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A real blog entry is on the way soon, but I had to post this in the meantime. Mark Cuban, a guy I said should be the NBA's example on how to create publicity through blogging, was just fined $25,000 for comments he posted on his Twitter feed about the calls refs made during the Mavericks 103-101 loss to the Nuggets.

One of his tweets is an instant classic in my mind (from the Fox Sports story referenced above):

"can't say no one makes money from twitter now. the nba does."

So if that doesn't convince you that there's something to this Twitter thing David Stern, I don't know what else will.

Also I have to note I just saw an interview with Gilbert Arenas after his return to the NBA where he swore off blogging. Here's what he told the AP:

"It's just like the double-(edged) sword thing: Eventually your words is going to kill you," and "it's like everything I said, everybody started using it as firepower, instead of saying it's just entertainment."

If my blog was getting that kind of traction, the last thing I'd do is give it up, but then again, I haven't signed an $111 million contract YET!

I spent last weekend on the West Coast and had basically five days with sparse internet access. Little on e-mail, less on Twitter or Facebook.

I realized how wired I am and how weird it feels to be unplugged. I have to say, I didn’t like it. The lack of social connection - even while spending time with friends and family - was a new sensation.

I might try the email fast sometime this summer. I’ve been kicking around the idea for a while, but I might want to take it to a new level and see what happens.

Just read this on ESPN and had to share because I think it validates my previous post. I especially appreciated this paragraph:

Though Villanueva promised not to tweet again during a game, he did question whether there's much difference between a player taking a few seconds to do a television interview at halftime and taking a few seconds to use their mobile phone to post a Web message to fans.

So there you have it. Tweet away you crazy NBA players, and make sure you follow the women's professional soccer league feeds. Who wouldn't mind getting a text from Mia Hamm every once in a while.

My recent comparison of newspapers to farms drew a number of comments from fellow journalists, but the one that gave me pause was from an unusual source – my daughter.

“Unusual” is not quite a fair term, as Gillian has never been afraid to voice her opinion. She has not only her father’s genes but also has a journalism degree from the University of Oregon.

Not that she shared my addiction to newsrooms. She instead became an elementary school teacher before tackling the full-time job of raising my rambunctious grandson and his lively little sister. At 31, she and her husband live in Charlottesville, VA, where she balances motherhood with authoring magazine articles and a book.

All that detail is a long way of saying she has a marketing bull’s-eye on her back. Gillian is in the demographic that newspaper advertisers most want – middle-class, college-educated moms who make the buying decisions for their fairly affluent families. And she even lives in the outer suburbs of the East Coast megalopolis.

All of us in the news media want the Gillians. My expert, however, warns that to woo them we need to work a lot harder than just diversifying into niche papers.

“I think that the key is localization not specialization,” she wrote, taking issue with a suggestion by the University of North Carolina’s Phil Meyer. “ I think that the generation that I, and in most ways (her 25-year-old brother) Garrett, are part of are heading to a hyper-local mindset.”

“Hyper-local.” How often have we heard that buzzword at conferences? And how well have we done at actually accomplishing it?

Gillian said she cares not a whit about the plays on Broadway nor who became the new mayor in San Antonio. She concedes that she regularly read the Sunday New York Times … “but it was the first thing to go when our budget got cut -- I could give it up easily.” The Gray Lady was fun, but she found she could get similar content from the plethora of online sites.

Staggering Dad: “Knife in the heart, dear daughter. What’s an old newspaper man to do?”

Impatient Daughter: “How about pay attention?”

“What I can't give up is reading the C-Ville and The Hook, which are focused specifically on Charlottesville. The "local" paper, The Daily Progress, focus too much on county information for me, so I never read it.”

C-Ville and The Hook? Though they sound like Comedy Network shows they in fact are just two of the umpteen non-daily newspapers in the United States that many journalists pretend do not exist. They don’t count among the Newspaper Association of America’s 1,422 – er, make that 1,420 – “real” daily newspapers. No one writes wistful op-ed piece about “what will the world be like without C-Ville?” In fact, I’ve never been able to find more than a guess at how many weekly newspapers are published in the United States.

(Brian Steffens of the small papers’ National Newspaper Association said “more than 7,000” is a safe estimate, though he has 11,000 unverified titles in his database.)

In both my heart and mind, I believe Gillian is right. But that does not mean only the metros are threatened by the recession. Cathy Harding, editor of my daughter’s beloved C-Ville, reminded me that the famous Creative Loafing filed bankruptcy and most other “alternative weeklies” are struggling with the downturn of advertising. No one is immune from the economy.

