"Is it a local paper if you don't have an editorial board to weigh in on matters of local importance, to call out the school board and complain about lousy streets? Is it a local paper if you rely on stringers to cover the big football games and miss the Cinderalla story that a beat reporter would've nailed?"
--What the future of news looks like in Alabama after Advance cuts staff by 400 | Poynter. http://bit.ly/LsG2Gd

In 1995, Jeff Jarvis and Steve Newhouse hired me to create and edit New Jersey Online, the first Newhouse online site, which drew from three local papers.  Here we are in 2012, 17 years later (!), and Newhouse has just laid off 400 people at their three Alabama papers and created a hub structure for managing operations. Steve Myers has a terrific piece about the layoffs at Poynter where he asks questions about how the papers will be able to operate locally with such deep cuts.

Meyers also quotes management as saying "The Mobile newsroom, which after vacancies are filled will have about half the current staff, "will be a hyperlocal operation." The staff "will cover the hell out of local news." "

He also says: "Advance seems to think a local newspaper is three things: a small group of reporters, advertisers who need your paper whether it's published three days or seven, and some readers."

Welcome to the present reality, folks. We're in a value-based economy here on the hyperlocal news front, not one based on brand, distribution or who's friends with the Mayor.  The level playing field is now about big corporate entities trying to scale down to the size of, say The St. Louis Beacon so they can pay their bills, turn some profit, and survive.

Here in Oakland, where a small team of us run Oakland Local, a future of news non-profit web site and training organization, we're adding advertisers and audience as the local paper, now managed out of San Jose but with a just opened "community newsroom" downtown, struggles to copy our model (and that of many other hyperlocal sites) and involve citizen reporters (even though they can't appear beside the union folks). 

Like the Alabama Newhouse properties, the Bay Area News Group papers are also being run as a hub, and they seem to be surviving, if not thriving--but the word is that more cuts are being planned there, as well.  Certainly, the paper's ability to cover Oakland has diminished as Oakland has become less of a profitable focus for the hub organization, but hunger has driven flexibility, as seasoned general-assignment reporters cover not one, but two to four beats. 

Here in the East Bay as  Oakland Local--and our cousins Berkeleyside and The Alamedan-grow, my sense is that we are both picking up readers who no longer turn solely to the local paper and new readers who never cared about the paper in the first place.  In Oakland, OL's audience is notably younger, browner, and more entreprenurial/activist/small business/creative class that the core audience for both the local paper and the local alt.weekly; in Berkeley, Berkleyside is developing a huge following based on an insider voice the local paper never achieved, and in Alameda, the newly revived local non-profit news site is covering stories the paper also doesn't seem to see.

The good news: relevancy drives audience.  The bad news: it's economically  brutal.

What the papers have that the hyperlocals don't is infrastructure and scale. While Myers is correct that selling locally will be tough without local salespeople, the reality is that alot of the great money is in regional and co-op buys, which most hyperlocal sites are not set up to handle.  The myth of print distribution means that a run of papers, read or not, can sell a buy to a regional advertiser who will also be willing to do a smaller online buy, state-wide.  An Oakland Local can't (yet) compete with that, though that day will surely come.

Newhouse has been printing and distributing papers since the early days in Bayonne, NJ and I don't see them getting out of the business anytime soon.  But in this economic climate, cutting staffers, consolidating operations and--as much as possible--trying to act like a lean startup--is unavoidable. 

Welcome to the future of news, where the Minimum Viable Product isn't just a tech idea, it's a real way to produce local community media.

So I am back actively consulting again.

My plate is pretty full right now, and, to my delight, I am really enjoying working with my clients. Both are fairly substantial projects, and I am at the start of one, and about a third of the way through the other. Up until a month ago, my focus was to consult half-time so I could work on my startup, but because of my work with The Knight News Challenge, that wasn't really happening (I was way too busy). Then two amazing projects both came through, with some other interesting possibilities down the road, and I decided to dial down my startup plans for the moment and work on these two other projects.

