Seattle Post-Times

Social metrics for Seattle news media: Newsdex Seattle relaunched

Image by WSDOT via Flickr

My friend, former colleague and neighbor Gary Love has lent his coding expertise to my sputtering hobby website, Newsdex Seattle. It is now a daily measurement of the social networks of metro-Seattle news outlets and other media.

We even include Dan Savage and Jenni Hogan (shown at left)! I repeat: We even include Dan Savage and Jenni Hogan! Are you listening, Web spiders?

Newsdex Seattle has a new interactive tool, complete with bar charts and a lengthy ranking from The Seattle Times on down.

Details about what we're doing are here.

My hobby

I've been building a vaguely defined website at seattle.newsdex.us which at this point consists merely of a weekly ranking of metro Seattle news Twitter accounts and links to lists at the site's Twitter page, @NewsdexSEA.

I'm thinking about going national! Maybe worldwide! If I get around to it.

Suggestions? Whatever I do, it needs to be easily automated or similarly low-maintenance. The weekly Twitter ranking I compile is in a FileMaker database which I populate and massage for posting on the Web through a series of Automator workflows. Only takes me about 10 minutes.

The Twitter lists:

• metropugetnews
• seattlenews
• hyperlocal
• transpo
• officialdom
• emergency
• orgs
• artsculturelife
• sports
• newspeople

Back in the game

Next week I'll become a paid journalist again as an editor at The Daily Herald in Everett, Wash. I'm really looking forward to returning to the news business after a detour of unemployment and a brief stint in corporate communications.

The Herald, owned by the Washington Post Co., is a newspaper with a great heritage, serving a county of about 711,100 people just north of Seattle — within commuting range of our home in northeast Seattle. Snohomish County and Everett are home to Boeing's biggest commercial airplane factory — which also is the biggest building in the world — and to a Navy base that is home to the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln.

My title at The Herald will be design news editor. I'll be involved in the Web site to a great degree but I'll also be designing pages for the print edition. (Never thought I'd work with InDesign again.) I will also be a lead in the planning and development of Web-first news content.

This will be the second Herald I've worked for. I started my post-college journalism career at the Tri-City Herald in Kennewick, Wash.

Metro Seattle general news Twitter rankings

I might make this a regular thing. Let me know if I'm missing anybody with more than 1,000 followers.

Snapshot taken Friday, Oct. 1, 2010.

1.	@seattletimes	22,180
2.	@king5seattle	14,743
3.	@seattleweekly	12,138
4.	@seattlemag	10,391
5.	@kiro7seattle	8,260
6.	@westseattleblog	7,979
7.	@seattlepi	7,277
8.	@komonews	6,063
9.	@seattlemet	5,274
10.	@nwcn	4,930
11.	@q13fox	4,147
12.	@thenewstribune	3,408
13.	@strangerslog	3,277
14.	@myballard	3,248
15.	@techflash	3,239
16.	@komonewsradio	2,862
17.	@seattleglobe	2,711
18.	@psbj	2,585
19.	@mygreenlake	2,554
20.	@seattlest	2,518
21.	@publicolanews	2,505
22.	@pnwlocalnews	2,490
23.	@wallyhood	2,184
24.	@seatransitblog	2,152
25.	@everettherald	2,009
26.	@btownblog	1,869
27.	@thenewp2	1,815
28.	@fremontuniverse	1,486
29.	@seacrime	1,470
30.	@queenanneview	1,439
31.	@columbiacity	1,422
32.	@phinneyridge	1,351
33.	@phinneywood	1,259
34.	@crosscut	1,066

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Papa's got a brand-new brand

Image via Wikipedia

And we're back!

I tried on corporate communications and decided the fit wasn't terrific — though I sure learned a lot about big enterprises, Boeing, and myself. So I'm returning to journalism. I've got a couple of news irons in the fire, all of them in the Seattle area, and I hope to decide on a new gig soon. (Speaking of irons in the fire, a real brand is the new tattoo. You heard it here first.)

Meantime, a former colleague asked me what I read to keep up with news at the intersection of journalism and technology, and I sent her this list of the sites I follow most closely, in no particular order:

• CyberJournalist
• MediaShift Idea Lab
• PBS MediaShift
• Nieman Journalism Lab
• Online Journalism Review
• paidContent
• Poynter Online NewsPay
• Reflections of a Newsosaur
• Steve Outing

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• What Skills Will Future Journalists Need? (pbs.org)

A big journalism confab to kick off 2010

Before we all disappear into the holidays, I want to put in a plug for a conference I'll be attending shortly thereafter, here in Seattle. It's called "Re-Imagining News and Community in the Pacific Northwest" and is organized by a national organization called Journalism That Matters. Actually, they're billing it as an "un-conference," which means the agenda will evolve over a period of days:

An overall convening starts with several hundred people, then quickly self-organizes into a series of smaller interest groups which report out ideas and action steps to the whole.

