Below the Fold

A New Year’s Apology to the Man Who Saved My Life

TWENTY-FOUR YEARS AGO, a college journalism professor kept me from making the biggest mistake of my life – and in doing so, saved it.

I was a broadcast major at the University of Missouri, which tells you how little emphasis the school placed on looks. My face is far better suited for radio, so not only do I have my professor to thank for steering me into newspapers, so does the American public

I never forgot that night or the professor’s pleading, or his joy when I finally agreed to change my major and join him in the Columbia Missourian newspaper’s newsroom.

But until recently, I forgot about the drink in his hand. I forgot his slight stagger and impish grin peering from beneath his scruffy smile.

I wish I knew then. But I was in college, I was having fun, and now I had a mentor who wanted to work with me, a man who earned a Pulitzer Prize. The biggest award I had to that point was a bowling trophy, so I figured I better do what he said.

He was the “cool” professor, the one who had “meetings” at his home that turned into parties. He had a pool, so for those of us taking summer courses in the ungodly Missouri heat, his house was a lifesaver. He was a gracious host, and over time, we became great friends.

But I forgot how this mostly quiet, soft-spoken man (I’m deliberately not using his name to protect his privacy) would on those evenings talk for hours on end, more animated than a cartoon. I forgot about the ever-present glass of wine. I was young and drinking with a professor at his house was a badge of honor. I thought that this must be what’s it like to be a journalist – discussing politics and culture into the night, stimulated by intellect and cocktails.

MANY YEARS LATER, after graduation, after a career in journalism, and after I went into business for myself, he contacted me out of nowhere. We occasionally kept in touch but our lives, as lives do, parted ways. So I was both surprised and excited to see him again, my mentor and friend who set me on the right path.

We met at a Starbucks. He was divorced and out of work, having been laid off or let go from his previous jobs, it’s hard to say. He had his resume with him and was talking about some interviews for which he was preparing.

It took a while to process, but I soon realized that my former professor was asking me to be a job reference for him. The same man who helped me get started in journalism was now asking for my help to get back into the field. And not just that, but he asked me if I knew of any jobs or if I could point him in the right direction.

How I wish I knew then. Until now, I had forgotten about his slower speech, the pleading smile cracking his graying beard.

Until now, I thought I had seen and spoken to my mentor. But that wasn’t the same man sitting across from me.

It was a ghost.

FOR THE NEXT TEN DAYS, from the Jewish New Year and leading up to Yom Kippur, I will apologize and ask forgiveness for my sins. I will apologize for sins of commission and omission, for sins big and small. I will apologize for sins committed this past year, or decades ago.

I will reflect on one night in 1986, when a journalism professor saved my life.

And I will beg for forgiveness, because after years of chances, I couldn’t save his.

Freedom From the Press Should Empower Today's Journalists

Journalists have more on their minds these days than the mere transformation of their profession. They are struggling with being just like everyone else.

Journalists are used to being special. They are the only professionals with their own line in the U.S. Constitution -- "Freedom of the press." That meant anyone could be a reporter, although the reality was you could only practice "freedom of the press" if you could afford the means of production and distribution.

Now "Freedom of the press" has become freedom from the press. We all have the means to be reporters, to produce and distribute news and exercise our freedoms of speech and of press. We can use services like Paper.Li to make our own automated "newspapers" like mine or that of my employer.

What my former brethren need to focus on is that just because everyone can do a thing doesn't mean everyone should, nor does it mean they will do it well.

You didn't lose your Constitutional rights to report the news. Social media didn't strip you of your obligation to the public trust.

We need professional, quality journalism more than ever. Remember that the next time you feel sorry for yourself or write a misleading headline just to earn more page views. 

Cancer Can’t Kill What She Did for Modern Media

Five years ago, a young San Francisco Chronicle editor built a bridge from old mainstream media to the then new and largely untested digital frontier. She didn’t know that she was doing it at the time – all she knew was that she had cancer, and rather than cry in silence, she decided that if she was going to die, she was going to die out loud.

Alicia’s Story, a front-page Chronicle series that I first wrote about here, was (and I quote myself) “An unusually naked view inside life with cancer, not to mention life inside a major metropolitan daily. It’s also bold for this kind of series to run on the front page, allowing for maximum exposure. And let’s face it: Who knew that a copy editor could actually, well you know, write.”

But as I also noted, Alicia's Story was something else, too -- a link between traditional and modern journalism. The series read like a long blog post or e-mail to her closest friends, making it hard to see where AP style ended and the freestyle writing of a blogger began. 

