A Tribute to My Friend and Colleague, Raul Ramirez

Center for Investigative Reporting, The Bay Citizen explore merger

By CIR Staff | February 7, 2011

The Center for Investigative Reporting and The Bay Citizen agreed today to formally explore a merger, a move that would combine the oldest nonprofit investigative news group in the nation with a startup newsroom focused on the San Francisco Bay Area.

The boards of both organizations signed a memorandum of understanding to begin working out details of merging their two staffs. The deal still has hurdles to clear before a merger can be completed.

Former San Francisco Chronicle Executive Editor Phil Bronstein and CIR’s current executive director, Robert J. Rosenthal, will lead the combined organization.

Bronstein will assume the role of executive chairman of the newly constituted 19-member board of directors. In his new role, a paid position, Bronstein's focus will be on overall strategy and audience engagement. He will emphasize fundraising and developing new ways to sustain the nonprofit.

Bronstein, 61, has served as chairman of the CIR board since January 2011. He played a key role in brokering a potential merger after he was approached to be the next chief executive officer of The Bay Citizen.

“I've been a journalist in the Bay Area my entire adult life and have deep roots and affection for the extraordinary and unique culture here,” Bronstein said. “There is more innovation, activism and civic involvement in this region than anywhere in the country. This is the basis for engaging people where we all live. With our unified nonprofit model, we can bring together combined talent, technology, investigative power and creative skills to serve the public in dynamic ways.”

Jeffrey Ubben, chairman of the The Bay Citizen board, said he is believes the merger “bodes well for an informed and engaged Bay Area.”

“Together, we will draw on the vision and talents of each of our high caliber staffs, and ultimately become stronger and more effective than the sum of our parts,” Ubben said.

As executive director of the combined operation, Rosenthal will oversee day-to-day operations of a staff that will number about 65 people. He also will play a key role in creating a vision for the merged organization.

Rosenthal, 63, joined CIR in 2007 and has guided the nonprofit at a time of unprecedented growth. The editorial operations will report to him.

In 2009, CIR launched California Watch, the largest investigative reporting team in the state. CIR added a video unit last year that has enabled the newsroom to produce stories for print and TV media partners across the country.

“We will now be able to bring our combined strategies for engagement and accountability journalism to a region of the country that can best embrace it,” Rosenthal said.

The addition of The Bay Citizen would give CIR its first local reporting hub and an expanded technology team to create reporting apps and tools around data, Rosenthal said. Though just two years old, The Bay Citizen has developed a loyal membership. The Bay Citizen also brings with it a solid fundraising base as the merged nonprofit attempts to develop revenue strategies that will help make it sustainable.

The Bay Citizen will continue to produce local and regional enterprise reporting, Rosenthal said, and California Watch will continue to produce statewide stories. CIR’s reporters, meanwhile, generate national and international investigations. But Rosenthal noted that some CIR stories can be localized for The Bay Citizen’s audiences, and some local stories can be broadened in scope.

“Because it's the Bay Area, stories we do here will also be of interest to audiences across the country and around the world,” Rosenthal said.

The 35-year-old Center for Investigative Reporting has grown rapidly – from a small newsroom with about a $2.3 million budget three years ago to a $5 million news organization. CIR has produced stories for some of the most recognizable news brands in the country, including Frontline, PBS NEWSHOUR, “60 Minutes,” The Washington Post and Newsweek. California Watch has boosted CIR’s distribution to include hundreds of news outlets in California.

Both boards met over the weekend to negotiate terms of the memorandum of understanding. While most Americans watched the Super Bowl, merger attorneys and board members hammered out details. By late Monday, only a few issues remained, including whether The Bay Citizen and CIR would issue separate press releases about the formal merger talks. (It was decided to do one joint release.)

The combined budgets of the two organizations add up to more than $10 million. A final budget target has not been announced. A small transition team from CIR and The Bay Citizen will begin working on the fine details of merging the two operations, including developing a business plan and building an organizational chart. The transition is expected to take several weeks. During that time, the newsrooms will continue to run independently.

Rosenthal said Mark Katches, CIR’s editorial director, will play a crucial role in determining the merged organization’s editorial strategies.

