Two unrelated things clicked in my head today as actually being related on a theoretical level. Thing one I spent some time the other day looking over the websites of some potential vendors. I’ve done this sort of thing lots of times before. As per usual, I was unimpressed by the websites themselves (which may or may not say much about the company itself). Thing two: Someone cracked the algorithm for cell phone signal encryption (really a sort of hiding) to the internet. Both these things show the conflict between the old industrial era way of doing things (let’s call it web 0.5) and the newer Twitter-ified way of doing things (web X.0). It tells us a lot about the changing generations and the growing struggles of the information age.

After that slightly pompous lead in, it’s tempting to just stop but I’ll add some detail, starting with the cell phone encryption code, which is a pretty big deal news-wise. The biggest weakness of cell phone security – and it’s a very big weakness – is that, in order to work, cells broadcast their signal in all directions at once. It’s not like the old fashioned landline phones that send their signal down a wire. In order to intercept the signal of one of those old phones, you have to tap the physical wire. In order to intercept a broadcast signal, on the other hand, you just need to be within range with the right equipment.

For a couple decades now, most cell phones have attempted to evade broadcast interception by (somewhat) randomly changing frequency multiple times during every transmission. That way it’s very hard to intercept more than a single tiny portion of the signal, hopefully too tiny a portion to make sense out of the message. The flaw in this scheme is that for the message to be received, the other end (the cell tower) must be able to follow all the frequency hops and put the complete transmission back together. So both ends need to be synchronized. True randomness is impossible.

News came out the other day that Karsten Nohl, a researcher with the A5/1 security project, has developed a way to crack that frequency hopping protection and released it to the public (See here and here and especially here or just google “GSM crack” for a horde of other sources). The first question that came up was, “Is it ethical to make dangerous information public?” This is an old debate in security circles. On one side are the people who believe that it is always wrong to make life easier for hackers, that keeping systems and methods secret is an essential part of protection. On the other side (and the side I’m on) are those who say that secrecy gives mostly the illusion of protection and that learning from failures is an essential tool to building better systems.

But there’s another, more basic, way of looking at this conflict, which brings me to the other thing I mentioned, looking at the websites of vendors. What the vendors were for is unimportant. What is important is that I found all of the websites to be visually very nice, sometimes using state of the art technology, professionally designed and almost completely devoid of useful information. I’ve done these sorts of surveys numerous times both as part of my job and through the course of formal education and there is nothing unusual about these findings.

Companies tend to design their websites as very fancy advertising brochures. They have a link for investors. They have a link to logos or names of famous clients. They have a link to information about “our team” or some such. They may have a link to their blog, though it’s not much like a real blog because it contains almost exclusively corporate cheerleading and marketing approved advertising copy. They might have a link to a twitter stream but that’s just another promotion channel to them. What they don’t have is the kind of information customers really want and that was once envisioned as being available through means like Amazon customer reviews and ratings. There’s no way to find out anything about the products, services or company that is not directly approved as part of the “corporate message.”

Ten years ago none of this would have been a big issue. Companies were considered to be riding the wave of Internet innovation if they had a website at all. The marketing brochure approach to web communication was considered a professional and effective thing to do. This is no longer true on an Internet where Facebook and Twitter are generating more traffic than every other corporate website combined. But note my criticism above of the way that blogs and twitter feeds are usually implemented. Even when they do them, they don’t do them in a way that seems to me to give people what they want: Actual communication.

If you’re one of those people who says things like, “I don’t get Twitter. Who cares what you’re about to have for lunch?” You may have a future in corporate communications – if there is such a future to be had. Because what ties together the current state of corporate websites AND the hacking of 20 year old cell phone code AND the debate over disclosure vs secrecy is the thing that seems to me to separate a successful Internet presence today  from the methods and even personalities of the last century:

The old way emphasizes control. Control of the message. Control of presentation. Control of the program code and the way people interact with the product and the other people. The new way demands giving up a large measure of control in favor of more fluid and fluidly evolving communication.

I highlighted that point because I believe it is key to success on the Internet as it is developing and is something even very large companies need to understand and cope with over the coming years. Probably because of the presence of the Internet in their lives, younger people seem to be much more likely to take the less control is better side of most issues (we’re talking about technology and interacting with others and with companies, here, not about politics). This has profound implications for the future, both near term and long term.

