Alter Egos and Just Plain Egos

The Social Media Club of Richmond's September meeting at the Empire Theatre was an exercise in One of These Things Is Not Like the Other. The theme was "Alter Egos, Identities and Covert Operations." There were three panelists who write under other names or who keep their identities shrouded, one who wrote a satirical news Onion-like website with an imaginary staff, and then there was Gene Cox.

Cox, the long-time news anchor for WWBT, has always just tweeted as himself. Maybe he was included on the panel because there was a short-lived parody Twitter account based on him, but it was an unsuccessful attempt because Cox doesn't take his own Twittering seriously, so how can you parody it?

That aside, did anything surprise me? A few things.

I had had some direct messaging exchanges with @thecheckoutgirl where she told me no one would ever confuse her for a boy, despite a blog entry about that very thing happening once at the grocery store where she works. From that I surmised she was buxom. Also, because she told me her bra size.

It was a surprise to find she was the mother of teenagers, after being surprised to learn she was a mother at all when she started a second blog marginally about motherhood at fuckyeahmotherhood.com. (The Check Out Girl blog is an empty shell and all posts are gone, for reasons I don't know. She eluded during the panel to being outed at work, and there is a strange recent post about a really tragic pet death that she introduces as the death of The Check Out Girl, and tries to make funny, but…no, it's tragic and horrible. I hope it's not true.)

But anyway, seeing her did not surprise me, but we'll revisit it later in Most Awkward Moments of the Evening.

I also knew that Jocelyn Testes-Harder was not a real person. (Really -- the name, think about it -- and redneck women don't usually go by hyphenated names because it is frankly too much writing.). "Her" writing style was too cosmopolitan and educated for the tooth-missing, mullet-haired woman who is the blog's avatar. I wasn't quite expecting the preppy looking man behind her, but I knew it was a man. I was expecting someone more arty looking, not a guy who looks like he works at the bank.

I was surprised Gene Cox feels he has to be careful about what he tweets because his boss and his boss' boss follow him. I would think he is at a point in his career where he is untouchable, but apparently not. He has been instructed, he told us, to just read the news straight and say no more, so tweeting is his outlet for his inner Jon Stewart.

And finally, I was surprised that moderator Jason Roop was such a very adequate singer, and was even more relaxed on stage than Gene Cox, who has spent his life on camera. I knew there was a rehearsal the night before and wondered how in the world you rehearse a moderated panel, but the night ended with a song parody of "Islands in the Stream" where the panelists at first seemed embarrassed as Jason sang about them, but then @thecheckoutgirl stood up and joined in the song just as nicely, so it was all an act. And a good one. I suspect there is a drama club in Roop's past. Or "Glee" is the story of his life.

Other Observations:

Much of the humor (and I am almost tempted to put the word humor in quotes here) of The Checkout Girl, Filthy Richmond and Cafe Darkness is based on being annoyed with their fellow man. They make fun of other people, sometimes very cruelly. And there's an element of self-loathing. Often the humor is vile, (although the value of vile humor is a matter of taste. My husband watches "South Park." It makes me cringe.)

(I am going to give Tobacco Avenue a pass here because its humor is a more benign parody of Richmond and its local celebrities, and is usually tasteful and genuinely funny. Also, Jeff Kelley does not appear to be a young man who loathes himself.)

During the evening, the panel insulted or offended a variety of their fellow men. Woe be to you if you are:

-- Meade Skelton, a true innocent who blogs his wistful musical ambitions in a painfully honest voice and has become a subject of ridicule and amusement to the bar crowd

-- Shoppers at The Check Out Girl's store

-- People who write comments on blogs and don't know how to use apostrophes

-- Mothers of babies proud enough to write about them and post photos

-- Babies in general

-- People on Facebook

-- "Older moms" on Facebook who are relieving the monotony of their lives by playing a little interactive Farmville 

-- Co-workers in general everywhere

-- The Toothless

-- Panhandlers who smoke

-- People who tweet about drinking, enjoying, buying, or needing coffee

-- Anyone who has had the misfortune to ask Cafe Darkness on a date, only to be ridiculed as a moron as she live tweets the date. "I've got to let other people know how dumb you are," she said. I felt bad for that guy. It's never fun to be the butt of a joke, and such cruelty seems high-schoolish.

I have to congratulate Gene Cox who consistently returned the conversation back to more uplifting themes, and he was the only one I saw frequently quoted on my Twitter stream during the conference.