It will be held Thursday through Sunday, Jan. 7-10, at the University of Washington. You need to register in advance.

As bullets fly, the Seattle Times tweets

In the age of Twitter and streaming police radio communication, the bar for a newspaper is high when news breaks. Over the past couple of years we've come to see that crowd-sourced journalism is well suited to fast-breaking news. Thousands of eyes on the streets (or ears listening to the police scanner) can be a substitute for authoritative reporting — to a point, at least.

Meanwhile, among news outlets still practicing one-to-many journalism, television has long held the edge on timeliness, with helicopters and live pictures.

So when four Lakewood, Wash., cops were slain in the Tacoma suburb of Parkland this week and a manhunt ensued, news junkies of course turned to Twitter to find out, to report, and to opine. The first person to report the apparent capture of fugitive Maurice Clemmons was a scanner-listener. Out in the real world, the helicopters were scrambled and the microwave masts were raised and press conferences were broadcast. A typical 21st century response to news.

But in the end — no, come to think of it, from the beginning — the story of four dead cops and one dead suspect was owned by our legacy ink-on-paper monolith, The Seattle Times. With as big a newsroom bureaucracy as they come, the Times turned a nimble double play by providing deep reportage and super-timely alerts, many from the streets.

Seattle newspaper circulation drops 16.4 percent

The Audit Bureau of Circulations this week announced figures for the six-month period ending Sept. 30, 2009, and the year-over-year drop in average weekday print circulation among 379 U.S. daily newspapers was 10.6 percent. That's not strictly due to people simply walking away from print. Over that year, the incentives to subscribe changed, in some cases through price increases and distribution pullbacks. But it's ugly just the same.

So what happened in Seattle? It's difficult, though not impossible, to say.

A year ago we had two daily printed newspapers, and today we have one. Complicating matters, we don't know how many people a year ago subscribed to both The Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which now publishes online-only as SeattlePI.com.

But here's what we know for sure: Today's Seattle Times average weekday circulation of 263,588 is, by my calculations, 52,085 less — 16.4 percent less — than the 316,673 combined circulation of both papers a year ago.

So while the Times is touting a circulation gain of "an amazing 32.6 percent" and that "84 percent of the non-duplicated daily P-I subscribers are now Times subscribers," the bigger picture of print newspaper circulation in Seattle is somewhere short of amazing, unless you're talking about an amazing drop.

The above chart was assembled by yours truly, who painstakingly pored over news clippings of the past 10 years and plugged the numbers into Excel. Figures are for the six-month periods ending March 31 (spring) and Sept. 30 (fall). Data are from ABC as reported by ABC, both daily newspapers, the Puget Sound Business Journal, and Seattle Weekly. Due to the wide range of sources required to assemble the spreadsheet, some numbers reflect adjustments after auditing and some numbers are those reported before audit. If anyone has a better collection of Seattle data, I'd love to see it.

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Crosscut.com emerges from temporary obscurity

The Seattle local-news Web site I helped found, Crosscut, has finally earned 501(c)(3) status and has emerged from a difficult limbo during which Publisher David Brewster pulled off a minor miracle: He kept it alive with almost no money through the transition from an LLC and he grew the readership.

Today Brewster confirmed that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, through the Seattle Foundation, has granted Crosscut $100,000 to get back on its feet. First order of business: a membership drive.

Crosscut was launched as a for-profit venture in 2007, a little too soon to see the full folly of an earnest journalism business supported primarily by advertising. That wasn't the only challenge standing in the way of success, but it was the biggest one.

<digression> I was an investor as well as a salaried employee, so when it became clear a year ago that Crosscut would survive only as a nonprofit, I lost everything — my investment and my job. I was laid off in November 2008. I mention this not only to explain a conflict of interest but to remind everyone that I'm looking for work! (Does this count as one of my weekly "job search activities"?) Like all business failures, this one was highly instructive and a great experience in spite of my personal financial purgatory. </digression>

I've always wished Crosscut well, but I do so especially now that Brewster has hired Mark Matassa (left) to be editor, part time for the time being. Mark is one of the best journalists in Seattle. He was a reporter and then political editor at The Seattle Times when I was there, went to the Los Angeles Times for a while, then returned to Seattle to be an editor at the recently ink-less Seattle Post-Intelligencer. (His significant other, Michelle Nicolosi, remains at SeattlePI.com as executive producer. Not to be confused with Mark's sister, Michele Matassa Flores, who also worked at the Times and about whom I wrote recently.) I can't think of anyone more qualified to take Crosscut to the next level than Mark Matassa.

