Tag: Jeff Jarvis

Gannett is ramping up on the advertising and editorial sides — but will it last?

For a long time I’ve heard an alternative explanation for why newspaper advertising collapsed over the past 15 years. The argument goes something like this: Yes, Craigslist, Google and Facebook offered a better deal and took most of the ads that used to belong to newspapers. But newspapers themselves were to blame, too. Ad salespeople had become so accustomed to sitting at their desks and taking the orders that came pouring in that they actually had no experience or incentive to get out and sell. The tech platforms were going to have a devastating effect on them in any case, but it was worse than it needed to be, so this argument goes, because they couldn’t shake themselves out of the lethargy that came with many years of enjoying a monopoly or, at worst, a duopoly.

Which is why there’s some reason to be at least a little bit hopeful about the latest moves by a large media company that is hiring on both the business and editorial sides. At a time when many news organizations are in the midst of laying people off (CNN, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times) or shutting down (The Messenger), one media mega-corporation that is a household name is taking the opposite approach.

Would you believe it if I told you that the company is Gannett? The chain, which controls about 200 daily papers, anchored by USA Today, is rightly known for hollowing out newsrooms and using the savings to pay down debt and enrich their owners and top executives. These days, though, they are talking about trying something different.

Recently Mike Blinder of Editor & Publisher had two top Gannett executives on his podcast, “E&P Reports” — the chief content officer, Kristin Roberts, and Jason Taylor, the chief sales officer. After years of cutting at Gannett and the chain that it merged with several years ago, GateHouse Media, Gannett is now in expansion mode. Taylor said that Gannett has hired about two dozen local general managers since last August, with plans to hire more. These are the folks who are in charge of selling advertising, and they say it’s paying off with new accounts and with the return of some old accounts that left years ago.

Meanwhile, Roberts said that Gannett has hired 500 journalists since June of last year, with more to come in the months ahead. These are reporters, editors and visual journalists who, she said, will “bring strength back to local newsrooms, so that they can do the job of strengthening their local communities.” And yes, she mentioned the reporters that Gannett hired to cover Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, so make of that what you will.

Now, of course we should be skeptical. Axios has reported that the combined company eliminated fully half of its 21,000 employees after the 2019 merger, and the destruction it has wreaked in the communities it supposedly serves has been deep. I would love to hear from Media Nation readers whether they’ve seen any improvement in their Gannett paper’s coverage of local news in recent months.

The situation is especially dire in Eastern Massachusetts, where Gannett has closed and merged dozens of weekly papers and replaced local news stories with regional content from around the chain. Weeklies were at the heart of GateHouse, but the new Gannett doesn’t seem to have any interest in weeklies. If improvement is going to come, I suspect, it’s going to be at the dailies.

It’s also fair to be skeptical about whether the current upsurge is sustainable. Roberts and Taylor were recruited at a moment when the executives at the very top of Gannett decided to see if a little expansion might bring in more money than round after round of cuts. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, well, we know that the cutting will resume. Gannett remains heavily burdened by the debt it took on when it merged with GateHouse, which led the new Gannett to cut half its workforce.

The hiring that’s taking place now doesn’t come close to making up for what has been lost. But if they succeed, perhaps the hiring will continue.

• Blinder has been on a roll with his podcast. His latest features Steven Waldman, the president of Rebuild Local News, and Jeff Jarvis, a journalist, author and the retiring director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at City University of New York. The discussion was billed as debate over whether legacy media is worth saving or if instead it’s time to let them go. They agreed more than I thought they would, though they diverged when the discussion turned to government assistance and efforts to force Google and Facebook to compensate news organizations. It’s well worth a listen.

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In a separate lawsuit, Gannett joins antitrust effort aimed at Google (and Facebook)

Photo (cc) 2010 by John Marino

Since early 2021, Google has faced legal challenges over its control of digital advertising. Essentially, the tech giant stands accused of violating antitrust law by controlling all aspects of the ad market. As Paul Farrell, the lawyer for a group of seven newspapers in West Virginia, told Gretchen A. Peck of the trade publication Editor & Publisher:

They [Google] have completely monetized and commercialized their search engine, and what they’ve also done is create an advertising marketplace in which they represent and profit from the buyers and the sellers, while also owning the exchange. Google is the broker for the buyer and gets a commission. Google is the broker for the seller and gets a commission. Google owns, operates and sets the rules for the ad exchange. And they are also in the market themselves.