Katches, 48, has edited two Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting projects and three Pulitzer finalists in the last eight years. CIR hired him in 2009 to build California Watch. He was promoted to editorial director for all of CIR last April.

“Much of the success of CIR and California Watch is directly attributed to Mark’s skills as an editor and as a visionary entrepreneur,” Rosenthal said. “We are both looking forward to working with The Bay Citizen and its staff to create a very special organization.”

Combining the two newsrooms will present challenges. Through its California Watch operation, CIR has forged relationships with local media partners like the San Francisco Chronicle and KQED. In contrast, The Bay Citizen has positioned itself as a competitor to the Chronicle, and it produces stories every Friday and Sunday for The New York Times’ regional pages, also a competitor of the Chronicle and other Bay Area news outlets.

Another delicate issue to resolve: The Bay Citizen newsroom staff has voted to join the local newsroom union. The larger CIR newsroom staff is not part of a union. Other questions remain about The Bay Citizen’s focus and mission – which has included culture and sports coverage – and how that will mesh with CIR, which is known for deeper-dive investigative and explanatory reporting. The merger must be approved by the California attorney general’s office.

The deal comes at a critical time for The Bay Citizen. In September, its first editor, Jonathan Weber, announced he was leaving after 16 months at the helm. In October, Chief Executive Officer Lisa Frazier tendered her resignation. Her last day was Monday.

In December, founder Warren Hellman died. And in January, The Bay Citizen’s interim editor, Steve Fainaru, announced plans to leave.

Of all the changes in leadership, Hellman’s death perhaps left the biggest void. The banjo-picking billionaire founded The Bay Citizen with $5 million in seed money in 2009. He recruited close friends to contribute millions more to the organization. His death will pose fundraising challenges for the merged organization.

Hellman created The Bay Citizen out of concern that strong local reporting had diminished due to severe cuts at the San Francisco Chronicle and other local news outlets.

How the two staffs come together will be closely watched, according to Bay Area-based media industry analyst Ken Doctor.

“In the short term, it's a vote of confidence in the California Watch model, one with more ramping revenue streams and partnerships than a purely local model,” Doctor said. “If it works, 49 other states will be watching.”

Rosenthal said he is looking forward to working closely with Bronstein.

"At CIR, Phil has been a terrific chair the last year, and since I joined the organization, he has been highly supportive of me,” Rosenthal said. “The CIR board knew of my vision when I joined the organization. I have had tremendous freedom and support in implementing that vision. They have understood the challenges we faced and allowed me to take risks and follow my instincts in a way that was almost impossible in a corporate, traditional setting. I know that will continue as we move forward. This is a huge challenge, not without risks, but it is going to be fun for all of us to be part of building a truly unique, special and important public service news organization."

KQED-FM Today: Bay Area News

Today's program on KQED Forum:

The Bay Area News Group announced yesterday it will consolidate its 11 daily East Bay newspapers and eliminate 120 jobs. With advancements in digital technology, news organizations are increasingly veering away from traditional print journalism. We discuss the state of Bay Area journalism in the digital age.

Host: Michael Krasny

Guests:

Alan Mutter, media consultant and former editor of The San Francisco Chronicle
David Weir, veteran journalist, former executive at KQED and journalism professor at UC Berkeley and Stanford
Ken Doctor, news industry analyst for Outsell and author of "Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get"
Mac Tully, president and publisher of the Bay Area News Group


Audio Link: http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201108241000

Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki

It's been sixty-six years since the U.S. military dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, in the process ending World War II, by destroying the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing massive number of civilians in the process.

An official military photographer named Joe O'Donnell, was the first cameraman to visit the devastated cities after the bombs' mushroom clouds dissipated into the skies above a defeated Japan.

A couple of years ago, I had the opportunity to interview Joe O'Donnell's son, Tyge, about the work his Dad did and how the photographs he took can help us all try to comprehend the long-lasting impacts of these incomprehensible, and unprecedented events.

Portions of this interview are now published, for the first time, to my knowledge, anywhere, as part of a video created by Tyge at YouTube.



Here is where you can find additional information about Joe O'Donnell, from Tyge O'Donnell's site.

