tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-219393462024-03-08T01:12:13.609-08:00The Medium RunEntrepreneurial local journalismMichael Andersenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12164724621772928851noreply@blogger.comBlogger55125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21939346.post-26332761491235813282009-07-31T23:30:00.000-07:002009-07-31T23:51:28.265-07:00Everything will be better in the new building<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.nuigalway.ie/civileng/images/New%20building11.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px;" src="http://www.nuigalway.ie/civileng/images/New%20building11.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>All right, my friends (and I think we both know who you are): the air in this joint's been getting stale, and all the people who selected this Blogger layout in 2005 are now much more famous than I am. Therefore, The Medium Run is closed until further notice; for the forseeable future, I'll be <span style="font-weight:bold;">blogging about entrepreneurial local journalism under my own domain</span> (but with -- never fear! -- equal sporadicity) at <a href="http://www.oldforestnewtrees.com"><span style="font-weight:bold;">OldForestNewTrees.com</span></a>, which will offer all the same services, including <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/OldForestNewTrees?format=xml">its very own RSS feed</a>, which will ding every time I post, and <a href="http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=OldForestNewTrees&loc=en_US">its very own email subscription</a>.<br /><br />I hope you'll join me there, where our new broadcast is <a href="http://www.oldforestnewtrees.com">already in progress</a>...Michael Andersenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12164724621772928851noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21939346.post-6773059003985315982009-07-05T16:51:00.000-07:002009-07-07T09:51:17.026-07:00Two kinds of products that rely on people's flawsHere's a distinction worth understanding:<br /><br />a) Products that rely on the idea that people will simply be <a href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/02/diggbar-keeps-all-digg-homepage-traffic-on-digg/">too dumb to figure out an alternative</a>. These products rely only on <span style="font-weight:bold;">informational barriers</span>: once you know the better way to do things, it's no trouble to do things the better way.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/54/144582345_12f03250cd_m.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 150px; height: 240px;" src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/54/144582345_12f03250cd_m.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>Like a car mechanic who preys on ignorance in order to sell more air filters, these products breed <span style="font-weight:bold;">resentment</span>.<br /><br />and<br /><br />b) Products that rely on the idea that people <a href="http://www.twitter.com">don't have the time or effort to pursue an alternative</a>. These products rely on <span style="font-weight:bold;">procedural barriers</span>: even if you spent the time to figure out an alternative, you'd need to alter your behavior to take advantage of it.<br /><br />Like a car mechanic who pokes around in earnest for possible mechanical problems you haven't yet noticed, these products breed <span style="font-weight:bold;">loyalty</span>.Michael Andersenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12164724621772928851noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21939346.post-57279093878464004342009-06-11T09:56:00.000-07:002009-06-11T10:08:52.256-07:00Summer job to save the environmentExciting news: I've been asked (okay, I basically groveled, but they are actually paying me) to cover local-news startups this summer for one of my favorite blogs, Josh Benton's ridiculously results-oriented <a href="http://www.niemanlab.org/">Nieman Journalism Lab</a> at Harvard's Nieman Foundation.<br /><br />A few other part-time interns and I should each be posting once a week.<br /><br />I expect this gig to consume most of my creative energy through September, but I'll be cross-posting here each week to add a few reflections on my reported pieces.<br /><br />If you have any suggestions of startups, startup plans or startup trends that need covering, I'll be scrambling for good ideas, so please shoot an email to mike (dot) andersen (at) Gmail or leave a comment below.Michael Andersenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12164724621772928851noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21939346.post-21014224771962337312009-05-12T23:27:00.000-07:002009-05-12T23:34:21.068-07:00Disprove thisHere's a brief proposition I'd be curious to see contradicted:<br /><br />The common factor among all profitable journalism startups in the last seven years is not Web distribution, user interaction, worse content, better content, more content, less content, paid content or free content. The common factor is a narrow audience.Michael Andersenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12164724621772928851noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21939346.post-56052329254876115882009-05-01T01:13:00.000-07:002009-05-01T02:29:36.445-07:00In which hog fuel demonstrates that paid content has potential<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.laneforestproducts.com/images/products_hogfuel_2.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 139px; height: 191px;" src="http://www.laneforestproducts.com/images/products_hogfuel_2.