It means, I believe, that attempts to maintain complete control over the corporate message or even over source code of products are, over time, going to become harder to do (there will be leaks and hacks) and more repugnant to the public. As the older generations (ie: mine) grow old, retire, die, the people who will become the prime consumers and decision makers, will have lived most of their lives under the assumption that the old levels of control are both impossible and undesirable. Sure, as they age, they will want more control. But they will be aiming at a lower bar than previous generations. Someone who grew up with twitter will never have the same view of communications (corporate or otherwise) as people who used to buy newspapers printed on physical paper.

I mentioned newspapers for a reason. I believe the failure to understand the loss of control is one of the central problems the newspaper industry has right now. I don’t know the answer yet but, hopefully, I’ve framed the problem in a way that will help people work on that.

A few years ago when I took a course in web development, I had an assignment to survey a number of different websites all from the same industry. Since I worked for a newspaper at the time, I chose the newspaper industry. After spending many hours on this assignment, my conclusion was that the newspaper industry was completely devoid of creativity or any thought, whatsoever, about the needs of the consumer. I found the web pages for all the different papers to be essentially the same, offering the same news in the same format, with the same crappy navigation system using the same old web 1.0 (or maybe 0.8) technology.

Since then, we have had a few years for web technology to develop and for companies to learn the ropes of the new system. For the most part, though, newspaper web sites haven’t improved beyond adding some video and maybe a search function. Circulations are down, advertising is way down but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of creativity going toward finding solutions.

Or does there?

I’m beginning to think the story might be more complicated than that. There might even be grounds for hope. Maybe. Don’t go buying stock in news media yet, but don’t write them off forever, either. I mentioned in a previous post (April Random Roundup) that my old employer the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle was planning on launching a pay-walled version of the web site. I expressed just a tiny amount of skepticism as to whether it was a good idea. Since then, there’s been a change. The site was late launching and then the D&C’s masters at Gannett pulled the plug on the whole idea. Apparently, there’s some thought of corporate rolling out a pay-site solution company wide. At least, that was the excuse I heard. It’s just dumb enough to be true, too.

I started thinking along more positive lines when I looked at the pay site (shortly before it was taken down). One thing that stood out to me was that the design was far better than standard newspaper web sites. Instead of the usual disorganized jumble of headlines, section links and ads (Oh! They have tabs now! So Gannett properties are up to the 20th century finally!) there was a simple, tasteful layout with a few headlines and a series of very easy to use drop-downs for navigation (It also had the same old boring content but that’s another story).

This reminded me that even a failed experiment is often worth trying, for the lessons learned and skills acquired if for nothing else. Gannett could have allowed the D&C pay site to proceed and tracked it as an important experiment. It could have been used as a way to try out lots of new ideas and to train people in applying technologies that, frankly, newspapers have mostly ignored in the childish hope that they would go away. The difficulty of getting upper management to even consider new things frustrated me numerous times when I worked there. When they finally decided to give something new a decent shot (even if it was the wrong thing to try), corporate stepped on them with all the deep insight and careful timing usually expected from lifelong bureaucrats (In case you’re wondering, that was an example of a literary device known as irony).

For the record, the idea that it would be better to try the whole thing corporate wide is idiotic. That’s not an experiment it’s policy. If it goes wrong, it goes wrong everywhere. And everyone learns the same lessons from it (history shows that lesson to be, “Those people at corporate are morons!”).

The stifling of innovation, not just from the D&C but from every other site like it that was thinking of trying some kind of experiment of its own, is emblematic of what’s wrong with the entire industry. It’s funny, really, that an industry that depends so heavily on writing should be so hostile to creativity.

But I said there was room for hope and I meant it. In recent days there have been numerous stories about efforts by various news agencies and companies to try things they haven’t before. Interestingly, the analysis is almost always similar to my original take on the D&C pay site: misguided and too late anyway. That might even be true of each individual story. But taken together, it shows signs that the newspaper industry has finally started earnestly looking for new ways to tackle the systemic problems that have been dragging them down. Here are a few:

An open letter by Mark Cuban

He has a number of ideas about how papers can improve their revenue. Some of these ideas are familiar to those of us who’ve been screaming (mostly metaphorically) at newspapers for years but they are still not mainstream. He has this wild theory that creative ways of using technology to give customers value might get them to spend money. Interesting stuff.

