asciidan || news :: rants :: commentary

If you need any more evidence that today’s journalism is a rudderless ship drifting about aimlessly, look no further than the reaction surrounding the recent decision to change the AP style for “Web site” to “website.” It amazed me to see the phrase “AP Stylebook” on Twitter’s trending topics, and as a former journalist who hasn’t quite washed the ink from his hands, I was curious.

My reaction to the news? So what? I yawned. I moved on.

And then I saw this. In a nutshell, Robert Niles of The Online Jounalism Review argues that journalism students need to ditch AP style and start learning SEO. Now my blood is boiling. Check out this idiocy:

The newspaper industry developed a common style, maintained by the Associated Press, to meet the communication needs of a print-based industry trying to most effectively communicate with a broad audience.

Today’s online publishers, editors and reporters need a new style that most effectively allows their words to reach their intended audiences. Unfortunately for them, the print-inspired AP style is not that. Today’s (and tomorrow’s) journalists need to learn search engine optimization [SEO] techniques as much as, if not more than their predecessors who worked the print industry needed to learn AP.

The argument is that AP style is for print; SEO is for online. And Niles argues journalists need to learn how to use SEO in their writing to help content “jump to the front of the line” in search engines. He says “good SEO can help make your pages more lucrative in keyword-targeted advertising systems, such as Google’s AdWords.” None of that has anything to do with journalism, and it absolutely shouldn’t. Ever.

AP style is an attempt to find a common, understandable language amongst members of the news industry. It sets rules so there’s a degree of sameness in language from one writer to the next. It allows for an authoritative voice that denotes a particular discipline. As such, it is extremely necessary. And not just for print. Even online, a website that doesn’t follow a consistent style is uncomfortable to read. Some readers may not pick up on why, but inconsistent capitalization, punctuation and language are disconcerting. AP style eliminates that.

As for Niles’ argument about SEO? It’s bunk.

A true journalist reports the truth, and should never never think of profit. Following Niles’ advice amounts to creating advertorial content. It’s slimy, dishonest and chips away at the pillars of what journalism should be.

One need look no further than Gizmodo’s recent series of stories about the next-gen iPhone to see why creating performance-based content is a bad thing. According to Gawker Media owner Nick Denton, Gizmodo reporters are paid “traffic bonuses” for their stories, and the reporters who broke the story about the next-gen iPhone stand to make a decent heap of cash for essentially buying property considered stolen under California law. That’s not good journalism. But it did quadruple the number of visitors to Gizmodo.

Reportage for the greater good and solid writing will get attention. And it’s worthwhile, even if it costs you.

As a young journalist, I investigated the trouble local pantries and soup kitchens had getting food donations from a large retailer (I won’t name the company, but it happens to be the largest retailer in the world). After the story ran, the retailer refused to sell the newspaper at the store. It cost the paper a considerable amount of money. But you know what else? Our local food pantries started getting donations. And due to customer demand, the paper was back on the racks there in a matter of a month.

Bottom line? Journalists need to write for people — not search engines. And if folks like Niles are the future of journalism, we’re in a lot of trouble.

With the big Apple iPad launch came a flood of reviews across the media. David Pogue loves the device. So does Walt Mossberg. Old Media are throwing themselves at the iPad as if it’s the promised savior.

For the New York Times and Popular Science, Conde Nast and the host of Old Media producers building apps, the iPad could very well be the last, best hope.

It’s no secret that newspapers and magazines are suffering from nosediving reader numbers. And nosediving reader numbers mean nosediving advertising dollars. Fewer ad dollars means less cash to pay stockholders, bloated management trees and, ultimately, journalists. And it’s less money to buy one thing these organizations have relied on since Gutenberg: paper.

Paper is a huge expense for newspapers, rivaling only salaries for the top expense at most print publications. Paper (and ink) costs can be downright crippling, but without paper, there’s no business. It’s like running a McDonald’s without frozen hamburger patties.

The iPad gives print publications the exact out they’ve been looking for: a device folks can use to flip through the pages of their favorite periodical — almost as if they’re holding the paper itself. It offers designers full control over the look of the thing, unlike the fairly typical newspaper website. It’s a wonderful way to print a newspaper or magazine without using paper. Brilliant. Newspapers could actually charge a whole lot less for their products and still make enough to pay the bills. And then some.

But the Internet is already an excellent platform for publishing. Heck, I do it myself whenever I get the chance. It’s cheap, reaches a vast audience, and publishing is immediate. So why are publishers so eager to put in the time and expense to join the iPad bandwagon?

Control.

Newspapers, by and large, hate the free Internet. Believe me on this. I’ve sat through the conferences and the seminars. Even now, publishers are confused and frightened about cannibalizing their print content, working too hard to generate added-value online content and how to handle the comment sections of their sites.

It’s that last one that really sticks in their craws.

In the pre-Internet days, it was easy to moderate public opinion. An editor just decided which letters to print and which to leave out. These days, it’s not so easy. Commenters and trolls say whatever they want, whenever they want. And thanks to the Safe Harbor rules, newspapers can’t do much about it, other than automatic filtering.