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>Here's the best case against paid news content. It's two sentences long:<br /><br />"<a href="http://www.yelvington.com/node/540">We tried that. It didn't work.</a>"<br /><br />But there's a powerful rebuttal to that case, one that grizzled online-news veterans (like my man Steve Yelvington, linked above) miss: The economics have changed since last time.<br /><br />No, consumer desires haven't changed since 1996. Sorry, <a href="http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2004/12/why-buy-cow-when-milk-is-free.html">Al</a>, they wouldn't pay for traditional newspaper content online then, and they won't now. But <span style="font-weight:bold;">local media incentives have changed since 1996</span>.<br /><br />The real question: whether those incentives have changed enough to force newspapers to make the <span style="font-weight:bold;">crucial shift that could keep them alive</span> -- a shift to niche products.<br /><br />If you want to understand how newspaper incentives have changed, you need to understand the following short story from the great Northwest.<br /><br />It's a story about hog fuel.<br /><br /><span id="fullpost">Hog fuel is a byproduct of papermaking. It's basically a bunch of tree scraps that get left on the mill floor because they aren't even good for turning into pulp. Paper plants, like <a href="http://www.longviewfibre.com/">this one</a> in my old hometown, produce hog fuel by the metric ton; they can't avoid it.<br /><br />What do you do with a nearly worthless byproduct? Maybe you could find some odd use for it. But that'd take a lot of work: gathering it, measuring it, marketing it, lining up buyers and shipping it to them. And for what? Obviously your workers' precious time would be better spent on the operation that makes the real money: paper.<br /><br />No, it's much easier to find some use for hog fuel that costs nothing. And that's exactly what paper mills do: they burn it. Hog-fuel furnaces offset a huge share of many paper plants' substantial electricity bills. It's a cheap and effective way to dispose of something you've got too much of.<br /><br />But what if paper suddenly ceased to be so profitable?<br /><br />What would happen to your hog fuel then?<br /><br />You'd still have a mill that's very good at chopping up trees. But suddenly, you'd start looking closer at your hog fuel. You might start looking for those obscure hog-fuel markets. You might start chopping your logs a bit differently to maximize the value of that hog fuel. You might even start researching how to turn hog fuel into something really valuable, like ethanol -- research that would have never been worthwhile before.<br /><br />You've got incentives you never had before to make hog fuel valuable.<br /><br />Hog fuel is Web content. Paper is -- well, paper.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">In 1996, when the print product was gushing cash, the rational thing to do with newspaper content online was to throw it up for free</span>. Unlike with paid online content, which requires a helpdesk, a sales effort, and maybe even some changes to the production process, the marginal costs of free content were minimal.<br /><br />The newsroom was already churning out a metric ton of content, after all. So what if it wasn't optimized for online readership? Hire a kid to hit CTRL-C/CTRL-V for an hour or two each morning, and you'll get some cheap exposure, a hunk of cheap online ad sales and a cheap feeling of progress.<br /><br />But now, the paper market has dried up.<br /><br />It's time to figure out what to do with all this crap we've been leaving on the floor, kids. We can squeeze money out of it. <span style="font-weight:bold;">We just have to change the process a bit.</span><br /></span>Michael Andersenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12164724621772928851noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21939346.post-50459788207404258822009-04-23T17:29:00.000-07:002009-04-27T23:41:42.490-07:00It's a manifesto<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://images.eonline.com/eol_images/Articles/20071107/425.cruise.maguire.110707.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 200px;" src="http://images.eonline.com/eol_images/Articles/20071107/425.cruise.maguire.110707.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>It's been the formula embraced by every half-crazy, screw-the-system dreamer in history, from Henry Thoreau to Jerry Maguire:<br /><br />Do less, better.<br /><br />And for journalists, it's <a href="http://www.gazette.com/articles/gazette_52210___article.html/news_small.html">the way of the future</a>. It's <a href="http://www.lastplanetojakarta.com/2009/04/also_on_the_subject_of_publici.html">exactly what consumers are demanding</a>.<br /><br />How cool is that?Michael Andersenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12164724621772928851noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21939346.post-60693626770734640242009-04-17T11:14:00.000-07:002009-05-01T16:02:09.289-07:00Online news should be replayableFollow-up thought on yesterday's <a href="http://mediumrun.blogspot.com/2009/04/dept-of-mythbusting-money-can-indeed-be.html">iTunes for news defense</a>: When analysts <a href="http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/how-solve-newspaper-industrys-woes/story.aspx?guid={4F2C6464-6377-4C8D-8D91-D2EDB0A1C900}&dist=msr_2">say things</a> like:<br /><blockquote><br />Newspaper content is ephemeral by nature ... It isn't the same as downloading a song and keeping it and replaying it. It loses its value almost instantaneously.