On the other hand, objectivity is killing journalism.

Daniel Froomkin, who blogged until earlier this year for the Washington Post and now is at Huffington Post, lays into to the bankrupt notion of "objective journalism" in an Economist interview:

Journalists should strive for accuracy, and fairness. Objectivity is impossible, and is too often confused with balance. And the problem with balance is that we are not living in a balanced time. For instance, is it patently obvious that at this point in our history, the leading luminaries on one side of the American political spectrum are considerably less tethered to reality than those on the other side. Madly trying to split the difference, as so many of my mainstream-media colleagues feel impelled to do, does a disservice to the concept of the truth.

Charles Krauthammer, for instance, is mad as a hatter. (An irony of sorts, since the McGill grad is a trained psychiatrist.) It's therefore imperative, in assembling a talking-heads panel, to include among those who are "tethered to reality" at least one individual who isn't. Which would be George Will (the Soviet Union will last forever), Michael Gerson (Bush's longtime head speechwriter), Krauthammer or any of the other neo-con status-quo upholders occupying perches at the "liberal" Washington Post. Froomkin managed to get fired from WaPo, after years of being one of the paper's most-read columnists - actually, among any U.S. paper's most-read columnists - which makes me worry about the job security of the paltry WaPo offering of moderates (the first-class E.J. Dionne, for instance).

But more to the point, on objectivity. Everything journalists do, and ever have done, is subjective. Do you run the Fort Hood tragedy above or below the fold? Do you even put it on the front page? Is it a "massacre" (a term we use too easily) or a "killing spree" (arguably sensationalist). Do we report the miserable U.S. jobs figures that came out the same day as good or bad news? (The jobless rate rose into double digits, but Obama and economists have been predicting that all year. The rate of job loss in this latest period is comfortingly lower than in previous months - meaning the trend is in the right direction.)

What stories we decide to cover, whom we choose to interview, the length and placement of stories in a paper or broadcast line-up, whether stories are accompanied by photographs or video reports from the scene, these all are subjective judgments that skew the story.

As to "getting both sides of the story," sometimes there's only one side. Pedophilia is bad. So that's a rare instance where we don't chase after some university prof who will defend it. But in reporting on French healthcare - if we decide to do so in the first place, a subjective judgment - though our reporting shows the French experience accord with France's ranking by most world health organizations as the best in the world (the U.S. ranks around 37th in most), we must find "experts" to provide the other side. Namely, that it's costly. Well yes, you get what you pay for. On torture, we must find someone to argue for it to accompany the chorus of the correctly appalled. These addled voices speaking for a malignant "other side of the story" greatly dilute the truth of matters.

Sometimes things are just right, or wrong, and we should say only that. And say it over and over again until the powers that be make a good thing the new normal and eradicate a bad thing from our midst. In the MSM, there is still some question about the wisdom about going to war in Iraq, an unqualified disaster that ranks among the worst foreign policy initiatives in U.S. history, Southeast Asia included. There's no honest argument to be had on this, only sophistry. A Republican House tried to block the banks bailout late last year, which would have tumbled us into a global depression. G.O.P. members of Congress were acting either out of partisanship, at the expense of sound policy and the public good, or were ignorant of basic economics. Again, there's no "other side" to this.

Some things are true - gravity, water finding its lowest level, Michael Jackson was weird. In reporting and commenting on crucial public-policy questions, we only muddle things by ensuring that cranks also are heard from. Our on-the-one-hand-on-the-other "objectivity" also coincides with the decline in audience for both print and TV network news. Fairness of course we strive for. Doing no harm, also. But objectivity not only is often bad journalism but lousy for business.  

 

 

QuickNews, Thursday, Oct. 29.

HOUSE AFFORDABILITY ERODES | Sharp rise in Canadian prices amid sales boom. Despite sluggish economy, average Canadian house price rises to $328,762 in 3Q. Vancouver priciest, at average $603,165. Toronto rises to $324,873. Only Calgary down, by 2% - first decline since 2005 in Desjardins Affordability Index.

Vancouver skyline. Nice place to visit, but can one afford to live there?

LEST WE FORGET | Lt. Justin Garrett Boyes, 26, killed by IED near Kandahar city. Brings to 132 the number of Canadian troops killed since our Afghan mission began in 2002. U.S. thinking hard about new strategy to protect Afghan's biggest cities and cede countryside to Taliban. But that strategy failed for Soviet occupiers.

MALAISE | Sluggish August GDP growth expected to continue when September GDP revealed. Canadian growth of just 0.3% expected for month. Today U.S. expected to announce 3Q GDP growth of about 3%.

PENSION REFORM | As expected, Ontario to follow Ottawa's lead in pension reform. Flaherty's proposed reforms affect only federally regulated employers. Provinces and territories must follow suit for more Canadians to benefit.

VOLTE FACE | Harper to visit China in December, India in November. Harper established hostile relations with Beijing even before taking office, criticizing Grits for placing trade ahead of human-rights concerns. Said he'd never sell out those concerns "for the almighty dollar." Now that Canada needs rapidly growing China as stronger trading partner, human rights agenda quietly shelved. (Photo: Chinese President Hu Jintao and Stephen Harper meet in Hokkaido in July 2008.)

CHINA BLASTED | Mark Carney slams China for manipulating currency. Bank of Canada governor raises volume on longstanding N.A. complaint that Beijing artifically suppresses value of yuan to benefit its exporters. Carney says resulting $2 trillion (U.S.) Chinese accumulation of greenbacks made possible easy-money era of earlier this decade that helped trigger record U.S. housing boom that in turn caused global financial meltdown and recession.

