The No. 1 thing newspapers have botched in the last 15 years is technology.

They have been slow to adapt, slow to embrace and slow to realize they are making themselves obsolete. Many newspapers continue to act like they exist in the pre-Web days, and journalists opening long for the past.

Why?

The Web will make journalism better, will inform more people and allow people to connect better with their communities. Despite this obvious realization, newspapers have done everything in their power to make themselves irrelevant.

Howard Owens has an interesting piece that I recommend everyone check out: Newspapers major mistakes with the Web

Owens writes about the eight historical mistakes he believes the newspaper industry made. It’s a good read for anyone who wants to understand what went wrong and what can be done to turn things around.

It goes over the major points that newspapers need to accept: a new classified model needs to be built (it has to be free online), user interaction needs to be embraced, a continuous news cycle is key, investment is a must and searchability cannot be overlooked.

If there is one point I disagree with, it’s his first on the importance of blogging. He overstates it. Newspapers need to be careful with blogging.

They need to add blogs that add value and are journalistically sound. He encourages a wide swath of newsroom bloggers, which probably would be a catastrophic mistake.

First, blogs have to be on topic. Often newsroom bloggers blog about random topics and get themselves in trouble by revealing biases.

Blogging is a technology. Bloggers are people. Users connect with good bloggers, not the technology.

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With the closure of Backfence, people are beginning to doubt the viability of hyperlocal sites as anything beyond a hobby for a few dedicated people.

That hasn’t stopped mega-dailies from getting into the market. The Chicago Tribune launched TribLocal earlier this year, and The Washington Post will be launching LoudounExtra this month. LoudounExtra is a much more in-depth hyperlocal site, and it will take a heftier investment from the Pot.

It’s a bigger risk, but it may prove a bigger reward. Or it just might be a much bigger failure.

But why has hyper local been such a mystery?

Paul Farhi sheds some light on the subject in the American Journalism Review this month:

In fact, many operators don’t really have a business model. The first wave of hyperlocal sites has featured seat-of-the-pants operations, staffed part-time by dedicated volunteers, community activists and impassioned gadflies. About half of the 141 respondents to the J-Lab survey said they didn’t need to earn revenue to stay afloat, thanks to self-funding and volunteer labor. A full 80 percent said their sites either weren’t covering their operating costs–or that they just weren’t sure. Only 10 of the 141 said they were breaking even or earning a profit.

For many hyperlocal sites, the idea was never to become rich and famous. Many of the sites were launched because of a dearth of quality local coverage by existing media outlets. With newspaper cuts in recent years, the first thing to go is local coverage, and that coverage is usually replaced by wire stories.

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Atlanta Journal Constitution rethinks everything
A lot mega-dailies have been shedding staff in recent years — The New York Times, Dallas Morning News, the AJC and many more. But it at least sounds like the AJC is doing more than just cutting staff.

They are rethinking their whole approach to news. I don’t have a problem with cutting staff if less and less people are buying the product. No one would think twice is Apple laid off employees if the iPod stopped selling. But Apple would also try to think of the next big product to sell.

Newspapers just cut staff without thinking of anything new or big. Certainly, you can eek out another profitable quarter by cutting costs, but eventually if you cost too many costs, you don’t have a product. The AJC decided to try to position their new product as Web first, print second.

That’s exactly how newspapers will succeed in the future. There will always be people who want to read newspapers. They are older, “settled” adults. They have established careers, make good money and are educated.

They, however, aren’t the only people who want news. A lot of younger people (like, say, me or my friends or my generation) aren’t settled and certainly aren’t thinking of subscribing to a newspaper. That doesn’t mean we don’t like to be informed.

It just means we need a medium that fits our lives and our schedules. The Web is it. I can get up-to-the-minute coverage of what I want to know on the Web, at any time.

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Farewell Backfence
The hyper-local community journalism site is now defunct. It will be missed, but the lessons learned from the project can help all journalists. It showed that journalism that is more local — and not the trend towards more national as most main-stream media outlets had been doing — resonates with readers.

The problem Backfence had was that it ran out of money, probably partly due to the company trying to expand too quickly. They should have found a successful business model from one area and then expanded. That never happened.

Also, Backfence was a nice community, but it was light on journalism. A project like LoudounExtra.com (launching July 16) should prove a lot more popular, profitable and long lasting. It combines a lot of database and social networking features of Backfence with real journalism from dedicated Post employees.

Personally, I am excited as ever for hyper-local journalism, but you know what they say: You can always spot the pioneers. They’re the ones with arrows in their backs.

CNN winning raves from designers
I’m a fan of the new CNN.com and it seems some accomplished designers are too. Although my rave review was more on the technical end because of the use of Ajax.

Andy Rutledge writes:

Like many people, I’m a big fan of CNN’s recent website redesign. While I believe that a few structural and hierarchical elements could have been addressed better, the overall result of this redesign is a very neat, very clean and clear presentation of information; exactly what an online news site needs.

After looking at the CNN site for a week now, it is growing on me more. It’s simplicity and grace aren’t eye catching, but the more you use the site, the more you come to respect and appreciate it. It’s something that a lot of non-Web people I spoke to last week didn’t appreciate, but I think users will find its style and layout to be exactly what they were waiting for.

It’s finally a content first approach to design.

Newspapers and training
Now that new media has arrived, companies need to harness the talent they have and give their staff members additional skills. You can’t learn everything in college and most j-school students know very little about new new media.

So, why are paper’s so loath to provide training or send staff members to courses? Many are still stuck in the old mindset that you can learn everything you need on the job. That’s not the case anymore.

I have been trying to get my work to send me to some programming classes for a few months now. I laid out exactly why I wanted to learn these languages and how they could help me build better and more advanced products for the company. And it’s not like I am a newbie to the Web — I have been building Web sites since I was 12-13 years old.

If a Web editor like myself has trouble getting his paper to sign off on additional training (I think they will in the end), I can only imagine the trouble many of you are having, especially if you are a print person trying to add new skills.

If newspapers want to succeed, they have to spend money to make money and unfortunately the trend for many papers has been to cut budgets. To be a new media journalist, you need to be a journalist first, which newspapers have plenty of.

Now they just need to give those journalists the skills they need to make products for the Web. It’s not all about hiring dedicated new media people, it’s also about giving established journalists new skills.

A tricky question for media companies will be how to best harness the power of social networking.

Some companies like USA Today have built in social networking straight to their sites. I think all journalism companies should embrace social networking, especially local sites. USA Today may be a poor candidate for social networking because it has an unfocused audience and content stream.

But let’s face it: social networking will always be done best by dedicated companies like Facebook and Myspace, and that’s what we’ll tackle today. Certainly, there is a market of young, educated individuals out there for media companies to tap into on those networks.

Journalism is facing a crisis. The majority of people reading papers and watching TV journalism are old, but social networking sites give journalists the chance to turn that around — if they play their cards right.

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I know what you’re thinking, “of course they do!”

But do they?

There is a difference between taking risks and truly innovating by making new technologies and features. If technology companies like Facebook, Flickr, Technorati and Google show us the way, do newspapers really need to think of the next big thing, or do they simply just need to embrace technology and social trends?

I would argue the only areas that newspapers can truly be innovative in is telling stories. But to tell stories in innovative ways, newspapers need to embrace technology and trends. Newspapers don’t need to be social networking pioneers (too late for that anyway), but I think it is important for many newspapers — especially more local ones — to embrace social networking and other Web 2.0 conventions.

Let’s face a cold, hard reality: newspapers and most journalism companies don’t put a lot of money into R&D (or staff or anything). If you don’t put money into R&D, you can’t be innovative. But every newspaper needs to be forward thinking (and most aren’t).

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Where are the standards?
If there is one thing that really bothers me about a lot of Web sites (not just journalism ones) is the lack of standards — as in standards-compliant code. As much as I like what The Washington Post does, I really don’t understand its over reliance on Flash, especially for navigational parts of its Web site.

ESPN is another prime offender, but it’s worse at espn.com because they use so much flash and video that it bogs down Web browsers and makes for a slow experience for many users. And nothing is worse than when I go to their site early in the morning and hear one of those screaming video commercials play unsolicited.

If ESPN didn’t have awesome content, I wouldn’t go there. I can’t take their slow Web site some days, but the site shows that content is king because I keep coming back.

The same effects that the Post and ESPN use could be achieved with Ajax. Why does it matter? Well, not everyone has Flash, Flash is a property of one company and it’s not forward thinking.

Mobile browsing may be the future of the Web. The iPhone is the first real mobile browsing experience, with a full-featured browser (standard compliant to boot) and large screen. Well, it only supports standards-based Web design. That means no Flash or Java.

Apple has good reasons for not supporting either, for various reasons.

Yes, some Smart Phones do support Flash Lite, but it’s nothing like the Flash that home computers have. Don’t rely on one product and one company for important parts of a Web site. The point is, Flash is a poor choice for the back bone of a site or any navigational element.

Flash is at home with multimedia content.

Web 3.0 from the BBC
The BBC has long had some of the best journalism content in the world. When I interviewed people in 2006 for my honors thesis, most people considered BBC News to be the best news Web site in the world. Well, it has stagnated a bit since then, and I would say it has fallen behind a few other players.

BBC is now making a push to reposition itself again as one of the top dogs.

Highfield said that after web 1.0 and web 2.0, he is looking at web 3.0 - the world of the semantic web, the internet that is intelligent.

Manging reader’s comments

25,000 user visits in just seven days, 400 reader comments … these were some of the results when 22 Danish online journalism students set up a website dedicated to covering the home town soccer team.

The class used a Word Press blog to create a Web site that would use all of the skills they had learned that year — round-the-clock online coverage, still photos, audio, video, multimedia features with comments on every story — to cover a local professional soccer team.

Every journalism school should have a class where students do a project like this. Not only did the students learn a lot about new media, but they also provided a real service to the community.

Gannett and its 24-hour “Information Centers”
this year to less-than-stellar results. Part of it is just poor thinking, which I’ll tackle in a minute.

Editor and Publisher profiled the “Information Center” at the Daily Record in North Jersey. The center was launched this year, and already has begun back tracking. The editor profiled in the piece, Kathy Shwiff, no longer comes in during the middle of the night, for good reason.

A 40,000 circulation paper has no business paying an editor to come in at 2 a.m. What could possible happen in the middle of the night in Morris County, New Jersey that anyone would care about? Nothing.

Gannett and the Daily Record would have made a much smarter decision spending that money on a journalist dedicated to making special features for the Web. Alas, they thought posting random updates at 4 a.m. was money better spent. News flash, you’re not The New York Times, I’m not checking your site in the middle of the night for “breaking news.”

And why is Editor and Publisher writing a story about Gannett’s “information centers” when the one they profiled no longer has someone coming in during the night?

USA Today relaunches its Web site
It is what it is, which is nothing special (but a much better site nonetheless). They are embracing some cool social networking features that every news site should have been doing for years.

The stories are tagged, which allows users to find similar stories, which is a good way to get people to view old content (this is a good, cheap feature that every news site should have). Users can also click the recommend button on stories, but I’m not sure why that is so much better than having a section of the site for most popular stories by page views. Yes, one is recommended by users, but users clicking on headlines is itself a recommendation.

Either way, these aren’t exactly earth-shattering enhancements in 2007. USA Today also allows every registered user the chance to have a blog, make friends, send messages and have a profile. All of these are fine ideas, but I don’t understand why the paper spent all the money on social networking for a site geared towards older people.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to get younger people in first and then add social networking features? USA Today still is a heavily print-focused site. Print stories have huge headlines (also to attract old people I assume), while video, blogs and other features are buried at the bottom of the homepage. That’s quite forward thinking.