</blockquote><br />...the speaker is not describing a problem with iTunes. She's describing a problem with the way news is traditionally presented.<br /><br />It's a problem that <a href="http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/060226niles/">can</a> be <a href="http://www.newsless.org/2008/09/hello-world/">solved</a>.Michael Andersenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12164724621772928851noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21939346.post-56637657868824992142009-04-16T12:21:00.001-07:002009-04-16T18:36:07.596-07:00Dept. of mythbusting: Money can indeed be exchanged for goods and services<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3200/2401722298_5dd70f8067.jpg?v=0"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px;" src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3200/2401722298_5dd70f8067.jpg?v=0" border="0" alt="" /></a>Is an iTunes for news possible? <a href="http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2009/01/12/an-itunes-for-news-dumb-dumb-dumb/">The</a> <a href="http://www.buzzmachine.com/2009/01/12/penny-for-his-thoughts/">cool</a> <a href="http://www.buzzmachine.com/2009/01/12/penny-for-his-thoughts/#comment-389280">kids</a> <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-sinker/appetite-for-destruction_b_169629.html">all</a> <a href="http://techdirt.com/articles/20090414/1637304509.shtml">say</a> <a href="http://www.yelvington.com/node/540">no</a>.<br /><br />They're wrong.<br /><br />A year ago -- three months ago! -- I would have been the last person to make a case for paid content. But I've been coming around, and not for the reasons you think.<br /><br /><span id="fullpost">It's not because I think newspapers can ever turn back the clock or put the news genie back in the bottle. They can't. From now on, most content will always cost $0.00.<br /><br />But not <span style="font-style:italic;">all</span> content will be free, because money is not the only cost consumers must pay to read content. Gathering information -- even free information -- requires time, effort and knowledge: time to find it, effort to determine whether content is reliable, and knowledge of what content does or doesn't exist.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">If a product can save its readers enough time, effort or knowledge, they'll pay money for it</span>.<br /><br />This isn't to say that <span style="font-style:italic;">newspaper Web sites in their current form</span> can save people enough time, effort or knowledge to be worth money.<br /><br />My point is: the problem here isn't the price.<br /><br />It's the product.<br /><br />(photo courtesy Flickr user <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/roby72/">Roby72</a>)<br /></span>Michael Andersenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12164724621772928851noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21939346.post-42308377899011748032009-04-13T15:37:00.000-07:002009-04-16T13:00:00.990-07:00King Content needs a diet<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/182/429053165_91923c6986.jpg?v=0"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 200px;" src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/182/429053165_91923c6986.jpg?v=0" alt="" border="0" /></a>Here's a simple principle for general-interest-ish publications an age of abundance:<br /><br />Most readers don't want more. They want less. Though they want more of it to be relevant.<br /><br />Quicker is better.<br /><br />Simple as that.<span id="fullpost"><br /><br />And as Eric Schmidt noted the other day: when speed is the goal, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20090407/google-newspapers/">print still works faster than pixels</a>.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Newspapers</span> aren't very fast.<br /><br />But print is, or can be.<br /><br />That's why <a href="http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/04/print-is-still-king-only-3-percent-of-newspaper-reading-actually-happens-online/">print is still king</a> among newspaper readers.<br /><br />It's something to consider.<br /><br />(photo courtesy Flickr user <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/44124324682@N01/">mharrsch</a>)<br /></span>Michael Andersenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12164724621772928851noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21939346.post-27576221324721076152009-04-02T22:23:00.000-07:002009-04-02T22:31:39.895-07:00The career ladder loses its top rungsOne of the many reasons that small markets are not safe from the current roil: small papers and broadcast stations, with their low pay and heavy workload, have always been subsidized by the promise of advancing to a larger market, which (unlike the small papers) offered an upper-middle-class family wage and the time to produce high-quality work.<br /><br />Now that larger markets tend to be basket cases, this subsidy will cease; fewer talented, hardworking people will be drawn to smaller markets; and the quality of small outlets will suffer observably.Michael Andersenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12164724621772928851noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21939346.post-78078969050051257252009-03-31T21:17:00.000-07:002009-04-01T00:38:41.603-07:00Why the general audience existsOne word: classifieds.<br /><br />By now, most people in the news business know that the <a href="http://www.stateofthenewsmedia.org/2009/chartland.php?id=996&ct=line&dir=&sort=&c1=1&c2=1&c3=1">collapse of classified revenue</a> is the biggest financial threat newspapers face in the short term. But many fail to realize that not only were classifieds hugely profitable, <span style="font-weight:bold;">classifieds were the only glue holding general-audience publications in one piece</span>.