Inoffensive, “objective” journalism isn’t good journalism, it’s good business. At least it was before the Web. In a world where printing presses — and by extension, competition — are scarce, it’s good business to try to appeal to the largest audience possible. A good way to appeal to the largest mass possible is to try not offending anyone.

This naturally leads to journalism that tries to triangulate both sides and sit somewhere in between. Not every story or issue has two correct sides. Good journalism is about trying to find the truth, but the truth can be offensive to people who don’t want to hear it.

Writing a story about climate change? Get a scientist on the record talking about how it is happening, then go find someone to say that it is not happening or that man isn’t causing it. Then make no determination of which side has more evidence or what the preponderance of science supports.

Instead, take the inoffensive — often ineffectual — middle ground. Let readers “decide” based on the “evidence” presented. This will usually lead to many stories and issues appearing as if there is consensus. Offense minimized.

Then came the Internet, and smart people didn’t want this limp reporting anymore. They wanted experienced and knowledgeable journalists to help them make sense of it all. People want journalists to help them find the truth, no matter how offensive that truth may be to some.

This has become a problem for newspapers. The notion of modern objectivity doesn’t serve journalism, it serves making money. At least it did.

After the Web took off, niche publications, blogs, social media, etc began to flourish. Suddenly it was OK to offend people. Suddenly it was OK to tell people what they didn’t want to hear.

Why? The barriers to entry for starting a Web site or blog are incredibly low. Building a printing press took a large investment. A good way to pay if off — and rack in monster profits — was to try to appeal to as large of an audience as possible. But starting a blog is free and building a professional Web site is a fraction of the cost of a printing press (let alone operating and running said press).

Now appealing to everyone doesn’t make business sense. At least, it’s not a requirement. Suddenly it makes sense to appeal to niches. The nicheification of content is at the core of the Web. People have diverse interests, and the Web allows those interests to flourish.

Want to write about just science stories? Start a blog for free, and you’ll probably find more success by not trying to be in the middle ground all the time. If you’re knowledgeable about a topic, people want to hear what you know and think.

I don’t envision a future where we see giant 1,000 person newsrooms anytime soon. But if newspapers want to survive, they’ll have to consider creating passionate journalism again. They’ll have to consider offending people.

They key to offending people is to be right. I can respect someone who challenges my beliefs when they are right. After all, that’s a main way my beliefs change over time.

To bring this back to the lede, newspapers need more Dan Froomkins, not less. Dan was not afraid to offend people, and at one point, he probably challenged everyone’s views. He was willing to tell the truth and be fair and honest.

His brand of objectivity wasn’t to give both sides to every story, but for him to try his best to find the truth. And that can often be “offensive.” But that’s also what made Dan so popular and respected.

People are turning to blogs and new media outlets precisely because they find much of traditional media too afraid to tell the truth. But if newspapers accept that objectivity isn’t about telling all sides to every story, but rather about finding the truth, I believe they’ll find better success moving forward on the Web.

The notion of “objectivity” has been a big part of the downfall of traditional journalism. It turned into passionless, he said-she said nonsense. And people are smart enough to know that no one is truly objective. That’s why transparency trumps all.

The ideal would be to be transparent about who you are, what you do and what you believe and then try to go about objectively reporting. That’s what I strive to do.

The altar of objectivity has led traditional journalism down an unfortunate road of giving both sides of every issue equal time. That’s not objective. That’s just perverse.

Being objective should be the quest for finding truth, not for equivocating on every issue.

But no matter how we define objectivity, transparency should be the key to what modern journalism is about. It’s at the heart of the social Web.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said he is willing to invest up to $11 billion in search over the next five years. I have a much better idea for Ballmer. Instead of investing in the future, why doesn’t Microsoft consider buying yesterday’s companies — with yesterday’s business models — instead?

That model has been a rousing success for the newspaper industry. The supposed high-minded, civic-minded Fourth Estate has been mostly about profits the last few decades (with some exceptions), while supposed money-grubbing companies like Microsoft take nothing for granted.

Imagine that, a company with robust profits using those profits to invest in the future? Get out. Unheard of.

“When I was in college, a professor said, ‘Beware of the Internet.’ Everyone and anyone is a ‘journalist’ or ‘writer’ because of it. Six years later, I owe the Internet a big hug, because before my memoir Rattled! there was Storked! on glamour.com. But I do consider myself a real writer, and my stories are genuine.”

That quote comes from well-known blogger Christine Coppa. She has been making a living off of her blog and now has a book out based on her blog. She’s very fortunate that she didn’t listen to her professor.

