yelvington.com

The first time you visit ESPN.com today, you’ll see a large auto-play video ad that introduces you to both the redesigned site and Ford’s new F-150, which kicks up mud on the sports anchor.

Certainly cuts through the clutter from an ad perspective, but some folks, like VentureBeat, were a little annoyed. “With this redesign, they have crossed a line which I expect other sites may try to cross as advertising revenues dip in the weak economy,” writes MG Siegler, who disliked the start screen as well as the ad positions on the home page. (My own opinion: ad integration in sports comes the territory.) Advertising aside, the new ESPN.com features a big 16×9 content area that also converts into a video player, a customizable scoreboard across the top of the site and the ability to personalize your headlines in a tab on the home page. So in other words, you can customize ESPN.com to emphasize your local teams. (Full dislosure: I work for msnbc.com which is partnered with NBCSports.com.)

The New York Times has been among the prime examples of media organizations that refuse to call torture what it is: torture. The euphamism that the Times and other traditional (and cowardly) media outlets have been using has typically been “enhanced interrogation techniques” — despite the fact that at least one of those techniques, waterboarding, has been the basis of our own government’s war-crimes cases against others in the past.

Today the Times moves the ball slightly toward the correct goal line. In an online posting about the naming of several key Justice Department officials, reporter Eric Lichtblau writes of “practices bordering on torture.”

This borders on accuracy, and is an improvement. One of these days, the newspaper may actually use the correct word without equivocation.

IndyStar.com
"The Prayer, a short ecumenical petition that is prayer at its most vanilla, has been a staple of the morning read for decades," writes Star blogger Robert King. "Interestingly enough the prayer's longtime companion, a daily attempt at humor in 8-point type known as the Chuckle, kept its slot."

One of my new favorite bloggers, Martin Langeveld, mentioned one of his favorite new bloggers, John Thornton and his Insomniactive, where the Texas venture capitalist spouts off smart opinion and analysis of the newspaper industry. Great stuff; add Insomniactive to your RSS reader if you care about newspapers.

I was wondering how Thornton’s blog could have escaped my radar, but it looks like he only started posting stuff on media and news topics in late December 2008. So I guess I can be forgiven.

Along with Alan Mutter’s Newsosaur blog, now you’ve got an excellent duo of bloggers documenting the financial side of the newspaper industry’s spiral downward. I think Thornton is clearly the most pessimistic, and seems to think that the newspaper industry is headed toward a future of non-profit journalism. Also:

“You see, the online news outlets of the future are shaping up to be -– and it grieves me to say this –- a bunch of grubby, cruddy, marginally profitable little businesses. …

“Can some of these things make a little money? Sure, why not? It’ll be sort of like a Mad Max movie, or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road -– after the nuclear holocaust, plenty of assorted post-armageddon, beady eyed-sole proprietors with shopping carts and automatic weapons will do just fine — cockroach-like, and speaking in the broadest of relative terms.”

OK, maybe that’s too stark and depressing for you. Don’t read Thornton. Keep your head in the sand. … I’ll be reading, and I hope he sticks with news and media topics for a while.

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Editor & Publisher
Speculation that he was pushed out of his job "would be wrong," says departing Post managing editor Phil Bennett. "It was my decision. The timing was determined as much by my own personal situation as anything, wanting to do something else and having another act."
> Jaffe: Will Don Graham buy a magazine for Bennett?

> Abramowitz leaves WP to join the Holocaust Museum
> What should j-profs tell students about the news business?
> Blagojevich case is teaching material for Chicago j-profs
> Souza accepts position of Obama White House photographer
> Russ Smith: NYer piece muddies history of VV, other weeklies
> Business & Media Institute stops griping about housing coverage
> New California law protects school journalism advisors
> Tribune's bankruptcy may trigger tax complications
> Battle Creek Enquirer's printing press runs for the last time
> What did Einhorn bring to Sunday's NYT op-ed pieces?

This from Timothy Garton Ash in the Guardian: "It must be obvious that the planet cannot sustain 6.7 billion people living as does today's middle class in North America and western Europe - let alone the projected 9 billion world population in mid-century. Either a large part of humankind has to be excluded from the benefits of prosperity or our way of life has to change."

So, let's try and answer that question honestly. Are you planning (and therefore by implication are you pushing your elected leaders towards planning) to radically change your way of life, voluntarily becoming in material terms very much poorer? Or are you planning (etc) to leverage your current political, economic and above all military advantage to make sure that some other portion of humanity gets excluded from the benefits of prosperity? Honestly...I'm going for option 2. The alternative is trusting everyone else on earth to match what sacrifices I make for the common good and I don't fancy my odds. Looks to me like a big - indeed the biggest, humanwide - collective action problem, an enormous tragedy of the commons played with energy sanctions and, ultimately, nuclear weapons to preserve a way of life that even if we are all willing to give up we have to trust everyone else to be willing to give up too.

Cheery stuff for the New Year? We've all read bleaker today already. Happy 2009.