<br /><br />It's one of the many reasons why startups should generally not seek general audiences.<br /><br /><span id="fullpost">In media that face a scarcity of supply, like broadcast television or highway billboards, things are different. But the central goal of newspapers -- amassing a large general audience -- is profitable only because <span style="font-weight:bold;">a classified section is a snowball: the bigger it gets, the faster it grows</span>.<br /><br />(Briefly, here's why. Obviously, every additional classified-section reader makes that section more valuable to advertisers. But because people who use a classified section want more than anything to maximize their selection of products, <span style="font-weight:bold;">every additional classified ad makes the section more valuable to readers</span>. It's a virtuous cycle.)<br /><br />All this, I've understood for a while. Here's what I didn't grok until lately: the need to maximize the classified audience used to be a huge centripetal force on news content, pulling coverage toward the center of public life, toward the things everyone shared. The publisher's objective: maximize the audience. <span style="font-weight:bold;">The editor's marching orders: please everyone in town a little bit</span>.<br /><br />Meanwhile, there was an opposing, centrifugal force: display advertising. Unlike classified advertisers, most businesses are looking for narrow demographics. They don't want to pay for a big display that everyone will see. They want to pay for a cheaper display that only the <span style="font-style:italic;">right </span>people will see. The narrower your audience, the <a href="http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/John_Wanamaker/">less of your marketing budget that you're wasting</a>.<br /><br />So: retail ads would seek diversified audiences, classified ads would seek general audiences -- and for a while, classifieds would win.<br /><br />Then the sea change.<br /><br />These days, newspapers aren't scarce; a <a href="http://www.blogger.com">printing press</a> comes free with every Internet connection. For a few years, even the lure of free classifieds on Craigslist couldn't offset the value of the big audience offered by a newspaper. But one by one, advertisers slipped toward the free service, and the classifieds audience has followed. A <a href="http://www.stateofthenewsmedia.org/2009/chartland.php?id=996&ct=line&dir=&sort=&c3=1">tipping point came in 2007</a>, when <a href="http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2008/03/06/craigslist-making-gains-in-classified-market-share">Craigslist's growing audience</a> (and that of other listings sites) got big enough to be really valuable.<br /><br />More or less, this is why <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/business/media/12papers.html?_r=1">the crisis</a> is happening now.<br /><br />Today, retailers are still looking for niches. <span style="font-weight:bold;">Retail advertisers want to push newspapers and other audience-generating businesses away from the center of public life, into all the demographic nooks and crannies</span>.<br /><br />And today, there are no classifieds to pull us back.</span>Michael Andersenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12164724621772928851noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21939346.post-1300744048070456882009-03-11T20:17:00.000-07:002009-03-11T20:25:09.789-07:00Old forest, new treesIf you stand far enough back, the future of local news is so easy to see at this point that you can practically phone in your story and still sum things up well.<br /><br />That's exactly what <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/business/media/12papers.html">Perez-Pena does today</a>. He quotes the right people, including Jeff Jarvis, who has the emerging conventional wisdom:<br /><br /><blockquote>The death of a newspaper should result in an explosion of much smaller news sources online, producing at least as much coverage as the paper did, says Jeff Jarvis, director of interactive journalism at the City University of New York’s graduate journalism school. Those sources might be less polished, Mr. Jarvis said, but they would be competitive.</blockquote><br /><br />That's where things are going, and that's where this blog is going, too.Michael Andersenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12164724621772928851noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21939346.post-28977532196641526382009-02-04T21:32:00.000-08:002009-02-04T21:35:02.689-08:00Two things about the Seattle Courant1) I wish them well, and you should, too.<br />2) ...but note the comma splice on their "<a href="http://www.seattlecourant.com/about.php">about</a>" page.Michael Andersenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12164724621772928851noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21939346.post-61734927730845540682009-01-10T15:09:00.000-08:002009-01-10T18:16:55.982-08:00Letter to a(nother) young reporterIn the two years I've been playing hooky from the blog -- late '06 to early '09 -- many outlets have launched exciting new lifeboats, most of which have been or are about to be sucked under by the Titanic that's about to submerge behind them.<br /><br />The latest fad seems to be a call for papers to <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/22/business/media/22carr.html?_r=2&8dpc">shun their still-unprofitable Web sites</a> and turn to the real business at hand: harvesting ever-shrinking profit from the print product.