Google should buy a newspaper

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll had an interesting piece — at least the first half of the column was interesting — in today’s edition.

He takes a look at newspapers and bloggers and the future of journalism. He makes a good point regarding bloggers and online forums and the like.

Bloggers are wonderful at what they do. They have changed the nature of the dialogue, and they have upset the power imbalance between purveyors of data and consumers of data. A few of them (like Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo) really do reporting. But mostly they aggregate – they put together information gathered from other sources in interesting or amusing ways. They produce opinions that challenge conventional wisdom.

It’s darned bracing, but it’s not the same thing as reporting. In a Chronicle opinion piece on Friday, journalist Dan Reed wrote about the reporting skills of his friend Chauncey Bailey, the Oakland Post editor who was killed last week, probably because he was probing the activities of Your Black Muslim Bakery, an unsavory organization made doubly loathsome by its trading on a wholly imaginary connection with the Nation of Islam and the black power movement.

Asked Reed: “Would bloggers have confronted the Black Muslim Bakery? I don’t think so.” Neither do I.

So, what is the answer? He says it makes sense to have Google — and like companies — purchase newspapers.

Oh, I know a lot of you think Google is the evil empire, but actually Rupert Murdoch is the evil emperor, and he’s buying everything that’s not nailed down. So if the choice is Google or Rupert, I’ll take Google. It doesn’t know anything about the news business and, my guess is, it doesn’t want to know anything about the news business. (Note to Google: It’s actually boring most of the time.) It might let news people run the newspaper, which would be a refreshing change.

It would be, as I see it, sort of like McDonald’s buying a lot of cattle ranches. It would be vertical integration. Google buys the groups that make the news, and then they aggregate the news. They might even assign more stories about complicated issues, because that’s what some people want, and the Lindsay Lohan market is already served.

Plus, they have trainloads of money parked on a siding in Sunnyvale. Open a boxcar; save a newspaper.

Interesting. 

For my part, I agree wholeheartedly with his take on bloggers, online forums and the future of journalism. 

Bible verse contest

This will be the first newspaper where I have ever been a part of the Bible Verse Contest, which is a popular feature in a lot newspaper across the country.

I’ve seen the pages before, and I’ve thought them to be a great idea, something the entire family can sit down and do together. It just seems that I’ve never had the chance to get it together.

So, I’m pleased to announce that at the end of the month, The Demopolis Times will launch a four-month special event — the Bible Verse Contest.

The contest is simple: We will publish at least 16 Bible verses every week. Each Bible verse will have a hint included in it, telling readers where they can go to find the verse. Contestants simply fill out an entry, identifying at least three of the verses. From the entries, we choose 16 winners each week and publish them in the newspaper.

Here’s the greatest part: We will give away a free Bible to every winner!

This contest is great for Sunday School classes. We’re sending letters out to area churches today, encouraging them to participate in the contest. In the past, classes take the Bibles that they win and donate them to their missionaries or to people in their communities who might not be able to afford a Bible. It’s a great way to do a little evangelical charity work.

As an added incentive, at the end of the contest group who enters the most will receive a free, family-sized Bible. This Bible could be given to the student in the class who answers the most verses correctly, donated to the church or given to a deserving member of the congregation. It is a really nice Bible and would make a tremendous keepsake that could be handed down from one generation to the next.

I encourage everyone who can to participate in this contest. It is fun, family-oriented and, most of all, it gets people spending a little time with the Bible each week. I could stand to do a little more of that myself.

Goodbye, Mr. Rove

Karl Rove is leaving the White House.

That is hard to digest. For me, I suspected it would be as described by Jim Rutenberg of The New York Times:

It was widely believed inside and outside the White House that he would walk out the door behind Mr. Bush at the end of Mr. Bush’s term in January, 2009.

Paul A Gigot, editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal, had an excellent piece on Rove. It was a fairly candid interview with the same kind of grand persona usually projected by the quintessential Republican political operative. In it, Rove said:

“I’m a myth. There’s the Mark of Rove,” he says, with a bemused air. “I read about some of the things I’m supposed to have done, and I have to try not to laugh.” He says the real target is Mr. Bush, whom many Democrats have never accepted as a legitimate president and “never will.”

For someone like me, who generally finds himself on the opposite end of policy issues with Republicans like Mr. Rove and his boss, I’ve always respected Rove as much as I’ve disdained him.

Rove is an easy target for hatred by those who oppose the Bush Administration. For certain, Rove has been at the center of some pretty questionable ethical policy decisions made by the Bush Administration. For that, he is easily villified.