A New York Times story about electronic readers for newspapers

There’s been a lot of buzz about this one lately. Several companies are apparently going to put out a clipboard-sized flat screen device that people can read their newspapers on. Most analysis I have seen has been highly skeptical (See here and here for example) and with good reason. But the whole idea is a century ahead of the thinking of most newspaper executives (which puts it around the year 1953 but that’s not the point!)

An interesting one about the Chicago Trib actually asking customers for comment on online content

Some journalistic types appear to have considered it a breach of ethics to do this (maybe because it was done before stories were published, though that might just be a cover for indignation at the possibility of being judged. Again, for purposes of this post, the reason doesn’t really matter). The more interesting thing is that newspapers have been very slow to embrace the idea of working with online readers rather than merely shoveling content at them. Despite the reaction to this one, expect to see more of it in the future. This is probably more important than delivering content to fancy new gadgets.

Last on today’s list, Rupert Murdoch wants to charge money for access to the news

This is another one of those doomed-to-fail experiments but maybe it needs to fail spectacularly (as only someone of Murdoch’s caliber can) for people to get the point that locking up content and charging for access only works if people are reasonably sure the content is worth money. If you can just click a couple links to read the same thing on some free site, there’s no chance at all of making money off of it.

Anyway, despite negative reviews for so much of the stuff in the list, taken as a whole what I see is a burst of innovation and experimentation (outside Gannett) that will likely go on for years and produce some real successes in with the failures. Just the act of criticizing someone else’s experiment will help other people at other papers come up with their own ideas. They may be just as hare-brained as the originals but with new twists and new combinations of features, until something clicks. Notice that I’m not saying that newspaper-sized e-readers or pay-walls are the answer. I’m just saying that the atmosphere of experimentation, of competing to produce ideas, is healthy.

This is where the hope for newspapers (and newspaper readers) starts: With humans cooking up crackpot schemes – that sometimes work. Keep your fingers crossed.

A random roundup is what happens when I’m so busy (or lazy, or disorganized) that I start a number of blog posts over a period of several days, but never seem to finish or post any of them. So instead, I slam them together into one big one and pretend like I’m being conscientious. The latest crop includes some notes about Twitter, Facebook, Roadrunner and my old employer the Democrat & Chronicle.

Twitter is bad for you

In other news – if you can call it that – Twitter makes us less moral. Really. Scientists said so (Can Twitter Make You Amoral? Rapid-fire Media May Confuse Your Moral Compass). Apparently, someone thinks that the stream of consciousness that characterizes much Twitter content is too fast to allow people to reflect on other people’s feelings. Do we need to use more smileys? Can you do smileys on Twitter? Having never used a smiley anywhere, I wouldn’t know. But surely those will make us more moral by putting our feelings out there for others to see, right?

Actually, the research seems to imply that Twitter is not good for teaching morality and that someone brought up on 140 character or less communication may have some deficiencies. So when raising children, remember to talk to them sometimes, not just Tweet at them.

Do I need to go into a rant about the poor quality of most science reporting now or can I get away with something under 140 characters, like “Are they kidding?”

Roadrunner updates

I warned in The Roadrunner Rip-off that Time Warner was running the risk of provoking government regulation by instituting completely unnecessary use caps on consumers. Some evidence begins to emerge to support that: New York Representative Goes After Time Warner’s Metered Broadband (Thanks to the hard Twtter work of Susan Beebe for bringing that to my attention). The rep in question is Eric Massa.

Now we have New York Senator Charles Schumer jumping on the anti-TW bandwagon (see Sen. Schumer to Get Involved in Bandwidth Battle? – again noticed in Susan Beebe’s Twitter stream!). While Senator Schumer does not appear to have promised anything, he is a powerful man and TW would be foolish not to take notice.

At the time, I wrote about TW’s plan, I wasn’t even thinking of individual reps grand standing for attention (or responding to constituent concerns, if you prefer). I was thinking that Internet service has become a utility, like the phone or electricity. New York state regulates utilities heavily. This alone indicates a willingness to put a lid on companies like Time Warner that they should have considered before moving toward instituting caps.