I can’t help but wonder how many aspiring journalists received sage advice like that only a few years ago. Imagine how much that has impacted the journalism industry? Worse still, many journalism professors still don’t get the power of the Internet and openly believe it will be (or has been) the downfall of journalism.

That’s a shame. So what if everyone is a journalist because of the Internet? As we are seeing right now in Iran, the revolution will be tweeted.

Bloggers like Andrew Sullivan are helping to make sense of it all. In fact, the mainstream media has been woefully inadequate when it comes to covering Iran and the recent election. Thank God for Twitter, blogging and social media.

When everyone becomes a journalist, we’ll be a more active, engaged and informed citizenry. When everyone is a journalist, corruption will find it tough to incubate; tyranny will have no place to hide.

There is still a place for professional journalists. Citizens can help report what they experience in their lives, but journalists can still put together the trend and analysis pieces. Professionals can also curate citizen content.

The Internet is a win-win for everyone. Well, accept the corrupt, the despotic, the tyrannically, the unethical.

It’s clear, however, that students should avoid the Internet at their own peril.

Rather than comment on these legally-challenged meetings, I’m here to offer some suggestions for charging for news. Let’s assume that newspaper leaders have committed to charging for news. Here are my suggestions for what to do and what to avoid:

1. You can’t charge for something that has been free for years without drastically improving it — The idea of putting existing journalism content that has been free for years behind a pay wall is laughable at best. More realistically, it’s suicidal. People simply will not find value in it. After all, it was free for years. What’s changed now? Your balance sheets? People don’t care about that. Unless you are suddenly going to hire all those reporters that you laid off back, don’t even dream about charging for existing content. In fact, most newspapers offer an inferior product today than they did five years ago.
2. People won’t pay for the police blotter – Just because you spend time “reporting” on a subject, doesn’t mean people will pay for it. Consider carefully what you want to charge for and not charge for. I’m not saying to give up the police blotter, I’m just saying to not even dream about charging for it.
3. It’s much easier to charge for a new product or feature that was never freely available — It’s much easier to convince someone of the value of a product or feature that was never available before. It’s new. It can be “premium.” If the feature rocks and adds value to people’s lives, it might just work. This is where news orgs need to concentrate their efforts on. “What can be create new that people will find valuable?” That’s what newspaper execs should have really been discussing.
4. Even if a news org develops products & content worth paying for, it still needs plenty of good, free content – A uniform pay wall with all content behind it is suicide. How will a news org find new users? It won’t. Any news org hoping to survive and thrive long term needs a strategy that caters to current users while also cultivating new users. Even though most people coming from search engines, Twitter, aggregators, etc aren’t loyal users, they all offer the ability to convert random users into loyal users. Even pay wall-hero The Wall Street Journal has a mix of free and premium content. Same with ESPN.com. There must be a free-premium model at work. And the free content should satisfy 90 percent of users.
5. Premium products for premium users — You want to develop premium products for premium users. Premium users are dedicated and loyal. They check a Web site several times a day, not a month. Not all users are created equal. Steve Yelvington points out that news orgs offer a tale of two audiences — one casual, one dedicated. We want free products for the casual, while also developing premium features, products, access and even user interfaces for the dedicated.
6. A pay wall won’t protect print — People who left aren’t coming back to print. This is the worst possible reason for a pay wall, and yet some news orgs are hoping that a pay wall will save print. MediaNews president Jody Lodovic said, ”The whole idea is to stop the erosion from print to online and encourage people to become print subscribers.” Many people simply don’t want to be print subscribers anymore, especially to a daily newspaper. Everyday that goes by another person from a previous generation dies, while several more who will live their whole lives with the Internet are born. I’m 24; I’ve spent most of my life with the Internet. I’m not going back.
7. Think outside the box — I’m not a fan of charging for content. Most newspapers have never done this. We charged for a product — a printed newspaper. People also paid for delivery of said product. I already pay for Internet access and a computer (printing and distribution in the digital world). I’m not also paying for basic content. Instead, newspapers should concentrate on charging for what they always have — platforms and products. That’s really what a newspaper is. Ideas like the Times Reader are a step in the right direction (premium user interfaces and experiences for premium users). Mobile apps present another avenue to charge with. Why not charge for access and community? That’s one thing newspapers should do well.

Getting people to pay for a product isn’t rocket science. It usually starts with understanding what people are willing to pay for.

I recently noticed that your company has filled for bankruptcy protection. I think I can help.

Can I turn things around? No, but I think I can run things less poorly. You and your management team managed to sink Tribune into bankruptcy in less than two years.

Those are skills far beyond what I offer. But I offer my skills for less. If you’re going to fail, why not fail cheaply?