The suit filed by Farrell on behalf of the West Virginia papers was later joined by about 200 papers and included Facebook, which was accused of colluding with Google in order to receive preferential treatment. Attorneys general in Texas and several other states filed a separate suit, with BuzzFeed News reporting that the CEOs of Google and Facebook “personally signed off on a secret advertising deal.” The Justice Department got involved, and the European Union is suing Google on similar grounds.

On Tuesday, Google’s legal woes grew that much more complicated as Gannett, the country’s largest newspaper chain, filed its own lawsuit against Google in federal district court. Writing in USA Today, Gannett’s flagship publication, chair and CEO Mike Reed accused Google of “monopolization of advertising technology markets and deceptive commercial practices.” He added:

The core of the case and our position is that Google abuses its control over the ad server monopoly to make it increasingly difficult for rival exchanges to run competitive auctions. Further, Google’s exchange rigs its own auctions so Google’s advertisers can buy ad space at bargain prices. That means less investment in online content and fewer ad slots for publishers to sell and advertisers to buy. Google always wins because it takes a growing share of that shrinking pie.

In addition to USA Today, Gannett owns about 200 daily papers and other publications across the country, including local papers such as the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester, The Patriot Ledger of Quincy, the MetroWest Daily News of Framingham and The Providence Journal.

So why did Reed decide to file his own lawsuit rather than joining antitrust efforts that are already under way? It’s a good question, and it’s one that Editor & Publisher’s Mike and Robin Blinder asked him about in their vodcast, “E&P Reports.” Reed’s answer: “You know, as far as us going by ourselves, we just felt like we had the right size, we had the right legal counsel, and we felt like we didn’t want to wait.”

Jeff Jarvis, a well-known digital media observer and director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism, was critical of the Gannett suit, telling E&P:

It is tragic that once-great Gannett is resorting to protectionism and retribution against its competitors rather than have a strategy for innovation and growth in a changed marketplace. There are legitimate questions to be addressed regarding Google’s power in both sides of the advertising market and authorities in both Europe and the U.S. are investigating them. But for Gannett to blame Google’s alleged monopoly for its present troubles is just sad.

But you can disparage Gannett for decimating its newspapers while still supporting legal efforts to hold Google to account. Few media observers have been more critical of Gannett than my What Works partner Ellen Clegg and I. Greed and crushing debt have led the chain to cut its journalistic capacity far more deeply than would have otherwise been necessary. Yet it’s simply a fact that very little digital advertising money has flowed to the news business, and that lack of innovation on the part of the news business is only partly to blame. If news publishers and government investigators are able to show that situation is either partly or wholly the result of illegal practices on the part of Google (and Facebook), then there’s no reason why Gannett shouldn’t be one of the beneficiaries, regardless of the company’s otherwise loathsome behavior.

Moreover, the antitrust route strikes me as far more promising than congressional efforts to force Google and Facebook to pay for the news they repurpose. Last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee passed the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act on a bipartisan 14-7 vote, according to Ted Johnson of Deadline. The JCPA would allow the news business to bargain collectively with Google and Facebook for a share of their revenues. Even if the JCPA passes the full Senate, though, it seems unlikely to prevail in the Republican-controlled House. A similar law in Australia has served mainly to enrich press baron Rupert Murdoch, and there’s no guarantee that the JCPA would bolster journalism at the local level.

Regulating a monopoly often leads to unintended negative consequences. Breaking one up, as Gannett and its numerous co-plaintiffs would like to do, can spark innovation. Local news today is getting by through a combination of paywalls, low-value programmatic ads and — in the nonprofit sector — foundation grants, membership fees and events. Nothing would be more welcome than to see that bolstered by a reinvigorated ad market.

Two celebrated hyperlocals in N.J. will merge; plus, a 2009 visit with Baristanet’s founder

Rooster mural in Montclair, N.J. Photo (cc) 2016 by Rob DiCaterino.

If you felt some distant rumblings coming from the general direction of New Jersey a few days ago, I’m here to tell you why. A pioneering local blog in that state, Baristanet, will merge with a six-year-old community news organization, Montclair Local. Liz George, the editor and publisher of Baristanet, will served as publisher of the combined outlet.