Alicia's Story was personal and conversational, but it never lost its grip on the need to report and to educate the reader. Alicia Parlette was a "mainstream" journalist practicing citizen journalism, channeling an authentic style that we now take for granted.

Remember, this was 2005, and Alicia’s Story was groundbreaking stuff. Not everyone understood why this “news” belonged on the front page. But the Chronicle didn’t’ care, nor did Alicia, and for that we are grateful.

Which brings us to 2010, and a hospital bed in California.

Alicia’s cancer is back – and this time, it’s going to win. Her friends have set up a web site, www.msparlette.com, to keep track of her condition, though even the doctors say it’s a only a matter of weeks before this young, brave, unintentional scion succumbs to the disease.

I’ve written innumerable stories and blog posts in my career; I’ve covered major disasters, interviewed U.S. Presidents and earned awards for articles about people I can’t recall. But Alicia’s story stuck – five years later it’s still the most read post on my blog, and it’s a chapter in my book, The Last Newspaper.

I’ve never spoken to Alicia, but she still speaks to me. She is dying out loud again, sharing her ordeal with friends and with perfect strangers.She helped change journalism and didn’t know it; she gave people hope and asked for nothing in return.

What Alicia did was an unintentional act, which made it all the more powerful. Unintentional acts, after all, change the world. Rosa Parks didn’t mean to start the civil rights movement, but she did with the simple act of sitting on a bus.

Alicia Parlette got cancer. And then she changed journalism – not in a big way and not even in a well-known way, but in a lasting way of deep emotion and significance.

Die out loud, Alicia, so loud that your voice and your impact remains here on Earth, while you go to a better place and find lasting peace.

(30)

Newspapers: Making the Case for Free

(Originally posted at www.edelmandigital.com)

The future of newspapers may well be in Colorado, once home to the late “gonzo journalism” provocateur Hunter S. Thomson and today home to no less that 12 free dailies. All of these papers are very local, and perhaps more importantly, successful. This trend is even more interesting in light of tough times at the “real” state papers like the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post.

This isn’t a Colorado-only phenomenon. Palo Alto, Calif., in the heart of Silicon Valley and arguably Ground Zero in the “print is dead” movement, has two free daily newspapers. A free paper in Santa Monica, Calif., may soon expand.

Online advertising, pay walls, premium subscriptions – newspapers are trying anything to find new business models. But the future of print’s survival may be in Free.

Yes, free. No subscription, purely ad-driven free newspapers; hyper-targeted to neighborhoods and towns, not cities or regions. And rather than published in the morning when the news is at its most stale and competes for attention with people’s Facebook and Twitter feeds, these papers can come out in the late afternoon (for you old-timers, afternoon papers used to be commonplace in the United States.) A free, local, afternoon paper gives you analysis, context and hometown perspective to the news of the day.

“Most revenue for newspapers comes from advertising sales that subsidize the per-paper cost,” Curtis Robinson, editor of the free Portland (Maine) Daily Sun, says on the paper’s web site. “We just work on the model — like broadcast TV and nearly all Internet sites — that people want free news and that advertisers want to reach that readership. Media gurus sometimes assert that free dailies are the “transition” from traditional print media to online-only news — which sounds okay, except that free dailies did well before the Internet.”

The Case for Free (and Local)

It’s a popular conceit that people ever paid for content via their newspaper subscriptions. What they actually paid for was the means of distribution — paper, ink, presses, gasoline, tires and so on.

Advertisers were brought along for the ride – the more subscriptions a paper had the more ads that could be sold, which meant more pages and then, you guessed it, higher distribution costs.

This worked fine until the Internet Age. Newspapers made the mistake of looking at the Internet as simply another means of distribution, figuring that people would come to their web sites and read the news, and more importantly read the ads that helped pay for the web servers.

But search trumped any vision of people reading the news only at a newspaper’s web site. Now they could read the news on Google, Yahoo!, MSN or via RSS and Twitter feeds directly on their computer desktops or mobile devices. New media companies like Google saw value in the content, not the distribution, and traditional newspapers have been trying to catch up ever since.

Free may be the answer. And by staying hyper local – or a “micro daily” as Robinson says – the old distribution costs are greatly reduced. The paper is now attractive to readers and to advertisers, who see greater value in ads targeted to their most likely customers.