Toronto Star
A woman is struck by a bus and dragged beneath its wheels to her death. Some witnesses tell a reporter that the victim was decapitated. Do you publish this fact in the article and headline? Readers are asked to make the call. PLUS: More decisions for reader-editors. || More editor/publisher/ombud columns:
> Strib's goal for 2009 is to improve its investigative reporting
> N&O editor: Gov's wrong; our series wasn't a "hatchet job"
> WP Co.'s community papers switch to broadsheet format
> Lafayette, La. paper makes changes to deal with tough times
> Temple has lunch with the next U.S. senator for Colorado
> Vaden: Middle East violence guarantees news bias complaints
> Reader thinks he sees a same-sex couple in photo, gets upset

Although its stock has been pummeled to pennies per share and its auditors have stated the company is in danger of defaulting on $1.4 billion in debt, Lee Enterprises still produces a larger operating profit, percentage-wise, than Exxon. So, let’s not forget that there is a reasonably robust business here. The problems are that (a) the business is not as robust as it used to be and (b) the

In print.

Unfortunately, this example from The (Colubmbia, S.C.) State shows what's wrong with shovelware in a Web 2.0 age.

Look at the last line.

There is no "related story on this page" and -- it's the Web, dang it -- there's no link from that to the related story elsewhere on the site.

Newsrooms have got to learn to fix things like this. Yes, it may be hard the way they are set up, but it is imperative because it signals an operating mentality.

This time at Media News's L.A. newspaper group.

Romenesko Memos
"I've decided it's the right moment for me to move on to new things," writes Phil Bennett (left) in a memo to his staff. "Next week, I'll move to the 9th floor to work for Don [Graham] on a project relating to the future of the news business. I will be writing, thinking about what's next -- and pulling for you." || Related memo from executive editor Marcus Brauchli.
> Downie says Bennett "definitely exceeded my expectations"

A lovely review of the Folger Shakespeare Library show on the birth of newspapers by Philip Kennicott in the Washington Post has some gems:
If you learn about the world primarily from newspapers, the Folger Shakespeare Library’s exhibition documenting the birth of journalism in the Renaissance will be a wistful affair. It’s like looking at baby pictures of a distinguished old relative who is now on life support. Look how vibrant, how youthful, how full of vinegar the old man was. Once upon a time, before the plummeting circulation, the shrinking ad revenue and the highly leveraged corporate owners.

But if you get your news primarily from the Internet, there’s nothing sad here at all. New media is new media, whether it’s scurrilous pamphlets distributed by hand, or partisan Web sites that spread their happy mischief through the wireless ether. The forms, the tone, the types of personalities who gravitated to journalism when it was new seem fantastically familiar in our own anarchic and newly democratized age of the World Wide Web.

Kennicott susses out these themes through the ages:
When John Taylor, a bargeman and alehouse keeper turned journalist, published an edition of his Mercurius Aquaticus in 1643, he included a complete reprint of a rival paper, the Mercurius Britanicus — followed by a point-by-point smackdown of its contents. This was “fisking,” 17th-century-style: a form of argument beloved by bloggers who cut-and-paste something that offends them and then interlard it with commentary.

The extra margin space included in a 1699 issue of Dawks’s Newsletter was meant to allow readers to write notes and commentary before passing the paper on to someone else. Web site designers may think that posting reader comments, which all too often devolve from sincerity to silliness to bigotry and ad hominem attacks, is a brave new invention of the interactive world. But interactivity is ancient. It’s at least as old as graffiti, and often just as useful.

There’s also a slick swipe at cable news, but I won’t ruin the punchline.

: I was going to buy a copy of the exhibit book until I saw that they charge $10 for shipping. Damned print.

To start out 2009, the Guardian's Roy Greenslade has some brutal predictions -- mostly UK oriented, but you can find a lot of U.S. truth, too.

At least one major regional owner will go under. Even if there is no further consolidation, there will be "accommodations" between rival publishers. More, many more, local titles will be closed or merged. More freesheets will vanish. Needless to say, more journalists will lose their jobs. As for the national newspaper industry, it is probable that a couple of publishers will throw in the towel. I somehow doubt that their titles will vanish altogether, but that must be a possibility too.

He hits the bull's eye at the bottom of the column:

Meanwhile, and here is the rub, necessary online innovation is being stifled. There is a lack of genuine inventiveness about how to forge a new form of journalism, because companies are too focused on dealing with commerce. Many regional and local paper websites are so clunky that they cannot hope to gain new audiences, let alone retain the current ones. Staff required to "service" print and web on a 24-hour basis are not given the time and space to experiment and there is precious little encouragement from managers who are interested only in bottom lines.

Similarly, many national paper websites are chasing ratings rather than innovating - in the long term, building trust and credibility is far more important. The importance of online journalism cannot be stressed too often. It is foolish to call it the future because the future is now. ...