This is a huge development in the world of hyperlocal news. I was especially struck by the news that the Local will drop its print edition, which had been a key part of its business strategy. The Local’s digital content is free, but the print weekly has served as an extra goodie for donors. Last year, when I was in Montclair to report on the media ecosystem in New Jersey, ProPublica editor-in-chief Stephen Engelberg, who serves on the Local’s governing board, joked that the print edition was the Local’s “tote bag.”

Now that will be going away, with the final print edition coming out this Thursday. According to the announcement, published in both the Local and Baristanet: “Putting out a print edition consumed more than 40 percent of the Local’s revenue from donors and advertisers, and trustees concluded it was better to spend the Local’s funds to generate more stories.”

The two outlets will continue separately through the summer while George works on a new website that will bring together both sites, according to the announcement. Baristanet was a for-profit, but the new, expanded Local will continue to be a nonprofit.

The spring of 2022 was actually my second visit to report on local news in Montclair. I also paid a visit in 2009 to meet with Debbie Galant, who founded Baristanet in 2004 and who at that time was regarded as a leader in DIY local journalism. George joined Baristanet several months after the founding. I wrote about Baristanet in my 2013 book, “The Wired City,” and I’m including an excerpt below.

Baristanet, founded in May 2004, was among the first successful hyperlocal sites. It was an inspiration for Paul Bass, who keeps a frisbee from a Baristanet anniversary party on the wall of his office at the New Haven Independent. Centered in the New York City suburb of Montclair, New Jersey, Baristanet in 2011 covered seven communities — six of which had their own Patch sites. AOL reportedly chooses communities based on an algorithm comprising 59 factors, including advertising potential, voter turnout and household income. Clearly the affluent, well-educated suburbs served by Baristanet were exactly what AOL was looking for.

Despite the threat posed by Patch, Baristanet continued to do well, according to Galant. When I interviewed her in 2009, she told me that revenues for the site were between $100,000 and $200,000 per year. Two years later, she said revenues were “a bit higher than $200,000, but our expenses have gone way higher too.” She did not specify what those expenses were. Unlike Howard Owens at The Batavian, Galant and her business partner, Liz George, had always treated Baristanet as a sideline, doing much of the work themselves but hiring part-time editors and designers as needed to accommodate their other projects — which, in Galant’s case, includes having written several published novels.

I met Galant on a rainy day in June 2009 at a Panera — a then new advertiser — just outside Montclair’s downtown. At the time, it was covering only three communities, and had just recently incorporated a parenting site that was renamed Barista Kids. Galant said she got the inspiration for starting Baristanet after losing her freelance position as a local columnist for The New York Times and then meeting Jeff Jarvis, an online-news expert and the author of the blog BuzzMachine. “He was talking a mile a minute about this idea of hyperlocal blogging and hyperlocal journalism. And the idea just really clicked in my head,” Galant said. “I thought it would be a fun thing to do. I’d been freelancing for years and years, and I saw that you could be vulnerable as a freelancer. I’d rather be a publisher.” The name of the site was based on the idea of “a virtual coffee shop,” she said, explaining, “In the old days you used to go to your bartender and talk to your bartender. These days, everybody’s at the coffeeshop, so you talk to your barista.”

The tone of Baristanet is conversational, fun and a bit snarky, and Galant is adept at involving readers. For instance, during an outbreak of swine flu just a few days before our meeting, she quoted from a news release issued by the Montclair public schools promising that students would not be punished if they were absent because of illness. “Does the usual policy for staying home sick from school include reprisals and punishment?” Galant asked. The brief item attracted 37 comments. “A traditional journalist would have taken the same tip, would have gone to the schools, interviewed the superintendent, interviewed the high school principal, and attempted somehow to find a whole bunch of representative parents and students to get their input,” she told me. “But they wouldn’t have actually gotten it nearly as efficiently or with as widespread a response from parents as from just having put it on the website.”

Baristanet is tracked by Quantcast, which found that the site attracted between 27,000 and 35,000 unique visitors a month for the first half of 2011. Galant told me her internal count was about double that, between 50,000 and 70,000 uniques per month.

