By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions

Month: June 2007 Page 3 of 4

Stop the presses

Check out this great slideshow of the just-closed New York Times building. Narrator David Dunlap gets a bit carried away with the sound effects, but there are some wonderful old pictures of the newsroom and the presses.

Eat now, pay later

I don’t mean to steal a page out of Seth’s blog, but I have important news to report following a weekend visit to Woodman’s: (1) believe it or not, they’re now taking credit cards; and (2) when I ordered the fried jumbo shrimp plate, I was offered cocktail sauce instead of automatically being given tartar sauce. Not nearly enough horseradish in the cocktail sauce, but, still, it was a huge upgrade.

Photo (cc) by kariek. Some rights reserved.

Food fight

As a somewhat disgruntled customer of Wild Oats (my suggested motto: “You’d Better Want What We Have, Because We Don’t Have What You Want”), I’ve been looking forward to seeing my local outlet converted to a Whole Foods.

Now Daniel Gross of Slate tells us that the Bush administration has finally identified a proposed merger it doesn’t like. As Gross suggests, it sounds like revenge.

What Craig hath wrought

I’ve been catching up on some new-media blogs this afternoon, and have run across a couple of favorable references to this post by Ryan Sholin, titled “10 obvious things about the future of newspapers you need to get through your head.”

I agree with a lot of it, despite a tone that stands out for snottiness even in the generally snotty world of blogging. But I want to take serious issue with this:

It’s not Craig’s fault. Newspaper classifieds suck and they have for years. Either develop simple database applications with photos and maps to let your users actually find what they’re looking for, or partner with a good third-party vertical who can. Anything less is a waste of your time.

Uh, actually, it is Craig’s fault. Not in the sense that Craig Newmark did anything anything wrong or evil when he created Craigslist. Rather, I’m talking about a simple reality — he and newspapers are in two different businesses, and his business has caused serious damage to the news business.

A large daily newspaper is an enormously expensive undertaking, and, traditionally, about a third of its revenues came from classified ads. Many newspapers actually made a pretty decent transition to the online world. As I recall, the Globe had a searchable help-wanted database on its Web site 10 or 12 years ago, and the Herald wasn’t that far behind.

But they still needed to charge money — lots of it — in order to pay for their journalism. When Monster.com and Craigslist came along, offering free and nearly free classifieds, there was no way that newspapers could compete. I recall reading a couple of years ago that help-wanted revenue at the San Jose Mercury News dropped from something like $115 million to $15 million in just a few years. (Note: Since I first posted this item, I found the article describing this.) Not surprisingly, the Mercury has been cut to the bone, with rumors of more cuts in the offing.

Could online newspaper classifieds be improved? Sure. But you have to wonder what the incentive is. The Globe is now partnering with Monster.com, which makes a lot of sense. No way, though, can this be as lucrative as the days when the Globe had a near-monopoly on the local classified market, and the Sunday paper was as popular for all those job listings as it was for the news it contained.

State employees online II

The Herald’s online database of state-employee salaries seems to be working as intended today. You can search by name, look up entire departments and sort by name or salary, among other features.

Adam Gaffin has some ideas on how to make it more usable — although it looks like at least a few have already been implemented. Personally, I’d make it so that you could download the whole thing into an Excel spreadsheet.

I’ve looked up a few people this morning, and found out that they don’t make as much as I’d assumed.

Update: Joe Dwinell shares some tips, including how to pull parts of the database into Excel. What about the whole thing? “Sorry, it’s too big to e-mail.” Yes, but it could be posted as a downloadable file.

State employees online

Herald city editor Jules Crittenden may think the print edition is what matters, but the most interesting thing going on in his paper today is online: the Herald has unveiled the entire state payroll as of April 2007.

I think there are some legitimate privacy concerns, but the fact is that these are all public records. On balance, making them readily accessible is a good thing — although I’m less than thrilled with the Herald’s page-one tease calling it “Find-A-Hack.”

Herald Web guy Joe Dwinell calls the online payroll a searchable list.” Maybe I’m missing something, but all I see is a non-sortable table broken into 3,979 Web pages that you have to click on one at a time. Perhaps further refinements will be coming.

Revenge of the nerds

Paul McMorrow’s Weekly Dig account of yesterday’s Statehouse hearing on Verizon’s bid to do away with local regulation of cable television franchises is so entertaining that I’ll forgive him for deriding “local legislators and cable access nerds” as guys who wear “pants from Kohl’s.” Even though I’ve been known to wear pants from Kohl’s. (Not today, though. They’re from Bob’s.)

What undermines it, unfortunately, is characteristic Dig cynicism. To wit:

At the heart of it, this is a battle between two mega-corporations — Verizon and Comcast — over who gets to have a near-monopoly where. Comcast is fighting the legislation, and is reportedly helping to fund a massive, Yay local! ad effort to defeat it. Verizon, pissed that Comcast is muscling in on its phone market, is pushing back by getting all up in Comcast’s digital-TV grill. At the end of this fight, somebody’s gonna end up richer than they were before, and it’s probably not going to be you.

Thanks for the link, Paul. And I certainly agree with the proposition that Comcast’s motives are no more pure than those of Verizon. But at the moment, at least, it’s in Comcast’s corporate interests to keep cable franchising and regulation at the local level — and that’s what’s best for consumers and local media as well.

More coverage from the Globe, the Associated Press (by way of the Herald), the Eagle-Tribune, the Springfield Republican and State House News Service (via the MetroWest Daily News) can be found here.

About face for Hillary and the Herald

OK, see if you can follow this.

(1) Herald columnist Margery Eagan seems to say that Hillary Clinton has had “work” done, only she (2) takes it back toward the end; (3) the Herald runs some pretty stunning before and after pictures, except that (4) they turn out to be after and before; (5) Drudge (right) picks it up; (6) Herald spokeswoman Gwen Gage says it was all a mistake or something.

Whew. Greg Sargent explains all at TPM Cafe.

Wouldn’t it all be so much easier if we’d just stop obsessing over Hillary’s looks? I know, I know. It makes too much sense.

Personal journalism

Dr. Denny says he’d pay a blogger $191 a year to cover his community. And what if hyperlocal bloggers cobble together user fees with advertising? “Just maybe that advertising income, paired with the subscription money, will allow you to make a living, live in a community you grow to like, raise a couple kids and become a respected journalist,” he writes.

Not a bad idea.

No big deal

The Globe’s Carolyn Johnson reports that while Verizon tells the public that local franchising regulations are an obstacle to the glories of its fiber-optics cable television service, company officials are telling investors that the regulations are no big deal.

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