A very smart comment at TechDirt (Law To Ban Broadband Caps Moves Forward) points out that, rather than regulating caps away, it would be better to improve competition so that companies like TW would think twice before handing their competitors issues to use against them. And if politicians were that smart, cable executives might be too!

Update

You gotta love this: Time Warner Cable tells FCC to shut up about net neutrality. Apparently they’re feeling a little heat and rather than respond to customer rage by playing nicer, they’ve brought out the lawyers.  The bad news is, that approach sometimes works, though usually only in the short term.

Bigger update 4/6/2009 2:07 PM

Time Warner appears to have backed down. This was announced by Senator Schumer. I warned them not to get the politicians involved! See Time Warner Cable cancels Internet tier pricing plan. I’d be doing a victory dance except I figure this just means an across the board rate hike will be hitting any minute. Oh well. You win some, you lose some. The good guys won this one. Thanks to Ceejayoz of the fabulous Democrat & Chronicle IT department for getting this up on Twitter so fast.

Facebook Bad, too

Somewhat better reporting here from Jeremy Hsu at LiveScience.com about the correlation between Facebook use, reduced study times and reduced grades among college students. I say this one is better because the article (Facebook Users Get Worse Grades in College) points out that correlation is not causation, meaning in this case that no one is claiming that Facebook use is what causes the students who use it to get lower grades.

What no one covering this study seems to have noticed is that the “lower” grades of Facebook users averaged between 3.0 and 3.5. Those are passing grades. The high end of that range is roughly a B+. That’s not exactly terrible. So maybe Facebook isn’t as evil as Twitter after all. Of course, I use both of them so I guess I’m doomed to both immorality and passing but unspectacular grades.

Here’s Hoping I’m Wrong

News leaked this weak (Rochester: Bauer confirms for-pay website ‘option’) that the newspaper I used to work for, the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle is soon to launch a pay web site with premium multimedia content. I still know quite a few very good people at the D&C and, for their sakes, I hope this works out well for the paper.

Realistically, though, I think it’s about 5 years and a lot of layoffs too late. Pay-walls rarely work. In those instances when they do (The Wall Street Journal is the only one I can think of offhand) the product as a whole has a reputation for high quality niche content that attracts a wide audience with a fair amount of disposable income.

That doesn’t describe the D&C. Sorry folks but it really doesn’t. Even if the paper once had a rep for exceptional content (and those of us who remember the afternoon Times Union might dispute even that),what’s the niche? Rochester? Sorry but there are weekly papers in most of the suburbs and several TV stations covering the same area. It’s not “nichy” enough. Besides, the layoffs I mentioned above have likely gutted the ability to not only keep it up but add enough value to a pay site to attract more than a few die-hard D&C fans.

For a hint of the long-term prospects of walled off online newspaper content, see Teens Love Aggregation and ‘Free’, Newspaper Study Finds.

This is one time where I wish I had something more positive to say than, “Good luck with that!”

The stream of bad news for newspapers has been almost constant for months. Yesterday, we heard that the New York Times would be cutting pay across the board (New York Times set to impose 5% pay cut on all staff). Last week, Gannett announced 1 week of paid furloughs (2 for higher paid employees) in Q2 of 2009 (Gannett calls for second-quarter furloughs). This is in addition to a week of furloughs imposed on employees in Q1 (where old newspapers go to die). This is exactly the same as a pay cut except with the added bonus of giving people extra free time to stew about it. Who says big companies don’t care about morale?

But wait! There’s hope! US Senator Benjamin Cardin (D-Maryland) (Cardin’s official website) has introduced the Newspaper Revitalization Act, which would allow newspapers to operate as non-profits – That is, as organizations exempt from taxes on their profits because of a stated dedication to a purpose approved by the government as being beneficial to the greater good, as opposed to their common current status as “failing to make a buck in spite of trying REAL HARD.” Apparently the theory is that letting them keep all of the money they make will help them stay healthy (Don’t ask why that doesn’t apply to the rest of us. I don’t know). In order to justify the non-profit designation, papers would no longer be allowed to endorse political candidates (apparently the Senator thinks we don’t know who the papers favor otherwise).