The editors of the free Palo Alto Daily Post put it more bluntly on their web site (where you won’t find any news):

“Giving away news online is a dumb way to do business. News is valuable. We put our news in print. The news creates demand for our paper, and increased readership makes our ads more effective than advertising in any other medium.”

Still Much Work to Do

The latest “State of the News Media” report from the Pew Project on Excellence in Journalism offers few surprises: Big-city papers continue to have the worst of it. But small dailies and community weeklies are generally doing better. “The latter come closer to the late-20th century position of newspapers as the dominant source for local information and the place for local merchants to advertise,” the report said.

The New York Times launched regional supplements to its San Francisco and Chicago editions, and even ESPN got into the act, starting regional sites in Chicago, Boston, Dallas and Los Angeles, challenging papers there for the hearts and minds of local sports fans. Yet these new products still don’t give locals what they really want – high school sports coverage, City Hall and Neighborhood Association news, or why that helicopter was circling overhead last night.

All of this news can and should be delivered online and via mobile devices, especially when it comes to time-sensitive information or live events. And location-tagging services like Foursquare and Gowalla will make the news event more local, and therefore more relevant.

The future of newspapers is still comprised more of bits than atoms; this transition can’t be stopped, nor should it be. But local print dailies have a place and a purpose. They appeal to young and old and everyone in between.

In a world drowning in fragments of fleeting “content,” print is the king of context and narrative. And free is the way forward for print to remain relevant – and survive.

The Real Story behind "The Last Newspaper"

 You don’t get to age 43 without experiencing some loss, usually the loss of hair and the ability to maintain that body you once knew in high school. It’s a familiar theme, even necessary. Hell, without loss there would never have been a Disney animated film.

A few days ago, someone asked what my new book, The Last Newspaper, was about. I started into my usual spiel about media transformation, journalism trends and all that, when it became clear.

This book is about loss – the loss of a predictable past; of comfort; of story and of an industry. And as a former newspaper journalist who had planned to change the world, it’s also about losing yet another part of me.

I didn’t realize it until recently, but loss has been my life’s defining thematic. I lost my father at age 8; the chance at a “normal” childhood soon followed, as I also lost any memory of him or anything that happened prior to his death. It was as if I didn’t begin until he was gone.

In 1993, I lost all hearing in my right ear, the result of a tumor that was removed but still leaves its mark in the form of balance problems and the occasional seizure. The next year, my first book was published – a non-fiction novel about the death penalty. Again, loss reared its familiar head.

I thought The Last Newspaper would be prescient social commentary, a must-read for journalists as well as marketers. And, on the surface at least, that’s exactly what it is.

But it’s also a long goodbye. It’s an acceptance of what has happened, mixed with not just a little bit of defiance. And, I hope, it’s a warning. I’ve seen enough futures to know that not all of them are better than what came before.

True, it’s easier to feel helpless than hopeful. It’s easier to make excuses than to make a difference. It’s easier to think about the things we’ve lost than the things we’ve gained.

I work every day to avoid these traps, these psychological comforts. I still have hope for real journalism; and I don’t accept excuses from anyone, including myself, no matter how murderous my headaches or how tired I may get.

Loss defines me, but it won’t defeat me.  Hairline excluded, of course.

Where There is Journalism, There is Hope

(Note: The following is the final chapter from my forthcoming book, “The Last Newspaper.” It’s printed here with permission from, well, myself...)

“The one thing most likely to make the public value newspapers is newspapers valuing the public.”

-- Paul Bradshaw, senior lecturer in online journalism at Birmingham City University

THERE IS A POPULAR TWITTER channel that tracks layoffs, financial struggles and whatever gloom and doom happens to be falling on the traditional media industry. Called “The Media is Dying,” the tweets read like epitaphs. Thousands of journalists follow the stream, mostly to see if their publication is the next to suffer.

There are digital tombstones like this everywhere. It seems like there are more people writing about failing newspapers than there are journalists working for them. The Associated Press is facing major layoffs, while Politico, an online news site, hired a former Washington Post editor to start a local news operation in Washington, D.C., which itself will hire 50 people including two dozen reporters.

The Observer Newspaper, the world’s oldest Sunday paper, may close because of poor financial performance. And the Tribune Company, in addition to shrinking staff, is also shrinking the width of its papers to save money.

Yet the future is bright. Yes, that’s what I said. For where there is journalism, there is hope. However, we also need journalists to do a lot of the work.

Now I’m not going to head down the path of belittling or underestimating the power of citizen journalists – one only needs to remember the iconic images of the London Underground bombings in 2005, the first-hand reports of the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007, or the Tweets heard ‘round the world about the Iranian elections in 2009 to be convinced.

