Author: Dan Kennedy

Radio’s challenge to print

You may have heard that two Boston Herald sportswriters, Rob Bradford and Michael Felger, are leaving the paper to join WEEI.com as full-time sports bloggers. The move hasn’t gotten much attention, but I think it may prove to be pretty significant in terms of how the media continue to change.

The buzzword for what this is about is “disaggregation.” What it means is that the one-stop package that is the daily newspaper — hard news and automobile ads, obituaries and sports, political analysis and comics — is coming apart, with niche media better able to give people what they’re looking for.

You can already see this with television sports journalism. The sports segments on TV newscasts have been shortened because the true fans are watching ESPN. Now it’s coming down to the local level, with WEEI (AM 850), a phenomenally successful all-sports radio station, taking the first step toward competing with the sports pages of the Herald and the Boston Globe.

This is going to be a challenge for Bradford and Felger in that there is virtually no adult supervision at WEEI. They’re going to have to provide their own journalistic standards, and no doubt there will be occasions when they’ll have to stand up to management and say “no.” In a larger sense, though, I’m fascinated at the notion that a radio station is going to try to fill at least part of the role traditionally held by newspapers.

In that respect, the WEEI move is more significant than Sacha Pfeiffer‘s decision to switch from the Globe to WBUR Radio (90.9 FM) earlier this year. Pfeiffer’s new job, after all, is to be a radio reporter, not a print reporter who writes for the station’s Web site. It has more to do with a first-rate reporter moving to a medium whose non-profit business model, built on a foundation of listener contributions and corporate underwriting, is more solid than the newspaper industry’s.

Yet here, too, there are developments that bear watching. Every day I receive an e-mail from WBUR with the latest world, national and local news, complete with photos, AP wire copy and sound clips. It is a reasonably comprehensive wrap-up of the day’s news, even if it’s not quite as detailed as what I find in the Globe.

Currently the Globe offers a six- or seven-minute podcast that is little more than a teaser for what’s in the paper. But if WBUR is going to publish what is, in effect, an online newspaper, why shouldn’t the Globe compete with a half-hour podcast consisting of a reasonably complete news report, with paid advertising?

If digital convergence gives radio stations the power to become newspapers, then newspapers ought to consider what it would take to become radio stations. In the current environment, no one can afford not to experiment.

More: Dave Scott has some thoughts on what Felger’s move means for the local ESPN Radio outlet at AM 890, where Felger had hosted a show, as well as further background on the Bradford-Herald situation.

Another paper goes Web-mostly

It’s not yet a trend, but the managers of another daily newspaper have decided to go mostly online, and to scale back their print edition to just twice a week.

This time it’s the Daily Telegram of Superior, Wis., joining another Wisconsin paper, the Capital Times of Madison, which made the switch earlier this year.

Like the Capital Times, the Telegram is an afternoon paper owned by a chain co-owned with a larger, more successful morning paper in the same market. The real test will be when someone in a one-newspaper town tries this. Still, it definitely bears watching. (Via Romenesko.)

A non-disclosure disclosure

The Boston Globe today runs an op-ed piece urging passage of a free-trade agreement with Colombia. The piece, by Marc Grossman, is reasoned and nuanced, celebrating Colombia’s rescue of 15 hostages last week while acknowledging that the government of President Álvaro Uribe must continue to improve its human-rights record.

But there’s a hidden agenda. The tagline states that Grossman is a vice chairman of the Cohen Group, and is a former undersecretary of state. That’s a pretty weak disclosure. In fact, a little Googling reveals that the Cohen Group, founded by former secretary of defense William Cohen, helps private clients do business internationally. Here’s the lowdown, taken directly from the Cohen Group’s Web site:

The Cohen Group (TCG) assists clients to navigate the political and business landscape in Latin America.

Secretary Cohen and TCG principals have developed and maintain strong ties with political, business, military, and media officials throughout Latin America that can help to accomplish client business objectives in the region. Our understanding of and relationships in the region have enabled TCG to assist numerous firms in the U.S., Spain and elsewhere in Europe that have business interests in Latin America….

Ambassador Marc Grossman, as Under Secretary of State until 2005, worked directly with leaders from across the region on a broad range of political, economic and security issues. For his efforts to promote democracy and fight narcoterrorism in Colombia, he was awarded Colombia’s highest civilian honor, the Order of San Carlos.

An opinion piece such as Grossman’s is worthless if it’s not independent. The Cohen Group would benefit mightily from a free-trade deal with Colombia. Surely there are experts who could have made the case as effectively as Grossman without being tainted by their future earnings being tied up in the outcome of the free-trade debate.

Moving on at the Globe

Adam Reilly has a column in this week’s Boston Phoenix that attempts to put talk of a 10 percent wage cut at the Boston Globe in a larger context of union contracts, obsolescence and the future of the newspaper business.

What interested me, though, were the words of an unnamed newsroom insider, who demonstrated that there are some people at 135 Morrissey Boulevard who get it, and who are ready to move on:

It’s weird having white-collar and blue-collar workers in the same union, because they think differently. They’re trying to preserve something that’s dying. We understand it’s dying, and we don’t want to hang on to it. We want to go forward.

I’m not sure if this is the same source talking, but this, from later on in Reilly’s piece, is interesting nevertheless:

There’s no financial model that’ll stop the bleeding. We deliver a product whose business model doesn’t work. Printing a newspaper on paper and delivering it to people is not sustainable.

If the Globe is to survive, it needs to move quickly to an all-online or mostly online model, with the print edition subordinate to the Web. There are still a lot of smart people at the Globe, and I don’t doubt that they know this, starting with editor Marty Baron.

What we may be witnessing now, with the losses continuing to mount, is one of those turning points at which a slow transition suddenly becomes a stampede.

Using a blogging tool as a CMS

Blogging tools can only go so far, apparently. I’m the editor of my church’s Web site, and I’m planning a relaunch sometime later this summer or fall. At first I thought I would simply do it all in HTML with Sea Monkey or KompoZer.

But I realized I wanted a basic content-management system that could handle menu updates and that would provide a slicker look than I could do on my own. Mainly I need a CMS with short, flat learning curve. That rules out Drupal or Joomla, to name two solutions that webmasters who are smarter than I am get very excited about.

My thoughts turned to a free blogging platform. Naturally, though, neither of the easiest solutions is quite right.

WordPress.com offers the ability to create as many static pages as I want, and even allows me to set one of those static pages as the home page, with the blog residing somewhere underneath. That gets me 95 percent of the way there, and, frankly, it’s probably what I’m going to settle on. But customizing the template is, for all intents and purposes, not allowed. I can’t make the type size bigger. I don’t seem to be able to dump the blog-post calendar, which I’m afraid people will confuse with the church’s calendar of events.

I could try WordPress.org, but that would draw me into a world of effort and confusion that I’m trying to avoid. (See Drupal and Joomla, above.)

Blogger.com is much more flexible and easily customized. But it offers no static pages, which rules it out.

Frustrating.

Old ethics and new media (II)

The comments to my earlier post have transformed this into a substantive, productive conversation about journalism and standards in the new-media age. You’ll find intelligent posts on all sides of the issue, from outraged readers to GateHouse Media editors and executives.

I’m humbled by how much better the quality of the discussion is compared to my original post. As Dan Gillmor likes to say, “My readers know more than I do.”