In the process, I am learning some interesting things about myself:

• I am extremely team oriented (I know, you knew that about me, why didn't I see it)? Who I work with and working with more than one person is extremely emergizing to me. I enjoy group dynamics, like helping to balance people and find the brainstorning, sense of purpose, and momentum of a team refreshing (makes me able to do more).
• Rethinking something that exists into a newer and more efficient version of itself is a very different task than getting something that doesn't exist al all off the ground. Not better, or easier, just different muscles.
• Consulting today--just like it did when I had 5ive back in 2004 ish-has a wonderful Kung Fu  David Carradine quality cowboy in that I don't feel possessive of my knowledge and enjoy empowering those who pay me (and whose work I accept).
  
• The aspect of consulting that involves sharing knowledge and helping others--which is especially true in small and mid sized orgs that can't afford to commission expensive studies they then don't execute--makes the work more fun, and I enjoy that.
• I am trusting the universe a little more.  That sense of terror--If I don't do X right now, the world will collapse and thing won't happen!-has abated. It doesn't seem true for most of what I want to do.

Side note: I am also enjoying working for free, so to speak. The development of the Public Media Collaborative, and the direction it is taking, is exciting. It seems there is a lot of work to be done, and many groups we can collaborate with to make the work happen.

Some observations about social media..and my own shifting use of it, right now.Back in the day, say 2005, blogging was the main way to do the following:

• make your voice heard
• be part of a community
• establishe a reputation for your ideas
• influence thought and community

Needless to say, in those days I loved the blogosphere and participated avidly in my corner(s) of it.

Fast forward 3 years and we have a much more bifurcated set of ways to communicate:

• twitter--a great community tool--chatter with people you know and feel affinity with; be part of a virtual community
• friendfeed-post your lifestream links, influence others through comments on their links, and be part of a community
• blogging--all the of the above, but at a slower pace
• tubmlr--all of the above, only visual
• seesmic and 12seconds: join a visual video community

Point here is that I find myself using twitter to maintain community, blogging to share ideas and influence thought, and friendfeed for reputation (in that I take pride in the links I post and the comments I make on others' streams).

What is interesting about all this is that the only one of these tools that is bi-directional for real--ie there is the ability to communicate in something more closely resembling real time--is twitter. (Thought video comments on seesmic are great). 

Everything else is a publish and subscribe model, which I think is becoming less powerful as watching and commenting on lifestreams (the friendfeed model, again) becomes a way to  mimic being bidirectional (and as friendfeed keeps speeding up their crawlers, may truly become bi-directional, which would be amazing)



.

"On Saturday, Mr. Stelter's wonderful article in The New York Times on how people were working around the blackout on the Olympic ceremony began as a post on Twitter seeking consumer experiences, then jumped onto his blog, TV Decoder, caught the attention of editors who wanted it expanded for the newspaper and ended up on Page One, jammed with insight and with plenty of examples from real human experience.

How much more powerful is that networked intelligence than a reporter with a phone, a Rolodex and the space between his or her ears?"

--David Carr, writing in the NYTimes on news as a viral and networked process, with the open ceremonies of the Olympics as his example.

Susan sez: This is a good article, because it reflects the crowd-sourcing that makes social networks and the Net so useful to so many people and attaches it to the venerable traditions of news-gathering in a way print people (are there any left?) can relate to.

I'm delighted for my old friends Rafat Ali and Staci Kramer and the sale of Content Next to the Guardian Media Group for a reported $30million plus, but it also underscores how Guardian has something many traditional media companies in the US don't seem to have--a focused, outcomes based strategy on where they want to end up in the next 3 years.

First of all, the Guardian is acquiring talent.  Not only do they have the wonderful Simon Waldman and others who have been there for a while, they recently acquired Matt MaAlister from Yahoo! to run the Guardian Developer Network. 

