I agree that repackaging stories wholesale is bad, and should be punished. It’s also already against the law. The idea that someone driving traffic your way should pay for the privilege is so wrong-headed as to be mind-boggling. I know that publishers are rather desperately casting about for new revenue streams, but we’ve seen that rampant stupidity didn’t serve them well through the 90s and early years of this decade — it seems unlikely that idiocy will turn out to be a winning strategy now.

For the record, if you’d like to quote from any of my posts in order to link back to this site, feel free. Let me know if I can make it easier. At least I understand how the web works — unlike some of the highly-paid executives in my industry.

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Don’t give up on the new podcast about my cardiac adventures, either…I’ve got photos (courtesy of Carol) and a new episode that will cover my first foray into cardiac rehab. When will it go live? As soon as I have time to finish the recording! When it happens, I promise that you’ll be the first (or maybe the second) to know.

I’ve also been spending a fair amount of time on the Interop FaceBook and LinkedIn pages, as well as on other sites that will become much more public in the near future.

I also started going to cardiac rehab last week: that will be the subject of the next Learning About My Heart podcast, which should be posted tomorrow. The post should be fun, with plenty of photos courtesy of Carol.

Come back, take a look (and listen)…I’ll try to keep up a little better over here.

I’ll also be starting a new podcast series here — the subject is how I’ve learned about working with cardiac issues. The impetus behind the series is simple — it’s for a class at UF — but I hope that folks will enjoy the way the series goes together. I’m using it as an opportunity to try some new blog capabilities, so it should be an adventure all around.

While we’re waiting for those, feel free to head over to Inside Interop to check out my posts on network infrastructure, keynote addresses, and cloud computing. There’s more to come, soon…

EepyBird’s Sticky Note experiment from Eepybird on Vimeo.

Keeping in mind that these are the same folks who brought us dancing fountains crafted from Diet Coke and Mentos, I have to say I’m seriously impressed by the work, here. I can’t even imagine what they might do with a good stapler…

Last night he had a wonderful monologue on the importance of politics and voting. Coming immediately after David Letterman’s interview of Barack Obama,

it was a wonderful statement on why all the political stuff matter so very much.

Together, this is the sort of conversation and commentary we could use more of. At least, that’s what I think.

Update: YouTube reference to the Barack Obama interview was revised because the first video I linked to disappeared.. Revised 9/15/08

Jon Talton has written a serious and meaningful indictment of newspaper management in the current era. I saw many of the same problems he discusses, though mine were seen at magazines rather than newspapers. In too many cases, tech-phobic managers tried to block the technological forces of change rather than use them to deliver great content to the readers. Even more damning, too many publishers used a decline in readership as an excuse to abandon the existing reader base, rather than trying to build on reader loyalty to find new ways to grow.

The kind of inward-looking, defensive attitudes that Talton rails against are on display in Roy Peter Clark’s Poynter column on why the readers are wrong. I have listened to fellow journalists run through the arguments that Clark makes, and every one rings hollow, blaming our readers for not properly understanding our purity and greatness when we are the ones who claim to be professional communicators. If the public in large numbers say that they see bias in our coverage, then the proper response isn’t to claim that the majority of the population is unable to properly read for meaning, but to apply the same sort of rigorous scrutiny to our pages that we claim to apply to government, business, sports, and the other societal structures that we cover.

I firmly believe that the public isn’t falling away from newspapers because they no longer read, but because we’re no longer giving them stories that they want and need to read. Our readers aren’t fixated on celebrity twaddle because they’re shallow, but because we as an industry have offered them little else. Let’s stop pretending that our highest calling as journalists involves looking back at a "Golden Era" of limited competition for reader attention. Society needs the stories we’re able to tell, and deserves a press that looks at itself as honestly as we claim to look at them.

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Back in the early 1990s, before the World Wide Web had become a platform available to more than a relative handful of researchers, I argued to publishers that columnists, writers, and on-line hosts (as we sometimes called the folks who kept the pot stirred in our on-line reader forums) should have at least a portion of their compensation based on the number of readers they attracted. I was actually a bit more crass than that: I said that a portion of ad revenue (based then, as now, on the number of eyeballs seeing the ads) should be paid to the content creators. This "commission" would give them incentive to do more and better work, and would be a fixed portion of revenue, so the publisher could create more accurate budgets. I thought then, and think now, that it’s a great idea for everyone concerned. Of a certainty, a baseline payment should be made "for professional services", but as the audience responds and the publisher flourishes, then the journalist/writer/columnist should flourish, too.

The most common counter-argument I heard from publishers was that my ideas wouldn’t work because journalists didn’t care about money. As a journalists who enjoys the warm feeling that comes from writing a non-bouncing check to the mortgage company, I disagreed. Journalists may well be motivated by factors that can’t be put into a bank savings account, but that doesn’t mean we don’t care about money. What I’ve come to understand in the decade and a half since I floated the original idea, is that there are some journalists who don’t like the idea of being measured or evaluated in any way. For these folks, the idea of having something as concrete as money attached to their work is horrifying. For many other journalists, the idea that practicing better journalism could result in a healthier bank account has a great deal of merit.

In the New Era of journalism, some folks "get it" and thrive by tying readership to compensation. Though a commentator more than a journalist, Glenn Reynolds has made the new model work for him when he calls attention to journalist’s compensation in a recent post. Other’s like Michael Yon, base their journalism almost entirely on direct support from readers.

I think that the principles of Nick Denton’s new compensation plan are spot on: a base salary for regular work with a bonus based on how many people read it. Journalists like Lucas Grindley see this pretty much the same way I do: it’s a model that leads to everyone on the publication team prospering through the success of the publication. Other journalists, like Jack D. Lail, see the issue through a similar lens — one that ties compensation to the journalist’s value to the publication.

Today, the arguments against this sort of compensation ultimately boil down to "It will lead to pandering." If, by "pandering", you mean telling stories that interest and benefit the reader in an active, compelling manner, then I’m all for it. If, on the other hand, you mean chewing over cold celebrity stories with rancid titillation thrown in for flavor, then I suggest that you’re part of journalism’s problem. The idea that the only two possibilities are "good for you" pieces that no one really wants to read or celebrity trash is poisonous to the health of real journalism. I believe that people are no less interested in solid, meaningful stories than they ever were — they’re just tired of having them wrapped in bad prose and preachy tones. Tell a good, honest story in a lively, engaging way and people will read it — and they’ll prefer it to the latest crap about who couldn’t find the underwear drawer on the way out of the house.

I hope the new model for compensation will take hold because I honestly believe it will encourage good writers to become good journalists. We need good journalists — it’s the same old way of doing things that we can do without.

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I’ll be using LiveWriter to update my student blog, and I’ll be creating some photo pages here in the near future. LiveWriter should make building the blog and those pages much easier — and I’ll just have to live with having to say nice things about another Microsoft product.

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