For some, the economy of small scale is a blessing. The Hook’s editor/publisher Hawes Spencer said the paper is down about 20%, “but that is not a fatal blow.” Like many small papers, everyone on his staff has multiple jobs and the company operates on a pay-as-you-go budget. The Hook has no middle management and no debt. Wouldn’t McClatchy love that?

Enough with the business stuff. What about Gillian’s local focus?

Local does indeed have an enticing appeal, both of her favorite editors said. While the daily paper is event-driven, Harding said the weekly gives readers something they can settle into for a while. They do that by drawing meaning from fact instead of just reporting the facts alone.

Both papers also put great stock in appearance. “If it was just a rag … it wouldn’t have the loyalty it has,” Harding said. C-Ville is “attractive, bright and free.”

Like the Internet. But neither editor holds out much hope for the digital medium. Revenues from their excellent Web sites are “microscopic.” Hard analysis shows the print publication stands up well to the Web readership, but those digital editions are an “investment in reader habit” that awaits the genius who can pull a Web revenue rabbit from the next generation’s hat.

So don’t give up on print, my dear daughter advises.

“I really do hope that there is a stronger future for small, local, even weekly papers,” Gillian wrote. “I think that the generation coming into things is too used to using cnn.com to get their national news to ever really get into the swing of reading one of the big papers.

“But as we age, we will find ourselves wanting to know what our neighbors are up to.”

Eureka! She really did inherit my news nose.

When I first saw this headline on ESPN.com, I thought, "Not again." I thought the NBA, or at least the Milwaukee Bucks, were following the NCAA's lead in banning reporters from liveblogging games. I wondered how the NBA could misunderstand the ways people use Twitter so much that it would ignore the marketing potential following a game on your cell phone has.

But then I actually read the story, and now I'm not so sure. I still think Twitter could be a valuable tool for a large sports league like the NBA. I think it needs to give its players more freedom to create fan opportunities online. But maybe players should focus more on the coach's halftime speech and less on updating their feeds.

I guess I've gotten ahead of myself, as I often do. The story, if you haven't already read it, describes how Charlie Villaneuva, a Milwaukee forward, sent the following tweet or twitt, as he calls it (Is that right? It sounds dirty.) during halftime of the Bucks game against the Boston Celtics:

"In da locker room, snuck to post my twitt. We're playing the Celtics, tie ball game at da half. Coach wants more toughness. I gotta step up."

I guess he did step up. I couldn't find out how many points he scored after halftime, but he led his team with 19-points in the 86-77 win.

If I were the coach, I would want my player focused on the game, not his cell phone, so I can understand Scott Skiles' decision to ban Twitter from the locker room. But I also think he and his team are overestimating how hard it is to send a quick tweet. I can't imagine it takes any longer than the inane halftime interviews coaches or players grant to the sideline reporter. I think it's a lot less distracting than being " mic'ed up " or followed constantly with a courtside camera. I mean during last Sunday's NHL on NBC game, I could watch Sean Avery's every move online. So what's wrong with a little tweeting?

I think the real issue is not distraction. It's control. The league wants to dictate how and when its players promote themselves. But the league look at Gilbert Arena's or Mark Cuban's blogs to understand how individual players or owners acting alone can drum up more publicity than their well crafted technological angles.

I'm all for imposing, as we say in the business, "content neutral" rules on Twitter. Players could, for example, limit their tweets to the first five minutes after the half is over. But if you are going to give the media unprecedented access to players through mics and cameras, then you have to give players the same rights. The NBA might be surprised at what happens.

P.S. On a side note that's related and probably should have been the focus of this post, the Utah Jazz have been innovatively using the Web to connect with fans for the last two years. Jazzbots is a collection of fan blogs, sponsored and maintained by the team. From what I can tell, the blogs are the honest opinions of fans, not sanitized to protect players or coaches. I've really enjoyed what I've read, especially the posts from a fiery writer named Mallory Meyer . Ok, she's my niece, but she does a great job and the spirit of what she's doing meshes well with my research interests. I smell a conference paper!

Facebook went live with its redesign this week, and if I may take a moment to be a bad researcher and generalize from a small sample, everyone hates it. This is probably an exaggeration, but then again I can confirm that I’m the only one I know who likes it.