"There's a drive in all of us to say something…and we want someone to hear it," he said. He enjoys the brevity restrictions of Twitter. Blogs too often lend themselves to overwriting, and all the panelists agreed that they were blogging less since they went on Twitter. Blogging is like...work.

"The older I get, the list of things I worry about gets shorter," Cox said, maybe to offset the others who had spiraled through all the annoying things they suffer in their lives that needed to be insulted or denigrated by tweets.

Cox also told stories about how his tweets complaining about businesses and service have been noticed by those businesses, which respond with free coupons and apologies. I've had that experience, too, so it's not just because he's famous. 

And now, what you've been waiting for:

The Most Awkward Moments

A guy came out during the middle of the discussion in an elaborate costume of some animal sort and handed out bananas to the panelists for what Roop said was a "potassium break." The audience did not laugh, maybe because they were waiting for the punchline, which didn't come. The distribution of the bananas was the joke but something was missing. Later during the panel, Cox unintentionally delivered the pay-off when he asked, apropos of nothing, "Why am I holding a banana?" That got a big laugh, and was widely tweeted, and of course, makes no sense whatsoever if you saw the tweet. You had to be there, I guess.

Jeff Kelley backed himself in a corner when asked to discuss the most surprising thing he had learned from the panel, and he said The Check Out Girl's early blog entries were written in such a "sultry" way, he was expecting someone entirely different. He was expecting a "hot blonde." 

Which is another way of saying;  you are not hot.

But I knew what he was trying to say because I had noticed it, too. Men who I knew were happily married would tweet back to @thecheckoutgirl in such a flirtatious way, I used to wonder what's going on here? They were too obsessed with finding out who she was and where she worked. Something about the way she wrote about her cranky, rude customers was indeed, as Kelley awkwardly tried to explain, tinged with a mysteriously alluring subtext. And then one by one, the flirtatious tweeting stopped. I surmised they had found her and been disappointed. Around that time, her style took a scatological and vagina-monological turn that was so raw, I had to back away, too. She peppered her panel talk that evening with a few shocking comments, like a reference to menstrual blood pouring into her shoes at work. While that stuff happens, the telling of it seldom turns men on, and I felt like rushing on stage and escorting the startled Gene Cox to a safe place. 

But she also said, in a revealing moment, that it's all a parody of other Tweeters and bloggers, and testing jokes for a possible stand-up comedy act. (A local Lisa Lampanelli?) Her "real pain" she doesn't write about. And now it all fits, because real deep pain often travels with this kind of no-boundaries humor. I can relate. I know whenever I am relatively content or feel safe, or possibly even happy, my ability to write funny eludes me.

And the last Most Awkward Moment was when Cafe Darkness accused Gene Cox of unfollowing her. He looked apologetically puzzled. Then she offered a possible explanation. She had just fired off a tweet full of "fuck yous" and "fuck thats," and poof, he unfollowed her. She appeared offended that Mr. Cox might choose to exercise his right to not want her invectives clogging up his Twitter stream. How dare he?

One thing the younger generation doesn't understand is they've grown up in a society where the "ef" word is as common as "phooey" and they've been inundated with it in movies to the point where it has no shock value anymore. But to older people like Mr. Cox, and myself, it still resonates like a slap in the face. We still imagine we live in a Polite Society where such language is reserved for extreme moments, the verbal equivalent of an atomic bomb over Nagasaki. I actually feel beat up when someone peppers their conversation with obscenities. It's not a good feeling, so if I can walk away from it with a simple unfollow click, I do, too. Again, I wanted to rush on stage and escort Mr. Cox to a safe place where he still had the right to unfollow a cursing girl and not be chastised publicly for it.

So, the Twitter hashtag #smcrva was aglow afterward that it was the best SMCRVA meeting ever, and it actually was. We don't need guest speakers to come in and tell us how to do it. We just want to talk about ourselves. Isn't that what social media is?

Good bye Brick, Not Even a Nice Try

During most of Brick Weekly and Brick Reloaded's life, I had to hold my tongue because my son was pulling down a weekly check from the publication for shooting one or two events each weekend. The photos were usually used on the cover and in a two-page photo spread. You can see many of those photos still on Brick's long-neglected website.

Getting his photo assignment was always a last-minute thing. After the editor was sent packing and never replaced with anyone who knew the difference between a newspaper and a shopper, the photo assignments came from whoever was last in the office on Friday afternoon, and not much thought went into it. Several times I found myself scanning event calendars on Saturday afternoon trying to find something worth a two-page spread for him to shoot, since whoever was running Brick had just said, whatever you want to shoot is fine with us. I would think, this is a Media General product and they don't seem to care if it's good or not. Why are they doing this?