CHINA PREFERRED BIDDER | Ford gives China's Chery the nod as inside bidder for Volvo.

BREAKTHROUGH | After a 10-year impasse, Obama extends hate-law provisions to gays.

PREVIEW | Sunday NYT Magazine profile of Barack and Michelle Obama. When Obama first asked his wife of only three years for her permission to run for elected office, Michelle's response was: "I married you because you’re cute and you’re smart. But this is the dumbest thing you could have ever asked me to do.”

U.S. HEALTHCARE DRAMA | House bill to include "public option," as Senate bill will. But Pelosi, in appeal to conservatives, would require new government insurer to negotiate costs with private-sector providers rather than set the rates itself, in contrast, say, to OHIP schedule of reimbursements. Senate's twist is that states can opt out of public option. Seems only "option" U.S. legislators won't experiment with to gain passage is the only one that really makes sense: cost-efficient, genuinely universal single-payer system that the rest of industrialized world has had for decades. Congres divided on public option, but not Main Street, where support for new government insurer to keep private ones honest remains strong. 

NAIL-BITER | Iran to announce today if it will accept tentative deal to have Russia store its uranium. Many Iranian officials getting cold feet, say no assurance Russians will return the uranium. U.S. acting oddly with this coup in sight, harshly dictating deadline for Tehran. And Clinton in Pakistan when Tehran would seem more logical place for secretary of state's diplomatic skills at this moment.

HYDRO-HYDRA | Hydro-Quebec will today announce deal to buy N.B. Power for close to $10 billion. Already N.A.'s biggest hydro-electric utility, Hydro-Quebec also keen to buy or ally with N.S. and P.E.I. power utilities to dominate Eastern Canadian production. Maritime utilities have U.S. contracts that will add to Hydro-Quebec's.

HALLOWE'EN HAUL | Trick Or Treat Index identifies most promising neighbourhoods. For Seattle and Los Angeles, Website zillow.com has factored in home values, population density, walkability and local crime rates. “Based on those variables, this Index represents neighbourhoods that will provide the most candy, with the least walking, and minimum safety risks,” says site's Whitney Tyler.   

QUOTE OF THE DAY | "He thinks by infection, catching an opinion like a cold." -John Ruskin.

Courtesy The New Yorker, Oct. 26 edition.

My stubborn faith in newspapers.

1. The traditional newspaper industry only looks dead.

As is commonly known, the crisis in N.A. papers has mostly to do with unsustainable debt taken on by media moguls who acquired dailies and newspaper groups at the top of the market in 2000, and the subsequent purchasers who also vastly overpaid. Examples include the CanWest purchase of the Hollinger big-city papers in 2000; the Knight Ridder chain's purchase by the McClatchy chain, now a penny stock; and Chicago real estate developer Sam Zell's leveraged buyout of Tribune Co. (which earlier had acquired Times Mirror, owner of the LA Times and Baltimore Sun). Tribune, also owner of the Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel, filed for bankruptcy protection only a year after Zell took control of it.

Rupert Murdoch's outlandishly priced $5-billion purchase of the Wall Street Journal last year already has triggered a significant writedown on that investment. Murdoch is conspicuous as a poor operator of newspapers. Both his flagship Times of London and New York Post are chronic moneylosers, their losses long pre-dating the Internet era. He's underwater with MySpace, as well, but that's another story. All worth keeping in mind as Murdoch wails about how newspaper readers must, must, must be made to pay for online content. Or he'll, I dunno, hold his breath until we do.  

Great, mournful attention has been paid to recent newspaper deaths in Seattle, San Francisco and Denver. (The media loves to cover itself.) The dailies that perished were in each case runner-ups to a dominant paper. The death of the two-daily town is a trend that was well advanced prior to the current downturn, and already had claimed the "second" paper in Toronto (the Telegram, in 1971), the Washington Star, the Chicago Daily News, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, the Memphis Press-Scimitar, the Courier-Express in Buffalo, the Ottawa Journal, Montreal Star, Calgary Albertan, Winnipeg Tribune and so on. The real story of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Denver's Rocky Mountain News is that they hung as long as they did. 

Meanwhile, the fundamentals of the newspaper "habit" remain surprisingly strong, at least relative to the many obituaries written for Gutenberg's spawn. The financiers messed up, big time. But editors generally continue to serve their markets quite well. Most dailies today are losing money or at best are marginally profitable. That is almost entirely due to the biggest plunge in ad revenue since the Great Depression, amid a global economic downturn also worse than conditions since the Depression.

By most estimates, about two-thirds of the lost ad revenue will return when the economy is fully recovered. Because newspaper publishing luxuriated in some of the highest profit margins of any industry for the past century, it will be comfortably profitable again despite not returning to the peak ad revenue earlier this decade. And that does not include that average 6% to 8% of total ad revenue that papers now garner from online ads. Ads on newspaper websites continue to be heavily discounted. Newspaper advertising sales forces are still figuring out how most effectively to sell the new medium. And potential ad clients haven't yet learned how an innovative online ad can drive sales of their products.

Thus there is a tremendous upside in online ad revenues - for the reasons above, and because online newspaper reading is nowhere near as prevalent yet as is commonly assumed. In Canada in 2008, just 4% of adults 18+ read online newspaper editions exclusively. Many Canadians read both the print and online editions of their favourite dailies. Which suggests (a) a very strong hunger for news, and (b) that there are attributes unique to each of the print and online experiences that readers seek.

News and entertainment consumers have never had such a wide choice of alternatives to traditional daily newspapers. Yet, in Canada, 73% of adults 18+, or 13.7 million people, continue to read at least one "dead-tree" edition of a daily newspaper each week. Amost half of adults (48%) have read yesterday's paper; 69% have read at least one weekday paper in a given week; and 77% have read a paper's print or online edition in the past week including weekend editions.