I like what they’ve done by making the home page a live feed of what people are doing. The ability to filter by user-created groups helps cut down on some of the noise, and it will probably hasten the use of this feature by people who didn’t know it was there before the launch.

It looks like Twitter, and I think there’s a reason for that. Twitter, while claiming less than 1/1000 of Facebook’s users, clearly is on to something with its rapid growth. And it is more mobile friendly right now than Facebook. This appears to be a case of Facebook tapping a good idea and also trying to stay ahead of the competition before it loses market share.

The fact that I like it probably says more about my use of Twitter than anything. I tend to be on there more than Facebook because it gives maximum information value while requiring less attention.

Whether this move is a good idea long term is up in the air. Any relaunch that makes drastic changes like this one requires the entire audience to have to reorient themselves. With two major redesigns in the past year, that’s a lot to ask of an audience when utility is a premium part of your product.

On the other hand, where will the audience go? To MySpace, where the orientation learning curve is even worse? Smaller networks like LinkedIn that require not only a switch but convincing your network to do so as well? There aren’t a lot of options.

To a degree, it appears Facebook is using its dominant market position to introduce drastic changes that will allow it to compete with an upstart like Twitter at a time where there’s no serious challenger to scoop up a dissatisfied audience.

It’s a bold move, and not one you see from media companies in a dominant position. Rather than just gobble up competitors, they are being attacked head on from a position of strength.

It’s something I wish newspapers had done while they had the market position and profitability to innovate. Innovation from a position of desperation is a completely different ballgame, and often amounts to a series of stabs in the dark.

Gather 'round young 'uns, and I'll tell you a story. It's about the time before everyone was on Facebook, about the time when you had to have a .edu e-mail address to get in. Your nerdy storyteller was a budding Internet researcher at the time and he happened to be a grad student, so he signed up for the grand experiment never thinking much about it. He languished with less than a dozen friends for more nearly two years. But then, a funny thing started to happen. People he hadn't seen or heard from in years started "poking" him. Seemed like they wanted to be his "friends" again, and he gladly accepted. Before too long again, he was the Bell of the Ball, and he lived happily ever after.

Yes, that was supposed to sound like a fairy tale, but strangely enough, it's all mostly true (except for the "Bell of the Ball" part). I started writing this fairy tale because my wife recently challenged me to step back and take an objective look at the social networking phenomenon. She basically called the site a passing fad, akin to Ugg boots and Tivo. As much as I want to disagree with her, my own history with the site suggests as much. I didn't really become a Facebook power user (or colossal time waster) until everyone else started joining.

Applying what I know about communication theory and even the results of a Facebook survey I helped another doctoral student administer on campus, that's probably the way it should be. You could almost think of Facebook like the early telephone. A phone was pretty useless if you were on the only one on the block to have one, but become exponentially more useful as larger and larger groups of people started installing them in their homes. In fact, our study suggested that Facebook forges such powerful connections between online friends that people rate news stories sent by their friends more credible than those sent by news organizations.

My Facebook attention waxes and wanes. Some days I struggle for an hour to come up with the perfect status update while on others, I hardly care what happened. I still love finding old friends on the site, but my definition of friend has definitely become looser and looser the more time I spend there. Honestly, I vacillate between whether Facebook is a powerful tool for social cohesion and relationship building or, like my wife, whether it's simply a fad as transitory as the Pet Rock. (I really hope Tivo last a long, long time, or at least until I can afford one.)

In the end, I think I realize what Facebook really is. It's simply a tool, just like a shovel. It really all depends on how people decide to use it. If the best Facebook applications we can come up with are Vampire hunting games and hucking Legos and In and Out Burgers at each other, then I think Facebook will go the way of the Rubik's Cube. But if can find useful ways to make the tenuous connections we make online have real world implications, then I think Facebook will not only survive, but it can become a communications tool more powerful than the newspaper or telephone. That's why I decided to write about it here, on my "professional" blog. It's up to those of us researching, designing and evangelizing the future of media to step back and analyze this funny tool we have in Facebook and decide how to most effectively use it.

Many of my friends are already on the cutting edge, to some degree. I like the instant status updates I get through Twitter. I follow a lot of the links people post to keep on top of the news (Through Facebook, I learned about the latest controversial episode of Big Love, and I even joined the group.) I can even sometimes get 3 out of 5 on the New York Times news quiz.

But we can't stop there. We could all use a challenge to step away from the screen for a minute to try to figure out how we can dig better holes with Facebook. I'm sure Mark Zuckerberg won't mind.