That said, one cannot ignore Rove’s success. He is a hard-nosed political operative who has had unprecedented success. Were someone else running the president’s politics, it is hard to imagine he would have survived his first term, much less won re-election and continued to be able to push policy points as a lame duck (though, as any lame duck, Mr. Bush’s power is quickly dwindling).

Perhaps Rove is leaving because of that dwindling power, or perhaps Rove is leaving because his day before Congress is coming. Or, perhaps he is leaving for the same reason so many other presidential policy advisors leave — the job is a demanding one, and it is time to go.

Much will be made of Rove’s decision to leave, and Democrats will jump on this as a sign of weakness and guilt. Publicly, they should do just that.

But behind the scenes, the smartest thing Democrats can do is study Rove’s moves over the past eight years and prepare to emulate them over the next 18 months. It just might serve them well, especially if their nominee is, as Rove says, “a tough, tenacious, fatally flawed candidate.“

Playing with Numbers

I’m a Mac guy. I believe computing on a Mac “just works”, as they say. I also believe it’s more aesthetically pleasing. And that does count. If you are going to stare at a computer screen for half the day (or more), then you should enjoy looking at your work.

In my job, I live in Excel much of the time. I don’t exactly “hate” Microsoft, but I do not care for their OS or Office. I think it’s bloated. I prefer Pages to Word (but usually write in TextEdit or Journler) and Keynote to PowerPoint. I don’t use a database, but when I did I used FileMaker.

But for Excel, there has been no alternative. Then, on Tuesday, Apple announced iWork 08, which included their new Numbers spreadsheet program. I toyed with it late last night, watching some of the tutorials, and I must say it is a great entry into the field.

That said, Numbers is not an Excel killer for power users. If you use PivotTables (which I don’t), then you are stuck with Excel. If you use macros (which I do with a few of my reports), then you are stuck with Excel. Numbers is not scriptable at all, which is odd. I’m assuming Apple will add this ability in a future update.

Past that, for your moderate to even advanced-but-not-power users, Numbers would work. (Personally, I’m just a moderate user. I’ve never written a macro, and I don’t know what’s involved. But people in BNI far smarter than I have written them into key reports.)

Still, Microsoft could learn a lot from Numbers. The interface is terrific. Apple has added a few tricks that makes building spreadsheets and manipulating data much easier than in Excel, at least for someone like me who has limited to moderate knowledge of Excel.

Numbers is most likely aimed at people with my Excel skill level whose company or work does not require Excel because of either macros or PivotTables. As for me, I might try porting a few worksheets over, and I’ll definitely move my home budget to Numbers. 

Otherwise, Excel stays in my dock and one of my most used programs. (For now…)

Covering Barry Bonds

One of my favorite sites to watch is the blog at SportsDesigner.com. Quite often, they put together portfolios of how different newspapers covered major events.

One such of event was Barry Bonds hitting his 756th home run to pass Hank Aaron as the all-time homerun king.

If you want to see several examples, check here and here. 

Notice how the Chicago Sun-Times covered it, keeping the focus on Aaron and not Bonds. SportsIllustrated.com also took a “different” approach as well.

Balancing act

My column for Wednesday’s edition walks a tightrope. 

My gut says Fire Chief Ronnie Few is a lightening rod for controversy. I’m not much on coincidence. If you have three high-profile positions and are embroiled in three high-profile controversies, then I believe you probably brought at least part of it on yourself.

That said, I like to give certain people the benefit of the doubt. I’m doing that with Few for a, well, few reasons.

• I’ve never met the guy. Given the fact that I may actually get to talk to him one day, I think it is within me to give him the opportunity to explain his side of the story.
• He is our fire chief, like it or not. More important than this scandal is the morale of the fire fighters in the department. If he can provide satisfactory explanations to what happened in the past, then it might turn out that he’s an effective fire chief.
• Politics gets dirty. I’ve seen good, innocent men screwed by ruthless politicians. And, I’ve seen good, innocent men who are being politically persecuted fight back and become embroiled in a big political broohaha.

Anyway, my two cents are in black and white and on the Internet for all to see, including Chief Few. In that vein, I’ll repeat my public request: Chief Few, please sit down with us, explain your side of the story and let’s talk about your vision for the department. You owe the people of this city that small courtesy.

Moving to the Web

The biggest obstacle facing newspapers today is how to successfully migrate from the printed medium to the online medium. Newspapers large and small are trying to discover what the “new business model” will look like in five and 10 years.

Complicating this move is the ever-changing online world. We’re in a period where online technology is growing at rapid speeds. By the time we catch up with, often someone else has moved ahead. 