USA Today should have added more video, more slide shows, more special features, more database and more new media journalism long before it decided to try social networking. As it stands, I have no reason to join the USA Today social network because the site’s content isn’t very good.

Content is king.

USA Today allows comments on just about all of their stories, which is a step in the right direction, but every news organization should allow this or some sort of “talk back” feature on their stories, especially the bigger ones. News outlets need to embrace two-way communication, because if they don’t readers will just go to other sites that do.

Head over to Read/Write Web to read more about recent site relaunches.

Backfence loses a little more of itself
Backfence was, is and will always be a citizen journalism pioneer. It will also be a foot note in history within a few years. The site just closed down it’s Evanston site, which is a wealthy suburb outside of Chicago.

Most of its operations and staff are shutting down because the site no longer has money. The ideas the site championed (a site centered around citizen participation and database content) will forever change the industry, but the site tried to grow too quick too fast (it started in several D.C. suburbs but went to California and Illinois, among others in a little over a year).

It’s an excellent case study in what to do and what not to do with citizen journalism.

You have to own a market before you expand.

Rob Curley likes what he sees in Europe
Curley, the VP of Product Development at The Washington Post, writes that he was impressed by what he saw newspapers doing during his trip to several Scandinavian newspapers.

He writes that the most important thing for success in new media is getting the top editor to buy into the concepts of new media and to be willing to try new things. From there, it’s all about new ways of telling stories.

“The lesson here is simple: If newspapers don’t get off their butts and start embracing this sort of storytelling, then the very folks we normally cover will just do it themselves.

If you don’t believe me, spend about 15 minutes on the MLB.com site for your closest Major League Baseball team, and then tell me if the hometown newspaper for that team covers the team as well or as deep.”

I couldn’t agree more.

If I were in charge of my paper (or yours) this is how I would staff it.

Don’t worry, this will never happen. At 22-years old, I have about as much say as the cleaning staff.

I am going to stay out of staffing for editors and publishers and just concentrate on building a quality Web staff.

This is how I would transform my newspaper (and these are recommendations for your staff):

1) Invest more in staff resources

You can’t run a race without horses. We need more horses. All papers need more horses.

Isn’t it remarkable that most papers are cutting staff (mine is growing, but that’s not the point), and yet think they can somehow transition to a modern newsroom? Let me get this straight. You think by NOT investing in your future, you’ll have a future?

Get real.

My paper has been adding more Web staff, without cutting from other staffs. That’s all good. Our circulation is growing, but our online readership is stagnating. This is largely because we need a complete paradigm shift and infusion of young talent to make big strides.

We need more online staff members, but more importantly we need a rethinking of allocation.

2) Allocating resources properly

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CNN.com launched a new version of its site, and at first glance it doesn’t seem like anything earth shattering.

It looks similar to the old design. Some like it more, some like it less and few really care one way or the other (I have no real preference over the looks of either, as they were both above average but nothing special). The new CNN.com is a much better site, however, and here is why:

CNN got rid of Pipeline, it’s old commercial free video service on the Web. For $19.99 a year users got live feeds and a lot of CNN video clips (all searchable) without commercials. I was a subscriber, and it was a good idea, but wasn’t executed well. There was no Mac version of the application, and the Web player was buggy. It often didn’t work right, and I all but stopped using it out of frustration.

CNN also got rid of it because less than 1 million people subscribed. They just weren’t reaching a mass audience with the service, and CNN is a video company. They didn’t want to pull a Wall Street Journal and limit their impact on the nation.

Now pipeline is gone. In its place is the ability to watch video from CNN.com itself. The video is bigger, looks better and is easier to use than Pipeline. Best of all you don’t need to sign up and pay money to see it in a pleasing format. The occasional commercial is worth it in my opinion for free content.

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