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.

Head in Sand

I've been to literally half a dozen seminars in the past few months about social media. Everybody is excited about it. Government and business communicators are excited about it because it's an inexpensive, often free, way to get information to their clients and citizens.

Since the elections there's been a seminar every week on how the candidates used social media.

People who are entrenched in social media are very excited about it because it's creating new ways to do their jobs, and in some cases, actually creating jobs. Bloggers, Facebook users, Tweeters are all feeling a part of a social information revolution.

Only the established press is not excited. I recently attended several lectures at the Virginia Press Association headquarters in Glen Allen. I got in through the backdoor. I maintain a membership in the Virginia Press Women and that group was invited to this VPA event to fill chairs. In the two social media tracks I attended, the presenters were excited about how newspapers can embrace this technology and make it their own.

Like: find your cities' most influential, popular bloggers and link to them on your newspaper's website.

Some of the editors and reporters from small towns across the state said they had no idea how to find such bloggers, or even if they existed. The rest were downright hostile. Bloggers traffic in rumors and untruths, according to the press. Why do they want to link to bloggers?

One presenter showed how reporters who also blog are doing amazing jobs covering sports. Sports is a weekend game. No one wants to wait until the Monday morning paper to read about the game or comment back. The sports reporters who are online are instantly reporting. This often means staying up late after the game is over to converse with readers, or writing and posting on Sunday.

On Sunday.

You can feel the room ice up with Virginia-resistance.

Some of these sports bloggers have become their own self-employed news hubs, divorcing their papers and setting up advertiser-supported websites to report on their beats.

As evidence that bloggers are liars, one Richmond rep mentioned bloggers and Tweeters had gotten the Ukrop's grocery store chain sale story all wrong, that they fanned a rumor that turned out to be false. Did it? The core of the story is true. The supermarket chain was faltering and might very well take a good offer. (It's 2012 now, and that's exactly what happened. Social media had the freedom to speculate on it first because the grocery store, a major advertiser, had cooled the story to the daily paper to not influence the sale.)

The moderator brought up several types of stories -- like how to buy and finance your own home without a realtor -- and asked how many papers were doing those kind of stories? In these perilous financial times when no newspaper wants to lose more advertising, do advertisers control the type of stories written?

There was no shouting of nay, nay or blasphemy! blasphemy! Everybody there knew it was true.

Another lecture was about how to make money from social media. It's hard to get ad salesmen excited about selling digital button ads at $100 or less. Some innovators have found ways to automate it. But here was the future of ad selling: Twitter!

The Austin Statesman will run certain types of ads -- those that offer discounts, coupons or magic word incentives -- on its Twitter feed for two Tweets a day for $150.

But what's going to keep a person with a healthy following from undercutting you? Tweeting your ad twice a day for $50? Or just doing it for free. You'll be craiglisted in weeks. In fact, I pointed out, in Richmond we already have @rvabargains doing that and @styleoffers is trying to get off the ground.

Ice.

Superman's Alter Ego

Writing Less is More

I used to write essays/editorials. For a long spell, I sold dozens of these to three or four regular newspaper clients. I had a 1,000-word limit. This was good training. My average first draft was around 1,500 words, and telling the same story in two-thirds of the words is a great discipline. People don't want to read all your digressions. They want you to stay on topic.

As my clients went out of business, or new editors came in with different tastes, I started self-publishing myself on my various blogs. This is bad because there's no money at all in it, and fewer readers. But it's also good because there's no rejection. Everything you write gets published. But there's also no discipline. You don't have that 1,000-word limit. Out of habit I still tend to edit down, but I am seeing many, many bloggers who have never experienced writing for print publication -- or even writing under a copy editor -- who have no discipline or polish at all. A few of them even have avid followings. I just wish they were better self-editors. I had to give up reading most of the posts on rvablogs.com because it's like a Wild, Wild West of undisciplined, unedited verbal diarrhea for the most part.

So there I was, rattling along on my various blogs, writing in a silent vacuum for mostly myself when I discovered Twitter. Twitter doesn't just limit your words. It limits your characters to 140. Big words can drastically reduce how much you can say. This was a challenge, to write that small, that concisely, that to the point.

It's also a lot less work when you get the hang of it, meaning I neglect most of my blogs now for the quick, dirty, in-and-out of Twitter. I neglect reading blogs because a Twitter stream is so much more efficient. I can tell immediately, in seconds, whether you have anything worthwhile to say or not. Writing less is the future.

It's hard to pick up a newspaper after you've been in the Twitter stream, or even watch the evening news, because both news reporting disciplines still depend on time-honored but archaic ways of padding out a story. For instance, getting a man-on-the-street comment or observation, which is just ridiculous. Who is this random person? Why do I care what they think? They're actually just a stand-in for the reporter who, because of that objectivity thing, cannot react emotionally to whatever he/she is reporting.

Or the horrible, terrible how-do-you-feel question. Something terrible has happened to you or to someone you know, or someone you've heard about. How do you feel?

I feel bad. I feel sad.