Then last spring, they started using him less. There was still money, so the last person in the office on Friday started throwing the assignment to his friends and their camera phones. Because who cared at that point about quality?

Brick folds next week. I'm surprised it lasted this long. I could count the ads each issue on one hand. It started out as Punchline brought back as a zombie. The format of snarky, hostile replies to letter writers, inside jokes in the small type, and a mix of boring, dense articles from third rate syndicates was all too reflective of the editor's personal tastes and interests. That format had already failed once. You would think someone would say, okay, let's try something that might actually have a broader appeal.

But, no. Eventually they let the editor go, but didn't change the format except to gradually phase out every single local writer except Chris Bopst, whose columns are just not enough to support a wide reader base. And Bopst was not even exclusive to Brick. He also wrote for the RVANews website.

People don't pick up newspapers to read syndicated material. You will not last long doing that. And people don't go to newspapers to read reviews of movies, books or music. The national stuff is all available everywhere on the Internet. You really need big local coverage from local writers who can infuriate and delight readers, sometimes at the same time.

The embarrassments were legion: using dirty language in a misguided effort to appeal to hipsters; the made-up letters to the editor, which destroy a paper's credibility; restaurants writing their own reviews; cheesy strip club ads on the back page. Who exactly was the market here?

The only amazing thing about the paper were the classifieds, which appeared to have more genuine help wanted ads than even the Sunday Times-Dispatch. And I knew one person who enjoyed doing the puzzles.

Why did Media General never put a real editor in charge of the paper and package some reporting and opinion writing that would appeal to a target audience? It is not that hard. I could go to the RVAblogs website, pick a few bloggers that are particularly talented and knowledgeable in a variety of topics, offer them a modest payment for a weekly contribution, and have plenty of material to edit into a lively, creative and interesting paper that these writers could then cross promote on their blogs and Twitter feeds.

Most street papers have to struggle to fill the ad sales positions, but Brick had a built-in room full of newspaper ad salesmen. All they had to do was give them a great product to sell the hell out of. And the one thing that every real journalist knows is you never, ever let the ad salesmen be in charge of the paper's content.

Nothing about putting together a paper that reflected this moment in time in the history of Richmond's up and coming youth culture should have been a problem...except working with Media General, I guess. How could they have failed so miserably at their own profession?

Playing Nice in the Social Media Sandbox

Is there anything new to learn about social media? Or is there just too much to learn, and as soon as you think you know something, things change? Yesterday I had a breakfast meeting on social media I paid $10 to attend, and an after-work meeting that also cost me $10. So what's my money's worth of information?

I've been putting out social media for work and personal use for nearly 18 months now. How am I doing?

I heard about Facebook landing pages in the morning. I didn't know they existed, and it was a brief mention in passing. The rest of the presentation was fairly basic and obvious information. I had to go back to the office and watch a YouTube video on how to create a landing page to realize what it was and what it was used for. (It's 2012 now, and I think they have since disappeared in the everchanging landscape of Facebook.)

Companies are making money creating these landing pages for clients, which are essentially, a single web page.

I heard about QR codes, which I think won't be in common use for awhile yet, so I have time to figure that out. (2012, probably don't have to. It's not catching on.)

I learned we should be thrilled about Ustream broadcasting, even though the quality is usually crappy. I decided not to be concerned with that either. I'm still thrilled about how easy the Flip Video camera is and it's not crappy. (2012, Cisco decided last year to stop making this great little camera because people shoot video on their phones now. Phone video is not as good.)

The evening session was on evaluating social content. There were more PowerPoint slides. Whoever figures out something more dynamic than a PowerPoint slideshow will be the next software billionaire. And I have yet to attend any presentation where the projector and computer worked from the beginning. Or that the first people to arrive didn't sit in the aisle seats and make everyone else crawl over them.

There were mentions of various Internet tools to measure performance, most of which cost something to use. The presenter used the expression "play nice in the sandbox" four times. Once it was used to explain why he thought you should follow everyone on Twitter who follows you, even if you are never going to have the time or interest to read all their posts.

Why? I asked. Why not just have the stream you want or is useful for you? Because it's playing nice in the sandbox, he said. For results people, it's all about numbers, and this is a number. The lady who twitters for Strange's Florist said she follows everyone and reads all their posts to learn about what kind of gardening everyone is doing. (Wonder how long she kept that up.)

I feel like if you follow everyone, you are going to get pitched by other marketeers more than you want to be.