Conditions in the U.S. are similar, with a decline in newspaper readership of just 7% since the 2002 peak, compared with a 10% drop for prime-time television in 2007 alone. About one-third of Americans, or more than 104 million adults, read the print edition of a newspaper every day, according to the Newspaper Association of America, and more than 115 million read a Sunday paper. Papers remain popular enough with the young, 65% of the 18-24 and 25-34 demographics having read a print or online newspaper edition at least once each week in 2008. The audience for U.S. newspaper websites has soared 75% since 2004, to 73 million unique visitors a month.

2. Panic.

The "death of newspapers" story line is unique to N.A. European papers continue to flourish. True, the reading habit is stronger in Europe, where half a dozen "quality" dailies and another half dozen tabloids  duke it out in London alone. It is not uncommon for Greek consumers to read three or four dailies each day, and for Parisians to take three papers daily. Why? Because European papers are more opinionated, they stand for something, they often are strongly aligned with a political party or political philosophy. I am leaving out here sports and other specialized dailies, such as the ethnic press. Polish and Russian expatriates in Munich and Chinese-born adults in Toronto make time to read a local metro daily as well as a local daily in their mother tongue.

You have to wonder about the death of newspapers when Toronto has six English-language dailies. (Again I'm leaving out a vibrant local ethnic press). Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver each support two local dailies plus the Globe and Mail and National Post. The two-daily town survives in Quebec and Winnipeg,  

The decline in N.A. of the two-paper town accompanied an undeniable gradual drop in newspaper penetration rates. Again, why? Because the remaining, monopoly paper, eager to keep the dead paper's readers it had effortlessly inherited, became determined not to offend them. The monopoly papers that have now dominated our industry for decades stopped having a forceful point of view. They stopped being interesting.

The crusading ethic or gutter-press instincts of competing papers disappeared, replaced by a monopoly paper whose quest for increased readership no longer took the form of "scoops" or investigative journalism or even pandering to the lowest common denominator. (That was the Toronto Sun's remarkably successful formula, of immigrant and gay bashing and a Page 2 "Sunshine Girl" before it was neutered by new owner Quebecor, making the paper irrelevant to its former audience. This is one case that does not bring me to tears.)

The new key to success has been to not alienate anyone. To not be controversial. Combine that with the "objectivity" doctrine drilled into J-school students beginning in the 1960s. Which was compounded by the media's inflated sense of its power after Watergate, and accompanying self-imposed mandate of being extraordinarily fair. The result has been the "one-the-one-hand, on-the-other" journalism of today. Today, any newspaper article describing what is blatently true must include in equal measure the views of nutbars holding the opposite view. "These things we hold to be self-evident" would not pass muster with contemporary newsroom managers. Instead, the operating principle is: "This story's not balanced, everyone you quote says water is wet. Go back and get the other side."

Coincident with this trend was the curse of chain ownership, which usually if not always imposed a sameness in content and design across papers often spanning the continent. An integral part of this "absentee ownership" was the revolving door of newspaper management, as publishers and editors in chief were constantly reassigned within the chain to different cities. The tradition of a publisher and chief editor having roots in the community perished. Chain-wide "templates" for everythng from story selection and article length to human resources techniques and front-page layout methods gave the Tampa Tribune and Cleveland Plain Dealer so similar an appearance that readers were primed for a radical alternative - which ulitmately arrived in the form of Internet newsites and "blogs." (To see how enduring is the lookalike reality in newspapers, click here.)

It is striking that not one major newspaper in America objected to the "war of choice" in Iraq in 2003, with the exception of a desultory editorial-page skepticism in the New York Times. (Which the Times made up for with reporter Judith Miller's fraudulent, front-page Times stories about phantom WMD in Saddam's Iraq, just ahead of the crucial U.S. Senate vote that greenlighted America's worst foreign-policy blunder since Vietnam.)

Canadian papers were no different. Only the Toronto Star opposed the war in the run-up to the March 2003 invasion; the Globe and Mail and the CanWest papers were in lockstep support of the Bush administration's delusional vision of a reinvented pro-Israel, pro-West Mideast with Saddam out of the way. That was hardly an isolated incident. N.A. dailies have been afflicted by groupthink, afraid of their own shadows, for so long that it is something of a miracle they retain the substantial audiences they still command. The reason they do is the overriding importance to readers of local news, which only the hometown paper covers in anything approaching comprehensive detail.

Newsrooms once were grumpy places, a curmudgeon sitting at every third desk. Long acquaintance with fires, floods, layoffs and municipal and corporate corruption will do that to you. But now they're morose places, hangdog expressions all around as we've come to believe our own exhaustive reporting on the supposed decline of our industry. There have been repeated waves of layoffs at major N.A. papers. These have been due partly to the advertising drought, but mostly to the struggle of feckless owners to make monthly payments to banks and bondholders.

The Internet is so fascinating an invention, by now its ubiquity informing a journalist's thoughts so thoroughly, that a great many newspaper managers have become panic-stricken about the imminent demise of their businesses. One hears constantly this singular refrain: "We need a new business model, and no one has a clue what that might be." Too many publishers imagine themselves to be buggy-whip makers at the turn of the last century, just waiting for the last few customers to straggle out and then close the doors for the last time on a business that has no future.