But citizens don't need to learn how to be journalists – instead, journalists need to learn how to re-connect with their communities and earn back the public’s trust.

Journalists can start by not blaming technology for all of their problems. The Internet didn’t force the Los Angeles Times to stop covering City Hall (if anything, the wide availability of national and international news should have had the opposite effect.) The Internet didn’t turn once respected reporters like Lou Dobbs and Bill O’Reilly into cult leaders, or give a former sports anchor a prime time political bull whip. The Internet didn’t tell Jayson Blair to lie, Judith Miller to report government propaganda or Ann Coulter to go bat shit crazy (the voices in her head did that.)

We expect Fox News and TMZ to “flood the zone” with tasteless and baseless drivel designed to bait and anesthetize an already fearful public. But we needed – and still need – real journalists to fill the void with news that matters. We need them to talk to us, work with us, and help us regain the sense of community that’s been lost within a cacophony of “content.”

Journalists need to get back on the “beat,” forget about technology and focus on sociology, humanity, community and, most important, their Constitutional duty to watch those who would watch over us. They need to be hyper local, hyper personal and medium agnostic in their reporting. Journalists need to stop being led and learn how to lead once more.

As I said, where there is journalism, there is hope. And there is a lot of hope out there if you know where to look:

• Pierre Omidyar, an investor who backed early (and now failed) citizen journalism startups Backfence and Bayosphere, is starting a non-profit news service in Hawaii that will be staffed with professional journalists. As Omidyar says on his blog, “We’re a small, fast-moving entrepreneurial team dedicated to bringing civic affairs journalism and analysis to our community in a commercially sustainable way. We combine our social media and online community experience with a passion for journalism in the public interest.”  This is an emerging trend that’s worth following and supporting, a sort of “NPR” model that requires journalists to work with their communities both for stories and ongoing funding.

• Some reporters are taking matters into their own hands, such as former Florida Sun-Sentinel reporter Jerry Lower, who took a loan against his house to start The Coastal Star, a hyper local offline and online newspaper serving the Delray Beach area. His paper is turning a profit, as is Health News Florida, a niche as well as local news site run by former Orlando Sentinel reporter Carol Gentry. Her non-profit model leverages a variety of funding sources, typically in small amounts from multiple foundations and organizations.

• Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at New York University, was one of the first to coin the term “Pro Am” journalism, where professional reporters and the lay public work together to cover the news. Early examples include the Northwest Voice (backed by the Bakersfield Californian), My Missourian from Columbia, Mo., and Rosen’s own (albeit now defunct) Assignment Zero. I’m no expert in why Assignment Zero failed and why other experiments survived, but I have to believe it’s due, at least in part, to focusing on being smaller. Just look at ChicagoNow, a local blog hub started by the Chicago Tribune Media Group but run entirely “by Chicagoans for Chicagoans.” The site focuses on stories people can’t get from the bigger, more traditional ChicagoTribune.com – and for those stories it turns to more than 120 local bloggers who are experts in the kind of minutia of daily civic life that only a taxpaying resident could love. The bloggers are paid $5 per 1,000 page views and are encouraged to comment and interact with the community.

Local, local, and then more local news – this, to me, is the key to journalism’s rebirth. People will support it and advertisers will pay for it (imagine, reaching people who can actually go into your store.) This isn’t about a “paper,” it’s about reporting – in words, in video, online or on mobile. Follow the story and follow your audience, then apply whatever technology makes sense.

Sometimes this also means recognizing and raising the voices within your community – journalists are also great aggregators and should leverage the social web for stories and collaboration, such as Robert Quigley of the Austin-American Statesman, who uses Twitter to find the best local information as well as share relevant news from the paper itself.

Local news is bigger than ever – according to a study by the National Newspaper Association, 86 million Americans still read local newspapers every week, and 60 percent say the newspaper is their primary source of information about their community.

Yes, the future of news is bright even though the outlook is dim. Besides, we can’t give up on journalism, for if we do that, we are giving up on ourselves. We would be giving away our rights and a freedom that nearly every other society in the world would love to experience, and whose people and journalists are dying almost every day for that privilege.