Clay Shirky’s post that examines the historical underpinnings behind the current newspaper collapse is making the rounds today on all my social media channels. It’s longish, and a pretty detailed, but if you’re concerned about collapse of this medium in your community it is worth the time.

As I read it, I am reminded that as much as I loved the good old days, we aren’t going back. The model between information access, publishing ability, advertising, and economics has shifted too radically. It doesn’t mean newspapers are going to die, but it does mean that the old business model is only going to work in some types of settings (small rural towns come to mind). By extension, though, it means that more newspapers are going under if they don’t radically shift gears. The model just isn’t sustainable in certain community types.

I am glad that Shirky offered a road map for the way forward. A cynic would say he’s being vague, but at this point I’d settle for a vague set of principles to guide innovation. We’re still at that stage. Anyone claiming to have the answer is being dishonest.

In case you missed Jon Stewart’s brilliant interview with CNBC’s Jim Cramer yesterday, I’ve embedded part of the clip above. But I would go to DailyShow.com to see the full episode and even to watch the full unedited interview, because it is a fascinating peek at what journalism sometimes is missing in financial coverage.

In case you’ve missed the news coverage this has gotten (CNN / NYT / WaPost), Stewart took Cramer to task for the fact that he and his network essentially cheered on a bubble built on working class dollars while hedge fund managers and Wall Street insiders cashed in.

If the pundits only focus on how entertaining this was (and it was entertaining), this is a missed opportunity. Stewart’s interview not only exposed the culture of CNBC’s reporting habits, which are filled with conflicts of interest, but also showed how it’s done in an era where expert pundits often are fresh off the payroll of the industry they’re covering.

Two things stuck out, and they relate to elements laid out by Kovach & Rosenstiel in their excellent The Elements Of Journalism.

First, Cramer rightly noted that he’s called out companies on CEOs that have been dishonest and defrauded people of their money. When Stewart challenged him on this by noting that screaming about it after the fact does little good to people who’ve lost everything in the Wall Street meltdown, Cramer flat out said something to the effect of, “Look, these CEOs lied to me. They were my friends and they lied about the health of their companies.”

Few critics I’ve read have snapped to attention on this one, perhaps because we’ve taken for granted how important it is that professional journalists be rigorous and independent. Kovach & Rosenstiel have this as their own element:

Its practitioners must maintain an independence from those they cover.

This is not a choice. Credibility is the lifeblood of professional journalism, the one thing that separates it from partisan media. And you can’t have credibility unless you break down these conflicts of interests.

Now, Cramer might say he’s not a journalist, but we shouldn’t let him off the hook that easily. He works for a financial news channel. He dispenses advice daily with the disclaimer that he’s not your broker. So what is he then? An entertainer? No, he’s a pundit for a news channel. He’s expected to show qualities that befit the network he is on, ratings be damned.

The second thing that stuck out was the question of loyalty. The classic moment on last night’s show was when Stewart showed video for subscribers and insiders that had Cramer talking in 2007 about how to game the system using fear and misinformation. Jay Rosen tweeted something this morning on Twitter that summed it up well:

Barons hit Cramer for being a poor stock picker, @mattwaite. Stewart was saying: you and your network have the wrong loyalties. Comparable?

This is where some of the misplaced anger goes. In the two-week war between CNBC and The Daily Show, some have assumed that Stewart is riled up that CNBC simply made some bad stock picks and cost people a lot about money. But this riff hasn’t been about money, not for Stewart. He is criticizing something much deeper and more insidious than financial losses. He is saying that when a network does not aggressively pursue independent reporting, does not fact check and verify what is being said, and does not offer up more than CEOs and talking heads that cheerlead the whole process, then that network is not serving the public. Rather, that network is serving the financial industry and those who thrive on rumor and speculation to make money as a result of fear.

K&R have an element for this too

Journalism’s first loyalty is to citizens.

While many on Wall Street are making use of the advice CNBC offers daily, the network sells itself as the vital source of news for the working Joes who have their money in 401(k) accounts and pension funds, people who need their investments for retirement. And when the network is found to be reporting “news” out of one side of their mouth and shilling for insiders and CEOs on the other side, the network is no longer serving that citizenry. It is serving itself.

In truth, this isn’t entirely CNBC’s fault. The trend with cable news the past 10 years is to throw up talking heads on different sides of an issue (often only two sides, sadly), debate it around for 5-8 minutes, come up with no resolution, and then cut to commercial. No questions are really answered, no insight is gleaned. Just lots of yelling.