Salon Founder David Talbot Returns to the Helm on Interim Basis

According to an 8'K filing with the SEC:

"On July 7, 2011, Salon Media Group, Inc. (the “Company”) appointed David Talbot, a member of the Company’s Board of Directors, as interim chief executive officer (CEO) of the Company succeeding Mr. Richard Gingras who resigned from his position as the CEO and Director of the Company on June 21, 2011, effective as of July 8, 2011. Mr. Talbot will serve as the Company’s CEO until the Company completes the process of hiring a longer term CEO.

"Mr. Talbot has not entered into a written agreement with the Company and the terms of his compensation for his service are not yet subject to mutual agreement. The Company will disclose the terms of Mr. Talbot’s compensation arrangements as interim CEO once they have been finalized.

"Mr. Talbot, age 59, served as the Company’s CEO from 1995 through April 1999 and again from October 2003 through February 2005. He was the Chairman of the Board of Directors from April 1999 through December 2006. He served as Editor-in-Chief from the Company’s incorporation in 1995 through February 2005. More recently, Mr. Talbot has been an author of books and articles for numerous publications including Time, The New Yorker and Rolling Stone. Additionally, in July 2007, Mr. Talbot joined Fenton Communications as a Senior Vice President and, in 2008, he co-founded a media company, The Talbot Players, which produces books, documentaries and TV series. Mr. Talbot holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Sociology from the University of California at Santa Cruz."

Google Subpoenaed by FTC

According to its 8-K just filed with the SEC, Google has received a subpoena from the FTC, indicating that an antitrust investigation is going forward:

On June 23, 2011, Google Inc. received a subpoena and a notice of civil investigative demand from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) relating to a review by the FTC of Google’s business practices, including search and advertising. Google is cooperating with the FTC on this investigation.





GOOGLE INC.

Date: June 24, 2011

/s/ Kent Walker


Kent Walker

Senior Vice President and General Counsel

Salon CEO Gingras Resigns

According to an 8-K filing with the SEC,

"On June 21, 2011, Mr. Richard Gingras resigned from his position as the Chief Executive Officer and Director of Salon Media Group, Inc. (the “Company”), effective as of July 8, 2011. Mr. Gingras is resigning to accept a position at another company. Mr. Gingras’ resignation was not related to any disagreement or dispute with the Company’s management or the other members of the Board of Directors of the Company. We anticipate that the Board of Directors of the Company will appoint a successor to Mr. Gingras’ offices in the near future."

An App to Help You Find a Parking Place (But You Still Need to Figure Out How to Parallel Park On Your Own)

The current tech boom is driven partly by location-based apps over mobile devices, or what you might call a Lomo push that employs a lot of coders in Somo and elsewhere around San Francisco.

And the City itself recently decided to join the party by releasing its SFpark, an iPhone, iPod, and iPad app designed to help you find parking places on the streets or in the city's parking garages.

Early reviews from users were decidedly mixed.

"It works at last, and is phenomenal. Surprisingly it maps everywhere I need, and is completely accurate," says mhlester on the city's website.

"It crashes the phone and makes it reboot every time I try to launch it," writes Editthisdghyxdsddjvnjk.

Weswag reports: "Crashes repeatedly, so I wasn't able to even see if it helped me find a parking space. I have serious doubts, however. In my experience living in SF for many years, parking spaces on the street in highly congested areas remained open only briefly, and the only way to snag one was to spot people getting into their cars to leave. The info re this app stated that there was a one-minute delay before the data about an empty space was uploaded to the server. Parking spaces are long gone in that amount of time."

According to Matt Richtel of the New York Times, "San Francisco’s is by far the most widespread approach that several cities, universities and private parking garages are experimenting with."

The app depends on a network of wireless sensors that have been embedded in streets and city garages. These sensors report if a spot has opened up.

Hmmm. I guess one thing that is worrisome about this otherwise very cool-sounding project is that many drivers already seem dangerously distracted while talking on their phones or texting while driving.

So couldn't it be somehow integrated into your car's GPS system?

Or, better yet, all of these new digital that are making their way into our cars suggest to me that it's time to take a serious look at Stanford researcher Sebastian Thrun's self-driving car.