I’m confident that I can run any number of businesses into the ground — whether they be newspapers or financial institutions like AIG. Unlike, however, business executives who claim that they deserve their high salaries and bonuses even when they perform poorly, because “it’s the only way to keep ‘top talent,’” I can deliver the same caliber of results, without having a drastically overinflated view of my self worth.

I know I’m not worth millions a year in salary and bonuses, especially when my company is filing for bankruptcy or asking for a federal bailout. I understand that in a real capitalistic society, you get paid based on your performance, not based on what you the little elf in your heads tells you you’re worth.

Would I have foreseen the wisdom of an over-leveraged $8.2 billion buyout for a newspaper company in 2007? No, that level of incompetence is usually reserved for the most incompetent incompetents. I cannot go toe-to-toe with you or the new Tribune executive team.

But I can do it for less. If you’re having financial problems, why not consider somebody just as unlikely to turn around your sinking ship, but who is willing to do it for less? I’ll accept a salary half of what the average top Tribune executive makes and will only accept a bonus if the company does well and isn’t receiving a federal bailout or in bankruptcy.

I also guarantee that I have better ideas how to turn your company around.

To illustrate why I believe I’d make a better CEO for Tribune, I’ve put together this handy pros and cons list.

Pros of Sam Zell:

• Swears a lot.
• Can convince people to help him purchase companies that have little future for a lot of debt.
• Agrees that Tribune executives are overpaid.
• Is at least entertaining to have around.

Cons of Sam Zell:

• Doesn’t have the first clue how to run a newspaper company (at least one with $13 billion in debt).
• Can convince people to help him purchase companies that have little future for a lot of debt.
• Once told employees that “Everyone likes pussy. It’s un-American not to like pussy.” He’s 67-years old. It was creepy.

Pros of Patrick Thornton:

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• Swears a lot.
• Cannot convince people to help him purchase companies with no future.
• Has actually worked for a newspaper.
• Doesn’t have overinflated view of self worth that will cost company tens of millions.

Cons of Patrick Thornton:

• Doesn’t have the first clue on how to run a newspaper company as poorly as Tribune.
• Tweets too much.

Sam, even if you insist on keeping yourself on staff, why not get rid of all those overpaid motherfucker executives at Tribune and hire me to do their collective jobs. What’s the worst that could happen? Tribune goes bankrupt?

The latest numbers the company has shared with us include 15 billion photos uploaded in total, an average of 220 million new pictures posted each week, and at its busiest, 550,000 images being loaded each second.

Somehow news organizations lost sight of the fact that people love photos.

Instead they poured money and resources into newer, trendier fads, while neglecting a market they should be owning. What makes this even more inexcusable is how much money news organizations — especially newspapers — spend on cameras. Why give a photographer $10,000-20,000 worth of equipment for just a few shots to appear in the newspaper and online?

Still today most news organizations are only uploading a few photos from events that they take hundreds or even thousands of photos at. Still today news organizations are passing up events like high school proms, even though they are fantastic community and brand building events (and they will generate a ton of traffic and time spent). Still today most news organizations don’t allow users to upload photos to their Web sites.

Instead, people are uploading billions of photos to Facebook, Flickr, TwitPic and other sites. Imagine if those photos (and those eyeballs) were instead on news orgs’ Web sites? Imagine if news orgs tried to aggressively sell photos? Imagine if news orgs sold user-submitted photos and developed a profit-sharing model?

I hear all this talk about videos and databases and iPhone apps and Web ninjas, when news organizations could be making a killing by just utilizing something they have done well for decades: photos. Why have we lost sight of the fact that people love photos?

A few suggestions:

• If you attend a community event like a high school football game and take hundreds of photos (or thousands), upload hundreds of photos.
• Make photos big and beautiful. If my high school can do it, any news organization can too.
• Make buying photos incredibly easy. Again, if my high school can do it, any news organization can too. Check out their awesome photo buying system. Just click on the photos you want (with add to basket button under each photo), go to check out and select the sizes and quantities you want. Really simple.
• Allow users to upload photos. This is especially big for community events like parades, festivals, proms, sporting events, etc. Just check out how many people are at each of these events with digital cameras. We want their photos.
• Forget about captioning every photo. It’s a huge time sink that often delivers zero value (how many original captions could one sporting event really have?). Stop thinking about captions for community events and start thinking about tags.

Ganett CEO Craig Douchebow racked in $3.1 million for his outstanding performance in 2008. If I didn’t know better, I’d say that the newspaper industry is rolling in the money!

I have to hand it to newspaper companies. Since we can longer reward success (due to a lack thereof) we might as well make lemonade out of lemons and reward failure.

