yelvington.com

A long time ago someone said to me: "When the parent becomes threatened by the child, the stage is set for a Greek tragedy."

If reports are to be believed, that's playing out right now in San Diego, where Karin Winner, the editor of the decaying and decrepit Union-Tribune, has engineered the exit of Chris Jennewein and Ron James, two of the best online guys in the newspaper business. Not the first time this has happened. And sadly, probably not the last.

The newspaper's audience in-market penetration has sagged to 54%, while the website has added 17.2%, according to the latest ABC data. In addition, the website has built a separate national audience/revenue proposition (out-of-market usage is not measured by ABC) based on inbound tourism. So the response is for the newsroom to seize control and oust the growth guys. Dumb.

Back in the early 1800s a young French writer wrote some observations on the character of American society that I think have something to tell us about how journalists and newspapers should use the Internet.

The writer was Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville, and he wrote Democracy in America, a remarkably clear and astute commentary on the nature of American society.

Consider the era. Most of Europe was ruled by coalitions consisting of aristocratic families, monarchs, and the Roman Catholic church. The French revolution had ended disastrously, as most revolutions do. The unfolding apparent success of the American experiment was no mere curiosity.

De Tocqueville was looking for lessons, and he sought them by using the tools of the reporter. He traveled, he visited, and he interviewed hundreds of Americans.

Occasionally a newspaper journalist will write something arrogant and stupid about the blogosphere today. Such writers should read de Tocqueville carefully. His frank account of the failings of the press, and his carefully hedged defense of freedom of expression, might help one or two newspaper columnists understand that bloggers ultimately are part of the fraternity and not the enemy.

But the parts that I find most compelling have to do with the process of association.

De Tocqueville found the United States to be populated by joiners -- people who spontaneously associated in various types of clubs and groups, formal and informal, as their first response to any sort of challenge.

"If a stoppage occurs in a thoroughfare and the circulation of vehicles is hindered," he wrote, "the neighbors immediately form themselves into a deliberative body; and this extemporaneous assembly gives rise to an executive power which remedies the inconvenience before anybody has thought of recurring to a pre-existing authority superior to that of the persons immediately concerned."

In other words, when faced with a problem, Americans get together in groups and solve it. But it's not just about problem-solving; it's about everything.

In his second volume: "Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies, in which all take part, but associations of a thousand other kinds, religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive. The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it is proposed to inculcate some truth or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society. Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association."

The reason I find all of this interesting and germane to the question of how journalists should use the Internet is simple: I think the ultimate product of journalism is a political product.

By informing, we empower individuals to take an active and participatory role in defining our collective future. Our real product is not the newspaper or the website or the corporate profit margin, but rather a democratic society that works.

If that is our actual goal, how should we use the Internet?

Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam cites de Tocqueville and the American practice of forming associations in Bowling Alone, his landmark book on "the collapse and revival of the American community."

Putnam documents a decline in our tendency to form and join associations, and correlates that with a number of depressing statistics including the decline of interest in, and readership of, newspapers. Journalism is part of community, drawing from and contributing to the process.

Democracy works when people have a strong enough web of trust that they are able to work together, and when people have faith that their own actions can make a difference.

Both our trust and our faith are endangered by an array of powerful forces as diverse as entertainment television, the automobile, and the cynical political consultant who seeks to divide us in order that his clients may conquer. As we withdraw from the process of association and pull back from civic life, we suffer both individual and collective setbacks.

But if we understand that as journalists we are participants in this process, and not mere observers (or victims), we may find clues that lead us to an answer to my question.

Print journalists tend to look at the Internet as a publishing platform, a distribution channel that they should adopt only on the principle that "readers" should be able to get "news" in any form they might prefer.

But that misses the salient characteristic of the Internet. It is a network in which all nodes are created equal, and endowed by their creators with with the potential to contribute and participate as well as consume.

This democratizes and transforms journalism from an institution belonging to persons of rank ("professionals") to one that is open to all, and that is disruptive. But it also creates opportunity if we recognize that our goal should be an informed and engaged democratic society that works.

By convening, by leading and facilitating conversational processes, we can feed and reinvigorate the American habit of association that de Tocqueville saw in the 1830s. We can help rebuild the "social capital" that Putnam describes as declining.

But to do this, we have to not only rethink our jobs and recognize the constructive role we play in community. We also must confront some fears. These include fear of technology, fear of our own inadequate skill sets, fear of opinion, and ultimately fear of the "people formerly known as the audience."

And we need to understand the big value of small talk.

There are many ways to fail when convening community, whether online or off.

The abandoned garden represents one kind of failure. A newspaper launches a forum or adds commenting capabilities to its website with no statement of principle, no aspirations other than adding some cheap pageviews, no leadership, no management, and often no rules. The result is chaos and damage.