The iPad brings back  those halcyon days when the editor decided everything. That’s because the iPad is about consumption, not interaction. It’s a device for consuming media — not creating it.

I’m not saying that’s an entirely bad thing. I am saying it’s a potentially dangerous thing.

See, we count on our newspapers and magazines to be our watchdogs. But who watches the newspapers? Who calls these outlets out when there’s conflicts of interest, shoddy journalism or outright lies? For the past 10 years, bloggers and commenters have been serving that function. We’ve held journalism to a higher standard than journalists hold themselves to. And that’s a very good thing.

The Viacom vs. Google court battle is getting downright nasty. Viacom has dug up a bunch of e-mails and instant messages they claim show YouTube’s founders were purposely leaving copyrighted material online during YouTube’s early days — damning evidence against Google.

But more interesting are Google’s claims that many of those copyright-infringing videos came from Viacom itself — some of them uploaded to YouTube by Viacom employees, who were directed to put them online from places like Kinko’s, where they couldn’t be traced back to Viacom.

Already, Viacom has backed down from some of its claims, based solely on evidence that it did indeed upload its own videos to YouTube (hence, Viacom as copyright holder could not infringe on its own copyright). Now, this new accusation throws into doubt the rest of the alleged infringing works. How can Viacom prove which videos actually broke the law?

The issue boils down to this: Early on, and up to today, Viacom sees online video as a threat to its business model. But execs probably wanted to take advantage of the medium from the very beginning. By uploading videos, Viacom got two things: attention for the shows and content it was promoting and grounds for a lawsuit down the road. It got both.

Antics like this don’t surprise me at all. They just point to a crazy, disheveled slash-and-burn mentality, in which in Viacom’s collective mind it can do no wrong. It’s a mentality in which the company can willingly and unabashedly twist the law to its own advantage. And, if my personal experience is any indicator, Viacom is very likely succeeding more than anyone at this point can guess.

Nearly four years ago now I was producing a series of local spoof news videos for an online project I was getting off the ground. In one video, our crew took aim at Tom Cruise’s fight against South Park (the infamous Scientology episode). In editing the video, we used approximately 5 seconds of video from that episode, to illustrate the Cruise parody. We used no audio whatsoever.

Shortly after the video hit YouTube, it was unavailable, with a message that said it had been “removed for violating copyright.”

I was enraged. There was no proof the video violated copyright. In fact, it was a clear case of fair use. YouTube followed the letter of the law that is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act — once a complaint is received, the video is removed. I disagreed with the decision, but understood why it was removed. I first fought YouTube for labeling me a copyright infringer. Though the DMCA forces YouTube to removed the content, it does not mean a conviction has been won. Eventually, the note on the video said it had been “removed due to a copyright claim by Comedy Central/Viacom.”

My next step was to call the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

With a little help, I filed a counter claim, they failed to respond, and within days the video was returned to YouTube. As a lawyer at EFF told me, the video was clearly fair use.

So why was it removed?

Viacom’s policy was clearly to take down anything it didn’t like, banking on the fact that most users wouldn’t fight back. Since Viacom doesn’t actually need proof to get a video removed, it could, for all intents and purposes, remove any video it didn’t like — even if it in fact didn’t contain a single bit of infringing content.

Here’s the video, just in case you’re interested. It’s still on YouTube:

The question here isn’t just about user-generated content. It’s about our rights, and the dishonest tactics the movie, television and music industries have been employing to stifle innovation while padding their own pockets.

It’s about time this is all coming to light.

On Tuesday, the New York Times skewered David W. Johnson, a top aide to New York Gov. David Paterson, in a news report that brought to light Johnson’s run-ins with the law as a teenager, questions about his qualifications to serve as a campaign advisor, and domestic violence allegations.

To be fair, it would concern me to learn that my state’s governor surrounds himself with drug dealers who beat women. But that’s not what’s in this story. What we learn instead is that Johnson had two run-ins with the law for selling drugs when he was a teenager — about 20 years ago. And the domestic violence accusations? The most serious one in the article is made by an ex-girlfriend who said Johnson punched her in the face in 2001. She didn’t file a complaint with the police, he denies it, and though she claims to have filed complaints with the police before, she refused to share the information with the Times.

A good newspaper editor would never have printed these things.

First, Johnson served his time for the drug sales. Not only that, but he went to college, studied criminal justice and turned his life around. He took a job as an intern in Paterson’s office (Paterson was a state senator at the time), later became Paterson’s driver, and continued to work his way through the ranks. It’s a “troubled youth makes good” story if I ever heard one. But you know what? The reporting of the drug arrests themselves is disturbing. Because Johnson was a youthful offender, he has no official criminal record. None. In the eyes of the law, he’s squeaky clean. So how does the Times know about the arrests at all? We’ll come back to that.