It’s a morale booster of sorts. Think about it: What would make you want to work harder and innovate more after your furlough/pay cut than hearing that your fearless leaders are getting bonuses? Sure you might be struggling to pay the mortage on your $40,000 salary, but think about how executives will now be struggling to pay for maintanence on their yachts?

This is an unorthodox strategy for sure, but I have full confidence that giving bonuses to executives at failing companies is the best path forward.

The managers sold these reporters on the idea of learning video by telling them that it would increase job security. You know, video is the future and all of that, and the Morning News has been through several rounds of layoffs.

Of course, a year later all of those journalists were laid off. Turns out video wasn’t the future.

One of the most depressing things I have seen with newspapers and other mainstream news orgs is how newsroom managers often follow the latest fads. They hear buzzwords like podcasting, hyperlocal, blogging, RSS, video, databases, link journalism, etc and think they have to jump on those bandwagons. Of course, they often don’t get how to fit in these new technologies or journalism techniques with what they are already doing.

Or, more importantly, if said technology even makes sense for their newsroom. And the truth is, each newsroom is unique. I can’t make blanket recommendations.

It seems like a lot of newsroom managers are trying to attempt the latest trends and stay up on the latest buzzwords for job security. But there is a large difference between learning about the latest techniques to try to make a better journalism product (and thus something more desirable to people and advertisers) versus  jumping onto the latest buzzword in an attempt to prove one’s worth.

I’m not trying to say that it’s 100 percent clear on what newspapers should be doing. But guessing isn’t it. Newspapers need a plan of attack.

And that means, if they’re going to invest money in training journalists to do video, they should stick with that commitment. Better yet, they should think carefully before committing time and resources to something like video. Video is not something you just guess at.

Either you want to make video a big part of your journalism operation or you don’t. And yes, experimentation is the path to salvation. But good experimentation requires a lot of research and forethought. Guessing is just following the latest buzzwords and trends.

I think a large part of the problem is that there are newsroom managers who don’t use or understand the technologies they are recommending. Hence why they are so prone to follow buzzwords and trends. Imagine newsroom managers from a decade ago not reading newspapers.

Unfathomable right? Then why would someone seriously take suggestions on blogging from someone who doesn’t read blogs (or better yet, have one)?

When I added podcasts to BeatBlogging.Org, I already understood the technology, and I had a reason for wanting to add that kind of content to the site. Podcasts allow for us to deliver a product that works really well on mobile devices like iPods and smartphones. Plus, I wanted a format that would allow in-depth interviews to shine.

Since I had experience with podcasting, I was able to quickly and cheaply start up a podcasting series for the site. Same thing when I added screencastserbium-doped fiber amplifier. We knew we needed a better tool for training people and screencasting just made sense.

Is screencasting the latest or sexiest buzzword? No, but it is a great training tool for the Web. So, I started a screencast series, and it has been quite successful.

Neither the podcasts nor the screencasts were guesses, however. I had reasons for thinking that both might serve a niche for BeatBlogging.Org. More importantly, I understood the technology and how to deploy it.

I just run a small non-profit Web site with a tiny budget. Certainly someone helping to run a newsroom with revenue in the millions should be as knowledgeable as me. Right?

Debt didn’t bring the newspaper industry down.

Declining advertising rates didn’t bring the newspaper industry down.

Complacency did.

When an industry goes from so high to so slow, so fast, it’s ultimately because its leaders became complacent.

They never thought that the monster profit margins would end. They never thought that diversification was important. Instead, they gleefully doubled down on print in recent years with ill-advised acquisitions.

After all, why diversify away from newspapers when they make so much money?

When you look at industries that ultimately fail, it’s because their leaders never thought a new technology or a new way of producing a product could come along. They thought they would be able to do the same thing forever. That short-sighted thinking is ultimately doomed to fail.

After both radio and TV tried to supplant newspapers for news delivery, you would have thought news industry leaders would have been on notice. Radio news was always destined to be a supplement, not the main event, but it still changed how some people consumed news. TV news has permanently stolen eyeballs and advertisers from newspapers, and yet newspapers were caught flat-footed when the Web hit.

The irony is that the Internet and Web should have helped newspapers make even more money. They are both vastly superior information content dissemination vehicles than newspaper trucks. The cost of making a good Web site is a fraction of that of a newspaper and is falling over time, while the cost of printing and distributing a newspaper is rising.

Even when America was enthralled by America Online, it didn’t become apparent to enough in the newspaper industry that this was the future. Nimble, non-complacent industries would have loved that millions of homes were getting Internet. Here was a much cheaper and easier to scale venue for content distribution.