There is a guy on Twitter who is always bragging about his number of followers. If he reached 1,000, he wanted 5,000. If he was at 5,695, he kept begging for more followers until he had an even 6,000. Why? He didn't read them. He probably only looked at his mentions. What did the number mean? It doesn't mean all those followers are reading him because they may be just collecting him like he is collecting them.

At a staff meeting, a person tweeting for another department bragged about having 700 followers. Wondering if I could entice any of them to follow our department, I went through her list and found marketeers from around the world, pornbots, and empty shell twitter accounts. If I counted only the real people who were likely to use her department's services, she really didn't have any more followers than I did. But saying "700" in a meeting sounds better than "346."

Lurking in all this is the thought that if you have a certain number, you will be paid to send out monetized tweets. That's where all these measurement guys come in with their charts and graphs, looking at all the demographics of your pool. And this was the core of the evening lecture, to study and analyze and chart and graph your audience so you would know exactly what piece of bait to put on your hook.

Advertising and marketing is so eager to get into social media as a delivery tool, it spoils social media as something we were playing with for enjoyment. It's like when cable tv starting having commercials just like broadcast television. Why am I watching commercials and paying for cable? What happened to my sandbox? I started using it for work, that's what, and now it's work.

What Happened to the Press Women?

I didn't go to the Virginia Press Women conference in Roanoke last Friday because even though I had received a postcard informing me I had won something, Roanoke is just too far to go. I am not a fan of that long ride down Interstate 81, and I made that trip last year to go to a conference in Blacksburg. Once a decade is enough.

I figured I'd find out what I won in the Saturday newspaper. But the Times-Dispatch didn't have a Saturday story, or a Sunday one that I could find online. I googled my name and came up with nothing new. Only the Fredericksburg paper had posted a story on Saturday, and that was about the people from the Fredericksburg area who won awards. If anyone else in the state did, that was not news in Fredericksburg.

So I went to my real source of information, Twitter, and posted a plea for information. Sunday night, the editor of the Richmond Good Life website, a news aggregator, tweeted back that the Virginia Press Women website had finally posted a press release. I had won first place for full color newsletters!

Yeh! But wait. There was no second place or third. I was in a class by myself. Apparently a full color newsletter is so expensive and useless, no one does them anymore. My nearest competitor was the George Washington Foundation, which had entered a spot color newsletter and also came in first in that very specific category without any competition.The more competitive fields were for web writing.

Then I realized the reason the Times-Dispatch had taken no interest in publishing this story. There were no winners from the Times-Dispatch. Back in the days when I yearned to be considered a Virginia Press Woman, the Times-Dispatch and Norfolk newspapers dominated these awards. No one from the Virginia Pilot won anything either.

I looked over the list again and found that out of 54 men (yes, there was one) and women winning awards from the Virginia Press Women, only six of them actually worked full time at newspapers, and those newspapers were the Farmville Herald, the Fredericksburg Freelance Star, and the Henrico Citizen. Media General, which owns a big block of newspapers in this state, had either not budgeted for contest entries or their female employees are in such fear of losing their jobs, they don't want to call attention to themselves?

Or maybe there are no women left working full-time for major newspapers. Twenty-four of the winners listed themselves as freelance writers. Seven did communications and public relations for colleges and universities. Twelve worked in communications for businesses, non-profits or government. One listed herself only as a web content librarian, which may be another word for freelance. Three were from magazines. One entry was in radio. 

Of the web category awards, only one winner worked for a newspaper. Two were magazine web pages, four were college web pages, nine were associated with businesses, nonprofits or government, and five were freelance, so there's no telling where their web writing or editing appeared. Does this mean I can start entering my blogs? (It turns out, yes.)

The "Press" in Virginia Press Women is dying as surely as newspapers. This organization needs to rename and rebrand itself if it wants to embrace a wider membership of young women entering the communications field. (They did by 2014!) The hottest job title these days is "social media manager." 

Weaning Ourselves Off the News Print

My husband survived another Sunday without the advertising inserts from the Sunday paper. That is his only interest in the Sunday paper, and it was so intense, after I finally let our Sunday-only subscription expire, he went to the 7-11 for three weeks to purchase the paper. I made him buy me a lottery ticket every time he went, so maybe his intense dislike of the lottery finally helped to wean him off the paper.

His argument, and that of others who have posted comments, was we recouped our investment in the Sunday paper by using the food coupons. That's possible, but cutting out and sorting the coupons was becoming as much of a chore as flipping through the Sunday sections looking for articles I was interested in reading -- which was always not many. I was down to reading just one comic, just the fake letters in the Parade section, and maybe an article in the Money section. The want ads were down to three or four pages at best.