By doing as Thrun has proven can be done, and inserting robotics into our vehicles, we could probably substantially reduce the hazards of auto accidents caused by human error -- which are the cause of the overwhelming majority of such accidents, of course.

But I wonder when and if Americans, with our oft-cited "love of the automobile" and our romantic image of taking roadtrips on the open highway, will ever be able to turn the wheel over to a technology that can handle these tasks better than we can.

Of course, one would expect there to be robot errors, from time to time, and this brings up another characteristic that seems deeply ingrained in our culture -- fear of robotic technologies.

Just think of all the books and movies from iRobot to Battlestar Galactica, that are predicated on our fears, and then try to find some with a more hopeful approach?

But to bring it all back to this week's news, SFpark, I can't help but wonder whether most people around here might be happy to at least turn the vexing task of parallel parking on hilly, crowded city streets over to a robot perfectly programmed to execute this maneuver successfully every single time.

A combination of these technologies might even eventually revive those happy-face smiles on the models playing families on road trips back in the 1950s.

Then again, there might arise a new threat -- robot road rage...but I'm sure that someone in the world of sci-fi has already imagined that one, too.

Thank you to Louis Rossetto for suggesting that I look into robotics and Thrun's self-driving car.

Journalism and Innovation

Here is the text version of a speech I gave at an event to benefit San Francisco State University's journalism department last night in downtown San Francisco.
March 24, 2011

Around the middle of 1995 I left what by then had already been a long career in traditional media to find out what a new platform called the world wide web was about.

After helping a small group down on Main Street launch a magazine-style website, Salon.com, I moved over to Third Street to take a job working for HotWired, which was the online side of Wired Magazine.

My job was to head up a team to develop and produce the first daily political news site, to be called The Netizen. We did this in less than a month, working pretty much around the clock.

In the process, I noticed that all of the young men and women on my team kept using words that I had not heard before – or at least not in this type of context. Odd words like:

Bandwith, interface, packet, feature set, functionality, server push, code freeze, firewall, asynchronous thread, cache, node, interactivity, granularity and TCP/IP.

So I kept a list of these and other words on a slip of paper, and once we had launched the site, I approached two of my young colleagues over dinner and asked them to explain what all of these strange terms meant.

They just smiled at me. One of them then said, “David, it doesn’t matter what they mean. Just sprinkle them liberally into your conversation and your market value will triple!”

So I did and it did, at least for a while. This was in the years leading up to the great dot.bomb implosion when we were reminded that what the market giveth, the market also taketh away.
***
I tell that story partially as a cautionary tale of sorts about the topic tonight – journalism and innovation. Back in the 90s, people like me thought we were very likely in the process of reinventing journalism, or at least extending it onto a brave new platform.

We definitely did not think we were contributing to its demise.

Fast forward to today. Right here in San Francisco, we are going through a mammoth new wave of innovation that will inevitably reshape the media industry every bit as much as we’ve seen over the past 15 years.

The best guesstimate I can make tonight is that we have around 5,000 technology startups within the city limits of San Francisco alone. This does not include countless others throughout the broader Bay Area, especially Silicon Valley.

The majority of these little companies are focused in one of three areas – social media, mobile platform (iPad) applications, or advertising solutions.

All of these areas have major implications for how the future of media will play out. So let’s consider the context.

In effect, what happened back in the mid to late 90s is that the world of journalism was hit by the equivalent of a 9.0 earthquake. I do not in any way intend to minimize the current tragedy in Japan by making this analogy, but in terms of impact on an industry and the people working in it, that earthquake shook the news media to its roots, opening up fissures that have not been sealed to this day.

Following the earthquake that was the web came a very slow-moving tsunami that by late in the first decade of this new century had swept away many of the major institutions that had previously controlled journalism and left the rest damaged almost beyond recognition.

Thousands of newspapers and magazines, radio and TV stations around the country shut down or cut back their operations drastically. There was wave after wave of layoffs, until the main adjective used to describe professional journalists became “former.”

Some have suggested that we have reached the point now where “Journalism no longer is a profession, it is an activity.”