Right off the bat, executives should have seen that the Internet and Web could do a few things exponentially better. Classifieds are one of the first thing that comes to mind. Rather than make a searchable, easy-to-use classified system online, newspapers shoveled non-Web friendly newspaper classifieds onto the Web. These weren’t searchable, didn’t contain links and photos were an afterthought.

In fact, they were such shovelware that they even carried the same space restrictions over from print onto the Web. Space in print is limited. The whole print model was built around scarcity.

There is no scarcity on the Internet. There never will be.

So, when people started seeing ads on the Web advertising homes with a frpl, instead of fireplace, it’s not hard to see why when Craigslist hit, the gig was up. Craigslist is not a technological wonder, its UI isn’t very good and it feels quite dated.

But it at least didn’t have ridiculous print abbreviations. And it was searchable, it allowed for links, it had photos and it was easy to use. Years later, it still looks and feels much the same as it did back in the 1990s, and yet Craigslist is better than virtually any newspaper classified system on the Web.

Complacency gave away to defeatism. After Craigslist caught on, newspapers began to give up on classifieds, thinking that we’ll never get them back. But we can get them back.

Nothing is lost forever. That’s the whole point of technological change. The newspaper industry has to reinvent itself.

Apple went from the brink of bankruptcy to current darling. The Internet, and products that utilize the Internet, are a big part of what has allowed Apple to turn things around. Apple recognized that it had to change from a computer company into much more.

Even Apple’s name went from Apple Computers to just Apple. Executives at Apple realized that they were no longer just a computer company; they are so much more. They had to be so much more — it was the only way to survive.

Newspaper companies have to become so much more than newspaper companies. This means completely reinventing corporate culture, mission, products, etc. Yes, this means making products that don’t have anything to do with the paper part of newspapers.

Most newspaper products on the Web were an awful lot like newspaper products in print (classifieds anyone?). That’s the problem. If newspapers want to reinvent, it means a lot more than just finding new ways to disseminate old content.  Reinvention means thinking of completely new products that tap into separate markets.

That’s why a computer maker gets into the portable music space. That’s why a computer maker starts selling movies. That’s how a computer maker becomes a dominant player in the cell phone space.

If Apple executives insisted on only being a computer company, Apple would have gone bankrupt. Instead, when the chips were down, they decided to start taking major risks and those risk paid off. Newspaper companies have to start taking real risks, and they have to be captained by those willing to take risks.

Gazette Communications has decided to take real risksonline casino. They are separating content from products. That’s crazy right?

Sometimes crazy is what the doctor ordered. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer went online only. What’s an online-only newspaper anyway? It’s a newspaper that is reinventing itself. It’s a newspaper that wants to at least have a chance of being around in 10 years.

Defeatism must stop. The newspaper industry’s obituary has not be written. We can change the course of the future if we cast aside defeatism and complacency.

Even small steps — in the grand scheme of things — can make a big difference. Newspapers don’t have to concede the classified space. They can carve out their own niche and bring in revenue.

It just won’t be easy. To get classifieds back, we have to be non-complacent. We have to work hard — harder than Craigslist for sure. We have to build a system that is categorically superior to Craigslist.

Within a decade or two, I would be shocked if Craigslist was still the dominant online classified site. At this rate, I would also be shocked if a newspaper company overtook Craigslist. Rather, I’m sure, some non-complacent, nimble Web start-up will come along and reinvent classifieds, just as Craigslist had done decades before. Again, however, the future has not yet been written.

We cannot change the complacency of the past, but we can change the course of the future. We must make a pact never to be complacent again. New technologies will be rapidly forming and changing lives in the coming years.

If the remnants of the newspaper industry want to survive and ultimately thrive, we have embrace new technology and get out of front of trends, not behind them. We have to embrace change. And, yes, that means we have to employ people in all ranks who are not married to the past and are willing to be a part of a revolution.

And so, the newspaper industry eventually won’t have that much to do with paper. Like Apple with computers, newspapers will still have print products (and they should, after all there is a market for them), but newspapers will be so much more than papers. They’ll produce products that are wildly different from newspapers.

That’s the only path forward.

There is no newsroom. Jay Rosen and I don’t even live in the same state. Oh, we do collaborate like mad.

We just don’t need to be face-to-face to do it. The NYU students who work on the project don’t need to be at NYU or even in the New York area to get work done. We can work from anywhere.

We use Google Docs, wikis and an internal blog. We have a modern e-mail Web app like GMAIL to send e-mails and IMs. We use Skype and Twitter.