Furthermore, no newspaper has yet been able to find out how to make online profitable. For newspapers to exist as they do today — large staffs covering a variety of news —

we must find a revenue stream. Theories of thought on this range from the belief that a natural migration of advertising dollars will occur as online becomes as prominent as print to the belief that newsrooms will be forced to completely change the paradigm of coverage.

In my opinion, it will be somewhere in the middle, though I tend to lean more toward the natural migration of advertising dollars. We are in the growing pains part of this evolution, but it is not the first time our industry has faced such a transformation.

Here at The Demopolis Times, we’ve drastically upgraded our Internet presence. We went from a really crappy Web site to one that is suitable for our immediate needs. Now, the trick is to train our newsroom to go to the Web first with their information, which for those schooled in “old school journalism” flies in the face of all they know.

Still, I’ve seen great success with our Web site over the past year. Here are a few numbers:

• In July, we averaged 2,176 unique visitors to our Web site. 
• Our daily average page views were 6,367 in July.
• In the past few days, we’ve seen our average visitors almost double, and our page views topped 8,000. That’s the power of the Web when news breaks hard and fast.  

Those numbers are a hefty increase from a year ago when I started, when traffic was low and inside page views were next to nothing. (I would share those numbers, but I can’t put my hands on them right now. We have migrated to a new stats system, so they are not easily looked up either.)

Still, the future is even brighter. I look at what our sister newspapers are doing, and I get excited.

First, I think The Shelby County Reporter is the truest example of the future of newspapers and how we will serve a community. They are a weekly print newspaper, but they update their site daily with fresh, staff-driven content. 

Second is The Natchez Democrat. This site is the model for many — if not all —

Boone newspapers in the near future. For certain, I want Demopolis to be one of them. 

Having the ability to send out IMs and text messages as alerts, bring video to the Web and offer rich database searches is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what the future holds for us.

As we move The Times toward an online publication, I ask that you provide your feedback. You can comment here, or you can e-mail me at sam.hall@demopolistimes.com.

We want to create a print and online edition that meets the needs of our target community. 

Back from the dead

So, it’s been just a wee bit of time since I’ve been blogging. I could blame it on the fact that work has been hectic, that I now have two children instead of one and that I have nothing really to say. But the first two would be bad excuses and the third is complete crap.

Anyway, I am now pledging to myself to blog more frequently. I’ve been doing a little blogging in other places, but it has all been non-DT related. I’ll continue to do that, and I’ll provide a link or two when that happens.

For now, I’ve got a post that has to be written. Nothing like a little controversy to get things going. Of course, it will be on the hiring of Ron Few as the fire chief. What else would it be?

Paris on King

It seems that CNN’s Larry King has won the battle over who would land the first post-jail interview with Paris Hilton. Of course, it seems he may have won by default after ABC and NBC pulled out.

After deals with ABC and NBC fell through last week, Paris Hilton will now give her first post-jail interview to Larry King on CNN on Wednesday night.

Mike Sitrick, a spokesman for the Hilton family, announced the agreement yesterday.

Ms. Hilton is expected to be released on Tuesday from jail in Los Angeles, where she has been serving a sentence since June 3 for charges related to traffic violations.

She and her representatives have been negotiating for the exclusive rights to the first interview for most of the past week. Both ABC and NBC were heavily involved in pursuing the interview, expecting it to attract high ratings.

But the negotiations turned sour late last week when news accounts described the interaction between the networks and representatives of the Hiltons, which involved potential cash payments for materials that the Hiltons would provide with the interview, like photographs and videos.

ABC had offered $100,000 for that deal but was told by the Hilton side that NBC was offering far more. On the print side, People magazine had made a deal to pay $300,000 for photos that would have accompanied an interview with Ms. Hilton.

I know this will draw large audiences, but I don’t plan to be among them. My wife may be, but I won’t. 

Revolving doors?

When I first arrived here, the big question was how long was I going to last. People joked of the “revolving door” at The Times that had editors and publishers rotating in an out at a quick clip over the past few years.

In reality, it just took some time to get the right people here. If you look over the newspaper’s history, we’ve had good, consistent leadership more times than not. 

Since I’ve been here, we’ve settled down a good bit. I’ll admit to revolving a few people and of a few people revolving themselves. But for the most part, we’re stable. I’m proud of that fact.

That’s not to say we won’t see staff changes in the future. I hope that we are developing good talent here that will move on to other opportunities. I could name three people right now who have the ability to grow in this field. They likely will end their career far from where they began it.

Such is my view of what is taking place in Marengo County right now. I’ve had several people comment on our recent losses. Superintendents, coaches, pastors, a librarian, an economic developer and a police chief — to name a few. 

Some are retiring. Some are moving on to other opportunities. None seem so fed up that they just can’t take it anymore. So long as that’s the case, we’ll be just fine.