<br /><br />That's fine: <a href="http://mediumrun.blogspot.com/2007/08/you-say-newspaper-next-i-say-exit.html">if newspapers don't need us, we don't need them</a>. Which was basically my argument in the following letter to an aspiring reporter. Among my claims:<br /><br />1) Young journalists should generally <span style="font-weight:bold;">not seek work at any general-audience outlet</span> that is older than the Web browser.<br /><br />2) Yes, that includes <span style="font-weight:bold;">small markets</span>.<br /><br />3) The brightest up-and-comers are Web startups that cater to <span style="font-weight:bold;">smaller, more highly motivated audiences</span>.<br /><br />4) For a newcomer, the likeliest path to a job at one of these startups wouldn't be demonstrated expertise in writing -- it'd be <span style="font-weight:bold;">demonstrated expertise in the subject matter</span>.<br /><br />Full letter follows.<br /><br /><span id="fullpost">Hi, Patricia-<br /><br />GA-THUMP! I'm going to load you with more information than you need on a quiet Saturday morning.<br /><br />First off, I'm a government reporter. I occasionally get to dabble in various sorts of artsier culture coverage, but mostly I'm interested in policy, and that's what I write about. But most of my reporting colleagues -- features, sports, business -- got here in more or less the same way.<br /><br />Starting with the stuff about my own career: I worked four years at the main student paper where Anna and I went to college, including one summer internship at a free alt-weekly paper in my hometown. When I graduated with an English degree in 1999, this wasn't enough to get me in the door at a small-town daily paper, so my first job out of college was at a twice-weekly in rural Iowa. Then I took out $35,000 in loans to do grad school at Northwestern, whose j-school has a pretty good name. My best classes there were the semester I spent in D.C., covering Congress for the Tuscaloosa News (sort of a pseudo-internship) and a semester I spent writing the business plan for a prototype weekly paper for young adults in suburban Chicago.<br /><br />This got me a job running the Web site at the Longview Daily News, a small-town paper in Washington, and after a year there I moved to a suburban daily outside Portland. I've been at the Columbian for two years now. I'm 27. I make $15.97 per hour, 40 hours a week, $33,500 a year; I rent a one-bedroom apartment in a nice neighborhood for $595; I shop at Safeway, own a '99 Toyota, rarely fly, save 10 percent for retirement and cook for myself five or six nights a week. I'm comfortable.<br /><br />I love the freedom and independence of my job, which requires a good mix of artistry and technical knowhow. I like being able to play with different forms and I like learning something new almost every day. I like being responsible more to my readers and my community than to my company. I like having the respect of important people.<br /><br />I file about four stories a week, 600 to 800 words each. I do four or five major projects (1,500-2,000 words) per year.<br /><br />Like many newspapers, mine is dancing back and forth from the edge of bankruptcy and the bosses have no long-term plan to save it.<br /><br />For the last 30 years, this was a fairly typical trajectory for daily newspaper journalists, both feature writers and news reporters: spend a few years in the boonies, working overtime until you collected a portfolio of good clips. Using these, and using contacts among your colleagues and competitors, you climbed your way up to bigger markets, which offered better pay, less quantity, more quality and more specialization.<br /><br />Describing the journalism market right now is a tall order, so I'm going to depart from your template to do so.<br /><br />Local newspapers have traditionally been the biggest employers of journalists, with the biggest audiences and the most influence. (National outlets aside.) And as I assume you've heard, newspapers are in big, big trouble. Eighty percent of our revenue comes from ads, but with a shrinking audience, ads in newspapers are becoming less valuable. The audience is shrinking because the Internet provides broader and deeper information than our print product ever can, and our online product is basically just an electronic version of the print product, so it's not going to save us, either.<br /><br />The economy is making things worse, but this is a permanent situation. Buffett said that until the tide goes out, you don't see who's been swimming naked, and newspapers have been swimming naked for about a decade.<br /><br />Local TV news, another big journalist employer, is in the same situation. Network TV audiences are shrinking just as fast, and their Web sites aren't any more innovative than newspapers'.<br /><br />All this is to say that in case you were thinking about it, I would not recommend trying to break into general-audience outlets like newspapers or television. A smart newcomer could almost certainly find a job for a non-daily newspaper in a small town, but it'd almost certainly be a dead end.<br /><br />Many people break into journalism by freelancing for local or niche magazines. General-interest magazines are also in trouble, but niches are doing better. Business newspapers and trade publications (like American Cop or Architectural Digest) also seem to be doing fine.<br /><br />Freelancing requires some other source of income as you start, but it might be the best way to tap that artsier energy you mention. To start doing this, look on the Web site of a small publication you like (print or online) to find out if they pay for freelance pieces. If so, cold-call (or, better, walk into) their office and ask for advice on how and what to submit. Start with short stuff, and move to longer projects.