It is also sobering to realise that even if a national paper were to close - whether the Independent at one end of the market, or the Daily Star at the other - rivals will not benefit much. When Murdoch pulled the plug on Today in 1995, when it was selling almost 600,000 a day, the majority of readers vanished into thin air. Now, of course, they will vanish into cyberspace.

The fight that counts in 2009 is the one for online eyeballs seeking news and informed comment, not for the passive audience handed a freesheet with the minimum of journalistic merit or public benefit.

Patrick Smith at Paid Content:UK, a Guardian subsidiary, is as brutal, if not more so.

And a commenter on that site points to "Five Fatal Flaws that are killing local Internet Plays" by Dave Chase (the commenter credits Jeff Jarvis, but it was Chase's I found). Chase says, as I have written, that at least half the job of "saving" newspapers - in whatever form - is retooling the sales staff. But he gets into a lot more specifics.

I know firsthand from our work in Hartsville that his No. 3, inability to quantify the value of the audience, is a big problem, as is the mismatch in selling skills, or as he calls it, "Farming Hunters."

Reflections of a Newsosaur
Although auditors have said the newspaper chain is in danger of defaulting on $1.4 billion in debt, Lee Enterprises still produces a larger operating profit, percentage-wise, than Exxon, notes Alan Mutter. "While Lee is in a distinctly unpleasant position with respect to its shareholders and lenders, it is important to note that the business generated $207.2 million in operating profits last year on sales of a bit more than $1 billion."

Washington Post
"They look so greedy. They look so obnoxious: 'I need this to be exclusive!' I don't strong-arm anyone, ever," says Liz Claman, who left CNBC a year ago to join Fox Business Network. "I'm not a BusinessWeek reporter who knows how to perfectly distill a balance sheet. But I know a good business story when I see it. ...At CNBC it was a game of who can be the smartest, who can throw around the most alphabet soup -- CDSs, CDOs."

Advertising Age
The $200 million figure appeared in the the New York Times last spring, though anybody with basic math skills and a halfway-decent b.s. detector knew it was nonsense, says Simon Dumenco. "So how'd I come up with my $2 million figure?" he writes. "Basically all I did was look at HuffPo's competition, in particular a similarly left-leaning content site that's well-established." That's Salon, which had $1.98 million in revenue and a loss of $1.28 million in the quarter ending Sept. 30.
> Arianna Huffington's motto for 2009 is unplug and recharge

New York Times | All Things D | Media Nation
CBS bought the first ad, which appears in today's Times. The paper wouldn't disclose to its reporter the rates it charges for ads on page one. || Peter Kafka: "This is only historic because the Times management has been so stubborn about keeping its front page pristine. It's hard to imagine that any reader will care." || Dan Kennedy: Why the Times' front page ads don't matter.
> NYT expected to survive the industry shakeout, but...

Chicago Tribune | AOL Sports
Jay Mariotti, who resigned from the Chicago Sun-Times after 17 years in August, becomes AOL Sports' full-time national columnist and commentator on a variety of its platforms. || Mariotti writes in his debut AOL column: "I am here to bring you fiercely independent views about a multi-billion-dollar industry that is more complex than ever and, somehow, more fun than ever."

Peter at Video 2 Zero wrote a provocative post, with data — Ideal length for web video — a couple of weeks ago. The gist is, fewer people stick with an online video to the end if the video is longer. Longer than what, you ask? Just longer. In general, people open a video, start watching, and then begin dropping off.

This shouldn’t surprise anyone. It’s the same way you act when you open any Web page — you look or scan or read until you feel like you’ve had enough. Then you leave.

I don’t think this is any different from the way people read printed newspapers. You start, and eventually your attention wanes, and then you quit.

Now, before you start arguing — yes, sometimes I have searched for exactly that information (that video, that Web page, that story, etc.), and then I am likely to stick with it to the very end. So your fascinating video, or text story (about the cause of a plane crash, or the rescue of some avalanche survivors, or the future of our 401(k)’s) might be long, but I am already committed to it, and I am predisposed to watch (or read) the whole thing.

Most things that we encounter online do not meet that criterion. Most things we encounter online are not the exact thing we have been searching for.

So we sample. We take a little taste and move on to the next thing.

A 17-year-old recently told me that sometimes she starts looking at YouTube and somehow, before she knows it, three hours have gone by. “Really? Three hours?” I asked her. “Seriously,” she replied. But you know darned well she did not watch every video she opened to the end. YouTube is a place for sampling, tasting, surfing. It makes it really easy (and irresistible) to have another, and another, because of that “Related” box on the side.

I take two lessons from this:

1. A shorter, extremely tight and fascinating video has more chance of being watched; it is more likely to succeed in communicating its message, because more people would finish watching it.
2. News sites need to put more effort into facilitation of this sampling behavior, and production of long items (videos or text) is counterproductive to that effort.

Don’t take that to mean I want to dumb things down. I do not. But the array of information has to become smarter (like YouTube’s arrays), and the complex (long) pieces must be reconfigured into smaller pieces, to adapt to the sampling behavior of the audience.