We use Mevio for our audio files and WordPress for our site. We have Dropbox for backing up our files and could use it to share large files if we needed.

These Web tools have made us incredibly efficient and allow us to run extremely lean. We’re not wasting money on PC-based software or a physical location. Why should we?

In fact, I’d say working collaboratively and remotely makes us more efficient. I don’t have people stopping by my home-office (or a coffee house) bugging me, telling me random jokes or asking me if I want to go to lunch. And I can get work done wherever, whenever.

Sometimes inspiration strikes at 2:00 a.m. Because I’m set up to get work done remotely, I can capitalize on that inspiration.

This all brings me to my real point: What’s the point of a newsroom in today’s era of limited resources? What would you rather fire: content producers (and by extension money makers) or a physical building? For knowledge workers, I’d argue that physical buildings often make us less efficient and always cost a lot of money.

Workers > buildings

Michael Rosenblum and a client got rid of the newsroom. Why? It wasn’t worth the expense:

We had an office for the first station, but realized after a year, no one went there. There was no need for it.

All of our video journalists work from the field, cut on their own laptops, and set their own schedules. Coming into an office every day would only eat into their reporting time and serve no purpose. Not to mention the vast cost of a physical office – the building, the desks, the carpet, the lights.  All unnecessary.

So when we set out to design our second station, we eliminated the building and the office entirely.

Don’t need it.

Don’t want it.

Why do content producers need to be in a physical building? They don’t. Reporters should be out reporting and conducting office hours for the community.

If I’m an editor, I don’t want to see my reporters. If I am seeing them, they are not out being a part of the community. And I really don’t care where editors are located.

They certainly don’t need to be in the same building together. Heck, they don’t even need to all be in the same state or country. Same with Web developers, database journalists, etc. I just want people who are good at what they do and can work with collaborative Web tools.

Instead of laying off employees, news orgs should consider laying off their office buildings. Or at least downsizing them with the idea that workers would show up to this smaller, collaborative-focused newsroom less often.

In my experience, companies that require workers to come in every day to get work done aren’t utilizing collaborative tools that make them more efficient. If they were using Web apps like Google Apps/Docs, wikis, BaseCamp and Web-based e-mail, they wouldn’t need you to come in. With those tools, almost all meetings are obsolete.

Telecommuting is all about mindset. That’s all it is. Many mangers have only known showing up Monday-Friday, 8-5 in the office each week. They think that’s the only way to get work done.

They can’t envision a different way of working. They assume you’ll just slack off if they can’t walk over to your desk whenever they want. They think you won’t be in the loop and be able to collaborate.

You don’t want to work for these kinds of managers. They let fear override logic. They are stuck in the past, when the present and future offer a better way of doing things.

I’m here to tell you that those kinds of managers are wrong. In my previous jobs, I worked in an office. Now I telecommute full-time.

I no longer waste two hours of my day commuting into work. Instead, I can spend that time actually working. Now, if I want to get work done at 2:00 a.m., I can. Also, I can update our Google Site (a powerful wiki-like tool) whenever a good idea strikes me.

Nothing sapped my creative energy like being told that I had to think about work a certain part of the day and personal stuff another part of the day. Now, I can think about work whenever it makes sense to. I don’t work straight through my day and then go home.

No, I work in chunks and then do non-work stuff for other chunks. I’m much more flexible now, and I have to be because I follow journalists all over the world. You can find me doing work early in the morning and late in the evening.

And why not? It’s just more efficient to work when you have work to do, not just to show up for work when you are scheduled at the office.

I’m more efficient now, and I work more. I have more time to work, and I have less distractions. No longer do I feel drained from a long commute, and I don’t waste time traveling to work.

Rethink the office

There are times when it may make sense to meet in person, but we don’t need to meet everyday. In fact, I’d argue that meeting daily makes us less efficient, and a bonus of not having an office is that it cuts down on meetings. Of course, there are companies that will never really need to meet.

Want to collaborate? Use collaborative tools! Meetings are a time sink.

Get rid of the building, and the you’ll get rid of the endless, unproductive meetings.

Here are two options that should save money and make for a better product, while still keeping a physical office space when needed:

1. Have a smaller space that workers can bring their laptops in for collaboration.
2. Rent out a space just when you need it for in-person collaboration.

Option one is less radical, but it still saves money. If your workers work from home several days a week and don’t have set desks and offices, you don’t need anywhere near the same amount of space.

For instance, different teams could have different days of the week where they come in for collaboration. During these days, they would have access to the work space, which would be built around people bringing in laptops. There would be lots of white boards and spaces designed around serious collaboration (not around stupid, daily status meetings).

But it would be much smaller, and smaller means less money. Imagine if only 25 percent (or less) of your work force was scheduled to be in the office each day. Plus, you don’t have offices wasting space.

Option two is more radical, but it makes sense. Why not just rent out space once a week for collaboration or monthly or whenever you need it? Why buy or lease a building if you don’t need to?

Simply rent out space when you actually need to meet in person. If more businesses did this, there could be a sizable market for rent-an-offices. But these wouldn’t look like today’s cubicle-filled offices.

Again, they would be built around collaboration. They would be open and filled with white boards. They would have tons of wireless bandwidth, and they would have personality.

After all, if you’re going to have a physical office space, why not have it be something that people actually want to come into? Why not have something that is actually inspirational?

You can’t put a price on happiness

This is an often over-looked benefit of telecommuting. Employees will he happier. Many of us have to deal with huge commutes (especially those in markets like New York, Chicago, D.C., San Francisco, etc).

Trust me, no one likes spending his life in traffic, and American workers spend unconscionable amounts of time in traffic. So, why not get rid of one of the most stressful and least productive parts of your employees’ day? They’ll be happier if you allow them to skip that commute.

Employees will call out sick less. Heck, they’ll get sick less because A) they won’t be in the office with other sick workers and B) they’ll have less stress in their lives.

Which reminds me, I’ve never been sick since I started telecommuting. I used to get sick a few times a year when I had to make a commute each day (on the metro), be exposed to germs and sick people and then show up in the office and be exposed to people who refuse to take sick days. My health has improved, and I am just plain happier.

Child care suddenly becomes a lot easier and no longer a hassle for employees. Parents can work and spend time with their young children. If their school-age children get sick, it’s not an issue to find child care that day.

If the only reason you require workers to show up daily to an office is because, “that’s the way we’ve always done it,” you don’t get it. You don’t get how modern, Web-based collaborative tools can make your workers more productive and can save you money. And if you’re a manager, and you aren’t interested in making workers more productive and saving money, you’re doing it wrong.

And let’s be honest, doing things the way they have always been done has gotten news organizations into a lot of trouble. How about we make a new pact right here, right now: We’ll do things because they make sense, and that means being willing to rethink everything we do.

It’s the kind of thoughtful research and ideas about the future of newspapers and journalism that you won’t find in Time Magazine or The New York Times. It’s the kind of straight realism — and not the radicalism that many would have you believe — that this industry needs. I know it, you know it — we all know it: Journalism is rapidly changing in ways we can’t predict, and the old models are becoming obsolete faster than new models can develop:

When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.

I refuse to lie to people about the state of journalism or our future. I hope more journalists stop this game. Everything is changing.

I have been saying for awhile that there will be a dead period between when newspapers finally fall from being the dominant form of American journalism until new, viable journalism enterprises take their place. I can’t tell you how long it will be until the Internet/mobile can effectively replace newspapers. It could take the majority of my life until we see that reality.

But I can tell you this, a revolution is occurring. Make no mistake about it. Everything that we have ever known about journalism is coming to an end. It is both incredibly exciting and scary. Newspapers will be replaced.

When and by what? None of us can say.

Printing a newspaper took considerable resources. Starting a blog is free. That’s the fundamental problem with newspapers.

You can’t monopolize a free distribution medium. And newspapers were monopolies. They were uncompetitive.

We probably suffered because of the uncompetitive nature of newspapers. Imagine instead of having one outlet with one voice covering an area or topic, a virtually limitless amount of voices covering an area or topic? The Internet has the power to free us from all the bad parts of newspapers — shallow coverage, lack of transparency and misplaced trust in an ethos of objectivity, instead of honesty and fairness.

Make no mistake about it, there is a lot not to like about newspapers. And I would be shocked if journalism wasn’t exponentially superior 50 years from now than what we have today.

Trust me, business models will follow, especially when newspapers fall. When billions of dollars of advertising are freed from newspapers, it will naturally flow somewhere else. Advertisers will eventually realize that the Internet is by far the superior advertising vehicle.

The Internet will finally allow for targeted advertising, and it also gives far greater metrics over who is viewing ads. Plus, the Internet is opening up the ability for many more people to advertise too. Many people couldn’t afford to advertise in newspapers, even though they wanted to.

Advertisers have also been slow to grasp the power of the Internet. But they will. And people will make money off of journalism on the Web.

It’s not a matter of if, but when.

And that’s just the thing. None of us can say when that switchover will occur. It’s going to be a bumpy ride, but when we make it through this revolution, we will be producing better journalism.

It’s time to embrace what we know to be true.