For some discussion of the bill see

• Editors Give Cardin Nonprofit Newspaper Proposal Mixed Reviews
• Senator’s Solution To Dying Newspapers: Become A Non-Profit
• U.S. bill seeks to rescue faltering newspapers

I haven’t read this bill, so I won’t even go into obvious questions like, if a newspaper changes to non-profit status, who pays back the stock holders for the share value that ceases to exist? And I won’t bother addressing the obvious unconstitutionality of limiting newspaper speech (churches are also unconstitutionally forbidden from endorsing political candidates, though many do anyway).

Instead, I want to point out the three flaws in this plan:

1. It won’t work
2. It won’t work, and
3. It’s been tried. It doesn’t work (at least, not well enough to save an entire industry).

No, I’m not being facetious. Non-profits cover a lot of ground but roughly equate to what we normally think of as charities. How many charities are out there that are not continuously begging for money? Even NPR, a non-profit news organization that recieves government subsidies seems to be constantly running obnoxious fund drives. Touting their own importance and the moral worth of supporting their programs is what charities do. There is a subset of charities that exist solely for the purposes of raising money.

For an interesting education in the ways that charities use and abuse money, check out some of the articles at Charity Navigator.

The reason non-profits hunt for money so obsessively is simple. There are lots of worthy causes but only so many dollars that people have to give away. People will buy almost anything but they tend to be very discriminating about what they will finance without expecting something in return.

Oh, you say newspapers are different because they do give something in return? The trouble there is that people are not willing to buy papers at the price that the papers charge. Calling the price of the paper a donation really won’t change that disconnect, which seems to be one of quality. That is, the quality of the product does not, in most people’s minds, justify the cost.

This is economics 101. When I worked at the newspaper I was continuously amazed at how upper management never seemed to understand it. And now a US senator has also failed to figure it out. Working as non-profits might help a small number of newspapers. It seems likely that the New York Times and the Washington Post could find wealthy patrons willing to keep them in business out of sheer idealism (or more likely the prestige of being the savior of an institution). But most cities in this country have newspapers and it’s highly unlikely that there are as many people who would rather give money to journalism than, say, cancer research. Or AIDS research. Or hospitals. Or homeless veterans. Or … get the idea?

The idea of non-profit news is not new, as demonstrated by this piece from just over 3 years ago: Non-Profit Newspapers? Seems Inevitable or this one from last year Nonprofit journalism on the rise or this one from earlier this year, before the senator’s bill was introduced, A Nonprofit Panacea For Newspapers? or this one Who Would Fund America’s Largest Nonprofit Newspaper?

In a larger sense, reporting the news because it’s worth doing is a noble idea. The trouble is that reporters need to be paid and if Gannett or whoever they work for can’t pay them, they’re going to have to find someone who will. It’s because of that inconvenient eating thing these humans do. Once they have real jobs, if people still want to do the news, that’s wonderful. Having those other jobs will, however, cut down on the time and energy they have available to devote to it.

The driving idea behind the current incarnation of the non-profit newspaper idea, Senator Cardin’s bill, doesn’t seem to be directed at attracting donations or volunteer workers, though. It seems to have the more modest goal of easing the pressure on newspaper bottom lines. At best, this is no more than a stopgap. As noted above, the problem newspapers have is not that their expenses are so high but that the public doesn’t want to pay for their product.

In real life, that means the product needs to change. Admitting that is the first step to recovery.

Does anybody know if scientific journals are making money lately?

I don’t have any idea. A lot of commercial print information sources are having serious troubles. There are reports, for example, that the San Francisco Chronicle is in deep trouble [http://sfist.com/2009/02/24/sf_chronicle_for_sale.php] and even venerable (if you can imagine that word in this context) Playboy may be up for sale. [http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100906383&ft=1&f=1020] I’ve discussed before some of the troubles in journalism in general. But what I’m asking about today concerns the plethora of scientific and technical journals out there that seem to make up a huge industry.

The question came up because I came across a report that the International Journal of Technology Transfer and Commercialisation has a paper in an upcoming issue about how social networking could be used to discover prior art related to patent applications and thereby speed up the review process [http://esciencenews.com/articles/2009/02/23/social.patents]. It seems there’s an enormous backlog of patent applications and there isn’t much hope of reducing it with current procedures.