Domestic violence is an important issue. It warrants as much attention as we can give it. And there are few things as serious as allegations of child or spousal abuse. But the New York Times is clearly trying to demonstrate a pattern in Johnson’s behavior that is entirely unsupported by the facts. Witnesses saw him and a girlfriend yelling at each other once. A woman says he punched her, but he denies it, witnesses deny it and though she claims to have proof, she refuses to provide it. I’m not saying it didn’t happen; I’m saying as a newspaper editor, I wouldn’t print allegations without proof, and the Times did just that.

The big questions are: Why did the Times print this article? and Where did it get this information?

The answer lies in the rest of the story, where you find Johnson’s qualifications to serve as top confidante and campaign strategist to Paterson come into question by top Democrats. Kinda makes sense now, doesn’t it? These are “top Democrats” who feel like their very status as “top Democrats” should automatically “qualify” them to be closer to Paterson. They should get his ear more often…after all, they’ve been in politics awhile, probably went to fancy colleges and never never worked as drivers…

Oh, and these top Democrats bringing up all these questions? They’re unnamed. They’re other Paterson aides, clearly jealous of Johnson’s standing. And, most likely, they’ve been the Times’ most consistent backroom sources for Paterson news.

So, the Times reports the story the way the sources want it done. That makes the sources happy, and the sources will keep giving the Times more stories. And, if the story works and Paterson has to distance himself from Johnson, it leaves a big void that needs to be filled — hopefully by one of the jealous aides who fed the story to the Times in the first place. Unfortunately for the jealous aides, Paterson is standing by his man; after all, he clearly can’t count on the rest of his staff either, right?

We’ve been told to we can’t trust the intentions of bloggers. They all have angles. But this story illustrates in vivid color that even the Old Gray Lady hides its intentions, runs hatchet jobs to please sources, and has no trouble at all printing a half-baked scandal story worthy of Perez Hilton.

We deserve better.

My local newspaper (or, more correctly, the website associated with the local newspaper) recently put out a call for reader input. How, the bloggers asked, can we make the newspaper better? How can we bring you back? How are we doing?

You can see the suggestions here (hint: though the article was posted a month and a half ago, there’s not a single response).

I like to help and I do still hold a place for newspapers in my heart. So here are my suggestions and observations:

1. Stop asking me how to run your newspaper.
I’m a reader. I’m not I’m paid to run your newspaper; you are.

These pleas for public comment have been going out for years, especially as newspapers began to see their readership numbers decline. In my years in newspapering I was guilty of making similar overtures. The idea, of course, is that it makes the paper look like it cares what readers think — that it allows readers a greater stake in the newspaper. It doesn’t.

Instead, it makes newspapers look pathetic and lost. It makes them look rudderless and incapable of solid decision-making. You are supposed to be an organization of trained journalists. Don’t whine and beg readers to make your decisions for you. If you do, you undermine your authority, and your readers’ trust in you.

Speaking of undermining your authority…

2. Stop dumbing down your design.
There’s a reason everyone wears jackets and ties on TV news: Authority.

If new anchors wore T-shirts and jeans, you wouldn’t look up to them, would you? So why have all our newspapers gone from the stately, authoritative nameplates and designs to T-shirt and jeans equivalents? When I started in the newspaper business, the big metro daily’s flag screamed authority, in stately capital letters that demanded respect. The last two redesigns have reduced that nameplate, first to a friendlier font with lower-case letters and now, well, it’s become just initials, tucked away into the top left-hand corner.

Beyond that, the paper has moved to more digest items, fewer long-form stories, bigger photos, and all the little things readers have said they wanted for years. Guess what? It ain’t working.

3. Stop trying to prove you’re cool.
I’m glad you’re on Twitter. For me, the easiest, fastest way to catch up on the news of the day is to follow news outlets I trust, grab their headlines in my Twitter feed, and hit up the stories I’m interested in. So that’s working for you.

What doesn’t work are the news stories about Twitter, the constant references to your Twitter feeds in the newspaper, quoting Twitter feeds in the newspaper. It wastes valuable newsprint and it alienates readers who aren’t on Twitter — and that’s the majority of your readers. In fact, it’s more than 80 percent of your readers.

Speaking of Twitter…

4. Stop cluttering your Twitter feed with stories you didn’t write.
I don’t follow you for world and national news.

The Associated Press is a great resource for newspapers, if used properly. A good newspaper will include bits of world and national news of importance, and local writers and papers are just not equipped to cover that stuff. But national stories do not belong on local news websites unless they’ve been localized. I get my national news from sources with the resources to cover those stories. I follow them on Twitter, or I visit them daily. Including such stories on your websites and feeding them to Twitter waters down your strength, which should be covering local news.

The same really should go for the newspaper as well. More care needs to be put into what wire stories are chosen for the print editions, and in every possible case, those wire stories should be localized. If there’s not a local angle, why put it in the local paper?

I am a fan of newspapers. I spend every Saturday and Sunday morning with mine. And every weekend, I struggle with whether I will continue my subscription. As the quality of local coverage drops, the paper’s usefulness declines as well.

Unfortunately, nearly everything they’ve done to bring readers back drives readers the other way.

So maybe they really do need help.

Cuz it’s almost too late.