News print is dirty, smeared and difficult to read. The size of the newspaper is difficult to handle. Who has a kitchen table these days where they spread out this huge paper, and flip through the pages? Who even has a leisurely Sunday to do that? With the end of blue laws, Sunday is a major shopping day. You can even go to Ukrop's (uh...Martin's) now. I would come back as a subscriber in a second if the Times-Dispatch went to a daily tabloid format, but as many times as I tell them they need to imitate the New York Daily News and the New York Post, they ignore me. Even though we don't have subways except for sandwiches, we are a commuter society and if print survives, it's going to have to be as a more portable format.

But back to those suggestions that the Sunday paper pays for itself through coupons. No, it doesn't. If you are married to a shopaholic, the Sunday paper ad inserts, especially from Best Buy and hhGregg, were temptations to buy things you didn't previously know you wanted. That last Sunday paper he bought actually cost me $375 because a Craftsman rolling on wheels toolbox he wanted was on sale at Sears. It has been two weeks now and there are still no tools in that toolbox, and probably never will be. Maybe a few will go in eventually, but then they'll drift back to the last place they were used, and eventually they will disappear or rust up from being left out in the rain. The toolbox is a promise to get organized that will be broken. I have been through this many times before.

At least the Sunday paper will no longer be a guilty party in this.

The Legal of Social at SMCRVA

This month's Social Media Club of Richmond VA meeting on "The Legal of Social" was the most informative one of the series, and yet I have few notes.

Maybe it's because the presenter, fast-talking lawyer Chris Gates, opened with the closer: there is no social media law.

Okay then! Back to the cash bar!

If you paid attention in your libel law class in j-school, you know the basics already. Libel is hard to prove and a hard case to win, and if you are in any way a public figure, even within your own community, too bad. People can say whatever they want about you. On the other hand, try not to be the type of person who says whatever they want about other people. It's just not nice.

Blog and website hosters with open comments sections should post a policy in advance about what kind of posts will be taken down. You can have standards, as long as everyone knows them going in. What's said in the comments section is not your problem. Comment liability belongs to the commenter.

What kinds of things shouldn't you tweet or post? Well, how dangerously do you want to live? You probably shouldn't tweet trade secrets, or insider trading info that could impact stock prices of your company. You definitely shouldn't tweet nasty things about your boss or co-workers, that you're cheating on your spouse, or you buried the mailman under the house.

If you like to tweet or post ideas for movies or inventions, and then someone else makes that movie or invention, you may have a hard time proving you hold the rights to it on a tweet alone. And if you are the first to hashtag the rallying cry that wins the war and rights the economy, don't expect to get any credit for it. Settle for being a legend in your own mind. Who invented #SNOMG anyway?

If you're an adult outside the privacy of your home and you are photographed doing something stupid, illegal or naked, and that photograph appears on the Internet, kind of too bad for you. I imagine if you invite all your friends over to your private house and they all have camera phones, and you do something stupid, you may be equally screwed. Moral: don't be stupid. Or naked.

And avoid misunderstandings by giving your tweets and posts those stupid emoticons because the Internet doesn't have a tone of voice or facial expression to clue people into the context. ;P

There were several questions about the sticky area of adults and children interacting on the Internet. Photo releases at registration for events are recommended. Teachers letting their students be their Facebook friends? Hmmm, no. That's just asking for trouble. (Why not set up a classroom fan page, but keep your personal profile private?) Chatting with underaged kids online even if you work with them during the day? Not good.

Rhythm Hall at the Carpenter Center was standing room only at this event.

What Probably Went Down at the Beheading

It's a PR flak's job not to stop trying, so you can't fault that person for persistently bugging a reporter to the brink of insanity. As a result, one previously unknown motivational speaker who would have had a limited turn-out for his speech just scored a bonanza of free publicity and cast a massive PC guilt trip over all the liberals in town. If you don't come to his speech now, the verbal terrorists have won. From a PR point of view, that flak is a genius.

But who are we kidding? People say disparaging things about others in the privacy of their work groups, especially under stress, extreme aggravation, or just to be funny. Who gets more publicly insulted than overweight people? What comedian hasn't let slip a joke about the governor of New York's visual disability? Who hasn't "The Family Guy" insulted? Yes, it's part of the culture. Tasteful and polite we're not. So why did a local reporter get axed today?