I have some interest in this question because, thanks to my job, some of my colleagues and I have our names on some patent paperwork (applications not yet filed, so I can’t describe the work yet – too bad, it’s interesting stuff!) so I have some direct interest in the subject. The idea of using social networking to gather information about patents strikes me as being somewhat naive. There’s money in patents and that means there will be people more interested in gaming the system than in providing reasonable debate. Just look at how many studies a certain evil empire (that will remain nameless) has commissioned to “prove” that Linux (which is free) is more expensive than the evil empire’s very expensive commercial operating system and you get the idea.

But, there might be something more to the idea than described in the brief news article I saw, so I thought, as I often do, that I would see if I could get a look at the actual paper. This began a not unusual odyssey to try to download information from a company that hides information in order to jack up prices. Oooh! Did that sound a tiny bit less than complementary? My mistake. Let me rephrase: Thus began a futile search to find out the facts from a company that thinks that information, even when it appeals to only a very limited market, should be milked for ridiculous amounts of money. There. Does that sound better?

In this case, I found the article after a few clicks (quite a few. Why are these websites always so badly designed?). In order to actually view the content, however, I was offered the option to subscribe to the journal for 400 Euros a year (about $511.80) or to buy just that article for 30 Euros ($38.39 according to the online converter I used). I didn’t spend the money. I work for a living.

This is more or less the norm for peer-reviewed journals. There are a lot of them in the world. A high proportion of them seem to be put out by a small number of publishers. I’m not even making one of those “information wants to be free” arguments you see in some circles (though I have plenty of sympathy for the idea that knowledge should not be made artificially hard to get). I have nothing against paying a few dollars for a service or information I want. It costs money to produce, why shouldn’t the producers get some compensation for their trouble?

But $40 for a single electronic copy of an article? Electronic means the cost for printing is $0.00. That’s ZERO dollars. None.

There’s another force at work here of course. The majority of these kinds of journals are purchased by institutions – colleges and universities and sometimes big libraries. The print copies that are produced sit in boxes and are rarely – if ever – read by an actual human being. That is especially true now as more and more such content is made available on the Internet. Because I take online classes, I have access to a couple of such online repositories. None of them seemed to have this particular journal, though. Why would they? It doesn’t look like something that would have very high demand even among people interested in patents and new technology (like me).

And that’s my point. These journals seem to be a bad deal to me. They charge too much money for small amounts of niche information. Even university libraries have finite budgets. They must do at least some picking and choosing among journals. You would think (but then, maybe I’m too rational) that they would get more bang for the buck by choosing lower priced journals, or even none at all considering how rarely some of them really get used. It’s an economics thing. Scarce resources force us to choose those things that matter most. Even universities are feeling the economic crunch lately, or so I hear.

Let’s put it another way: If they had only wanted $5 for the article, I probably would have bought it. The sale was lost by setting the price far too high. Which brings us back to my original question: Are publishers of peer reviewed journals doing okay in the current economy, even when so much of the rest of the media is hurting?

My first reaction, on seeing the prices they wanted for a single article (let alone the outrageous price for a year’s subscription) was, “I hope not.”

The subject of my last post, the serious problems faced by news media today, hasn’t gone away. If anything, maybe I was early commenting on it. The news came out today that my old employer, Gannett corp, is furloughing workers for one week without pay. See D&C employees to take one week unpaid leave. Once again I find that my decision to leave was the right one – but I’m still worried and unhappy for the good people I left behind. They work hard and try to put out the best product they can. They deserve better.

One of those good people posted an interesting link to a blog post entitled When newspapers are gone, what will you miss? It’s an interesting post. Here’s the money quote: “Newspapers took two cents of journalism and wrapped in ninety-eight cents of overhead and distraction.“

What this is basically saying is that the stuff that makes newspapers most relevant, such as local investigative reporting, is only a small part of the total newspaper package. There’s a lot of money spent on cruft. That sounds like it is probably so. I remember from back in the days when I used to read newspapers that I didn’t read every section. Even the bits I did read I didn’t read every single word. But that’s all part of why I stopped buying papers. Why spend money on 60 pages (or whatever) when I only want 5?

But there’s more to the explanation than that. Despite layoffs, furloughs and various other desperate cost-cutting measures going on, I find it hard to believe that the noble institution that once supported the likes of Edgar Allen Poe, Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain and even Ben Franklin (he got his start as a printer, remember) is going to completely disappear from the Earth.

