Weekend reading: Can hyperlocal work?

(via Flickr: jj_pappas423)

Here's the latest installment of things worth reading:

"Hyperlocal Heartbreak: Why Haven't Neighborhood News Technologies Worked Out?" (ReadWriteWeb): With Aol's deal to acquire neighborhood news aggregator Outside.in as a backdrop, author Marshall Kirkpatrick tries to figure out why various attempts to develop sites in this niche have yet to work. Is it an idea ahead of its time? Don't enough people care about what's happening down the street? Is the revenue model too elusive? "I care about what's happening in the neighborhood around me," he writes, "and I want to see the fabulous new technologies of open government data, online news syndication, social networking and data mining all put to service to fulfill hyperlocal news wishes and dreams I didn't even know I had yet."

"Q&A: Jim Brady on the Death of TBD" (Columbia Journalism Review): Brady was one of the brains behind TBD, the online-only local news site in Washington, D.C., that saw the rug pulled out from under it by parent Allbritton Communications just six months after launch. Here he offers an extended post-mortem on the rise and fall of the site, which he says has been wrongly characterized as a hyperlocal effort.

Musical interlude.

"Memo to Newspapers: Incremental Change Is Not Helping" (GigaOM): Check out the graphic in this post by Mathew Ingram, which originally accompanied an analysis by Frederic Filloux of the disruptive changes now facing traditional media. It shows how rapidly print advertising revenue has declined -- with the Washington Post as a model -- vs. the slow rise in online revenue: there's no intersection of the lines as "digital pennies" are no match for "print dollars." For the Post, it means in real terms the loss of $5 in print revenue for every $1 gained in online revenue.

"Journal Register's Localized Video News Strategy Is Driving Profitability: CEO John Paton" (Beet.TV): In a video interview, Journal Register Co.'s John Paton explains the technology his "digital first, print last" company uses to get video to the web quickly -- including eliminating the bottleneck (emphasis added) of central editing.

Bonus reads:

"A Day in the Life of a Liveblogger" (MobileCrunch): This is a delightful, insightful tale of live-blogging, as one reporter psyches himself and syncs his mobile "office" to cover the folderol of new tech-product releases.

"So Long Again, Chicago Daily News" (Reflections of a Newsosaur): Newsosaur Alan Mutter reminisces about the 1978 closing of the afternoon paper in Chicago. "But this isn't just ancient history," he offers. "It is a valuable reminder to today's media companies of what happens when you run out of readers, revenues and ideas all at the same time."

Ouch! That $400,000 sure stings

I've mentioned before the peek I've had into my likely post-layoff salary: less than I had been earning but by how much is the big question.

So it's hard not to join the noisy reaction (see the comment sections here and here) on the money going to the chief executives of new nonprofit news organizations.

We just learned, for instance, that Lisa Frasier, named last week as CEO of the Bay Area News Project in San Francisco, will be paid $400,000. Paul Steiger, who heads the nearly 3-year-old New York City-based ProPublica, received compensation of $570,000 in 2008. And TexasTribune, launched last fall in Austin, pays chief Evan Smith $315,000.

Steiger, of course, once served as managing editor of The Wall Street Journal. Frasier was a partner at the San Francisco office of McKinsey & Co. (Yes, the same consulting firm that reviewed the operations of magazine publisher Condé Nast just before Gourmet and a handful of other titles were shuttered last fall.) And Smith had a career in magazines, most recently leading Texas Monthly for nearly two decades.

All of which is to say the three are long on credentials that can command an executive salary.

The organizations they're leading are different in scope and focus but share the model of seeking donations from foundations, philanthropists and John Q. Public to keep alive the civic and investigative journalism that has been wilting under the pressure of newspaper layoffs, buyouts and closings.

To be a nonprofit is not to take a vow of poverty. Rather, an organization must petition the Internal Revenue Service for an exemption from taxes after proving it meets certain criteria and pledging that no one person will benefit from any earnings.

Nonprofits compete for talent as vigorously as for-profit businesses, and they often will cite the need to pay comparable head-honcho salaries in order to capture attention.

And, indeed, the $400,000 going to the Bay Area News Project's Frasier is the same as the base salary paid to Donald Graham, chairman and CEO of The Washington Post Co., a for-profit publisher.

Now I'll freely admit this is an apples-to-football comparison: Graham's total annual compensation actually is doubled by the awarding of so-called performance units based on overall company performance in four-year cycles. And the Post Co.'s latest proxy statement says the board of directors believes Graham should be paid more, when compared to peer CEOs (the base salary of The New York Times' Arthur Sulzberger Jr., for example, was $1.09 million in 2008), but that he declined.

Putting on my former business editor's cap, I can see that a supply-demand or what-the-market-will-bear case can be made for paying these nonprofit CEOs like their for-profit brethren.

But as one among many still-unemployed journalists, the six-figure salaries sting nonetheless.

Let's hear it for toothpaste and newspapers

Here's a modest proposal for the future of journalism: consumer staples.



The New York Times brought to you by Charmin; Crest presents the Dallas Morning News; the Chicago Tribune sponsored by Gillette.

Why not hook up? The Washington Post just reported a third-quarter profit thanks to Kaplan Inc., the test-preparation company that also offers online graduate and professional degrees.

We could do worse.

Despite continued attempts to find the new business model for journalism, no one has discovered it yet. Just the other day, "some 50 of the foremost thinkers about journalism" gathered at Harvard University to ponder the future and how to make money in news, says the Reflections of a Newsosaur blog.

In the end, tweeted Newsosaur Alan Mutter, who was invited to attend, "Holy Grail undiscovered."

To be sure, the "media company" model hasn't worked: newspapers, radio and TV stations, billboards, and community weeklies all wrapped up together. And all were whacked in unison as the economy melted down last year.

So diversify: General Electric Co., which has been around since the late 1800s, knows it works. Why not newspapers?

Yet the Post took some shots for the strength of its Kaplan subsidiary. Said a headline on the Editor & Publisher website, "Q3 Profit Up at Washington Post Co. -- No Thanks to Newspapers." At MarketWatch, Kaplan was dubbed the Post's Mariano Rivera, "the reliable [Yankees] closer who strides out of the bullpen and saves the day."

For the Post, Kaplan produced 60 percent of third-quarter revenue, says MarketWatch. That seems an easier way to guarantee a positive bottom line than erecting pay walls for online content or crafting some kind of donations or outside funding system to pay reporters for their work.