We are experimenting with all manner of innovations, from "repurposing" reporters to also write blogs or become videographers to devising newspaper websites with a so many new, so-called "user-friendly" applications that they are, in fact, becoming ever more difficult to find your way around - or "navigate," as we say. Most newspaper websites are good or very good,. But most also have at least some features that no journalist would come up with. There's one major paper with a new website that now enables you to view the day's news in traditional newspaper format, or, at the click of your mouse, have all those same stories arranged in rows of blocks without photos or illustrations, or a third option in which all these stories are arranged in the form of pictures that one clicks on to get the text. I'm told that, at least in the early going, many online readers enjoy this novelty. To me it looks like a newspaper that can't make up its mind about that most essential of functions, ordering the news so the reader see what the editors consider most important for them to know.

Such novelties arise because newspaper websites are not designed by journalists, but by computer software writers, the two groups speaking languages largely incomprehensible to the other. There's no stopping applications like the one I just described, because the "techies" are in charge, and techies are prone to do whatever technology enables them to do, whether it's useful to the "end-user" or not. This is what Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft, calls "geek sex." At Microsoft meetings on prototypes with far too many bells and whistles, Ballmer asks his programmers, "Is this truly useful to our customer or is it just geek sex?" Usually it's the latter and it's removed.

One of the great truisms that disturbs our sleep is that young people are no longer taking up the newspaper habit. They are, presumably, defectors to the Internet. And yet, the average age of readers of CanWest's 11 big-city papers is only 47. Which means that while a lot of 60-somethings are reading the Victoria Times Colonist and the Ottawa Citizen, so are a lot of people in their 30s and late 20s.

In my 30 years in business journalism, a year hasn't gone by when I didn't hear about the growing crisis of our industry's failure to capture young readers. The CBC periodically tears up its entire programming schedule in pursuit of young viewers and listeners, killing off shows with large loyal audiences of relatively high-income earners in order to experiment with programs aimed at kids with scant disposable income and which usually fail. Chasing after audiences with the attention span of a gnat is lunacy. I wanted to be a journalist since Grade Six, but I didn't acquire the habit of reading a newspaper each day until my 20s. Young people have too much frantic growing up to do, and dense textbooks to master and essays to write, to spend half and hour each day with a newspaper, It was ever thus.

Newspaper managers are fretting over smartphones and Facebook and Twittering. They're in a panic that somehow a communication device that enables me to send a maximum 141-character message is some kind of threat to the knowledge disseminated by newspapers and magazines, with their in-depth coverage of the why and how of events and what's to be done about solving the world's problems.

Newspapers have survived magazines, the telegraph, radio and television. They will not only survive but exploit the Internet, which already has exploded the size of my newspaper's audience from one million to close to two million, and transformed my metro daily into a paper that reaches the entire planet. I could never have imagined, stepping out of the Ryerson journalism school for the last time in 1979, that someday the columns and features I write for a Toronto newspaper would be read by people in Singapore, London and Fort Worth, Texas. But every small-town paper with a website - and almost every paper and magazine has one - can now be read worldwide, on the date of publication. Our I should say the hour of publication, since newspaper websites are updated constantly through the day. In that sense - and this is a very big deal - these are the greatest days in the history of newspapers, which have never commanded such a vast, global audience.

Which raises the question of whether we actually need a new business model. I see newspaper executives with their hair on fire, and they're trying to put it out with a hammer. Yes, we must evolve. We must, in the same competitive spirit of old, strive to put out the best newspapers, online and print, in the world. Because the flipside of Londoners being able to read the Star in real time is that the Star's audience now reads the Guardian and the Washington Post.

It strikes me that our business model of the pre-one-paper town is the one that will ensure our survival and prosperity. We simply have to be the most interesting paper, online and in print, that our potential readers can choose from. There's no rocket science to this. We have to go back to scooping the competition - and Lord knows we've never had more competition than today. We have to describe gang violence and offer solutions to it that we have learned work in other places. We have to expose scoundrels and celebrate heroes. We have to employ columnists so good that they each command audiences of 40,000 to 100,000 readers all on their own - who, by definition, have a strong point of view. We must rediscover our dormant crusading instinct.  And, of course, if you're a metro paper, nothing happens in your city without you knowing about it and covering it with as many resouces as required.

3. The competitive advantage of newspapers.

The CanWest big-city papers have been around, on average, for 122 years. CanWest's Montreal Gazette dates from 1778. In every city in N.A., the oldest medium, most deeply knowledgeable about the community, and with a reputation for that knowledge, is the local daily newspaper. The strongest media brand name in any city is that of its dominant newspaper.

A few years back, the folks at Procter & Gamble decided that the American consumer needed a new type of dust mop. Instead of dipping your mop repeatedly in a pail of soapy water, this new mop would have the cleaning agent embedded in the slab of foam at the business end of the mop. P&G had to come up with a cleaning agent that wouldn't drip or evaporate in transit to the stores. The compound had to be strong enough to clean your floor but not so strong that it left scratches on it. P&G had to come up with winsome name name for this thing. It had to test-market what seemed a quite unnecessary invention. And to decide how to price it. And design it, everything from the packaging to the fit of the handle in your hand. They then had to convince millions of North Americans that they must have this product. 

When I first heard of the Swiffer mop I thought it was idiotic, unable to imagine sensible people shelling out a premium price for a dust mop. But I also thought, this is Procter & Gamble, one of the greatest marketers in history. An enterprise that's been around since 1837, and has such long-established relationships with Wal-Mart, Loblaws and every other national retailer that, basically, P&G is able to force products onto the market on the strength of its reputation and marketing prowess. The local grocer is thinking, I've made a fortune over the years on sales of Tide, Pampers and Crest toothpaste, I'll certainly give this new P&G product a try. And you know the rest. Swiffer - I still think it's a ridiculous concept - generates sales in the hundreds of millions of dollars for Procter & Gamble.