<br /><br />The up-and-comers, journalistically, are Web startups that cater to smaller, more highly motivated audiences (like, say, streetsblog.org). Right now, I'm looking for a job that'll let me do this for municipal policy, hopefully at a state or local level. It's hard to find, not least because of the thousands of laid-off newspaper journalists flooding the market.<br /><br />I'd tell you more about those startups -- who they tend to hire, how they pay, what skills they require -- but I don't know and in any case I don't think the rules have been written. I think personal contact is <span style="font-style:italic;">very </span>important for small companies like these, I don't think traditional journalism classes would do a very good job of preparing someone for this work and I don't think these companies would tend to care about what classes you've taken.<br /><br />I suspect that for a newcomer, the likeliest path to a job at one of these startups wouldn't be demonstrated expertise in writing -- it'd be demonstrated expertise in the subject matter. And I think the best way to demonstrate expertise on a topic is to launch a blog about it and post to it consistently over several months, whether or not it attracts a substantial audience.<br /><br />That's just my hunch. I hope it (and at least a bit of the above) helps. Let me know if you have any other questions (if you dare).<br /><br />Michael<br /></span>Michael Andersenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12164724621772928851noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21939346.post-46457682407526898542009-01-10T14:48:00.000-08:002009-01-12T21:09:01.001-08:00The Medium Run rebootedChanges:<br /><br />1) The subtitle: "local newspapers" -> "local journalism"<br />2) The goal: local newspapers -> local journalism<br />3) The sidebar: fresh blogroll, less noise from <a href="http://delicious.com/johnatthebar/mediumrun">Delicious</a><br /><br />Promises:<br /><br />0)Michael Andersenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12164724621772928851noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21939346.post-83571343858413673542009-01-10T14:41:00.000-08:002009-01-10T14:47:33.264-08:00BRRRING!<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/131/353753314_41c1dab493.jpg?v=0"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 300px;" src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/131/353753314_41c1dab493.jpg?v=0" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><br />I danno, boss. Thing been sitting right next to me all year, never rang once.<br /><br /><br />(photo courtesy Flickr user storm_gal)Michael Andersenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12164724621772928851noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21939346.post-13778937588423829372007-08-14T18:40:00.000-07:002007-08-14T18:48:26.298-07:00The logical conclusion of Newspaper NextThe surprising implication of the very persuasive <a href="http://www.newspapernext.org/">Newspaper Next</a> presentation I sat through today: <span style="font-weight:bold;">Screw newspapers. If newspapers don't need us, we don't need them.</span><br /><br />Need I add that I'm not talking about the short run here?<br /><br />No jump on this one. More about this in a later post, maybe.Michaelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04272304569919320833noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21939346.post-70587750381609925232006-12-31T14:45:00.000-08:002006-12-31T14:51:17.098-08:00Next gen of online comments: in-line commentsI'm late to this party, but if you haven't seen the <a href="http://www.jackslocum.com/blog/2006/10/09/my-wordpress-comments-system-built-with-yahoo-ui-and-yahooext/">comment system on Jack Slocum's blog</a>, you gotta. I'm not sure it lends itself to news, since it requires that click to view, but this is still explosive stuff.Michaelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04272304569919320833noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21939346.post-13456663374812085202006-12-31T14:14:00.000-08:002006-12-31T14:39:29.302-08:00The post-intrepreneurship Medium RunMike rediscovers the first law of blogging: never promise anything. If you say you've got three posts in the works, you won't write a thing for months. If you say you're going to type up your final thoughts on a seminar you went to, the file will sit permanently unfinished on your laptop's desktop. And if you say you're going to post something <i>tomorrow</i>, you'll <b>have an existential crisis, quit your job and go to work as a direct-to-print reporter for a paper that doesn't even post its content until noon</b>.<br /><span id="fullpost"><br />It wasn't actually much of a crisis, but a couple weeks ago I did leave the <a href="http://www.tdn.com">Daily News</a> of Longview for the <a href="http://www.columbian.com">Columbian</a> of Vancouver, a family-owned paper down the road that does some things online very well and others pretty clumsily. But it won't be my job to worry about that.<br /><br />I don't expect to stop thinking or writing about the Web, but I'm abandoning the pretense of regular updates here.