But the opposite also is possible. Diving into the deep end of the social capital pool also can lead to failure. An empty forum and a failed "citizen journalism" project are as forlorn as an empty restaurant.

To succeed we need, as de Tocqueville described, both the "enormous" and the "diminutive."

Human beings naturally exchange meaningless pleasantries about the weather before engaging in serious conversation. When we seek to build community online, we have to recognize that the small interactions are how we establish the social norms and the trust relationships that can open the door to productive and serious conversation.

The Saguaro Seminar prescribes "150 things you can do to build social capital." Some of them are very small actions. I particularly like "ask neighbors for help and reciprocate." Borrow a shovel, then return it. You've done something very small that can transform a relationship.

Now apply that to the Internet. And heed de Tocqueville's words:

"In democratic countries the science of association is the mother of science; the progress of all the rest depends upon the progress it has made. ... If men are to remain civilized or to become so, the art of associating together must grow and improve in the same ratio in which the equality of conditions is increased."

B (Baltimore Sun) launched last week and a bunch of new Examiner sites in the process of launching in cities where the Examiner doesn't (yet?) publish in print. They share a webby characteristic that's radically different from the typical newspaper: They link. To the competition. Like crazy.

B is the new free youth-targeted daily newspaper. bthesite.com is the website that accompanies it, and it's built entirely around group blogging. They're linking to WBAL, the Baltimore Examiner, the Washington Post, a couple of community organizations, Sports Illustrated and the mothership Baltimore Sun.

Travis Henry, former YourHub editor who jumped ship to the Examiner, sent me a link to the Denver Examiner site. When I looked the lead item was a summary/link directly to the Denver Post. Other headlines link to the Rocky and local TV stations, as well as to Examiner content. National headlines link directly to Fox News and ABC.

How refreshingly nonparanoid! It reminds me of this quote from Peter Gabriel that I stumbled across in a link someone (I forget who) posted to Facebook:

"My friend Brian Eno has been going on for some time about the increasingly important role of the curator over the creator."

What's he talking about? Here's another way of putting it: Context creates value. And another way: Loyalty accrues to the place that helps you find things, not necessarily the place that produces things.

If the world unfolded as predicted by Bill Gates, printed newspapers would be dead in the next four years. While he may turn out to have been directionally correct and merely wrong about the timing, it's been interesting to watch the world change around Microsoft and slowly render the software giant impotent at a time when newspapers continue to hang around and even start new print publications.

While it is surely premature to pronounce dead a company with a 263.2 billion USD market capitalization, the writing is on the wall: the era of the PC has ended. The Web is the center of the universe and the PC is just one of many peripherals.

Now Microsoft is saying that openly. After a series of high-profile failures (PlaysForSure, Zune, and now Vista) from Redmond, it needs to change its way of thinking from top to bottom to embrace Web services. (This is why it wants to buy Yahoo, an effort that I think will fail even if it succeeds.)

The problem is that MS has no particular advantage as a service provider -- other than mountains of available cash to fund development, which often is not the advantage you might expect. On the minus side, it has a demonstrated track record of incompetency and inability to stick with an idea long enough to make it work.

Just this week Microsoft told people who made purchases from its failed MSN Music online store that "as of August 31, 2008, we will no longer be able to support the retrieval of license keys for the songs you purchased from MSN Music or the authorization of additional computers."

Microsoft is surrounded by smart, more agile competitors, many of which have nothing to lose. As we move from desktop to mobile-centric Internet access, free Linux -- especially in the form of the Google-financed Android project -- will be the dominant platform. This will lead to an explosion of small-scale disruptive, innovative development, overwhelming Microsoft like an attack of fire ants.

Is there any value to newspapers in studying this, other than misery loving company?

I think it illuminates two options for newspaper companies, which are in many ways in the same trap as Microsoft.

One path is to embrace and leverage processes modeled on the principles of "open source" development, as Google is doing. This requires abandoning the arrogant hostility toward the reader that you find in many newsrooms, banning the language "unwashed masses" from thought as well as conversation. The Founding Fathers referred to "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind," a concept disturbingly absent among many journalists who are eager to latch onto other concepts expressed in that era, such as freedom of the press.

The other path is suggested by a line generally attributed to F. Scott Fitzgerald: "The cleverly expressed opposite of any generally accepted idea is worth a fortune to somebody." This essentially is Apple's path, the closed system where value is created through enforced simplicity and clarity. But can newspapers cleverly express anything? The quality of writing, and the quality of thought, in most of America's 1,400 or so newspapers is not encouraging.

My rule of thumb is a simple one: Use the right tool for the right job. The Internet's strength is collaborative interaction; print's strengths are linearity, focus and serendipitous discovery.

So in my world newspapers should use the Internet to execute a Google-like, open-source-inspired, conversational approach to journalism, while remaking print around focus, quality, depth and thought-provoking discovery. I'm troubled when I see newspapers trying to badly copy the Web's strengths into print (i.e. those awful Page 2 summaries of news you already know about) and failing to invest in journalism worth reading.

So in my vision of the future, the Web is not exactly the center of the media universe. It's one of the centers, and it's optimized for open interaction and community-driven conversation. Print should focus on our need for periodic escape from the cacophony of the bazaar. If we do that, perhaps newspapers will still be around for awhile. Maybe even longer than Microsoft. Who knows?

The other day in an email to a friend I referred to "the economic tsunami that seems headed for the U.S. newspaper industry."

Is that overstated? If you recently lost your job in a newsroom cutback, you probably don't think so.

But when I was traveling last week I saw something that surprised me.

The "Boxing Day tsunami" from the 2004 Great Sumatra-Andaman earthquake was a horrible thing, leading to 300,000 deaths and staggering destruction.

Many of us watched the amateur videos that were quickly posted to the Internet, some of them shot on camera phones.

We saw buildings collapsing, people pulled into the sea, and far worse.

Yet in my stay on Ko Phuket, on the Andaman sea in Thailand, I didn't see defeat. I saw life going on, undoubtedly changed but nevertheless defined by optimism and growth. I saw new construction. I saw hotels full of happy tourists and restaurants full of diners.

And on a food stand sign on Ko Phi Phi I ran across a sign: "Thank you to the tsunami that enabled me to have this shop today."

It was a powerful reminder that in any great change, even one as horrible as the 2004 tsunami, there are going to be winners.

Which we be? That is likely to turn on how we respond. We can sit and bemoan the passing of the era of the great metropolitan newspaper or we can choose to look for ways to invent the future. I think journalism will be changed, but it's going to survive.

In my PublishAsia presentation in Macau I walked through a general business case for social networking as an integrated feature of a news website.

The argument goes like this: We have an audience problem. We can fix our sales incentives, train our people, tune our pricing and our packaging, and replace leadership as necessary. But at the end of the day we're going to hit a very hard wall. That wall is available advertising inventory that meets the advertisers' needs.

That inventory comes from audience, from reach (unique users) multiplied by frequency (pageviews per user).

And while the reach numbers may look good, the frequency numbers suck.

It's even worse than the raw pageview-driven ad inventory would suggest. An effective advertising campaign requires repetition of the message until you really, really understand that Geico is so easy even a caveman can do it. There's an old ad-biz rule of thumb that a message has to be repeated seven times to be understood. If your average user visits your site twice a month, how can you possibly deliver effective ad campaigns?

We know that the tools of social networking -- connections, activities, notifications -- are powerful tools for driving frequency. But they're effective only among the minority of users who use them.

That's not enough.

There is no single solution to this problem. So we need to be looking for a broader toolkit of partial solutions, social networking being just one part of that toolkit.

What else works -- measurably?

Some obvious possibilities:

• Frequent news updating. Works for news junkies; ineffective for everybody else.
• RSS feeds that are limited to headlines and summaries. Works for people who want to read the rest of the story; can work against you with people who only want an overview.
• Newsletters that promote and link back to the site. I get one of these every day from NBC, but for some reason it's hard to get journalists to write them. Maybe we need to cut news staffs and hire marketers so we can get people to read the news?
• Games and promotions that require repeat visitation. Maybe our websites need to take a hint from the Brit papers, with their Wingo and such.
• Applications embedded in other social networks (i.e. Facebook). So far what I'm hearing is that these deliver very limited payback. Are they worth it?

I'm looking for success stories here -- even partial success stories. But failure stories would be useful, too.

From Pew Research: "The financial crisis facing news organizations is so grave that it is now overshadowing concerns about the quality of news coverage, the flagging credibility of the news media, and other problems that have been very much on the minds of journalists over the past decade."

From Editor and Publisher: "The McClatchy Co. reported at the close of the market that total revenue in February slid 11.7% to $156 million while advertising revenue plunged 13.3% to $130 million on weakness in the classified category."

From Dow Jones, via CNN: "The digital wave washing over newspapers has turned into a tsunami in the past several weeks, as hundreds of newsroom layoffs coast- to-coast are raising fears that the push for profits and a dismal economy are teaming up to accomplish the unthinkable -- putting the print industry in its grave."

OK, I think we're past the denial stage now. So who's responding in an interesting way. I don't mean interesting as in gee, "who's getting canned now?" I mean interesting as in reorganizing the newsroom to work more efficiently, redesigning the products to be more interesting and relevant, retargeting the advertising sales process to go after new money from new customers?

A crisis is a terrible thing to waste. Are there any success stories out there, or are we all just sitting around and whining?