“I believe in the profession of journalism,” wrote Walter Williams, the first dean of the Missouri School of Journalism, in 1908. “I believe that the public journal is a public trust; that all connected with it are, to the full measure of their responsibility, trustees for the public; that acceptance of a lesser service than the public service is betrayal of this trust…

“I believe that the journalism which succeeds best -- and best deserves success -- fears God and honors Man; is stoutly independent, unmoved by pride of opinion or greed of power, constructive, tolerant but never careless, self-controlled, patient, always respectful of its readers but always unafraid, is quickly indignant at injustice; is unswayed by the appeal of privilege or the clamor of the mob; seeks to give every man a chance and, as far as law and honest wage and recognition of human brotherhood can make it so, an equal chance; is profoundly patriotic while sincerely promoting international good will and cementing world-comradeship; is a journalism of humanity, of and for today's world.”

I believe in the profession of journalism, still. I believe in the hope it transmits and the values it embodies. And I believe the time has come to embrace journalism again.

Leave the Journalism to the Journalists

Being married for 18 years has taught me how to make excuses. Usually these excuses have little effect, other than to serve as a caustic reminder of just how little influence I have in my own house.

Nevertheless, my excuse for not posting in the past couple months is a pretty good one: I’ve been busy compiling a book based on this blog. So you see, I have been writing, just the old-fashioned way – in private.

The book – called The Last Newspaper: Reflections on the Future of News – should be done next month, at which time there might even be a few newspapers left. I hope so – as regular readers of this blog know, I’m still a fan of storytelling, something that Twitter can’t provide and that newspapers don’t deliver often enough. And I’m a fan of reporters, partly because I used to be one, and partly because they aren’t editors.

It’s easy to assume that all social media today is an iceberg, newspapers are the Titanic and that reporters are looking for lifeboats. While certainly true for some, there are others for whom newspapers have simply lost the desire to be different.

I met once such reporter recently in Sacramento. He was interested in looking for a new career, but not for the reasons you may think. He loves newspapers, loves writing for them and loves having worked for them for nearly two decades. He also loves technology and embraces new media as much as the old. And he’s not the least bit worried about becoming an unemployment statistic.

Blogs aren’t killing this mainstream media star – boredom is. The “product” being shaped by management is a bland, watered-down journalism designed not to offend, and in doing so ends up signifying nothing.

This is the opposite of what today’s newspapers need to do to survive. Newspapers have to provoke and inspire. They must be spontaneous and serious, make us laugh and cry. Most importantly, newspapers have to stop reporting the news and start telling good stories again.

The news business can’t drive the product – that must be left to the journalists. Let the good ones do their jobs and the product will improve. Let them get bored, strip their inspiration, and the last newspaper may be here sooner than we think.

What Google Doesn’t Know (and never will)

Inspired by a colleague who proclaimed that “books would be dead” in five years, I posed a tongue-in-cheek question on my Facebook page, asking “what will disappear first, books or the book review section” of newspapers?

Expecting similarly tongue-in-cheek answers, I instead received this:

“I read a story today in the New York Times Magazine about a guy who gave up his Ph.D. and work in intellectual think tanks to become a motorcycle mechanic. This was a fantastic article that no search engine would ever have found for me. I do not do searches on PhD, think tanks or motorcycle maintenance. Thank you, New York Times. That is what newspapers and magazines can do. Bring you the things you didn't know you wanted.”

Now, you can analyze this position in many ways, but for me, it boils down to this: There are search engines that learn from us (Google) and search engines that teach us (Journalists). We need both, and neither should diminish at the expense of the other.

The Next Level of Search

 “Search” may well become the most overused and misunderstood word or phrase in social media since, well, “social media.”

According to a recent white paper issued by my company, there are four kinds of search: Paid, Optimized, Reputational and Social. While correct, the paper overlooks one key fact – for content to be found, people need to know that they want to find it.

Most search strategies and methodologies today are about creating visibility and order – learning what people want, taking them to it, and helping them organize it. As a result, search is moving closer to that Web 1.0 dream of “intelligent agents” roaming the web, fulfilling your every request.

But what if you don’t know what you want until you see it? It’s great to have search that understands me, but I want a search that teaches me. I want serendipity.

Computers learn, people teach -- and this is where journalism and the printed word can still lead.

Journalists as “Search Agents”

Those “intelligent agents” we all wanted? They are called reporter and editors. They are magazines, newspapers and, yes, books.

These are the search agents that advance us and force us to confront what we didn’t think we needed or wanted to know. It doesn’t matter how well a search engine learns to learn if, in the end, it teaches us nothing.

So the next time you are in Barnes & Noble or Borders, look around and remember that you are standing inside a search engine, a vast repository of knowledge that is waiting for discovery. Pick up a newspaper (if there are any left in your town) and see what the “search agents” found for you to read.

