newspapers

Last week I heard someone refer to "NCN nostalgia." Just before the dot-boom, a bunch of newspaper companies got together and imagined an online future in which newspapers would be key players through something called New Century Network, which would be the definitive news resource on the Internet.

It all fell apart amid corporate bickering, and the inability of big media companies to cooperate was rightly blamed. But there was something else at work: technology was evolving faster than anyone's business vision.

I remember seeing one of the early NCN definitions in the form of a request for proposals to provide infrastructure for the network. The idea was for a federation of closed, paid-access websites, where you could navigate from site to site on a single membership pass. This was in the early days of Infinet, when newspaper companies thought they could have a sustainable business selling dialup Internet access.

By the time the RFP made it through the fax machine (yes, it was faxed) the idea was obsolete. Switch gears: Open portal. Switch gears: search engine. Switch gears: ad network. None of it worked and some players were left angry and bitter.

Enough time has passed that NCN nostalgia is at hand. And it surfaces in Jon Fine's Business Week column for next week. The idea of "Search Engines as Leeches on the Web" is a powerful one. But the way people use technology continues to evolve at a breathtaking pace. The notion that a we-tell-you news cartel would be relevant in a conversational universe may already be obsolete.

The alternative weekly Austin Chronicle says its rival daily American-Statesman "blunders with bland blogging" and has failed to engage the public with its public blogs, which it says have "the communal energy of the Yarborough Branch library on free beer nuts night." It's the usual alt-media sniping but there are some points to be found.

One is that blogging is its own art form that demands a different tone than that which prevails in newspapers. No question. (I could also argue that newspapers need a different tone than the prevailing winds.)

I tracked down Fred Zipp and Rich Oppel's tandem blog, "Rich & Fred" -- with no help from the Chronicle's writer Kevin Brass, who didn't provide a link. Not a lot of buzz, but I didn't see anything from that set off my arrogance detector. Still, the caveat is a good one for any newspaper staffers who stick a toe in these waters.

The other has to do with the Austin newspaper's effort to support blogging by the public on its own sites, which may indeed be failing.

Austin360 sports a shiny new design that's entirely built around calendaring. Where are the public blogs? I have no idea. I'm sure they're out there someplace, but neither of the newspaper's two websites treats them as a centerpiece.

You cannot succeed in this space by treating public blogging as a third-tier sideline when others -- such as Blogger, Myspace and LiveJournal -- focus on it.

But I find the Chronicle's article off-base here: "While the idea of 'citizen journalism' is a quaint idea for college professors to bat around over lattes at Starbucks, the best bloggers – the ones drawing interest and audiences – tend to be, at the very least, semiprofessionals, laser-focused on a particular industry, company, or community, not soccer moms with a zest for writing newsy diaries."

That just reeks of newsroom arrogance. The kind of organic citizen journalism (I prefer the term "participation") that we're cultivating at BlufftonToday.com happens to be largely powered by soccer moms. If you don't think soccer moms are laser-focused on their own communities and very capable of discovering what's going on and talking about it online, then you probably don't actually know any. Daily Kos and Wonkette are fine for obsessive political nerds, but that's not the life of real people.

Thanks to JD for pointing to the Chronicle item.

Pretty much every conventional U.S. daily newspaper published east of the Rocky Mountains has egg on its face this morning. So do some in the west. Contrary to what you may have found rolled up in your driveway this morning, 12 miners were not found alive in Tallmansville, W. Va. Between the time the presses rolled and the time the papers were delivered, the story took a tragic turn.

This isn't a new problem; I wrestled with it for years as a daily newspaper wire editor. But the world has moved on, and newspapers have not.

Most are still pretending to be the primary connector of a news-hungry population with the outside world. Most still think of themselves as gatekeepers. Most are still stuck on the idea of a "newspaper of record" -- if we don't write about it, it didn't really happen. Meanwhile, most Americans have switched from newspapers to television, 24-hour cable news, and the Internet for breaking news, especially disaster coverage.

It's time to sunset the 20th century. It's been over for five years now.

In the Wizard of Oz, the Wicked Witch of the West said: "These things must be done delicately, or you hurt the spell." Most newspaper journalists believe that; there's a deep-seated fear of alienating "our loyal readers" by making radical changes.

I'm not afraid of that. "Our loyal readers" aren't going anywhere, except inevitably to the grave.

I'm afraid of something else: never succeeding with an entire generation that has grown up in a digital universe where everything is connected, where everything is everywhere, where technology has broken the barriers of time and space. A universe where what you know is held not necessarily in your brain, but behind a Google query. A universe where everyone is a publisher and no one has to depend on outdated information thrown into the driveway from a delivery truck.

This should be a wake-up call to every newspaper editor. Get your key staff members in a room with a whiteboard. Write down the six things your newspaper can do really well. Then compare that list with what's really in your newspaper. I'll bet you'll find a big disconnect.