A Good Week at a Startup

What's the definition of a good week at a startup Internet company?

Several radio talk show interviews, an article in Adweek and a discussion with a major news company about distributing content from our Web site.

These are the days that you just know -- you're making a difference for the reader. And isn't that what good journalism is all about?

Fascinated by Facebook

A few days ago, a journalism editor and friend asked if I knew anything about facebook. His question -- how is it useful?

I must admit, I'm a facebook newbie. Several years ago, I set up a profile I rarely used and then, finally, got rid of it. I just wasn't certain I wanted to share that much personal information with the world. Besides, very few people I knew actually used it. At 40-something, I'm not exactly the facebook demographic.

Shortly afterward, I joined linkedin.com, a professional networking site, and became slightly addicted. The thing that struck me was how easy it would make my life. Now, instead of looking up numbers or e-mails for friends, family or colleagues, everything was right there at my fingertips.

It was like an online Rolodex, if you will. It helped me reconnect with some folks, connect for the first time with a few others and maintain contact with everyone else. Plus, my bio is attached, which means I never have to go searching for a copy when I need one.

Since then, I've decided to give other social networking sites a try. I failed miserably on myspace.com. I was befuddled by the site, which required too much thought to use. But my second go-round at facebook turned out to be so easy that I may soon become a pro. When my friend e-mailed me to ask what I thought about its uses for a non-facebook-using journalist, I came up with a list -- so I share.

1. I discovered young people.
And they've all hooked up to me on facebook. Between kids of cousins, kids of friends and my former stepdaughter, I apparently know quite a few people under the age of 25. Who knew? And really, why did it escape me that prom season was here -- until I began looking at their photos?

2. My high school classmates are alive and well and on facebook.
And, oddly, some are using it more routinely than I. They send me funwalls and superpokes and all kinds of stuff I still haven't figured out. Given that we're the same age, there's hope for me yet.

3. People at work are hooked up.
I don't just mean the people at the Internet startup where I work. I mean folks from linkedin are on facebook, too. And folks who aren't on linkedin are there. And when their birthday or their newest photo is posted, I know right away on facebook -- which I can even get on my Blackberry. It helps me keep in touch with more people, more often, something I really didn't think was possible.

4. The place is chatty, chatty, chatty.
If I have facebook open during the workday, I often get e-mail from there -- rather than my e-mail address. Sometimes writers will ask me questions about their stories for the web site. Or friends will give me the latest news about layoffs or cutbacks in the print industry. Several times I have had instant messages from journalists asking for professional advice -- right now -- as part of real time.

5. There's even professional networking.
Since signing up for facebook, I have talked someone into doing some work for the site. In another case, I convinced an editor who runs a fledgling non-profit journalism organization to put up some information on facebook. And I've reconnected with other journalists I've lost track of over the years through the Poynter Institute project, which has connected more than 7,000 journalists around the world.

Recently, I came across an article in venturebeat.com with statistics for social networking sites. Myspace, the leader, had dropped one percent earlier this year. Facebook had increased 77 percent. Linkedin -- number eighth on the list -- had increased 729 percent. With those numbers, the question isn't how useful they are, but which one works better for you.

Will Internet Portals Invest in Newspapers?

The most interesting thing I've seen in a long time about newspapers was a video on Yahoo! Finance. In it, Todd Harrison, CEO of Minyanville.com, who suggested that online portals buy large print companies like Gannett, my former employer. The idea of "Content as King," isn't news to a veteran newspaper editor like myself. Nice to see someone in the financial world with the same understanding.

I e-mailed the video to a number of newspaper friends, one of whom asked me what I thought would happen if such a deal emerged. As the editor of a startup company for a niche product, I think there's a real possibility in the idea. Given the media partnerships that emerge online, (msn.com, for example, using content from our site and links to it), it seems like a sound idea to maintain a steady stream of content that could be reused online from the original source -- the newspaper.

Until newspapers don't have any readers anymore, there's still income -- albeit much less of a profit margin than in the past -- that comes from the print product and the traffic from its online publications. So an online portal could maintain the newspaper's circulation until it becomes a financial liability and still get the benefit of great journalism.

These days, given the state of the struggling newspaper industry, the idea looks appealing indeed.

In Startups, It's All about the Little Things

When you're the editor at an Internet startup, days go by that follow a routine. It's all about the internal stuff. Playing with headlines to get better search engine optimization. Restructuring stories to make them easier to read online. Examining the look of the latest emoticons, avatars or landing page redesign. All worthwhile stuff, to be sure. But given my traditional news background, occasionally I miss the excitement of a good, old-fashioned breaking story.

And then one day, when you're out of the office at a daylong conference about startups, the fun happens without you. Your Blackberry gets tied up with e-mails about your content getting picked up by another news organization -- or two.

You find out a blogger from the Seattle Post Intelligencer has picked up a story about how baseball can help your relationship. Or Yahoo's women's site, Shine, quotes the same story. Or that msn.com has highlighted your news story about how the mortgage crisis may be adding to the divorce rate. And then U.S. News and World Report picks up the story the same day.

These are the days when you know, despite the daily routine, you're doing something right with the content. And you remember what a kick working on a good news story can really be.

Functionality, Not Form, in Newspaper Content

Leon Levitt, vice president of digital media for Cox Newspapers Inc, was quoted in editorsweblog.org as saying newspapers can boost online advertising revenue by "slicing and dicing" content to suit reader needs.

I couldn't agree more.

Since I jumped off the newspaper bandwagon and into a job as editor of an Internet startup site, it's become clearer to me that what newspapers aren't doing is making their content functional beyond the stories they produce.

I've had several conversations about this with newspaper editors in the last few months, including one this weekend with a friend who was visiting from Ohio. One of the keys to the puzzle of finding ways to make money off traditional newspaper content, I explained to her, was finding a way to improve the long-term functionality of the news that's produced daily.

What do I mean?

About two months ago, I began to re-examine the content on my site, not just for quantity but also for utility. While we've done a solid job of news-related content, the functionality of the site from an encyclopedic standpoint needed some improvement. After a discussion with our CEO, Cotter Cunningham, formerly of bankrate.com, it occurred to me that the encyclopedic information is in the news content -- just not organized in a way that makes it easy for users to find it again once the news content was archived.

Obviously, my news background was affecting how I focused the web site -- not a bad thing. But I what about users coming to the site for a specific topic on a day when it wasn't a top story? Yes, we have archives, but is that really enough?

When I examined our bounce rate (the rate that's given to site after users come to the site searching for a topic and leave without finding it), I discovered it's better than the average web site. But I realized it was still an area that needed more attention from me. So I began working on a project that will improve the long-term functionality of site's content.

Since I'm still a news junkie, it occurred to me during my daily reading of blogs, topic content feeds and stories, that this was also missing in most traditional newspaper operations. While some companies are working on these efforts, no one seems to be doing it very well. Imagine what they could do with all the content they have if, after publishing the traditional newspaper story form, editors considered the encyclopedic functionality of their content.

Thomson, a former newspaper company that sold many of its properties to Gannett some years ago, appears to be building a business model of this type. In its recent $16.6 million merger with Reuters, company officials told The New York Times that it plans to refocus Reuters on business news -- using that content to build a database of targeted content for users who need specific financial content and all its related information.

For traditional newspaper companies to build something similar, however, would require them to stop cutting back on the content-gathering efforts of their news operations and focus, instead, on investing -- in the reimagining of function over form.

Perhaps then we could stop talking about the death of the newspaper industry -- and start focusing on its rebirth.

MSN, Newspapers and Don Moore

When Don Moore began his career, he used a typewriter and a pica pole and processed his own black and white photographs in a darkroom. Today, there is a generation of young people who would not know what any of those things were -- much less how to use them. But they would know about msn.com.

That is why today is a particularly fun day for me.

In January, Mr. Moore -- aka my journalism dad -- was laid off from his job at the Charlotte Sun-Herald, a small, family-owned newspaper in Port Charlotte, Fla. Why? It was hit with the same financial reality that most newspaper companies have been hit with in the last few years. Too many employees, not enough advertising to pay the bills and more people canceling their newspaper subscriptions so they can go online and read what they wanted for free.

Don was just one of the journalists that Poynter Institute's Rick Edmonds wrote about earlier this week -- one of 2,400 newspaper people who had lost their jobs as the industry struggles to find a way in this new media landscape.

When he got his pink slip, Don had no idea how to use PC, what a wireless router was or what he would do without a newspaper job -- an industry he has worked in all of his life. I wrote about his plight in a previous blog.

After stewing about it a while, I asked him if he wanted to freelance for the Web site. After all, he has spent more than 40 years in the business. Writing stories -- regardless of whether they're in print or online -- isn't exactly a new skill for him.

He agreed to do it -- tentatively. Then he spent the next few weeks trying to bring himself into this century from a technology standpoint. In that area, he had some room for improvement. After a few frustrating weeks of technical challenges, his first stories hit the site, and I wrote about him again.

But the best part of this tale is that today, one of his articles, "Is Mortgage Crisis Causing Divorce?" was picked up by msn.com. The news site also shared links to two of his other stories on our site.

When I discovered msn wanted to use his work on Saturday morning, I was so tickled that I called him to share the news. He was sitting with his daughter, Shannon, at a soccer match in North Port, Fla. His granddaughter, Coral, was playing. Amid the shouts from the parents and kids, I broke the news.

"Your story is being picked up," I said.

"Oh yeah?" he said, stopping the conversation long enough to cheer for his granddaughter. "By who? AP?"

"No, no," I said, explaining that The Associated Press did not pick up stories from our site, but national web sites did. "Your story is going to be on msn."

There was a long pause in the conversation. All I could hear was the noise of the game in the background.

"Are you there?" I asked.

"Uh, yeah. What's msn?"

For a few minutes, all I could do was laugh. Then I made him hand the phone to his daughter so I could explain why I had called.

Fortunately for me, she was able to explain it all.

Can Web Sites Be Sued for User Comment?

Recently, I read an interesting story, "Roomates.com can be sued for violating fair housing laws." The story reported that a federal appellate court ruled that the housing site, roommates.com, could "be sued for helping to match roomates based on race, sexual orientation," etc.

Interesting enough, to be sure. But the case has far-ranging potential, according to another article about the issue in mediapost.com. Why? According to the article, "Some digital rights advocates view the Roommates.com case as a significant loss, because it appears to open the door to lawsuits against a variety of Web publishers for reasons that go far beyond discrimination in housing." One of those being the ability "to sue for defamatory comments" from users.

What does all of this mean for newspapers? There's the question. Many users of the Web consider the Internet a free-wheeling, free-for-all of commentary protected by The First Amendment.

But in an article by Robert Niles, "It's time for the newspaper industry to die," the author asks whether there isn't a responsbility attached to print stories posted online. In his article, he questions the user-generated commentary attached to a feature story. That commentary offered misinformation to anyone reading, and Niles suggested a reporter should have corrected the misinformation by responding to it -- a no-no in many traditional print newsrooms around the country.

Given what I know about the heated debate on the issue in several newspaper newsrooms I've worked in over the years, I must admit I have wondered long before reading his article whether he wasn't right. I must now admit I have a particular emotional stake in this debate, given that my mother left her own country to live in a country where you can say anything without fear of retribution. Plus, I'm a journalist, so I come with an additional bias -- I consider defending The First Amendment "God's work" as my old boss used to say.

But because of my background in community newspapers, I've also struggled with where to draw the line between the right to say what you want and understanding the damage it can do to people like my mother, who has been told a number of times over the years to "Go back to where you came from," because someone didn't think she spoke English very well. I suppose that makes me a little more receptive to the idea that The First Amendment comes with a responsibility -- to spark debate, to engage in discussion for certain -- but also to be respectful to others at the same time.

It will be interesting to see how the decision about roommates.com plays out. Whatever the effect it has on the discussion over the long haul, I hope that it offers something all of us can learn to live with -- a little less crudeness and a little more civility.