As with The Batavian and its competition, The Daily News of Batavia, Baristanet could not compete head-to-head with the weekly Montclair Times or other newspapers in its seven communities, even though Galant said she had sometimes beaten the Times on breaking news. Times editor Mark Porter told me he had 12 full-time and one part-time editorial employees working for him, a startlingly high number for a weekly newspaper. Porter was dismissive of his online competition, saying, “Baristanet’s skill is getting press releases and people throughout the community who email or text-message breaking news to people who sit in front of computers.” Despite his rather caustic assessment of the competition, there was no doubting his dedication or sincerity as he described the hours he and his staff put in and the local meetings and events they covered. [Note: The Montclair Times today is part of the Gannett chain. When I visited Montclair last year, the Times appeared to be slightly more robust than the hollowed-out remains of Gannett’s weeklies in Eastern Massachusetts, though it was a shadow of the paper that Porter had presided over.]

When I asked Galant in 2009 how long she wanted to keep doing Baristanet, she replied, “I really don’t know.” She surprised me by saying that she wished The Star-Ledger’s parent company, New Jersey Media, had tried to acquire Baristanet before its own business problems became so acute that they precluded such a move. “I think that’s every startup business’s dream — somebody coming in and offering a whole big pot of money,” she said. “It would have made tremendous sense. Of course, no newspapers have any money anymore, so that’s not going to happen.” Two years later, when I asked about her battle with Patch, she replied, “Competition is no fun, but we’re hanging in there.” (In the summer of 2012 Galant left Baristanet in order to accept a position at Montclair State University, with Liz George continuing as the editor.)

More: Here are a couple of video interviews I conducted with Galant and Porter all those years ago.

How Google destroyed the value of digital advertising

New York Times media columnist Ben Smith reports on efforts to compel Google and Facebook to turn over some of their advertising revenues to the news organizations whose content they repurpose without compensation.

The debate over what platform companies owe the news business goes back many years and has come to resemble a theological dispute in its passions and the certainty expressed by those on either side. Indeed, longtime digital-news pundit Jeff Jarvis immediately weighed in with a smoking hot Twitter thread responding to Smith.

I’m not going to resolve that debate here. Rather, I want to offer some context. First, something like 90% of all new spending on digital advertising goes to Google and Facebook. Second, Google’s auction system for brokering ads destroyed any hopes news publishers had of making actual money from online advertising. How bad is it? Here’s an except from my 2018 book, “The Return of the Moguls”:

Nicco Mele, the former senior vice president and deputy publisher of the Los Angeles Times, who’s now the director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School [he has since moved on], explained at a Shorenstein seminar why a digital advertising strategy based on clicks simply doesn’t work for news organizations that are built around original (which is to say expensive) journalism. “Google has fundamentally shaped the future of advertising by charging on a performance basis — cost per click,” he said. “And that has been a giant, unimaginable anchor weight dragging down all advertising pricing.”

For example, Mele said that a full-page weekday ad in the LA Times, which would reach 500,000 people, costs about $50,000. To reach the same 500,000 people on LATimes.com costs about $7,000. And if that ad appeared on LATimes.com via Google, it might bring in no more than $20. “Models built on scale make zero sense to me,” Mele said, “because I just don’t see any future there.” Yet it has led even our best newspapers to supplement their high-quality journalism with a pursuit of clicks for the sake of clicks.

From $50,000 to $7,000 to $20. This is why the advertising model for digital news is broken, and it’s why newspapers have gone all-in on paid subscriptions.

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New York Times: We got it right on ‘culling’ the staff

As I wrote Monday, I thought the most significant part of Nick Ciubotariu’s post in defense of Amazon was his flat-out denial that the company fires a certain number of employees every year as a way of “culling” the staff. So I want to note that The New York Times is now asserting that its reporting is correct and that Ciubotariu is simply wrong:

His points contradicted the accounts of many former and current colleagues, and some of his assertions were incorrect, including a statement that the company does not cull employees on an annual basis. An Amazon spokesman previously confirmed that the company sought to manage out a certain percentage of its work force annually. The number varies from year to year.

The responses to the Times’ megastory on Amazon’s workplace environment, reported and written by Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld, continue to roll in. Here are a few — none of them long — that I think are worth your time.

At Fortune, Mathew Ingram argues that though the Times’ reporting may be accurate, it lacks context. “For some, it is probably a cruel place where they [employees] feel unwelcome, and their performance is judged more harshly than they would like,” Ingram writes, “but for others I expect it is a challenging environment that makes them do things they might not have even thought they were capable of.”

Ingram also makes an important point that I couldn’t help but notice as I was reading the Times opus: an underlying dismissiveness of Amazon because it’s a mere retailer (not actually true, but whatever). Ingram puts it this way:

I think part of the reason that Amazon gets singled out is that it is seen as just a retailer, not a company like Apple that is making magical products to improve people’s lives or fill them with joy. This tone runs throughout the New York Times piece, which talks about how employees are subjected to inhuman treatment “with words like ‘mission’ used to describe lightning-quick delivery of Cocoa Krispies or selfie sticks.” The implication is that selling things somehow isn’t a worthwhile goal.

Buzz Machine blogger Jeff Jarvis thinks the Times article lacks balance, and says that though it did manage to take note of the fact that Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos also owns The Washington Post, more emphasis should have been placed on the Times’ rivalry with the Post.

“The Times did not say until halfway down its very long piece that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post, which some say is closing in on The Times,” Jarvis writes. “The problem at a moment like this is that once one starts to believe The Times might have an agenda, one is left trying to suss out what it might be.”

Former Poynter faculty member Bill Mitchell, a colleague of mine at Northeastern, praises the Times article for its use of on-the-record sources rather than relying on anonymous whispers. “I don’t recall an anonymous source amid the 6,700 words,” he writes. Actually, there are a few, but he’s right that the story is better documented than many such stories.

Mitchell also hails the Times for its “even-handed tone,” which I find interesting mainly because of how different readers interpret the same material in different ways. I thought the Times article was overwhelmingly negative, and that the Amazon employees and officials who spoke favorably about the company were cast in the role of corporate stooges.

Anyway, much to chew over — as there should be given Amazon’s role as a paradigm of the new economy.

New York Times journos discuss Innovation Report

Screen Shot 2014-09-28 at 4.28.30 PMAn all-star panel came together on Friday evening at the Online News Association conference in Chicago to discuss The New York Times’ celebrated Innovation Report — an internal document about the Times’ efforts to adjust to the digital age that became public when it was leaked to BuzzFeed.

The report, wrote Joshua Benton of the Nieman Journalism Lab last May, is “one of the most remarkable documents I’ve seen in my years running the Lab.” Both the full document and a comprehensive summary are available as part of Benton’s piece, and they are well worth reading. The report describes how the Times — in many ways an innovator in the transition to digital — is still being held back by an antiquated management structure, an overemphasis on what goes on page one of the print edition, and a lack of understanding of how to promote and distribute the Times’ journalism.

The ONA panel was moderated by Ann Marie Lipinski (@AMLwhere), curator of Harvard’s Nieman Foundation. The panelists were Amy O’Leary (@amyoleary), deputy editor for digital operations at the Times and one of the authors of the report; Tyson Evans (@tysone), the Times’ editor of newsroom strategy, who also contributed to the report; and Alex MacCallum (@alexmaccallum), recently promoted to a newly created assistant managing editor’s slot to oversee audience engagement.

Hundreds of people were on hand, and many of them — including me — live-tweeted the panel. Bursts of fragmentary news are no substitute for a well-crafted story about the event (here’s one by a student who covered it), but they can give you some flavor of the discussion. Here’s what I had say, including a couple of retweets that I thought were worth sharing.

https://twitter.com/dankennedy_nu/status/515638644028489728

https://twitter.com/dankennedy_nu/status/515640356046905345

https://twitter.com/dankennedy_nu/status/515641386117640192

https://twitter.com/dankennedy_nu/status/515641711557890048

https://twitter.com/dankennedy_nu/status/515641932325081089

https://twitter.com/dankennedy_nu/status/515643566836969472

https://twitter.com/dankennedy_nu/status/515645167823781889

https://twitter.com/dankennedy_nu/status/515646695141822464

https://twitter.com/dankennedy_nu/status/515652338045157376

https://twitter.com/dankennedy_nu/status/515653245948424192

Tell the White House we need to preserve net neutrality

Normally I’m not a big fan of journalists’ signing petitions. But preserving net neutrality is so fundamental to what we do that we should all send President Obama a strong message. We need net neutrality to provide the public with the information it needs for self-government — it’s that basic.

https://twitter.com/superwuster/status/460434350296006658

This particular petition is endorsed by Tim Wu, who literally coined the phrase. I haven’t checked out all the prominent supporters, but I know that Jeff Jarvis is among them. If the possibility of democratic media is important to you, please sign.