In my business, we also have been around a long time, for at least a century in the case of most papers. Like P&G, we have immense resources, more than our non-newspaper media rivals. Unlike P&G and its Swiffer, we don't have to explain what news is, and why it's valuable to our existing and potential customers. All my colleagues and I have to do is be better journalists than our rivals, just as P&G has to stay a few steps ahead of Colgate and Unilever. We need simply to go back to what we once did so well - being the first to tell you about Marilyn Bell's extraordinary feat in swimming the width of Lake Ontario, and crusading for an end to child poverty and gang violence in our community. And expressing a strong point of view about the things we believe will make our readers healthier and more prosperous - whether it's a new industrial policy to revive our Southern Ontario economy, or championing more research dollars for breast cancer. We have to surprise and entertain. We have to be willing to offend, in causes we know to be right.

It's really quite simple. We need to be essential.

Mea culpa, revisited.

I don't take back my mea culpa on bloggers and the MSM, in which to an exaggerated degree I asserted that the former were hitching their wagons to the former.

   
Gregory Lamb at The Christian Science Monitor appears to be treading into that contentious arena with a report in which he describes the increased "blurring" between the two. Lamb cites a recent study by Jon Kleinberg, computer science professor at Cornell, who says "News and blogs now exist in a continuum, so there's really no such thing as a two-part classification of the world into news and blogs."

His conclusion is echoed by close observers of the news world. Rather than any bright line between journalists and bloggers, they say, the picture gets muddier by the moment.

"The best newspapers are going to end up looking like the best blogs, and the best blogs are going to end up looking a lot like the best newspapers," predicted a 20-something new-media prodigy named Garrett Graff five years ago. Now "that's virtually happened," says Graff, now editor of the long-established Washingtonian magazine.

Today, big blog sites such as The Huffington Post, The Daily Beast, or Talking Points Memo - sites originally designed to be different from newspapers - "are basically evolving into newspapers," Graff says. They have bureaus, reporters, and editors...

On the other side of the equation, traditional reporters are blogging themselves, as well as posting observations on Twitter.com throughout the day, holding a two-way conversation with readers in which they not only dispense news but pick up information that enhances their reporting.

It's a symbiotic relationship in which "The Drudge Report, for example, wins a huge online following by displaying headlines from traditional news sites. But Drudge, in turn, drives traffic to the original publications, creating a 'win' for both parties."

As traditional and new media may be morphing into one another, one aspect of news may be lost in the transition, Graff suggests: the bread-and-butter newspaper story. The Washingtonian's website sports the short news snippets that people seek online, while the print magazine luxuriates in leisurely in-depth reads of 6,000 words or more.

"What I think you're going to see die," Graff says, "are the mid-length stories, from 500 words to 2,000 words, that are too long for people who aren't interested in the subject, but too short for people who are." 

My kind of irrational exuberance.

Nicholas Carr, the media blogger (Rough Type), was taken aback by the astounding stock-market $1-billion (U.S.) valuation recently placed on Twitter, which for all its buzz value has no profits and scant revenue. It is, in all likelihood, mere takeover bait for the likes of Google (it's Google's world; we just live in it). Then again, Google's YouTube has yet to show signs of even distant profitability. MySpace has become an albatross for Rupert Murdoch. Facebook, new king of social networking, is similarly profit-challenged.

But ya gotta have faith. The investors who took a minority stake in Twitter didn't blink in thereby putting a staggering valuation on the entire firm.

Thus inspired, Carr swung into action:

"I gave a guy down the street a 5% ownership stake in Rough Type in exchange for a 30 pack of Natty Light. The beer's worth $17.59, according to the sign in the window of the liquor store downtown, which gives Rough Type a current valuation of $351.80, or 0.0000003518 Twitters."

A reminder.

Sometimes tiny graphics on this site are a click away from being viewed full-size. So please click to enlarge! This also comes in handy if you want to print an image. It will appear full-size with no accompanying text.

 

 

 

Today's top news, Tuesday, Sept. 29.

GRIT DISARRAY | On eve of non-confidence challenge to Tories, Iggy loses Quebec lieutenant. Having embraced then rejected Denis Coderre's recommended candidate for Liberal bastion of Outremont, Iggy yesterday suffers a grandstanding Coderre's messy resignation as Quebec chief and Grit defense critic. This same Iggy was off to Bejing one day and scrapped high-profile mission the next. Was for the Iraq invasion, then opposed, which may account for his silence on Afghan quagmire. Railed against nationalism as a Brit pop intellectual, now embraces it (calls it "patriotism" now). An advocate of "torture-lite" - not what he meant at all, he now argues. Doesn't get that Quebec wing of federal Grits has, since forever, been a semi-autonomous party. Too bad Ignatieff will fail in forcing an election this Thursday, just to trigger the party's mandatory post-election leadership review to replace this naif who doesn't understand, much less control, his party. Globe's usually harmless Jane Taber on Iggy's haplessness. Top Grit strategist tells Post's Don Martin: "In our rush to dump Stephane Dion, we have given ourselves John Turner."

"In our rush to dump Stephane Dion, we have given ourselves John Turner,"

Read more: http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/09/28/330832.aspx#ixzz0SSo3PWkC

"In our rush to dump Stephane Dion, we have given ourselves John Turner,"

Read more: http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/09/28/330832.aspx#ixzz0SSo3PWkC

"In our rush to dump Stephane Dion, we have given ourselves John Turner," he sighed.

Read more: http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/09/28/330832.aspx#ixzz0SSncjUyt

"In our rush to dump Stephane Dion, we have given ourselves John Turner," he sighed.

