Avista Stadium and watch baseball. And crack jokes. And eat sunflower seeds. And keep score on one of these. And then scramble to write a story and get quotes before deadline at 10:15 p.m. Often I’m writing during the game, just to make things easier. It’s actually fairly stressful by the end of the night and I’m quite tired when I get back home.

But to me, having grown up a huge Seattle Mariners fan (they suck now, if you haven’t noticed), nothing says “summer” more than baseball. Warm nights, going to the stadium, eating a hot dog, watching for foul balls. There’s something very pure and American about going to the ballpark. And, so far, it’s been mostly fun to go every night.

There are drawbacks. For instance, Lisa works all day then I work all evening, so we barely see each other during the week. And deadline is so early that I’m rooting for 15-0 blowouts every evening, which doesn’t make for very exciting baseball; the close games are better, though five home runs in a night has its excitement factor.

On Friday night, after the game, they played “The Sandlot” on a big screen in the parking lot. It reminded me of days when I was a little kid, one of hundreds dreaming to someday be a professional baseball player. (Yes, I had that dream, though maybe for a much shorter period of time than other little boys.) It felt like summer.