Whether or not you entirely agree with this view, the facts indicate that it is not far off the mark. And that gives all of us who care deeply about journalism a choice. Do we try to fight a losing battle to defend what we thought was a profession against the unstoppable tsunami of technological change or do we embrace this change and find ways to help our essential journalistic values survive and make the transition to the new media landscape of the future?

It’s my view that this is no choice whatsoever, but a moral obligation to engage in this fight. While it is true that the old media world as we knew it has been shattered and is in a state of what appears to be terminal decline, it is not true, however, that journalism itself has collapsed. It is a business model that is broken, not journalism.

In fact there are now opportunities to invent a new journalism that is far more inclusive and responsive to society than the old model ever was.

***

One thing we’ve learned from the past two decades of relentless technological advance is that our old ways of doing things get disrupted a long time before we figure out how to adapt to the new. One rule of thumb is that it takes about ten years for society to absorb and adapt to these extremely disruptive, transformative technologies.

That is certainly true of journalism. Our old world has been disrupted but the shape of our new world is only a hazy proposition at this point. That is okay; that is how it has to be.

Many other professions or activities have been disrupted as well – the music industry, the telephone business, the advertising industry, PR, and every other kind of communications channel.

Complicating matters is the fact that the rate of technology change appears to be speeding up, and it cuts across many sectors, not just information technology per se. Consider that scientists can now program DNA in exactly the same way they program computers; or that software can be instructed to behave exactly the way DNA does – in other words, to evolve and reproduce.

In his provocative new book, local author Kevin Kelly explores, as he puts it, What Technology Wants.

He points out that we now have roughly the same number of computer chips wired to each other as the number of neurons in our brains – or roughly 170 quadrillion. In addition, the number of links among files in this vast computer network that now rings the globe is more or less the same as the number of synapses in our brains.

This Technium, as he terms it, has therefore reached the complexity of the organ we most depend on but know the least about – our brains. It follows reason, then, that certain anomalies computer scientists have noticed lately are not mistakes, but efforts by the Technium to reproduce itself.

Thus highly advanced software has been written that allows technology to sort through infinite numbers of options to how to propagate itself, rejecting less optimal lines of codes for those that accomplishes its purposes better. Technology is doing this all by itself now; we have no longer in the loop.

***

Okay, that’s part of the wider context. Let’s bring this back down to our world, the journalism world and talk about what all of these fantastic changes mean for us, and for the practice of an art form that most of us believe is extremely important for the health of our society going forward.

And I want to bring in here the other topic I promised to talk about tonight – the arrival of the tablet, in the form of its best-known product, the iPad, because many have hailed this particular device as the savior of journalism and the news business.

It may not surprise you that I am skeptical about these claims, as I am about all over-arching claims about individual advances in technology, if only because these devices and platforms are iterative in nature – they are always changing and improving.

We have a relentless set of forces at work here – the communications technologies we use to do our jobs and conduct our lives are getting ever more powerful, smaller, cheaper, and indispensable.

The reason the tablet as a form has been so breathlessly anticipated by some journalists is that it is, in essence, like a book, a magazine, or a newspaper in the sense that they are all mobile products that we can carry around with us.

Cellphones too are mobile but too small to serve as proper media platforms – desktops and laptops are too big and bulky. Therefore, neither of them have served as replacements for our old print favorites to date, but some believe that tablets may change all of that.

I’m not going to get into the differences between the many emerging tablet-like platforms for reading out there, from the iPad to androids, to the Sony Reader to the Nook, or the new, faster and more powerful Kindle.

For all intents and purposes these are all simply the early proliferation of options fighting it out for our attention and for market control. In the end, only one of them is likely to prevail but by then, we will scarcely be able to recognize the form its ancestors took back in the beginning days, in other words, today.

But while the future direction of this mobile platform is unknown, we do know enough to say that this offers those of us who care about the future of journalism to do something we did not do an adequate job of at the dawn of the world wide web, and that is to get in at the ground floor and to bring our values and our commitment to preserving great journalism with us.

Just remember whenever we talk about new technologies that it is a mistake to concentrate on the specific technologies themselves, because when it comes to communications technology, it is never about the technology. It is always about the networks.

My former boss and old friend Louis Rossetto, who is the founder of Wired, was fond of quoting a truism from the early days of another technology, the Fax machine.
“When you buy a Fax,” he would say, “You are not buying a machine so much as access to the entire worldwide network of Fax machines.”

In other words, you are purchasing a better way to connect with others.
That can be said for every other important technology in this space, as well as for the entire vast Internet itself.

At its basis, the Internet is one giant sharing protocol where any connected computer device anywhere on the planet can receive and transmit data to any other computer device. So the specific technology you choose is not important – it is access to the networks that matters.

At the same time, the development of tablets has brought us to the point where as journalists we finally may have an optimal platform for doing our work. Desktops were never very good – no good reporter wants to stay chained to her desk.

Telephones were helpful but not perfect because any journalist will tell you it is better to interview someone in person than over the phone.

Cellphones are too small for writing or reading – although an entire generation of text-happy teenagers may be proving me wrong on that point.

By contrast, the iPad and its equivalents offer us the promise that we can be both mobile writers and readers at the same time – we can go where the story is and send it out to our networks much better than we have ever been able to do before.

Here it is also important to note that how we journalists fit into the new interconnected networked world is fundamentally changed from the past. Fourteen years ago I used this phrase to illustrate how our role was changing --
“Journalists are no longer responsible for the final word. Now we are responsible for creating the first word.”

In other words, our job now is to get the conversation going – to set off the viral process by which news and analysis travels at light speed throughout our interconnected networks to audiences far beyond any we could ever have reached before.

Now, every story is indeed both local and global at the same time, and nobody can tell you which of the stories you write will travel the furthest or have the most impact. All we can know is it is not we who will determine that impact, but our networks.

Although our role has changed, it has in no way diminished the importance of maintaining the highest standards of good journalism – originality, authority, verifiability, credibility, fairness, and a commitment to pursue the unattainable goal of objectivity.

These are what we teach our students at places like SFSU, UC, Berkeley, and Stanford, and those students are going to serve as the guardians of these values going forward, as the new technologies whose origins we are witnessing today grow and morph and evolve into the communications channels of tomorrow.

Remember that all of these technologies, including the tablet, will disrupt our world a long time before we figure out how to adjust to them. We are in a moment of transition from an old world that is dying to a new world that is just being born.

It is still very early in this grand transformation, and it is only gradually dawning on us that one key characteristic of this new world is that change is constant – the technologies we depend on will never become static but will continue iterating into the future without end.

Our choice, again, is clear. We can sit back and watch the train leave the station, in which case there’s a pretty good chance that journalistic values will not be on board the train to the future.

Or, to use a better transportation metaphor, we can jump on the rocket of change and hold on for dear life, confident that is better to be part of the process of investing our common future than to settle for grieving the past.

In my view, we owe it to the next generation of journalists to try and get it right this time around.

-30-

Link: Women's Use of Social Media: "More Thoughtful and Intentional"

Now on 7x7.com:
Women's Use of Social Media: "More Thoughtful and Intentional"


"Since it's a cliche that men and women are as different as, say, Venus and Mars, it should come as no surprise that the genders use social media differently..."

Little Startup Fwix Takes on AOL, Google and Yahoo in Local Search Battle

"If this is the first time you've heard of Darian Shirazi, it's a safe bet it won't be the last..."

(Link to 7x7.com)
http://www.7x7.com/arts/berkeley-dropout-darian-shirazis-plan-win-hyperlocal-game-fwix

Twitter Upholds Bay Area Tradition by Defending First Amendment in WikiLeaks Case

Today, on 7x7.com:

"When the news broke a few days ago that Twitter had successfully challenged a gag order in the federal government's investigation into the WikiLeaks case, it was a reminder that the Bay Area is on the front lines of the battle to protect our First Amendment rights in the digital age."

Read More...

Want to Read Your Magazines on an iPad? Maybe Wait a While…(Link to 7x7)

As I was sitting in a Cole Valley café recently, watching Craig Newmark of Craigslist demonstrate how he uses his iPad (on a tiny easel) to handle customer support issues, it struck me that only a year ago this scene never could have happened. Read More...




http://www.7x7.com/arts/want-read-your-magazines-ipad-maybe-wait-while

Link to today's 7x7 post

The World of eBooks Exploded in 2010

New Site for Blog Posts

Update:

To follow my technology blog posts, please note I am now publishing weekly at 7x7.com.

