One of the things I went over very quickly in the presentation are what I consider the elements of success for newspaper-run blog efforts. Here’s the list:

• Transparency
• Humility
• Patience
• Resources
• Interactions
• Personalities
• Participation
• Accountability

Of these, I really think Transparency is the biggest right now. Demystifying the news-gathering and editorial process is huge.

I got flickr-ed while giving the ‘15 second recap’ of the talk to the entire conference. I look kinda pompous?

Great first day of Northern Voice. I got to speak on what we’re doing at Bluffton Today. The “Big Media Strkies Back” title was designed as a playful jab at the anti-MSM vibe in some of the earlier sessions.

Here’s the presentation in a nutshell:

1. Newspapers realize that news is commodity
2. Community building is central to the mission of a daily newspaper
3. “Web 2.0″ tools can help the newspaper achieve #2
4. Collaborating with the community by enabling commenting and blogging will lead to a better newspaper
5. The print product and the professional journalism staff server to focus and amplify the concerns of the community.
6. If you undertake these projects with openness and candor, people will contribute and connect.

There’s more to it, of course. But that’s the basic scope.

First day is done. Met some cool folks from Bryght and EZSystems.

A very good sessin on coding for Drupal and another on enterprise-level issues. We’ve made some good contacts with folks who could help us get Wig3 out the door faster. One of the Bryght guys was sure that they could help us make a common install of the product that could be mass deployed very rapidly.

Bobby also got some leads about using Oracle with Drupal — there are people working on it, but Oracle has some nasty gotchas.

What’s really interesting is that the whole process is very open. In many cases, we’re hearing plans from the development team and they are actively soliciting feedback. For instance, during a session on themeing, I told them that we have namespace collision problems when using our CSS in conjunction with the drupal default. Everyone went ‘oh yeah, that is a problem; we should fix that.’

Vancouver is cool, too, and we actually had 3 straight days of sun.

I saw the story on the Washington Post [rr], via Romenesko.

America Online Inc. yesterday agreed to buy Weblogs Inc., the publisher of 85 freelance online sites about cars, movies, parenting, travel and other subjects, the latest move by the Dulles-based Internet service to increase the size of its audience and profit from ads.

Officials of both companies declined to comment on the record about the price. A source familiar with the deal, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the transaction’s confidential terms, said that the base price was $15 million and that AOL could end up paying as much as $25 million if Weblogs hits every performance target in the future.

Jason Calcanis built the company, and had this to say to the Post:

“What makes this work is unfiltered citizens’ content,” Calacanis said of Weblogs. “My key question to America Online was, ‘Guys, you understand this is unfiltered and that is what makes this special?’ Traditional media companies are nervous about comments or opinions without editing. You don’t have that in this business. It is people talking to each other.”

“People talking to each other.” Sounds familiar. It is the future.

That’s the proposition floated by
Edward Wasserman, Knight professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University, in today’s Miami Herald:

Could news survive without advertising? Actually, your subscription check is already enough, all by itself, to pay for the news you buy this paper for — 18 percent of revenues to cover 11 percent of costs. In an online world, the advertiser could go the way of paper and ink.

Nobody knows how much of the erosion in the news audience is from the steady corruption of news into dumb, inconsequential forms fashioned to grab readers for the sake of marketers. But just as HBO has shown how the noncommercial, subscription model can re-energize entertainment programming, we’re approaching the moment when the news business may have no choice but to remodel itself.

Wasserman’s argument, briefly, is that mass-market advertising is dying. His solution is the reverse of current newsroom trends: cut the bloat in advertising, not the newsroom.

I am reminded of Robin Sloan’s EPIC 2014, with its prediction of the New York Times as a “newletter read only by the rich and the elderly.”

But will this argument ever fly in a non-academic setting? And why did the Herald publish it?

A very interesting concept at Fundable.org. The site lets ad-hoc groups make donations which, if they pass a defined threshold, are used to make a purchase. If the threshold is not reached, everyone gets his or her money back.

A good example of Steve’s “product development through actual need” theory.

There are some obvious uses here for non-profits and for groups of friends.

Original tip from Lifehacker