It’s possible that newspaper conglomerates are on the way out. It may be that the old business model of keeping large stables of writers and editors in order to produce daily content that is mostly of only marginal interest, all in order to sell overpriced ads to a small number of local businesses (all so the CEO can get paid millions while his company is failing) may be on the way out.  That would be the end of a lot of jobs but would it be the end of journalism?

There may be fewer people making a living from journalism. Maybe more of the investigative burden will fall to weekly papers or even tabloids. Is there something about having a multi-million or billion dollar corporate master that makes someone better at those things?

I was going to say, “no when I remembered that that the Treasury Department has been stonewalling Fox News’s Freedom of Information request on how TARP money is being spent (see http://finance.yahoo.com/news/FOX-Business-Network-Sues-the-bw-14033083.html). That kind of legal fight is one area where having deep-pockets backing can be a big help. Maybe I’m an optimist (not something I can remember ever having been accused of) but I believe that the need for other solutions will produce those solutions. Foundations, maybe. Or hackers (“They won’t produce the documents? We’ll get them for you! If it’s on a computer somewhere, it might as well be public!”).

Even granting that particular drawback to the death of big corporate newspapers, I don’t believe that the death of the current shape of the American news industry directly equates to the death of news. It’s a product people want, after all. And there are lots of unemployed (or temporarily furloughed) people out there who have ideas about how to fill that need.

Have some faith. The current phase is hard but it will all work out. I think.

On Twitter I follow a feed called THEMEDIAISDYING (http://twitter.com/themediaisdying). It posts numerous updates throughout the day about changes in newspapers, television and magazines. Not surprisingly, given the name, most of those changes are negative. There have been a lot of layoffs lately. Since I used to work for a newspaper and still have friends who do, I take a morbid interest in what is happening to the industry.

The picture ain’t pretty and I don’t believe the current recession is the whole reason. It’s just the last straw on the camel’s poor old back. When I was still at the paper, the signs of decrepitude were rampant. It was obvious for years that upper management regarded the internet with suspicion, at best. At less than the best, they showed outright hostility, even while they publicly claimed to be pleased at having new opportunities to serve the community and blah blah blah. In the editorial area blogs are still regarded with  suspicion, if not contempt, even when papers start their own sites that they call blogs.

That’s always funny. Seen the Wall Street Journal’s new tech blog? It’s at http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/. I have no idea why they refer to this slick, overstaffed exercise as a blog. It looks to me like ordinary empty-headed pseudo tech reporting of the kind you get from professional reporters who are considered experts in tech because they actually know who to call to find out the difference between a bit and a byte, or they may have actually interviewed an important tech guy like Steve Ballmer at some point in time.

Maybe I’m being too hard on them. That’s always possible. But it doesn’t alter the fact that WSJ analyzed the blog concept, decided it would be worth investing their brand and significant resources into, and came up with just another newspaper type section.

I’m probably going to delete the RSS feed before long. It’s boring.

In part, the problem is ordinary big corporate, play-it-safe, kind of boringness. Corporations don’t trust anyone or anything with too much personality. Blogs, otoh, thrive on personality. The newspapers and other big media of this country are extremely corporate these days. There’s also the problem of lifelong professional journalists who want to cover mainstream stuff in a professional way. Even if it fails, it’s good for the resume, right?

Yawn.

One of the few writers whose work I truly admire is a hilarious and brilliant Canadian named Mark Steyn (http://www.steynonline.com). Mr. Steyn was educated in England (I believe) and has traveled the world. His take on current media problems is that American newspapers are the English-speaking world’s most boring. I think one of the reasons they give this impression is because the media are all pretty much the same. They report the same stories from the same perspective. They even seem to make the same mistakes.

If that perspective is correct, then the death of one or two newspapers, magazines or even TV news shows, doesn’t matter to the consumers. They will just go to a different venue to get exactly the same information. With the Internet, they don’t even have to pay for it. Why should they if the exact same thing is available somewhere else for free? The same thing applies to advertisers. Why pay the local paper’s exhorbitant rates if there’s no particular reason for anyone to buy the paper?

That’s why the media is dying (am dying?), I think. The Internet is a fabulous opportunity for media who can find a way to differentiate themselves. So far, though, they haven’t even tried. Maybe I’m wrong. I’d like to be because, if I’m not, I know a number of good, hard working people who are going to be unemployed probably within the next year or two.