And here is some background on net neutrality from Free Press.

Ezra Klein and the problem with top-down control

Ezra Klein
Ezra Klein

This commentary was published earlier at the Nieman Journalism Lab.

What should a 21st-century news organization look like? A single entity, run from the top, with a common set of values? Or a loose network of related projects, sharing a brand and to some extent a mission but operating semi-independently?

With the likely departure of Ezra Klein from The Washington Post, the management of one of our last great newspapers might be showing signs of preferring the former approach. Klein, who founded and runs the widely read Wonkblog at washingtonpost.com, is reportedly leaving for a new venture, as yet undefined. According to Ravi Somaiya in The New York Times, Klein sought an eight-figure Post investment in the new project. Klein already has his own Wonkblog staff, but clearly he has something much bigger in mind — perhaps an all-purpose independent news organization along the lines of Talking Points Memo. (Although it wouldn’t be called Wonkblog — the Post owns the name and will be keeping it, writes The Huffington Post’s Michael Calderone, who broke the news about Klein’s proposal last month.)

We can’t know everything that went into the decision. Maybe it came down to money. But Wonkblog generates a hefty amount of Web traffic — more than 4 million page views a month, according to a profile of Klein in The New Republic last February. “It’s ‘fuck you traffic,’” a Post source told TNR’s Julia Ioffe. “He’s always had enough traffic to end any argument with the senior editors.” Apparently, that’s no longer the case.

Significantly, the Times reports that new Post owner Jeff Bezos was involved in the decision to let Klein leave. Last September, shortly after announcing his intention to buy the Post for $250 million, the Amazon.com founder lauded the “daily ritual” of reading the morning paper — which led to some chiding by one of the Post’s own journalists, Timothy B. Lee. Despite Bezos’ well-earned reputation as a clear-eyed digital visionary, he appears to have some romantic notions about the business he’s bought into. And allowing entrepreneurs such as the twentysomething Klein run his own shop inside the Post might not fit with that vision.

What makes the likely Klein departure even more significant is that in 2006 the Post, under the ownership of the Graham family, allowed John Harris and Jim VandeHei to walk out the door and start Politico. Now, I have a lot of problems with Politico’s gossipy “drive the day” approach. But as Times columnist Ross Douthat has observed, much of the media conversation about Washington politics has shifted from the Post to Politico, threatening one of the Post’s franchises. It would have been enormously beneficial to the Post if Politico had been launched under its own umbrella. And Politico itself might be better.

So if the Post is reluctant to loosen the reins, are there any other news organizations that are taking a different approach? Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher walked away from their AllThingsD site at The Wall Street Journal and set up a new project called Re/code in partnership with NBC. Perhaps the most famous example is Nate Silver, who brought his FiveThirtyEight poll-analysis site to The New York Times a few years ago and then moved it lock, stock and barrel to ESPN. In that regard, I suppose you could say NBC and ESPN have embraced the network approach. To some extent you might say also that of The Huffington Post, as it combines professional journalists, unpaid bloggers (I’m one) and a dizzying array content — from Calderone’s excellent media coverage to the notorious Sideboob vertical.

Jeff Jarvis recently argued that Patch — AOL’s incredibly shrinking hyperlocal news project — might have stood a chance if AOL chief executive Tim Armstrong had taken a network approach. Rather than running cookie-cutter community sites from the top down, Jarvis asked, what if Patch had offered advertising and support services to a network of independent or semi-independent sites?

The problem with such scenarios is that media executives — and business leaders in general — are not accustomed to the idea of giving up control. Calderone reports that some Post staffers have long grumbled at what they see as “preferential treatment” for Klein, which suggests the depth of the problem. But entrepreneurial journalists like Harris and VandeHei, like Mossberg and Swisher, and like Silver and Klein have a proven track record.

Legacy news organizations need to find a way to tap into that success outside the old models of ownership and not worry about obsolete notions of employer-employee relationships. Reach and influence are what matter. And they are proving to be incompatible with the ambitions of young journalists like Ezra Klein.

More: After this piece was published at Nieman, Mathew Ingram responded at Gigaom with his own smart take.

Salvaging something from the rubble of Patch

If you haven’t heard AOL chief executive Tim Armstrong’s nauseating conference call with Patch employees — complete with the mid-call firing of Patch creative director Abel Lenz, who had the audacity to take the great man’s photo — then by all means avail yourself of the opportunity. (Via Jim Romenesko, who has been diligently tracking the story of Patch’s woes.)