Read more: http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/09/28/330832.aspx#ixzz0SSncjUyt

"In our rush to dump Stephane Dion, we have given ourselves John Turner," he sighed.

Read more: http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/09/28/330832.aspx#ixzz0SSncjUyt

"In our rush to dump Stephane Dion, we have given ourselves John Turner," he sighed.

Read more: http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/09/28/330832.aspx#ixzz0SSncjUyt

STIMULUS REPORT CARD | Tories' third status report shows progress but raises questions. Harper says about 4,000 - or more than half the 7,500 infrastructure projects Ottawa has approved - are underway. Earlier criticism was that funds had been allotted, but no spades in the ground. Specifics in PM's third stimulus update, released yesterday (PDF here), include $650 million in social-housing upgrades to be matched by provinces and territories. Some bafflers, though, including a Financial Literacy Task Force and funding for a national securities regulator. These aren't job-creating stimulus projects, worthy as financial literacy is. National securities regulator is a non-starter since parochial provinces still object to intrusion on their authority.

FLIP-FLOP | Obama will go to Copenhagen this week to promote Chicago's bid for 2016 Olympics. He caves to pressure from fellow Chicagoans Richard Daley, Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jordan, who trump longstanding WH argument Prez can't spare the time from healthcare negotiations.

ROLLING THE DICE ON NICE | WaPo's Fareed Zakaria on the new, diplomatic Obama Doctrine. I'm guessing the talking - with Iran, North Korea, a stubbornly pro-settlements Israel - will set the initial tone in this administration's foreign-policy challenges. But soon it will give way to sanctions and other time-tested threats when efforts at "finding common ground" fail. Nothing new here. Remember "Speak softly and carry a big stick?"   

GREEN SHOOTS | Delta, U.S. Airways and American Airlines raise billions in fresh financing. Cautious Canadian families sitting on up to $1 trillion in cash and cash-equivalents they won't risk on stocks, real estate and other investments. Report finds U.S. small businesses optimistic about 3Q and 4Q recovery. IMF expected to revise upward its global GDP estimates. Xerox and Abbott Labs in multibillion-dollar takeovers. Only a year ago, when Lehman Brothers collapsed, there wasn't money to finance having your pants pressed.

RECESSIONS A TICKET TO GOOD HEALTH? | Study finds health improves in economic downturns. University of Michigan researchers looked at data on mortality and other leading indicators from Depression era, found all but one - suicide - improved during tough times. No firm explanation why, but conjecture is that buoyant times mean stress, over-eating, more smoking and drinking, increase in traffic accidents and fatal workplace injuries.  

SAY AGAIN? | Troubled Starbucks to launch instant java in Canada and U.S. Founder Howard Schultz insists "Via" line not to be mistaken for Nescafe or Maxwell House, but contains same magical ingredients that justify nosebleed prices for in-store brews. An apparent bid to goose revenues by cracking new market in grocery chains, teeming, as you know, with Starbucks habitues.

SILVIO SLIPS (AGAIN) | Berlusconi can't shake his fixation with Obama's "tan." The Italian PM, returning from the G20 in Pittsburgh, tells fans Sunday he brings greetings from the U.S. from "What's his name. Some tanned guy. Ah, Barack Obama!" Mistaking this for wit, he continues: "You won't believe it, but the two of them went to the beach because the wife is also tanned." Soon after Obama's election victory, Berlusconi lauded the winner as "young, handsome, and even has a good tan." I like "the wife" part. Guess this is the argument about men being from Mars. 

MAKE MINE BUBBLY | Study finds Champagne's taste mostly in the bubbles. Report co-author Dr. Gerard Liger-Belair of Reims University says: "It's the very first time that we have been able to detect the fine chemistry of Champagne aerosols which are really the essence of Champagne."

GOOD MANNERS | A lesson in dignity for Michael Richards from Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig. The two actors are a model of restraint in handling an idiot whose cellphone rang incessantly at a climatic moment in their well-received two-man play, A Steady Rain. (Text and video.)

QUOTE OF THE DAY | "He sounds wistful: in exile, somehow, whatever he says about having come home." -Rachel Cooke in her Ignatieff profile in last weekend's U.K. Observer, of Iggy's 27 years - most of his adult life - spent in Britain and the U.S.

Courtesy Gary Markstein, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

William Safire (1929-2009)

I'm not shedding tears at Bill Safire's passing.

And not because he actually took pride in penning "nattering nabobs of negativism" for then-veep Spiro Agnew, who first legitimized G.O.P. demonization of Jefferson's free press. (It was the only task with which the corrupt former Maryland governor could be trusted.) Or because, as AP reports, "Along with George Will and William F. Buckley Jr., Safire's smooth prose helped make conservatism respectable in the 1970s, paving the way for the Reagan Revolution."

Sorry, but a weakness for puns and alliteration does not smooth prose make.

No, as a footsoldier for reactionaries, it was Safire's use of his improbable NYT column for the concoction of untruths targeting good-hearted progressives that I won't miss him.

Safire himself legitimized vilification of the president, pursuing countless Clinton "scandals" that were sheer wind. "Like a pioneering blogger, Safire years ago started grabbing bits of information and wrapping them in the tightest partisan, what-if spin possible," Eric Boehlert wrote in the Web site Salon in 2004. "When the accusation unraveled, he'd simply ignore the thud of his charges hitting the floor."

And so did his editors at the supposedly liberal NYT - for 32 years.

An AP report adds: "From 2001 to 2003, Safire also published several columns pressing the case that Saddam Hussein was linked to the Sept. 11 attacks, calling it an 'undisputed fact' that hijacker Mohamed Atta met with a senior Iraqi intelligence official in Prague in April 2001. The 9/11 commission said that meeting never happened." (Tell it to Dick Cheney, who will go to his grave insisting it did.)