You have a constitutional right to practice irresponsible journalism

Image by team doster via Flickr

Ever since he came on the scene, I've been a big fan of Seattle Times baseball writer Geoff Baker. He's a great beat reporter, and just as important in this day and age, he gets the new media landscape. He writes an excellent blog. He engages his readers and is down with the local baseball blogosphere. He's tireless and was born to do what he does.

Today Baker posted his thoughts about a recent controversy involving former Seattle Mariner Raul Ibanez and Jerod Morris, a blogger elsewhere who, offering statistical analysis but no other evidence, has implied that perhaps Ibanez's improved recent performance is due to something other than his own hard work. In his own blog post, Baker rips Morris a new one, without naming him, and suggests that it's time for non-professional journalists to get some training and learn to look their subjects in the eye when writing critically of them. This is where Baker loses me. There's a certain lack of nuance to this analysis, much as I respect his baseball coverage.

The people convict KIRO-TV

A belated update: As I noted previously, the non-profit, non-governmental Washington News Council decided to take its media-accountability thing to the people, instead of holding a hearing, in the unofficial case of the Secretary of State of Washington v. KIRO-TV in Seattle. Secretary of State Sam Reed had filed a complaint [PDF] with the organization, seeking a public redress of grievances over a KIRO report regarding supposedly illegally registered voters in the 2008 election.

In the complaint, Reed said KIRO reporter Chris Halsne's investigative series on voter registration "fell far short of the most basic standards of journalism for accuracy, balance and fairness. This occurred despite our repeated efforts to correct some of his assumptions and methodology and errors before he aired his reports."

Well, the people weighed in, voting overwhelmingly to "convict" KIRO and Halsne of eight counts of wreckless journalism and disregard of the facts. The citizens then posted comments about how badly the station and the reporter botched the reports, clips of which [#1, #2] they viewed in addition to reading the secretary of state's complaint.

A Seattle media time capsule

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer today waxes nostalgic about the 30th anniversary of the Seattle SuperSonics winning the NBA championship — the only big-league title ever won by a Seattle team. (No, I don't count the Stanley Cup of 1917.)

Not being a basketball fan, and then being a relatively recent transplant, I wasn't all that into the Sonics. But I do recall that weekend in Seattle vividly because I had just moved here for the summer — to take some classes at the University of Washington, to get a taste of a big university and Seattle before finishing up the following fall at Whitman College in Walla Walla.

I lived that summer of 1979 in the basement of a house on Brooklyn Avenue Northeast, which a friend shared with other UW students. Except for a seminal course on media law taught by Don Pember, it was an unremarkable quarter academically, which was in no small way due to the fact that I was myself academically unremarkable. Had a blast living in Seattle, though, and I vowed to return. Which I did, for good, six years later, to work for The Seattle Times, a paper I first got acquainted with that summer long ago.

But I digress. The real reason I'm blogging this is to point out a very interesting component of the P-I's story today about the old Sonics. It links to a PDF of the June 3, 1979, edition of the P-I, and on that front page are examples of how things crazily change and stay the same over time:

A dim view of the Blethen legacy

Longtime Seattle Times chronicler Bill Richards has the cover story of monthly Seattle Business. In it he reveals some interesting new details behind the turbulent past decade of the newspaper company and has an unflattering assessment of CEO and Publisher Frank Blethen.

In "Blethen's Choice: Decisions made to pull the family together have weakened the Seattle Times," Richards suggests that a deep history of dysfunction among members of the Seattle-area Blethen family, which has controlled the privately held Seattle Times Co. since 1896, shaped the small newspaper chain's character in good and bad ways.

Frank Blethen, Richards reports, saw the company as something of a salve for familial wounds. But while the family's growing emotional attachment to the newspaper company resulted in kinship and good journalism, that passion also led to a number of bad business decisions that hurt the company's chances for survival in the digital age. Says Tony Ridder, the former Knight Ridder CEO whose company owned 49.5 percent of the Seattle Times Co.'s voting stock: "The Seattle Times was a good newspaper. But Frank absolutely did not make good business decisions."

Finally, the sale of Seattle Times-owned papers in Maine appears to be near

Richard Connor says he and HM Capital, a private equity firm in Dallas, have finally raised the cash necessary to close a deal announced last year — purchase of Blethen Maine Newspapers from the struggling Seattle Times Co. The price has not been disclosed, but unloading the three dailies and other properties in the other corner of the country is hugely important for the survival of The Seattle Times and its smaller siblings in Washington.

The papers to be sold are the Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram, the Kennebec Journal in Augusta, the Morning Sentinel in Waterville, plus a weekly and a Web portal, MaineToday.com. The union representing many workers at all three papers is to vote on concessions this week, including a 10 percent wage cut, according to the Press Herald.