Second of all, they seem to have a plan, not only can they support a developer ecosystem, but now they're building a base with a digital media trade news and conference company that has a global focus and that can help them increase CPMs in their online advertising business, as well as diversify their revenue stream.

And Rafat, of course, gets what many entrepreneurs come to dream of--economic validation for hard word, consistent execution, an ongoing focus--and the chance to continue to grow his dream with others picking up some of the work  so that the 22 hour days, 7 days a week, can die down.

"I find the colloquialism "You must join the conversation" a tired phrase legacy of 2006. It's overused, oversold, thrown around and just not accurate."

--Blogger Jeremiah Oywwang, Web Strategist, writing about how rankings, ratings, and even reading can be among the greatest behaviors within a community.

For the past four years, my pattern has been to get up early, have breakfast, check email, read, blog, and walk the dog, not always in that order. Now, that's changing.

Getting up early, check; walking the dog, check; eating breakfast, check--but I'm not blogging. Instead, I'm checking twitter, frendfeed and my email, then switching to facebook.

At that point, I'm 40 minutes into my allotted hour + 10, so this is definitely a behavior-changing pattern.

Here's where the shifts are I want to note and talk about:
a) Relying on social network connections for news.  Jerry Yang might resign? Someone tweeted the link.

b) Treating discourses more like transactions--getting short snippets of broadcast info from people works well in twitter, friendfeed comments.

c) Email is spam and items that need discussion. Notes on wire frames for a remote project need email--meeting for lunch should not (even if it still does.)

d) Blogging is for sharing longer and more thoughtful items (don't fit in a tweet or a bookmark), and posting digital assets--sound.video, images--that don't fit in a twit or SMS format.

Of course, I am still blogging pretty much daily and wil continue to do so, but I'm probably typical of alot of people for whom the blog(which replaced the newspaper online) is no longer the information source I rush to in the morning--now I go to my virtual communities, where people not only tell me how they are, they tell me what they are paying attention to.

How has your attention shifted? Do you fit this pattern? Have another one? Share, please.

Fred sez: "Social media is no different from all media. The number of people who at one point were interested in your content or service is not that meaningful. What matters is the number of people who engage with your content or service on a daily basis and how engaged they are. And RSS subscribers, Facebook app installs, and follower numbers don't measure that."

Susn sez: Fred is totally bottom line level of right. This is the active versus installed base of any application (as opposed to that other metric, page views for media).and the user to install or registration ratio is always easily 3 to 1, even less over time as people churn out.

Jeremy Zawodny leaving Yahoo: Just saw that my friend Jeremy Z is leaving Yahoo for a compelling opportunity with another company; I am excited for him, and wish him all the best.

San Jose Mercury News: Knight Foundation is awarding  aq set of organization in San Jose $1.5 million dollars to "help the community find its soul." ( Susan sez: I continued to be impressed--and thrilled--by Knight projects and investments (and am honored to be helping them with the Knight News Challenge.)

Amy Gahran: Is community news a nice-to-have? At The Future of News conference at MIT, Lisa Williams and other discuss whether local news is the holy grail local residents crave (verdict: Not.)

I'll be at the Editor & Publisher conference in Las Vegas for the next couple of days, in support of the Knight Foundation announcement of the 2008 Knight News Challenge winners.

If you're not aware of this Knight program, it's a multi-year grant program that supports innovative ideas that use digital media and technology (mobile, platforms, etc.) to transform local and regional community news and support discourse in the commons. Knight has funded both very location specific projects and much more platform-driven efforts and these efforts have jump-started platform and tool development around local, community, news and even some social justice and accessibility issues,because of how well-distributed the funding has been.

Last year's News Challenge (2007) winners iwent to 25 individuals, and to private and public entitiesthat ranged from individual developers to  MIT to MTV. This year's list of winner's is equally cool, and the announcement of the winners is tomorrow.