Safire, ne Safir, was not a pioneer in the fact-based blogging that will dominate that vocation, if it doesn't already. A trumped-up PR shill, Safire was in lifelong pursuit of respectability - escaping first his early calling in press agentry, then the criminality of the Nixon White House, jumping to his NYT perch in 1973, one of the first rats to desert the ship, a year before Nixon was forced from office.

Safire's claim to pioneering rests solely with helping drag punditry into the gutter, though he had the likes of H.L. Mencken and Westbrook Pegler as inspiration. Dating roughly from the 1980s, when movement conservatives grasped that maintaining a united front against a chronically divided Democratic Party was key to elevating the minority party to power and keeping it there, he (and Buckley and Will) turned punditry into partisan abetting of a reactionary agenda and its proponents. What he paved the way for was Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter and Glenn Beck, who at least are easily recognizable as entertainers.

Safire, a University of Rochester dropout, fancied himself a journalist. But his admittedly superb language column and profilic output of well-received books - one of them a brave examination of the life of Job - failed in disguising a pen for hire and intellectual mountebank who cheerily took on the labours of water boy for some of the most retrograde public figures of his time. 

A new model for newspapers.

Last winter I began floating an idea, born of necessity, for a new approach to newspaper publishing. In a nutshell, I advised that we drastically shrink the newsprint product to a 32-page broadsheet or tabloid featuring only staff-written feature-length content and the best material available from other publications worldwide - a book review on the new Keynes bio from the Guardian, a Dutch urban-planning journal's take on the remarkable waterfront rejuvenation that is Chicago's Millennium Park.

And all of the "generic" news - the news developments of the day that everyone from CBC Radio to Yahoo makes available free to millions of consumers - would be shunted to the Web. It would still professional newspaper journalists editing that generic news, "ordering" it in importance in traditional newspaper style, segmenting it into traditional Life, Sports, Business and other sections. The generic news would still be refashioned by the newspaper's staff, adding local angles and content to make it as relevant to as possible to an audience in Indianapolis or Vancouver - something papers in those cities would have to do to make their flagship websites competitive with the same generic news as it appears on the dime-a-dozen news roundups made available by everyone from Google News to Yahoo to Sympatico to the BBC.

I learned that Arlen Spector, the longtime GOP U.S. Senator of Pennsylvania, had crossed the aisle to the Democrats - a stunner for any political junkie like me - from the widescreen TV tuned to CNN in my dentist's waiting room. I first learned of Magna International's interest in buying Opel-Vauxhall from my girlfriend, who got the news from one of those mini-TV sets in the elevators of downtown office buildings. Traditional papers now have a near-impossible job competing in breaking news. So maybe, in our print editions, we should just stop trying - and consuming tonnes of newsprint in the process.

Can we compete in breaking news online? You bet. We can do it better than anyone. Newspapers alone have the large staffs of professional journalists expert at rapid gathering of accurate information. We have graphic artists expert in making maps and compelling charts. We have the librarians expert in pulling together at short notice previous events of a related nature. We have columnists expert on terrorism, the use of steroids in sports, and the evolution of Harper's position of aboriginal rights and living conditions. On the Virginia Tech massacre, the Star's Web team was taking real-time news feeds from more than 100 sources within 15 minutes of the initial reports. Unlike our print edition, online we could get that information to our audience with maybe a 5-minute delay to ensure the veracity of it.  

I confess this new model is as much a survival strategy as an exciting, drastic change in newspapering. And there are big risks. Chief among these is that online penetration rates in North America trail those in Europe and Asia. Many readers of North American newspapers still don't have a computer, much less an Internet provider. Many of these folks will not be satisfied with the new, vastly shrunken newsprint edition U propose for their daily paper.

The other big risk is how successfully can we "migrate" newspaper advertisers to the newspaper's bulked-up online edition? Even at the traditiional papers most successful in this regard, online ads represent only 8% or so of total ad revenue. There are plenty of ads now to be seen in newspaper online editions. But their price is heavily discounted. Newspapers still have a lot of work to do to convince traditional advertisers - as conservative as newspaper proprietors, if not more so - that their online ads are powerfully effective. Why effective? Because they can move, talk, and be hyperlinked direct to a faux car showroom where you can design your own vehicle. And perhaps most important, the ad client has more measurable assurance than ever in newspaper history that his or her ad is being read.

As I mentioned, survival. Every broadsheet page of newsprint, published 400,000 times, costs a fortune. Given the paucity of ad revenues in the current recession, every big city North American paper has had to focus on cost reduction. And so traditional dailies have shrunk. In particular, we are shrinking the all-important "newshole," the portion of space available to journalists after the ads have been placed. We have been significantly shrinking the newshole for the past two years, without lowering the subscription or cover price we charge readers. Thus we are, without acknowledging it, giving our readers less and less content and charging just as much for it. In 30 years of business journalism, I've never known of a business that succeeded by offering less value for money. Meanwhile, in our online products, these same newspapers give away their content. That too is unsustainable.

So squarely confronting the new reality, as Peter Drucker would call it, I propose that we provide a vastly enriched though must smaller print edition. Its virtue is that it provides "essential" content. The meaning of the news. What the events of the recent past tell us about how the future is likely to unfold. Articles that delve into the complexities of things, from our confused mission in Afghanistan to the root causes of the intolerably high rate of medical error in our hospitals.