The new Seattle Times editorial-page editor is fifth-gen Ryan Blethen

Ryan Blethen (pictured), son of Seattle Times Co. CEO Frank Blethen, has been named editor of the flagship paper's editorial page, replacing Jim Vesely, who retired last week.

This should be seen as confirmation that Ryan would, assuming the paper can survive, succeed his father as publisher of The Seattle Times.

Here's the e-mailed news release, which is not yet posted online:

With unforgiving readers, copy-editing is important

Image via Wikipedia

The images below pretty much tell the story. If you're going to claim breaking news as your bread and butter, you open yourself to extra scrutiny.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer was on top of an aviation emergency, but a hastily written story was posted with equal haste, apparently without editing.

For the non-copy-editors among you, there are three problems: a missed capitalization in the headline ("Sea-tac" instead of Sea-Tac), and, in the "lede graf," incorrect use of the plural form of smoke and citation of the wrong day.

Within moments, an unforgiving reader spotted it. Two of these three errors were corrected about 15 minutes after the original post.

In the age of print, this sort of on-deadline flub would be a big, embarrassing deal. Online-only, I don't know — not so much? What do you think? Does anyone care anymore?

Tackling the news-technology challenge: GonzoCamp!

Hunter S. Thompson (Wikipedia)

Heads up for a Seattle event May 22. It's called GonzoCamp, and it's a gathering of people interested in what's happening at the intersection of news content and technology:

In the spirit of a startup weekend, journalists, programmers and business development folks will gather in the name of news innovation. Using a barcamp-style unconference, the goal is to pitch ideas and work in teams to build a functioning prototype of a new digital destination or platform in one day. ...

... We're looking for tech-savvy journalists, programmers, designer/developer/UI people, entrepreneurs and some college students. We'll be relying on folks like you to work your networks and help us get the right people there.

The event is co-sponsored by the University of Washington Master of Communication in Digital Media program, the Online News Association, and Serra Media, a Seattle developer of news software applications, including NewsGarden.

Revenue unrealized: online local advertising

I don't know the first thing about the advertising business, but it doesn't take a madman to see that locally focused advertising online seems stuck in the 1990s, whereas the content side of the equation is bursting with new ideas and experimentation.

This has been bugging me for a long time. A lot of people have approached me about starting a news outlet of one sort or another in Seattle, and so far nothing has made sense because the revenue equation isn't there. Why is that? Here's why:

1. To my knowledge, venerable local news outlets and even innovative new ones have not given fresh thought to the way advertising is sold, or what it is or should be.
2. While there are plenty of Chuck Taylors out there who have good ideas about news content and how it should be presented online, I know of no one on the ad side with whom to team up who is bursting with ideas about how to efficiently and creatively tap what has to be massive potential local revenue.

I was thinking about this again today after I encountered an excellent post by Dave Chase, the publisher of SunValleyOnline, who has advice for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and anyone else tackling the local advertising market with an online-only news product. Chase is a former Microsoftie who was involved in Sidewalk. His "Top 10 business mistakes that newspapers must avoid as they go online-only" is a must-read. Highlights:

Washington News Council 2.0

John Hamer, the executive director of the Washington News Council and a former Seattle Times colleague of mine, says the organization he helped found a decade ago is at a crossroads. At a time when media criticism can be practiced by anyone with a blog, and when media performance is critiqued in real time, what role should WNC play?

Backchannel discussions about news in Seattle

Image by dantc via Flickr

Now that some of us have dismissed the new, online-only Seattle Post-Intelligencer as an utter failure 24 hours into the experiment (yes, day two was much better, and, truly, I wish them well), it's time to anticipate the longer-term future of Seattle journalism.

Some context: Before Hearst on Monday announced that the P-I would, indeed, cease the use of ink, people at the paper were twisting in the wind. For weeks, no one knew what would happen. Then a few weeks ago a magic wand tapped some two dozen of the 170 news employees on the shoulder to join a possible new online-only venture — the SeattlePI.com effort now under way "to break a lot of rules that newspaper Web sites stick to." This bifurcation of the staff upped the levels of anxiety and insecurity in the final days and hours, naturally, which helped inspire another handful of P-I journalists to consider striking out on their own once the severance checks are safely deposited.

These folks, who wish to remain nameless until the Hearst checks clear, asked me to advise them. (Now between jobs, I worked for a long time at The Seattle Times, organized and ran the Seattle Union Record during the 2000-01 newspaper strike, was managing editor of Seattle Weekly, and was the launch editor of Crosscut.) So far the relationship with these now-former P-I staffers is informal and free, but it's possible I could get more involved at some point. Anyhow, through this connection I've been privy to discussions with others in Seattle — including non-journalists — who are concerned about the future of local news. After all, The Seattle Times is in a precarious way, too.

So with that background out of the way, here's what I know about overlapping discussions about the future of news in Seattle, in light of historic disruption: