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Just a test

I'm going to be blogging tomorrow on Pat Crowley's Northern Kentucky Politics blog, helping him navigate a complicated election day. So this is just a test. Anyone have predictions for tomorrow's vote? You can find the blog at www.nky.com.

It's that silly election season in Northern Kentucky

Call me a political junkie. After 30-plus years of being in newsrooms on election nights, you’d think I’d be getting bored with the process, but there’s no chance of that happening to me this Tuesday. After all, Election Day is Game Day for democracy.

The past few weeks have been spirited. And dirty. You might be amazed by the amount of campaign dirt our reporters and editorial writers have had to sift, even in some local-local races. We’ve seen divorce decrees, court orders, faked military papers -- you name it.

And the amount of political trash talking we’ve all endured the past few weeks puts any high-jiving athlete to shame. Is there any way the NFL can fine some of these candidates for taunting? Will Ken Lucas ever wear beads again?

This election in Northern Kentucky also is mind-numbing in terms of the number of races on the ballot. Be assured that we’re geared to do our best at The Enquirer and NKY.com to help you navigate. Here is some of what you’ll find:

-- We can help you prepare for your decision by reviewing our coverage of nearly all the contested races in Northern Kentucky. You will find a story archive on the election page at NKY.com.

-- At NKY.com you’ll also find audio casts of several candidate forums we sponsored around Northern Kentucky that covered hotly contested races for the Kentucky House of Representatives, judicial offices and Campbell County judge executive.

-- Our political writer, Pat Crowley, does an online blog that is one of the most popular outposts in the world of Kentucky politics. Since even the multi-talented and heavily caffeinated Crowley only can do so much at once, yours truly will help keep the blog going throughout the day and evening with news nuggets from multiple sources. We encourage readers to email or call us if they spot any election-day mischief or just want to bring something interesting to our attention.

So, it’s almost time to put campaign silliness aside. American citizens age 18 and older have a serious, stirring obligation to carry out. Argue all you want about the war in Iraq, but agree that the roughly 50 percent of eligible adults who won’t bother to vote this Tuesday will be spitting in the faces of our troops and what we say their presence represents.

How valid is the Newspaper Readership Institute's work?

I had an interesting dialogue today with one of my favorite, provocative newspaper people -- designer Alan Jacobson. Alan just wrote a fascinating article that challenges a lot of the conventional wisdom of what matters in newspaper design. Here's the direct link: www.brasstacksdesign.com/design_matters.htm I think this should be required reading for any number of people in my industry.

In it, Alan questioned the effectiveness of the work of Northwestern University's Newspaper Readership Institute. He asks if papers that have embraced the work really have seen much in the way of circulation gains. By measuring and then improving something called a Reader Behavior Score, the NRI argues that newspapers can move a great distance in winning and keeping readers. But Alan's point is one worth asking. Has this prescription worked? (See www.readership.org for more information.) I told Alan today in a back-and-forth email that I think the NRI's work can be very valuable, but it's the application of the work where the controversy lurks. Here's a revised version of more of what I said:

I do recall NRI saying that moving up the RBS is no guarantee circulation will go up, which makes sense when you think about it. Lots of other variables influence circulation .. from changing market forces to some guy in an old pickup truck either delivers the paper late or throws it in the bushes. There is no "automatic" way to accomplish higher circuation. I drink Slimfast every morning and I know two things: a.) If I do that and a lot of other things, I should lose weight & b.) Slimfast by itself won't automatically cause me to lose weight.

The RBS is measuring the behavior of your existing readers. So, in theory, you could satisfy them but not move the meter much. I'll use one of my former papers, The Capital Times in Madison, Wis., as example. We could have had the happiest readers in America, but it wouldn't have changed that we were trapped in the afternoon in a perfect a.m. market. Still, being able to show that your existing readers are spending more time with the paper and are more satisfied with the product is a good thing in and of itself -- and an advertising dept. ought to be able to use that effectively.

I suspect that the one metric that could best apply as a test of whether a high RBS helps is to look at the subscriber churn rate. In other words, if RBS goes up, your churn rate should be going down because the readers are more satisfied. That's the question I would ask of papers that have really embraced this: What has happened to subscriber churn? Plus, if the churn rate starts dropping, you should have an enhanced opportunity -- external market factors aside -- to grow circulation because the newspaper now has more time to focus on new sales and continuous improvement (further driving up RBS) instead of re-selling people you've lost.

Institute founder John Lavine has long argued that increasing RBS and reaping real results involves the whole newspaper, and maybe that's the most powerful point of all. RBS was never intended to just be a newsroom challenge, and I suspect a lot of papers have focused excessively on the newsroom piece without really looking at everything else, from circulation service to advertising information as a readership driver. The desire of readers for advertising as content is a huge potential way to build readership. Think about it. Don't you want to see ads from the stores -- big and small -- where you shop? It's certainly fair to say that major design and news content changes -- no matter how good they might be -- only represent a few of the many puzzle pieces in driving readership up.

A final point is that the industry increasingly is selling aggregation of audience, not pure circulation. While some of this is, no doubt, defensive given all the gloom and doom flying around, it just makes sense when you think about it. In Cincinnati, for example, if we combine the audience we have in our daily, weekly and online products over a week, we have one heckuva powerful argument to make to advertisers about reach, and it's a very quantifiable and legitimate case to make. (Our daily circulation is up a bit, by the way.)