<br /><br />Leaving the front lines always comes with a sense of loss and guilt, I guess. My <a href="http://mediumrun.blogspot.com/2006/02/nonprofit-national-newspaper.html">previously mentioned</a> friend <a href="http://davidarcher.blogspot.com">David</a> linked to a <a href="http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/01/the_art_of_intr.html">Guy Kawaski post</a> that hit home:<br /><br /><blockquote>From the outside looking in, entrepreneurs think intrapreneurs have it made: ample capital, infrastructure (desks, chairs, Internet access, secretaries, lines of credit, etc), salespeople, support people, and an umbrella brand.<br /><br />Guess again. Intrapreneurs don’t have it better—at best, they simply have it different.</blockquote><br />I can do without the chair, but I'll miss the capital. Increasingly, though, my hopes for the future of online news lie away from capital. In the meantime, I just want to learn how to write.<br /><br />See you around.<br /><br /></span>Michaelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04272304569919320833noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21939346.post-32604528792407973792006-10-24T21:54:00.000-07:002006-10-24T22:07:22.575-07:00Let readers see (and edit) their own dataWork's been heavy lately. Tomorrow, a post on triaging limited programming resources. (As if there's some other kind...) Today, a quick suggestion for winning trust: <b>let readers access their own usage data</b>.<span id="fullpost"><br /><br />Job one, of course, is to start collecting readers' usage data. Seriously. Let readers know about it, tell them how they'll benefit, let them opt in or out, but start it right away and do it any way you can.<br /><br />Job two is inspired by this <a href="http://www.fredshouse.net/2006/10/im_a_bit_worried_about_this_go.html">Fredshouse</a> brainstorm (courtesy <a href="http://lifehacker.com/software/google/open-petition--google-data-privacy-manager-207309.php">Lifehacker</a>): Google should create a digital privacy tool for all its users that would let them <b>view, delete and set expiration dates for all data</b> that's collected about them.<br /><br />We should do that, too.<br /></span>Michaelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04272304569919320833noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21939346.post-20073293174128090882006-10-02T01:41:00.000-07:002006-10-02T01:45:41.798-07:00Not the feed you were looking for?Move along; move along.<br /><br />If your feed's been acting up in the last week, it's not your fault or imagination -- I've been upgrading to the new Blogger Beta in order to add features like topic tags (below every post), improved archives (at right) and peekaboo summaries (rather than always sending you to a separate page to read the full post). Thanks for your patience.Michaelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04272304569919320833noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21939346.post-32233946423036069602006-10-01T23:15:00.000-07:002006-10-01T23:46:36.960-07:00Newspapers should be classifieds clearinghousesEverybody and <a href="http://classifieds.friendster.com/">his brother's startup</a> has a free classified service these days. Even if you're ignoring all but the bigger players -- Craigslist, Base, Edgeio, eBay -- who can keep track?<br /><br />Hint: they're black and white and read in large but ever-decreasing quantities.<span id="fullpost"><br /><br />For the moment, newspapers in the smallest markets should probably still be trying to minimize the content that leaks onto competitors' sites. But in mid-size markets (and, before long, in the smaller ones) papers can keep offering value to classified advertisers by offering a service the big boys don't: <b>syndication of your ad throughout the Internet</b>. Anybody who pays for a classified should get it listed on all the free sites in addition to the print edition and the newspaper's Web site.<br /><br />Three startups called <a href="http://mpire.com/products/seller.html">Mpire</a>, vFlyer and <a href="http://www.postlets.com/home.php">Postlets</a> are trying to make this service into an entire business, the <br /><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/02/technology/02ecom.html">New York Times reports today</a>. (While they're at it, they check your spelling and suggest an effective layout.)<br /><br />It's not clear whether these guys are going to make money for such a relatively simple service. But if <b>newspapers can seed their ads into both the Web-savvy <i>and</i> Web-illiterate markets</b>, they'll be saving their clients a lot of time.<br /><br />No time for the staff to do all these postings, you say? Well, I happen to know of three fledgling Web sites who might make great partners for your classified department...</span>Michaelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04272304569919320833noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21939346.post-19121714517063060672006-09-29T21:34:00.000-07:002006-09-29T21:52:16.248-07:00Closing the software gapCan newspapers maintain competitive software on a smaller, less Soviet scale than <a href="http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003086961">Tom Mohr</a> would have us believe? Here are two signs that a few folks still think it's worth a try.<span id="fullpost"><br /><br />1) Reviewing the API's <a href="http://www.newspapernext.org/">Newspaper Next</a> study, Susan Mernit name-checks <a href="http://susanmernit.blogspot.com/2006/09/newspaper-next-talk-not-action.html">the two bits of software small newspapers probably need most</a>:<br /><br />- a self-serve ad platform<br />- a simple local listings service<br /><br />And she wants it done in open source, so we can all share & improve. Right on, sister. (Tx <a href="http://www.journerdism.com">Will Sullivan</a>.)