My early posts include these:


The Day That Twitter Ate the Cookies

Innovation at Facebook Comes from the Bottom Up

From 'Wired' to Willy Wonka: TCHO Uses Technology and Ethical Sourcing to Make Great Chocolate

Thank you for supporting my blogging work!

Big Loser in Murdoch/ Apple Partnership: The NY Times

As the media world awaits the arrival of The Daily, Rupert Murdoch's newspaper designed specifically for the iPad, early next year, what's wrong with this picture?

Going back to the launch of the iPad in January, the main promotional images that emerged from Steve Jobs and Apple at that time displayed a prototype of The New York Times, not one of Murdoch's newspapers.

On his whirlwind tour announcing the new mobile platform, Jobs visited several media companies in New York, including the Times and News Corp.

It seemed obvious to all of us covering the industry that the most-favored media company on Jobs' list was then the Times, widely recognized as the best newspaper in the country.

So what happened?

Why is it that Murdoch has announced an iPad-based news product, while the Times remains silent?

Right from the start, details leaking out from the initial meetings indicated that Apple and the media companies remained far apart on the question of how content partnerships would work on the new mobile device.

As I noted at the time, "major sticking points...include(d) pricing, revenue sharing, and ownership of subscriber information — in other words, pretty much the entire business model that would underlie any content deals for the iPad."

So in order to proceed, someone had to figure out how to close the gap on those issues and that, apparently, is what Murdoch (reportedly with Jobs' active involvement) has now succeeded in doing.

The basic premise supporting a paid model on the iPad was recently clearly stated by the Times' own David Carr:

"When I am on a Web browser and I bump into a pay wall, I reflexively pull back unless it is in front of something I really must have. But when I’m in the App Store on an iPad, I’m already in a commercial environment: pushing the button to spend small money on something I’d like to see or play with doesn’t seem like such a sucker’s bet."

While there remain major questions about how Murdoch's initial $30 million investment in The Daily will reach profitability anytime in the foreseeable future, there is always a competitive advantage in being first*.

So that nagging question remains: Why wasn't it the Times?

* Billionaire Virgin Airways owner Richard Branson is said to have an iPad-based news project ready for launch also, so it is unclear at this time which wil be "first."

Recommended reading:

Steve Jobs and Rupert Murdoch Save Newspapers — Well, One, At Least

For Rupert Murdoch, There’s No Downside to His Tablet-Only The Daily

Rupert Murdoch's iPad experiment is unlikely to succeed

Old media tackle the challenge of tablets

Forget print and, oh, forget the web: Murdoch to launch iPad-only newspaper

Go Down Moses, Apple Unveils its Media Tabula Rasa

The True Test of the NYT’s Paywall Plan Will Be e-Readers

Juan Williams, Fox & NPR

A recent show, which I participated in.

-30-

Crafting Effective Media Strategies Today: One Example is NPR

It shouldn't be surprising that there's been a great deal of confusion among existing media companies about the words "convergence" and "multimedia" over the past decade plus.

The proliferation of tools and platforms is confusing -- from a relatively static world of radio, TV, newspapers, and magazines to a new world of websites, audio clips, video clips, streaming video, citizen reports, social media, aggregated content hubs, ecommerce apps, sharing tools, blogs, and mobile platforms, just to name a few of the major developments that have affected media.

At a strategic level, however, it is less important what the various media forms are than how your company must be able to adapt to them.

If your core product was print, now you need to have a strategy for broadening your channels to include video and audio; if you were primarily a radio station, you now need video and print components; from a past in TV, you've had to integrate print and audio.

At various points in this process, companies may seize upon one thing -- maybe podcasts or Twitter feeds -- as a key part of their strategy, to the relative exclusion of others, but this isn't smart.

Rather, today's media companies need to have content strategies that are agnostic as to platform; social media strategies that aren't depending on any one source in a rapidly changing universe; and mobile strategies that can adapt as the market there shakes itself out.