On the local level, when you're in a sensitive official position, you have to know better than to put an unPC insult in writing. Then there's the nightmare of hitting the REPLY button on the email instead of FORWARD. This isn't the first time email technology has resulted in dire consequences. What happened was, the reporter thought he was forwarding an email from the flak to his editor, adding a note that the flak was a super annoying person in unflattering language. The flak, a minority, promptly went to the publisher and expressed outrage, and the firing was instant.

A decade ago, I professionally competed against the reporter in question. This behavior wasn't out of character. He's had similar dust-ups at other jobs. Those of us who travel in the same circles have heard about them. It is part of what makes him good at what he does, actually. He's an aggressive reporter. But journalism in Richmond has historically been a bow tie profession for gentlemen. There's no other explanation for why the premiere investigative reporter in the area was allowed to leave the city's only daily newspaper, and no one with the same skill set has ever taken his place there.

I have no doubt his paper flogged him for brash behavior, loose talk, chronically missing deadlines, or being less than tactful with sources in order to squeeze info out of them. Still, he advanced to the next level, the daily Times-Dispatch with its grim, humorless copy desk, I knew there was no way his rambunctious style would survive intact. Predictably, his bylined stories there were indistinguishable from any other reporter's. The copy desk was earning its salary distilling him.

From there he went to a county public information office -- obviously not a good fit. It wasn't long before he turned up at an arts and culture weekly as an investigative journalist. I suspect they were hoping someone else would show up to fill the position, but it's not easy finding a writer who can produce hard-hitting investigative journalism and still be a nonabrasive person who never causes the publisher one moment of embarrassment. Plus, if your rough copy needs editing for style and structure, turning it in late all the time makes your immediate editor hate the day you were born on a regular basis. 

So, when a good excuse to part company appears out of the blue, the employer grabs it, even though with such a small writing staff, it's going to hurt. A lot. Management could have offered a rote apology to the offended party and then circled the wagons around their star employee. When the wagons don't circle, you know there's more to it. It never makes sense to outsiders. You have to know all the unrelated deep background. Sometimes a boss throws a protective shield over you, and sometimes they let you twist in the wind, regardless of the transgression. This was just the final straw on a totally different haystack.

There will be a lot of public dialogue in the coming days about whether the punishment fit the crime, our culture and our social boundaries -- and that's what the PR flack wants you to think this was about, as well as buy a ticket to hear his client -- but the fact is, that's not even what this was about.

Flooring It at Another Crazy News Panel

Aaron Kremer, founder and editor of the website and email newsletter Richmond BizSense -- and famously against Twitter as a useful tool -- is apparently also against chairs. He originally booked his "Future of News" panel at a bar, Black Finn, then due to a surge of early registrations, moved it to another bar, Infuzion.

Except for bar seating along the walls, there were no chairs. No one thought to rent any. At least two-thirds of the attendees stood on the dance floor, drinks in hand. This is not my idea of a panel discussion venue. I sat on a cold concrete floor. Drink tickets don't do much for me; nor do salty chicken fingers and the ever-present veggie tray with a cup of ranch dressing in the middle -- so for $15, I would really like a chair. Even an uncomfortable folding chair would be nice.

And I would like some hard questions and some controversy, not a moderator throwing out soft, vague questions that can only elicit equally vague answers. Moderators need to actually listen to the answers and confront the speaker when they speak in banalities or inconsistencies. Nail somebody with something! Make somebody squirm! Challenge the panel. Demand some creativity of thought. Instead we get bland nothingness from adults in the communications business who don't know yet to hold the mic up to their mouth.

(I will refrain from commenting about having only one person checking people's names off and collecting the money at the door, creating a three-row line reminiscent of getting into Space Mountain. I will also say nothing about the name tags typed in a micro font, so as far as being readable from a distance: useless networking tool.)

So there sat Tom Silvestri, publisher of the Times-Dispatch, and an assortment of other media people helping to put him out of business.

Moderator Jim Bacon, after being schooled by the audience on speaking into the microphone instead of waving it like a magic wand, asked the first softball question, does content want to be free?

(Ooooh, let me predict: the print people will say you must pay for quality and the digital people will say with their much lower overhead, they can survive with a few web ads and not require digital subscriptions.)

Susan Winiecki of Richmond Magazine said high end journalism requires funding. Bacon doesn't ask her the follow-up question I'm thinking. Isn't advertising paying your bills? Why would you need to charge the readers, too? (Silvestri actually cops to this at the very end of the night. Subscriptions are not where the income is or should be.)