<br /><br />2) The Des Moines Register is searching for a <a href="http://www.journalismjobs.com/Job_Listing.cfm?JobID=685764">local search editor</a>. Bully. A dozen such "editors" won't do squat until the software is in place, but once it is, no set of editorial duties need more attention at mid-size metros, I think. (And nobody is better poised to see the benefits of that software than Gannett. Let's cross our fingers, k?)</span>Michaelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04272304569919320833noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21939346.post-54968066208556930292006-09-17T11:50:00.000-07:002006-09-17T12:40:05.912-07:00PR and its hopes for an online futureSmall is nimble. Small is friendly. Small can get by on the seat of its pants. Newsrooms that can be walked across in less than a minute will continue to see smaller internal benefits of IT innovation than bigger papers. So why bother keeping up with the bleeding edge of Web standards?<br /><br />How about this: so you can <b>spend less time retyping your damn press releases</b>?<span id="fullpost"><br /><br />Over in the PR industry, the fight is on over press release 2.0. This week, the heartbreakingly idealistic <a href="http://www.socialmediaclub.org/">Social Media Club</a> (they're trying to establish standards among social Web practices) <a href="http://biz.yahoo.com/iw/060912/0162010.html">formed a Media Release Working Group</a> with the goal of introducing a common set of tags to separate the traditional parts of a release: 5 W's, CEO headshot, self-congratulatory quotes, and so forth.<br /><br />Once that information's organized, it can be distributed to reporters, who'll be able to <b>quickly or automatically arrange the raw information in the release and slap a lede on top</b>.<br /><br />Enhancing the 75-year-old (?) "release" format, if you will. See my last post on the need to <a href="http://mediumrun.blogspot.com/2006/09/holovaty-were-building-databases-for.html">chunk up the data in our own stories</a>.<br /><br />I'm extrapolating here from one of the group's members, Tom "<a href="http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2006/09/how_the_secret.php">my son found lonelygirl15</a>" Foremski, who <a href="http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2006/02/die_press_relea.php">called for these changes</a> back in February. (But see <a href="http://prblog.typepad.com/strategic_public_relation/2006/03/tom_foremski_is.html">Kevin Dugan's response</a>, noting that markup standards won't solve all the problems with press releases.)<br /><br />Of course, this'll only clear the way for <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/bb3ac0f6-2e15-11db-93ad-0000779e2340.html">robot journalists</a>. (Tx <a href="http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=45">Romenesko</a>.) The presence of two members of the working group -- Market Wire and BusinessWire -- make it clear which reporting sector has the most to gain here.<br /><br />But seriously: new information standards will give newspapers both external and internal efficiency gains. And that's a few more minutes we can invest in the work that really matters: finding out how the hell the release might affect our readers.</span>Michaelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04272304569919320833noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21939346.post-1157624011688607292006-09-07T02:33:00.000-07:002006-09-08T08:06:07.540-07:00Holovaty: We're building databases for the future, not the presentAs you may have heard, a fellow named Adrian Holovaty has a Big Idea, and it's a really good one: newspaper information needs to be updated for the digital age by storing it <span style="font-weight:bold;">not only in the hundred-year-old "story" format, but in little database chunks</span>. What's the business model? He's <a href="http://www.professordevigal.org/blog_in/archives/000674.html">quick to say</a> he doesn't know, but his answer this week to one concern should be comforting to data compilers with small audiences.<span id="fullpost"><br /><br />Here's Adrian's line: if you've lifted a few words out of your story and flagged them in a way that a computer can recognize -- if a computer can indentify your story's "who" and "where" -- then you're setting yourself up to someday ask a computer to map all those "who"s against, say, a database of political donors, or real estate purchasers, or sources. <span style="font-weight:bold;">It's the difference between Fisher-Price and Lego.</span><br /><br />His most visible work at the Post has been stuff like the wonderfully nichey <a href="http://projects.washingtonpost.com/politicalads/">political ads database</a>. But in a <a href="http://www.holovaty.com/blog/archive/2006/09/06/0307">long blog post this week</a>, he reminds us that mere newsy databases aren't the endgame -- the greater purpose isn't serving today's reader, but <b>laying the ground for future remixes</b> of the data.<br /><br /><blockquote>If you store everything on your Web site as a news article, the Web site is not necessarily hard to use. Rather, it's a problem of <i>lost opportunity</i>. ... That Web site cannot do the cool things that readers are beginning to expect.</blockquote><br />That's a bit of encouragement for small papers considering similar projects in the face of minimal pageviews. (Squint. You see that? Wagging in the distance? It's the <A href="http://www.thelongtail.com/">long tail</a>!)<br /><br />It's also some motivation to keep that data well-scrubbed: more's at stake here than Saturday's paper.</span>Michaelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04272304569919320833noreply@blogger.com0