No one ever says, I feel nothing. Or I don't care. Or I am precariously enjoying the suffering of this other person. No one!

We need to get past this style of reporting because people want the news fast, short, and unadorned with the unnecessary or obvious observation. Get to the point. Write like you were tweeting.

The Business Pitch

"Reporting Local, Reaching Global" was a free panel discussion on business news hosted at Plant Zero by Aaron Kremer, founder of Richmond BizSense and notorious anti-Twitterite. (Can you be a Luddite if you operate a website?)

Panelists were freelancers Phaedra Hise and Maya Smart and former Media Generalists Robert Powell (now editing Virginia Business), Sean Ryan (now a PR flak with Hodges Partnership), and Pam Feibish, current activity unknown but former T-D business editor.

Here's what I learned.

Kremer wisely had several prepared questions to start the program. By the time they were answered, the audience was ready with their own, and if they had stiffed him and asked nothing, he still would have provided a substantial panel discussion, so that was good thinking.

Press releases, faxed or mailed, remain uselessly dead. Press releases sent as attachments to emails are on life support. Time of death will be called momentarily. Your best shot at a pitch now is in the SUBJECT LINE of an email, because most editors get so many emails, they can't open and read them anymore. Feibish said she used to get 300 a day.

Pitching your story in the subject line is shorter than an elevator pitch. It's shorter than a Tweet. It's a semi-tweet. All the more reason you should be on Twitter, learning how to say what you have to say in 140 characters or less, because less is not going to be more in this new media age. It's going to be ALL.

If you're pitching yourself or your client as a story, hang it up. Better to pitch yourself or your client as a source a la Larry Sabato who can be available to comment on any story the reporter is working on. When you call freelancers, ask only, "what are you working on?" and "what do you need now?"

As for being the story, you must have a narrative, a struggle, a trial by fire, from which you rise like the phoenix, triumphant and whole. You must be willing to divulge all your secrets and finances. You must contact reporters when you don't want anything from them and just be their friend. You must not call them on the phone because they are too busy. But you must call them when you have breaking news, especially if they are a frequent publisher.

You must never say "no comment" because it only makes them desire the words you do not want to say all the more. If you are in a scandalous mess, better to call the media yourself before they hear about it elsewhere, call all the media, and try to contain your bad news in one 24-hour news cycle. (In my opinion, confessing on Friday night is always good. The second-stringers are manning the media over the weekend and really don't want to work that hard.)

Panel discussions are always lighter learning experiences than one guy/woman with a PowerPoint and a laser light, pounding in the truths of our time, but this one wasn't bad and I went home with a new resolve to keep lobbying my workplace to give up the press release attachment. Also, the price was right and I had a Pepsi and some chips.

Some Thoughts on Free

These are quotes from Malcolm Gladwell's article on Chris Anderson's book "Free: The Future of a Radical Price" from The New Yorker.

[Anderson] Newspapers need to accept that content is never again going to be worth what they want it to be worth, and reinvent their business.

Out of the bloodbath will come a new role for professional journalists...There may be more of them, not fewer, as the ability to participate in journalism extends beyond the credentialed halls of traditional media. But they may be paid far less, and for many it won't be a full time job at all. Journalism as a profession will share the stage with journalism as an avocation. Meanwhile, others may use their skills to teach and organize amateurs to do a better job covering their own communities, becoming more editor/coach than writer. If so, leveraging the Free -- paying people to get other people to write for non-monetary rewards -- may not be the enemy of professional journalists. Instead, it may be their salvation.

Anderson's second point is that when prices hit zero, extraordinary things happen.

[Behavioral economist Dan Ariely] A group of subjects are offered a choice between two kinds of chocolate, Hershey's Kisse for 1 cent, and Lindt truffles for 15 cents. Three-quarters choose the truffles. For the next test group, the price is reduced by 1 cent. The Kisses are now free. The order of preference is reversed. Sixty-nine percent choose the Kisses. The magic word free has the power to create a consumer stampede. Amazon does the same thing with free shipping for orders more than $25. People will buy a second book to get free shipping.

[Anderson] From the consumer's perspective, there is a huge difference between free and cheap. Give a product away, and it can go viral. Charge a single cent for it, and you're in an entirely different business. The truth is that zero is one market and any other price is another.

The philosophy of embracing the Free involves moving from a scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset. Giving something away means that a lot of it will be wasted. But because it costs almost nothing to make things digitally, we can afford to be wasteful. Mechanisms we set up to monitor and judge the quality of content are artifacts of an era of scarcity. We had to worry how to allocate scarce resources like newsprint, shelf space and broadcast time.

Digital infrastructure is effectively Free.
Consumers love Free.
Free means never having to make a judgment of value.

Counter argument: [Gladwell] The Wall Street Journal has found more than a million subscribers willing to pay for reading online. Broadcast television is struggling. Premium cable is doing fine. Apple makes more money selling iPhone aps (ideas) than the iPhone (stuff). The company could give away the iPhone to boost downloads.

[Me] Fascinating stuff!