Even a lot of the prime time shows like O’Reilly, Hannity, Campbell Brown, Lou Dobbs, and Hardball follow this mold (Olbermann and Maddow thankfully are exceptions). This has become the M.O. for political coverage, and it has crept into other areas such as financial news. The problem is that when you do this, the audience has very little reason to trust the yell crowd on the TV, but the journalist who promotes this mess by giving them air time in the first place also loses the audience’s trust. This cable format may allow the networks to do it on the cheap (because what is cheaper than meaningless debate that gets us nowhwere?), but it does little for democracy’s bottom line.

The reason Stewart’s audience trusts him is not because he’s liberal and they’re liberal. They trust him because he asks legitimate questions, seeks legitimate answers, and eschews theater when the moment demands it. His loyalty is to the citizenry, in the name of answers. And he’s a comedian!

I hope yesterday was not a missed moment. The public needs to realize that Stewart, as he does most nights, is using comedy to show us how it is supposed to be done, and that we need to support good rigorous journalism with our dollars.

On the other hand, journalists, especially at the big media, need to ignore the seductive self-interest of access if it means denying yourself independence, verification, and loyalties to the people who trust you.

New York Times media writer David Carr penned an interesting piece that has gotten some play in media circles today. Summing up the feelings of a lot of my fellow journalists, he modestly proposes that newspapers get together and end the free ride on the Web for both readers and aggregators.

In other words, charge.

Carr notes that for this to work it’s going to take some collusion among newspaper companies, which is probably illegal and would require antitrust law changes to make it happen. A lot of what he’s saying is a rehash of what others have suggested, but it’s a pretty solid summary of the camp that wants to charge now and often.

The news lover in me would love for this to happen, but there are a lot of problems associated with charging right now. The main one is that the public is unaccustomed to paying, and I’m not sure how quickly they could be converted even if the product was worth it. How long can these companies, already suffering financially, survive a game of chicken with millions of Web users who expect that information on the Web generally be free?

Carr notes that there are examples of companies successfully charging for content on the Web. He’s correct, with some caveats. First, the most successful examples we have niche products, and with newspapers we’re talking about mass media.

But there’s a larger problem, one that I don’t see being asked often enough: Is the content newspapers are producing worth paying for?

The newspapers-are-a-watchdog-on-government crowd (a crowd I really, really love) would scream “Of course!” But how much of what we seen in the daily newspaper fits that purpose? When I worked at the Daily News, I’d say at least 60-70% of the newspaper editorial content on an average day was devoted to things other than hard news. Things like sports, entertainment, home/garden, and so forth - stuff I love, but would I pay for it?

I’d pay for good solid coverage of local civics and investigative work, but I suppose I am a rarity. I value that information and know I can only get it from my local newspaper. But what of the other content, the softer news. Will people pay for that? Do they really feel like they need a newspaper to give them gardening advice or movie reviews or would they be just as fine reading a blog? Or, would a powerhouse brand like ESPN become the source because they have the economies of scale in place to bury newspapers by making it free?

The argument we make is that news matters because they are the Fourth Estate, and it’s an argument I agree with. But I also believe it is intellectually dishonest to make that argument synonymous with the need to save the newspaper. Saving the entertainment section or my daily dose of Dilbert isn’t the same thing as rigorous government coverage.

Sure, by charging for all we can save the red meat part of the paper, but what kind of business model is that? Imagine Wal-Mart saying they’re going to use all the profits from 90% of the store to subsidize a small portion of its store that is a money-loser and has no expectation of turning it around.

Perhaps charging for it all would let people understand the value of news and make them want to pay, but I doubt it. You are fighting a war on two fronts: the apathy of the nonpaying Web public, and the sense that news has become more fluff than stuff over the years as news budgets have taken a hit. Stuff that doesn’t change overnight.

Too much, too soon. I think people will pay again, but you have to lead them along the path. We’re not ready for this kind of marketplace, and we’re really not ready for how few jobs would be out there were we to start going with a pay-only model tomorrow.

It would be the Great Charge, the last gasp for a crumbling industrial model of news production. And I fear it would lead most of these companies over a cliff. And perhaps it’s a FTW moment for companies that think they’re dying anyway, but that would be the cop-out option rather than tapping into some of the wonderful innovative things being tried at newspapers all over the country.

I’m more bullish on the future of news than I’ve ever been, but I’m not-so-bullish on using old models that don’t work as a fallback position.