The quality threshold would rise immeasurably. There's no shortage of content in the world, especially as it becomes McLuhan's global village with the advent of "citizen journalism" and the technology making that possible. In future, the print edition of your daily newspaper will provide only the best, most reasoned of this content. It will be a lean, efficient read, shorn of fluff and the 90% of content we currently provide that most readers have no use for. Bulky newspapers are clutter, difficult to "navigate," and long ago became an environmental issue for thousands of readers that traditional papers have lost on bulk alone. People actually feel guilty taking a subscription to a hefty paper, and then foolish when as so often happens they never get around to reading it. You can only take a pile of two weeks' unread papers out to the recycling about a dozen times before realizing it's time to cancel your subscription.

It goes without saying that the new 32-page paper, likely in tabloid or "Berliner" format, is more accessible and far less physically intimidating than the broadsheet model favoured by today's general-interest hometown dailies. Conversely, the space available on the Internet is infinite. The savviest operators of newspaper websites will be those who make the tremendous volume of content we provide there easiest to navigate. Who put an interpretive and local "spin" on generic news that makes it the preferred version of news that's otherwise available in hundreds of other places online, including now cellphones, and from free traditional broadcasting.

How this model marks a return to commercial viability is that we charge a stiff cover price for the new, smaller print edition - at least $2 and more like $3  the cost of a latte from Timothy's or Starbucks. I'm confident that in the case of a big-market daily, at least 50,000 customers will buy that product every day. Which means for the first time in modern newspaper publishing, circulation revenues will actually cover the cost of newsprint and distribution.

There will be advertising in this new print product. The cost per thousand (CPM) will rise dramatically. But the quality of that readership - as measured demographically in reader income and education levels and spending habits - will also be much higher. That will justify a high enough CPM to cover our other big expense, the compensation for those producing the editorial content.

The online edition, meanwhile, offers the advertiser a massive audience, and thus a dirt-cheap CPM. The interactivity, real-time reporting, citizen journalism, blogs, vlogs and intense local coverage offered online will make it a compelling read. Yet the editorial CPM - the number of journalists and technical and support staff required to serve every 1,000 readers - will plummet as ad revenues gradually rise to cover, and then surpass, the purely editorial cost of producing the online edition. No paper and ink costs for an online edition.

What I'm proposing, simply, is to vastly reduce print-edition costs while greatly improving the quality and essential-reading nature of the print product. And at the same time, greatly increasing the revenue potential of the online product as ad-buying practices gradually change to more fully embrace this new medium. Our much smaller new print edition will pay for itself and eventually become lucrative. Our online edition, with its comparatively low production costs, enormous audience "reach," and selection and editing of content to be powerfully relevant to a given audience, will see it, too, become lucrative in time.

It will not be an easy transition. But the transition already is underway. At most traditional papers, some of the best reading is to be found in their online editions. And everything in the print edition is made available online in any case. Should we charge readers for this online content, as the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times do? Probably not, since the online-pay model has been tried widely and usually failed.

There certainly may come a point at which we might charge for select high-value online offerings. But not now. For now, the nascent Web - and it is nascent compared with the 400-year-old history of newspaper publishing - remains a realm where users expect content to be free. One might as well try reversing the flow of Niagara Falls as change that reality. In 10 or 20 years, after online newspapers have proved their value to readers, and the N.A. Internet penetration rate exceeds 100%, we might then find ourselves reaping considerable subscription revenue from all or part of our online products.

It's gratifying to see that a few newspapers now are willing to at least contemplate a new way of newspapering. In Toronto, both the Star and Globe now are giving serious thought to this model, among other substantive alternatives to traditional newspapering. 

Unfortuntely, though, the industry's current "silver bullet" is to form an ologopoly, championed by Rupert Murdoch, in which all major newspaper publishers agree to start charging for online content all at once. The players know they can't be the first to do so, risking an audience exodus. So Murdoch all year has been furiously signalling his peers that he's about to charge for online access to his general-interest New York Post (which he gets away with at his specialized Wall Street Journal). But this would drive at least half the audience of the Post, already a chronic loss-maker even before the advent of the Internet, to Mort Zuckerman's New York Daily News. Which means Mort and every other big-city publisher has to follow Murdoch lock-step or the thing doesn't work. Which is why, for all his pronoucements about paid online beginning early this year, Roop has yet to charge even for flagship Post features like the Page Six gossip round-up.

So, without disturbing the sleep of the anti-trust folks in Washington, Murdoch is burning up the phone lines with his peers, and overcoming his personal press-phobia to grant interviews to anyone willing to listen, in which he explains his idea for reversing the flow of Niagara Falls. Murdoch's transparently desperate gambit is notably lacking in the brash innovation we've long known Roop for. It's the strategy of a man running scared.

And of course it won't work. The Web leaks like a sieve. A paid-up subscriber to the Indianapolis Star will promptly re-post a supposedly "firewalled" article on his or her blog. And from there it will show up in a hundred free-access places on the Web before the sun rises again over the Indiana capital. The music industry, or what's left of it, learned its hard lesson about focusing on protecting its intellectual property rights - to the point of bringing charges against 13-year-old girls who improperly downloaded a copyrighted song. Result: the traditional music business, as we knew it from its origins in 1920s-era sheet-music publishers, is effectively dead.

How much better, I think, to offer readers a higher-quality print product and a higher-quality online product. And ask audiences and advertisers to pay a tariff that reflects genuine value for money.

How we (now) use the Internet.

To communicate, social network, buy stuff, and search for things, yes. But overwhelmingly to consume content. As BusinessInsider puts it, the Internet, whose killer apps once were limited to e-mail, now is primarily a "content platform." Or, as I'd put it, a place to read stuff.

Which will come as shocking news to blog loyalists. But, heck, a chart makes it look more official.