Ross Catrow of RVANews is fine with low-end, citizen journalism and gives a shout-out to John Murden and the Church Hill People's News. Anywhere else, there would be cheers for John, but I don't think this crowd has ever heard of the CHPN.

Silvestri says if there's no advertising support anymore, you need a different business model. (Okay, obvious.) Yet (!) Bacon doesn't ask the follow-up question, what would that different business model look like? Do you have any idea? Do you have a contingency plan in the works?

Lori Waran of Style says the online edition of her paper is making money.

The conversation goes pro-digital. Catrow's RVANews is doing well with internet ads, too. Kremer bragged about getting his email newsletter out by 7:30 a.m. and by 9 a.m., he has solid analytics on what stories were hits and which were misses. Restaurant news is big in Richmond. So are stories about salaries. He phases out topics that get few hits, so he's evolving into the perfect business model. Survival of the hittest.

Waran can also track popular Style stories online, the winner being Jenna Bush's engagement. (Really? Really? Shame on you, Richmond.)

Winiecki has to blame or credit her covers for selling magazines, which is why we see so many "Richmond's Top Restaurants" and "Who Makes the Most Money" covers (I am not joking.)

Silvestri agrees restaurant stories and obits sell. (Where is the niche entrepreneur who is working on an Eat Richmond weekly paper and a Who's Dead Today website? They're going to make a fortune!)

At one point, I actually think I heard Bacon ask Ross Catrow if his business model was a threat to his business model. (The question was about web news aggregators. Part of Catrow's empire, RVABlogs, is an aggregator site. And the bottom half of RVANews carries feeds from the community blogs.) Bacon asks how do people like that Murden guy you gave a shout-out to feel about you STEALING HIS WORK?

Catrow says he really feels like they're all working in tandem. (Bacon must be unaware that Catrow's sites and the community blogs, including Murden's, are all financially linked together in an ad-sharing network.) Catrow gives a shout-out to Nate's Taco Truck, a one-man business that does all its advertising on Twitter, tweeting his location and menu each day.

It doesn't get any simpler than that, and it costs him nothing to do. The hard follow-up question: how do you as an outlet dependent on advertising counteract that? Nope, that question was not asked. Bacon, an early blogger, does admit he does not understand Twitter or Facebook. He calls it just more spam.

Waran tells a touching story about reaching out for her iPhone first thing in the morning to read the overnight headlines on her Twitter feed. (I do, too.) It's faster and more convenient than sloshing outside in your bathrobe to get the paper from the lawn. But, she adds -- trying to be nice to Silvestri -- some people probably still prefer the ritual of walking outside and looking for the paper.

Bacon does not ask the hard follow-up question: isn't the news on the lawn actually yesterday's news? If Haiti was hit by a 15.7 earthquake at 2 a.m. and sunk into the sea, it's not going to be in the paper that morning. It is going to be on your Twitter feed.

Catrow admits to loving Twitter, "a useful tool."

Kremer said he felt overwhelmed by following 50 people on Twitter. I am baffled, and begin to wonder if he has speed reading issues and can't scan through a narrow column of short sentences, which is all Twitter is. I follow 185 people and can keep up in two or three 20-minute scanning spurts a day. You cannot tell me that people who go outside to smoke three or four times a day and talk about what they had for dinner with the other smokers are getting as much out of their breaks.

The still not-famous-in-this-crowd Murden ventured forth to ask the first question about the "quality of the conversation," which got Silvestri a little worked up. His stock in trade is selling depth and quality of information since newspapers haven't been able to deliver immediacy since the dawn of television. Comments to stories on the website get out of control, especially in the morning, he says. The morning brings out the crazies. No quality of conversation then! Never read any comments posted before noon. Thoughtfulness doesn't check in until lunch time. The internet is going to need moderators.

Waran speaks up that at Style they like the passion of the debate. Bring on the crazies!

Second question is from a small business owner who says he thinks the future is web advertising and branding your business online. Winiecki counters with: you need a mix of advertising. You need to talk to your reps for direction, what's best for you. (!!!!! Like my newspaper rep is really going to tell me that newspaper advertising is not for me? Like Richmond magazine's ad rep is going to say, we're too expensive for you and people turn the page too quickly. We're not right for you. Take your money to my competitor.)

A business woman said she had no idea how to get into social media marketing and needed help. (She probably thought she was going to learn how at this panel discussion…and maybe even sit in a chair.) Someone handed her their business card. That person will make more money tonight as a result of this seminar than anyone on the panel.

Someone brings up the iPad and Silvestri says with almost genuine emotion that he wants OUT of the news delivery business and into the content business. He doesn't want to think about printing presses, paper, ink, and newspaper carriers. The electronic newspaper is his dream.