Many people today believe that if the news is important enough, it will find them. Perhaps – but I’d rather find it for myself. With any luck, I’ll find exactly what I don’t want.

The Last Newspaper

Daniel headed for the darkest corner of his local Starbucks, the Last Newspaper clutched snug against his chest.

He opened it slowly, carefully, as if he were cradling an ancient parchment. The crinkling sound it made drew a few stares, and then a few more as those around him realized that they were sitting just a few feet from history.

Daniel pretended not to notice. He wasn’t much for attention or conversation. But even he couldn’t deny the significance of this stubborn relic that had struggled against the future and lost.

So he didn’t cringe when several customers put down their Kindles and slid over to his table. After all, he had heard the questions over and over for months as he executed his daily routine of “offline” media consumption. He knew that this day would come, when the Last Newspaper rolled off the press and he alone would be left to feel the ink seep into the creases of his fingertips, turn the oversized pages and engage in a forgotten literary ritual.

The questions often took the form of puzzled amusement:

• "Isn't the news old by the time you read it?”
• "How do you search?"
• "What do you mean you had to pay for it?"
• "Why would you want a bunch of content you don’t care about?
• "I’ve got all the news that’s fit to click right here."
• "What is ‘ink’”?

Daniel took it all in stride. He nodded politely, laughed lightly, and answered what he could with all the patience and quiet pride of a museum curator.

He reminded his rapt audience that what they now refer to as “content” used to be called “stories,” delivered by trained individuals known as “storytellers” and “journalists.” These people didn’t work for companies like Google or Amazon as they do now, culling “content” from armies of information aggregators and feeding it into computers which analyze and pull out the relevant information by keyword. Before news was fully automated, Daniel said, individuals wrote entire stories themselves. They researched and crafted linear narratives – unheard of today, he admitted, but at the time people found value in following a certain flow.

Of course, people had more time back then, too. The move from stories to content was slow as well, and its tipping point went largely unnoticed. Before anyone knew what was happening, stories became shorter, sliced, repurposed and packaged as do-it-yourself news. Where once we read stories, we now consumed content.

Maybe this is why it happened, Daniel thought, as the crowd went back to the soft glow of their Kindles and mobile media devices. Maybe the descent from stories to content was the fait accompli of the printed page. 

Stories are personal and transformational. Stories have definition and character. Stories are history personified.

But content is cold, distant. Content is a commodity – a finite consumable of fleeting value. Content is artificial intelligence.

When storytelling is reduced to content, ideas die.

And with that, Daniel stood, folded the Last Newspaper back under his arm and walked away, leaving the future behind for the last time.

Newspapers Can Win by Being Last

My boss, who given the nature of our work is a savvy digital guy, noted via Facebook how the news about Gen. Colin Powell’s endorsement of Sen. Barack Obama for President broke first on Twitter, before the Washington Post, New York Times or Wall Street Journal. This is interesting as a piece of trivia, but what it says about the psyche of the American news consumer is far more powerful.

It says that the past decade or so of 24-hour news, infotainment, halfwit commentators and Internet-born drivel has taught us nothing.

It means that we still celebrate speed over substance, accolades over accuracy, and timing over truth. It means that winning is only about being first and not about being right. It says that getting out of the starting blocks first matters more than finishing the race.

I know this isn’t true for everyone, but it’s true for many and that is troubling enough.

Newspapers aren’t dying solely because of an outdated business model or modern means of distribution – they are dying because things without speed are viewed as having little to no value in a 21^st Century world.

The Los Angeles Times, my hometown paper, is getting thinner not for lack of advertising but for lack of news. A redesign to make stories and sections easier to find via call-outs and color coding hasn’t changed the fact that there is less relevance to the stories for people who already got that morning’s headlines via Google or iPhone.

Newspapers – and I’m talking specifically about the print product – need to stop chasing television and the Internet. We get plenty of news fast, but what we need is a place to slow down and digest.

Let the Web side of the house be more about the “what” and the newspaper side more about the “so what.” Give us analysis and investigation, and use the paper’s web site to fill in the gaps between editions and keep us on top of the breaking stories. And bring back the afternoon newspaper – the news will be timelier and the analysis more welcome at the end of the day when we’ve had our fill of RSS feeds.

If newspapers want to win, they need to finish last.

Hmm, that sentence is short enough to tweet. But I’m sure someone has already beaten me to it.