If the NRI work can help a newspaper stabilize daily circulation numbers and even grow it a bit, that's a huge help as newspaper companies focus on building audience in non-daily products. If RBS, or similar methods that don't have the Readership Institute on the letterhead, gets applied in a holistic way across an organization, it ought to be successful. The reason is simple. At the end of the day it's about attracting and keeping satisfied customers. It's about stirring passion and meeting needs people might not even realize they have. That spells success in any business.

OK, those aren't exactly new ideas, but they've never been more powerful. Call me idealistic, but I think there is nothing less than the heart and soul of not only journalism but the quality of our public discourse at stake in the coming decade. I refuse to accept that both are damaged beyond repair. When I retire in 10 or 12 years, I want to believe that my generation addressed these challenges and smoothed the handoff for the leaders who will follow.

Michael Jackson, global warming & Cincy TV news

I found myself watching, watching, watching and listening to television anchorbabble awaiting the Michael Jackson verdict to come in. So, now we know he's criminally not guilty but just very, very weird -- as were the parents who let their children go to the home of an adult man for a sleepover. But we all knew that and watched anyway.

Far more significant was the cover story of today's USA Today, describing the growing consensus that global warming is real. The newest converts are some of America's biggest corporations, such as General Electric. This has the best chance of getting the Bush administration's attention. Perhaps that sounds partisan and cynical, but it is reality. Will media outlets find clever ways to help readers/viewers take this kind of news more seriously?

Speaking of TV news ... I am doing an RSS feed to my "My Yahoo" account that includes Kentucky news from WLWT, a local affiliate here. Every single feed that the computer picks up has something to do with murder, violence and mayhem. Television news in the Cincinnati market is among my biggest disappointments after a year in this area. Words that come to mind: Shallow, trivial, sensation-seeking all-too often. And the infatuation with weather, while reflective of the market in some sense, is embarrassing. A few potential snowflakes routinely lead news reports and weather forecasters tease and tease and tease in shrill efforts to get you to keep watching for a forecast that rarely is very ominous. The stations are increasingly in "I-Team" wars in which they do low-level consumer investigative reports for the most part.

OK, I know. Glass houses and all that. Print side folks can do a lot better, too. I just think the newspaper people have a healthier fear of the future right now than the local television folks so maybe we're further down the road to meaningful change. The newscasts here are clones of what TV news directors were being told was "hot" at their conventions in the 1970s. The only difference, really, is the computer graphics are glitzier. As their audiences keep fragmenting, they'll either get better or even more shrill to be heard over the din. If anything, local affiliates will eventually face even more profit pressure than newspapers do today. Any bets on which way local television news will go?

Newsweek still doesn't get it

One other thought on anonymous sources. In the same issue in which Newsweek said they're going to improve their policies and procedures on anonymous sources, there was strong evidence that the Newsweek editors still don't get it.

An article on Latino political power said that the John Kerry campaign missed the boat with Latinos in 2004. This point was essentially well sourced. But, to illustrate it, Newsweek used an anecdote from a Georgetown dinner party in which Kerry allegedly "offered what two guests called 'a full mea culpa' and the assurance that he'd strive to avoid a similar fiasco in the future." Parenthetically, Newsweek reported the two guests "asked not to be named because they considered it a private event."

This is the exact kind of anonymous sourcing that is gratuitous and unneeded. The anecdote does not advance the story enough to justify anonymity. The premise the anecdote supports already had been clearly stated and reported. Nor is the story important enough for anonymous sourcing. Nor does Kerry get a chance to confirm or rebut. Well, maybe Kerry himself is a source. If so, all the more reason not to allow him to hide.

Consider the irony of this appearing in the same issue of Newsweek offering its own mea culpas. Unbelievable. Arrogant. Stupid. Hypocritical. And more ammunition for those who say journalism simply does not have its act together.

Watergate & sources

As someone who came of age as a journalist in the Watergate era, it's good to see the class and integrity Bob Woodward has displayed this week. Now we know for sure. Deep Throat wasn't an invented character. Woodward and Bernstein played it straight and didn't let the thirst to be first screw up their values -- at least not too often. (It did happen, though, as the Hugh Sloan incident in "All the President's Men" records.) Journalism could use some luster and class at this moment. We can argue about Mark Felt's motivations, but it seems indeed he was as advertised -- the dream source who was always accurate, knew a lot and kept reporters from making big mistakes.

Journalists mark roads, not build them

Traditionally journalists have thought of their jobs to build, mark and pave the one road worth traveling that readers drive on their knowledge journey.

In new journalism, journalists provide directional markers that reader/travelers can use on multiple roads. They might provide one, but only one, of the better, paved routes available. Many of those roads are unpaved. Many don’t lead anywhere. Some will lead to new, exciting places. Because there are so many roads and roads are now so much easier to create, the value of those who provide clear, credible, valuable directional markers increases while the cost of providing a road itself is open to anyone with a computer and a keypad who can imagine himself to be a road builder.

A world is emerging where everyone will carry their CPU with them. It will be able to plug into big screens, little screens, e-paper sheets, full size keyboards and perhaps virtual keypads defined by detectable finger movements. The CPU will be a personal computer, cellphone, MP3 player, video capture and play device, camera, etc., etc., etc. And it will work high speed and wirelessly.

Journalists have just as important a role to play in this world. Maybe more important.