Someone says "my hunch is most people are still getting their news from the Richmond Times-Dispatch." I don't think that's true. I think the television and radio reporters are still getting their news from the Richmond Times-Dispatch. 

The night ends with the stupidest question directed at Silvestri. "Do you feel like you're sitting next to pirates?"

What? WHAT?

We then have to hear pirate jokes from Silvestri, including an aaarrrgh. No one from local television or radio is even on the panel. If anyone is pirating the morning paper, it's them. Richmond magazine and Style Weekly cover different news in a different way. RVANews is covering a completely different side of Richmond -- the side where we all actually live everyday -- and aggregating nonsensical bloggers and the community blogs. The closest thing to a pirate in the room is Kremer, who builds most of his daily content with feeds from other news sources.

This panel was sponsored by a law firm and the Home Building Association of Richmond. I can't imagine what they got out of it. I go to about three of these "future of news" type affairs a year, and it's never any different. There's never any real insights. You hear about the now, but seldom is the future actually discussed. But I guess we'll keep talking about the future of news until news finally gets there.

To Sunday or Not to Sunday

A subscription renewal envelope fell out of last Sunday's paper, so it's that time again. Time to decide if I even want to keep getting the Sunday paper.

Last time the decision was made for two ridiculous reasons. My husband enjoys the sale inserts and convinced me clipping the grocery coupons more than paid for the subscription.

But now that I've reached the point where I barely read any of the paper at all, the fact that the subscription cancels out whatever savings I get from grocery coupons makes that seem less of a deal.

The more my life gets automated by electronic conveniences, the more annoying manual transactions are -- clipping and sorting coupons, pulling them out in the store and going through them by hand in every aisle. Who has the time! Besides, I scan my grocery card at a machine on the way in and it prints out a sheet of coupons for things I often buy anyway. Or I scan my card on the way out and it gives me all the sales. (Who shops without a card these days?)

I could live without the coupons. Sometimes they work against me. Sales inserts create a desire to buy items I actually don't need, like ever-changing types of household air freshener dispensers. And my husband can definitely live without the sales inserts because it only creates a desire for things we can't afford. We replaced two perfectly good TVs last fall because of store sales. Yes, we wanted them, but we didn't actually need them.

As for the rest of the paper, I only read Dilbert in the comics. I only read the fake questions and answers about celebrities in Parade. Definitely won't miss that. I don't open Sports or Celebrations. So now I'm down to what used to be called the A and B sections, Flair and Moneywise, or whatever the business section is called. I used to read the help wanted ads just to see if I could be doing better somewhere else, but now I have a problem finding wherever they are. And there's not that many of them.

Even this small pile of sections seems like a chore to get through on Sunday mornings. There's no convenient space on my table to spread out the paper and once your eyes get bifocally or trifocally challenged, reading on the sofa is impossible without a lot of folding and unfolding the paper into smaller sections. I'm not in the mood for origami on Sunday morning.

Sundays are not like they used to be: church, a big lunch that looks more like dinner, TV sports, a smaller meal, "60 Minutes," bed. Mom used to be able to relax with the paper because she had been home all week cleaning the house and doing the shopping. Well, not on this planet. I've been at work all week. The house is a disaster area. I've probably spent all Saturday cleaning and doing 10 loads of laundry, and Sunday I have to shop for groceries and other things. Who has time for a big newspaper? I don't. No time.

The paper was always something I read in the evening during commercial breaks or boring TV interludes on one of the four television channels. Now I get 300 television channels, and there's no boring interludes because I've recorded only the shows I want to watch, and I watch them straight through, fastforwarding through commercials and car chases. There's no time for any reading, and if I do find a moment, I look at my Twitter feed on my iPod Touch. The news is there in a series of headlines. The iPod fits in my hand and I can easily hold it right up to my eyes.

The first Sunday the paper is not on the lawn when my husband goes out to smoke his morning cigarette and hack and cough, he's going to whine. What about Best Buy? I don't know what's going on at Best Buy. Well, you don't need to know what's going on at Best Buy. Besides, that flyer is actually on their website every week. You can virtually turn the pages with your mouse just like it was a real paper. I'll buy you a wireless keyboard to go on your Playstation 3 and you can access it on your big TV hanging on the wall. You just can't take it into the bathroom anymore.

I don't want that to be the winning argument for spending $30 for 13 weeks of Sunday papers: so he can look at the Best Buy flyer in the bathroom. That would be sad.