At a high level, executives should not get stuck on any one platform or channel, because the one thing we can say about this environment is that it is going to continue to change.

When I hear Anderson Cooper of CNN these days stress that you can "follow us on Twitter," I cringe. First of all, even though what people primarily do with Twitter is follow other people, that does not necessarily equate into a smart public relations plan.

Integrate Twitter, of course, but don't necessarily make so much noise about it, that's using a sledge hammer to deliver a message better delivered by a tiny bird's call.

Over and over again, however, media companies make this mistake, overly promoting their websites, their Facebook pages, their blogs, their iPad apps -- whatever top execs have been told is the latest and greatest trend.

The problem is that by the time they are talking about it, the moment for promoting it has already past.

Properly formulated, a media company's overall strategy encompasses every tool and channel mentioned above as well as some not yet invented. The capacity for digital technologies to remake our workplaces and work styles is endless.

Start from that perspective, remain utterly agnostic about channel, and you'll be off on the right course.

Thus, one of my favorite companies to date has been NPR, which has recognized the need to become a source for print articles to augment its traditional audio offerings. NPR can compete in text forms as well as anybody; video offers additional opportunities.

In that regard, today's announcement that NPR is leading the effort "to develop a digital distribution network that will allow public broadcasters and web producers to combine, create, share and distribute their news and cultural content" is a move in the right direction.

The effort is a joint effort by five national producers: American Public Media, NPR, PBS, Public Radio International (PRI) and the Public Radio Exchange (PRX).

Rather than a collection of multimedia bells and whistles, what is badly needed in so many companies is an old-fashioned editorial strategy, which is the guts of any content strategy.

Know what stories you are good at getting, how best to get them, and which of today's channels provides the best first option for communicating them. Strong visuals imply video, naturally; complex stories require long-form print or documentary capability.

We've seen enough come and go now to predict the future. There will be more tools, more channels, more options. Fine, if that's the way it is to be, we never have to commit so fully to any one option as we did in the past.

Stay open, be experimental, embrace change.

Good advice in all avenues of life, actually, not just in media.

Two Growing Trends: "Delete My Facebook Account" and Google's eBook Store

Could it be that all the recent controversy over privacy at Facebook is having an impact on the social networking site's business?

Search Engine Land reports that in the "how do I?" category of search on Google, one fast-growing question is "How do I delete my Facebook account?"

Meanwhile, Kyodo News Service is reporting today that Google has "the support of almost all publishers in the United States for its digital bookstore expected to be launched as early as the end of June," according to unnamed company officials.

This report says that more than 25,000 publishers and authors have agreed to participate in the search giant's effort to distribute digital books online, which if true would amount to a very large new e-bookstore indeed.

The project is called Google Editions.

Roger Ebert and the Joy of Writing

Recently, I saw the great film critic, Roger Ebert, onstage at the majestic Castro Theater. He was in town to receive another award; he's the kind of person who could never win too many. He's America's greatest film critic, but that is not what impressed me most about him.

It was his indomitable spirit. He's frail from many cancer operations, can speak only through his computer, and cannot eat or drink anything at all.

Despite all of this, the most memorable part of the evening at the Castro was Ebert's beautiful smile, which never left his face during a long ceremony that featured tributes from a number of film's top directors.

He exudes joy. He repeatedly gestured to the audience, indicating that his sense of humor remains undiminished.

In fact, he was the happiest person in the place.

It's hard to watch someone who has been so ill that he has lost almost all of his former robustness, physically. But he's lost nothing mentally.

He writes now more than ever. His website and his twitter stream are among the most engaging in the country.

Roger Ebert is a great writer, and like many great writers, he just keeps getting better.

Here's what he has to say about the current state of film reviewing.

"This is a golden age for film criticism. Never before have more critics written more or better words for more readers about more films.

"Twenty years ago a good-sized city might have contained a dozen people making a living from writing about films, and for half of them the salary might have been adequate to raise a family. Today that city might contain hundreds, although (the Catch-22) not more than one or two are making a living.

"What the internet is creating is a class of literate, gifted amateur writers, in an old tradition. Like Trollope, who was a British Post official all his working life, they write for love and because they must."

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