Even fewer journalists would have gotten that story idea accepted. And almost none of those journalists would have had their story wind up on the front cover of Time Magazine.

Enter Walter Isaacson. 

He got a cover story into Time Magazine on the incredibly half-baked idea of micropayments — charging for content by literally nickel and dimeing people. Let me remind all of you that this idea is not remotely new. Mark Potts points out that this idea dates back to well into the 1990s.

The difference is that Isaacson is a journalism bigwig. He is revered in many circles. He can write whatever he wants, and we’ll print it. 

And we did.

If I wrote the same exact piece and published it to my blog, I would have been laughed at. and Time Magazine would never have seriously considered publishing it. But shouldn’t Isaacson be held to a higher standard than me, not a lower one? After all, my half-baked ideas aren’t thrown on magazine covers and TV shows for all to see.

Or is journalism really about comforting the well connected and privileged? I hope not.

If a politician proposed a really bad idea, journalists would jump all over it and start dissecting it. But when a bigwig journalist proposes an idea, regardless of merit, it’s accepted as gospel within mainstream circles.

Thankfully the journalism blogosphere and Twitter have thoroughly dissected Isaacson’s ideas (the kind of work Time’s editors should have done). Unfortunately, I don’t believe that the people in charge of a magazine like Time — or other large, influential news organizations — spend much time reading blogs or Twitter. Pity, they might learn something.

It’s clear from reading Isaacson’s ideas that he did not do any substantive homework. If he did, he would have known micropayments for journalism have been discussed for more than a decade and that there are strong concerns about being able to overcome transaction fees and make a profit. Plus, Apple developed the iTunes store to help sell high-profit margin iPods.

Isaacson and others have forwarded the iTunes Store as a successful micropayment model. The problem is that Apple sells plenty of higher-margin macropayments on the store (the iTunes store is for a lot more than just music, and I hope — but doubt — that Isaacson knew that) and Apple has been actively trying to find ways to make money off of those 99 cent micropayments by getting people to purchase a lot more than just 99 cents at a time (cards loaded with $20 are a great way to do this).

Jay Rosen on Twitter nailed why Isaacson is allowed to have such a big mouthpiece for such poorly researched ideas:

One answer to CJR’s question: http://is.gd/jizZ Journalism babies its bigfoots. They get to skip the homework and jump right to solutions.

Journalism bigwigs play by different rules than most of us. They are babied and rarely challenged. And that’s a loss for all of us.

And when I say proprietary, I don’t mean just software built in house but also software provided by vendors. If the answer is no, our proprietary solutions are inferior, than you have some serious soul searching to do. Why would you pay for an inferior product?

Now it is possible that A) your CMS and other Web software predate some of the quality, free open-source alternatives available (many would argue that Drupal, while quite a robust option now, wasn’t that good a few years ago). If this is the case, your organization should look into modernizing its Web software ASAP. I still hear journalists complaining about being hampered by creaky CMSes.

Don’t let outdated software stand in the way of your ambitions, especially when there are so many strong open-source options available. A good CMS won’t give you a good Web product, but it also won’t stand in the way of one either.

But if the answer is B) because we didn’t know any better, than that’s a serious, serious problem. There are news organizations that don’t have the right people making these decisions. Some will be easily swayed by vendor marketing tactics, while others will go with whatever CMS integrates easily with their print content management system. Listen, your Web CMS is more important than your print content management system.

Ideally, both will be strong systems that integrate well with each other. But with a Web-first strategy, tight integration isn’t that important anymore. Back when print content was pushed onto the Web it was, but times have changed. Web and print content are often different, with the Web often getting many exclusives. Increasingly, Web and print content will be distinct, negating the need for tight integration (or the need for purchasing a CMS and print content management system from the same vendor).

Utlimately, the point is that you can’t let poor software decisions hamper the potential of your news organization. The good news is that a good CMS doesn’t cost much money. The bad news is that the people in charge at your news organization may not know that.

That’s fantastic insight from Lyons in these times of churnalism. Lyons was supposedly banned from CNBC for telling one of its reporters to apologize to viewers for being serially wrong about Steve Jobs’ health.

Instead of Lyons being banned from the network for calling out a reporter who refused to admit he was responsible for regurgitating spin, CNBC should look into doing some real journalism and tightening its editorial standards. Plenty of journalists do real journalism and know how to separate spin from fact. You can’t be a good journalist if you believe whatever people tell you.

In fact, the best advice I can ever give a young journalist is to not believe anything anyone tells you without corroborating evidence. People are always trying to use journalists. Watch this clip and see how several CNBC reporters/anchors/non-journalists defend their inability to act as a filter.