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The end seems to be near for Patch, AOL’s network of hyperlocal websites, which never had a business model that made sense. Given that Patch is failing in precisely the way it was predicted to fail (see, for instance, this archive of Patch articles at Business Insider), Friday’s conference call was a time for Armstrong to show some decency and humility — not to strut around like a ’roided-up rooster.

The cuts Armstrong announced were devastating — over the next week, hundreds of employees will be laid off and around 400 Patch sites will be closed or somehow partnered with other sites, according to Darrell Etherington of TechCrunch. That’s nearly half of Patch’s 900 or so sites.

At this point, the most merciful thing Armstrong could do is shut down the whole thing and help the hard-working local editors become owner-operators. I suspect many of these sites could be viable if the corporate bureaucracy AOL has laid on top of them were removed.

Howard Owens, publisher of The Batavian, an independent online news site in western New York, makes a compelling case at NetNewsCheck that the economies of scale AOL promised not only haven’t materialized, but that putting together a vast network of hyperlocal site actually costs more than launching independents. The problems, he writes, include enormous tech investments and highly paid supervisors at corporate headquarters:

Armstrong chased scale: IT infrastructure scales, server farms scale, message systems scale, cloud computing scales. But local news does not scale.

Widget makers understand scale. The most expensive widget is the first one. Each new widget is comparatively pennies on the dollar.

In the news business, the first story costs just as much as the third or the 30th or the last. Online, it’s possible to get more production out of a single reporter, but time is not elastic. At the end of the day comes the end of the day.

What Armstrong should have done, Owens adds, is fund independent start-ups — an idea that AOL could still pursue, writes City University of New York journalism professor Jeff Jarvis at his blog, Buzz Machine. Jarvis  offers this advice to Armstrong:

Set up independent entrepreneurs — your employees, my entrepreneurial graduates, unemployed newspaper folks — to take over the sites. Offer them the benefit of continued network ad sales — that’s enlightened self-interest for Patch and Aol. Offer them training. Offer them technology. And even offer them some startup capital.

You could end up better off than you ever were by being a member of an ecosystem instead of trying to own it.

Whether AOL steps or not, at least one other funding source for converting Patches into independent news sites has emerged. Over the weekend Debbie Galant, co-founder of the pioneering hyperlocal site Baristanet and now the director of the New Jersey News Commons at Montclair State University, announced on Twitter that her program was ready to offer grants and training to New Jersey Patch employees who lose their jobs. (There are 89 Patch sites in New Jersey, according to Patch’s online listings.)

As I found in “The Wired City,” hyperlocal online news is alive and well, with a variety of nonprofit and for-profit sites thriving. But as Owens says, local doesn’t scale. Independence and grassroots control are keys. Chain ownership was deadly to the newspaper business, and it was never a good idea for online news, either.

If the demise of Patch can lead to something better, then let’s get started.

An innuendo-laden attack on Greenwald

Edward Jay Epstein has written an innuendo-laden column for The Wall Street Journal in which he strongly insinuates that filmmaker Laura Poitras and/or journalist/blogger/lawyer Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian criminally assisted Edward Snowden in leaking National Security Agency documents.

Epstein’s toxic brew of archly worded questions leads to the inescapable conclusion that he believes the two journalists ought to be investigated and possibly charged under the World War I-era Espionage Act.

Josh Stearns, who serves with Greenwald on the Freedom of the Press Foundation board, has some thoughts about journalism and the Espionage Act. He writes:

The First Amendment and press freedom questions that haunt the Espionage Act are particularly important right now. Changes in media and technology have put the tools of journalism and media making in the hands of more and more people, challenging old assumptions about who is a journalist and how journalism is done. Increasingly, independent journalists, nonprofit news outlets and citizens are playing critical roles in newsgathering and reporting on the most important issues of our time.

I don’t think Stearns gives sufficient weight to the idea that merely publishing leaked documents is, in fact, a violation of the law, and that investigative journalism depends on the hopeful notion that the government won’t use its authority. Otherwise, though, it’s a useful guide to the issues at stake.

More: Greenwald responds to the Epstein column in this Storify involving (mainly) Jeff Jarvis and Michael Wolff.