Robert Ivan, tweeting, Haiku style, from the Newspaper Association of America’s mediaXchange conference

LAS VEGAS — It’s so quiet on the casino floors here that you can hear a — well, all right, it’s not that quiet. But with visitors and gaming revenue down sharply, this party town has a really bad hangover. The dealers at the blackjack table stand forlornly, no players to employ them.  Hotel room rates are marked down. (But the food court still charges $11 for a cheeseburger and potato chips, so it’s good to know some things haven’t changed.)

Were it not for the recession, the lush setting of the Mandalay Bay hotel and casino might seem an incongruous setting for a meeting of newspaper executives.  But the stillness of the casino floor mirrors the mood at the Newspaper Association of America’s inaugural mediaXchange conference.

The mediaXchange replaces NAA’s annual marketing conference and its NEXPO technology conference and trade show — a recognition of the industry’s increased focus on digital publishing, and according to NAA, the increasing collaboration of the “audience and revenue side of the business and technology professionals.” Indeed, the seminars here offered promising reports on new products that are generating revenue: mobile content, web video, contextual advertising.

Where is everybody?

Still, there was a Night of the Living Dead feeling to the proceedings. At the ceremonial ribbon cutting to open the exhibit floor the applause was hollow and half-hearted. At the opening session, keynote speaker Tony Hsieh, CEO of online retailer Zappos.com, addressed a huge ballroom that was less than one-quarter full.

John Sturm, NAA president and CEO, opened the conference with a little gallows humor, referring to the “good old days” before the global financial crisis, when newspapers only had to worry about their secular challenges of declining circulation and advertising revenue. Sturm insisted bravely that is not circulation but local “reach”  — which incorporates visits to newspaper websites via computers and mobile devices — that matters to the industry.

And by that measure, there is some good news: Nielsen Online reports that newspaper websites’ audiences hit an all-time high in January: nearly 75 million unique visitors, representing 44 percent of all active web users. “City by city,” said Sturm, “we power the local markets because the path to consumers goes through our newspapers and websites.”

No, 44% still isn’t the kind of penetration newspapers had in the days before the web, cable TV and satellite radio. But it’s enough to suggest a future for newspapers — if they seize it. “We’ll never get back to being a dominant media in the way we were 40 years ago,” said Roger Fidler, director of the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute program for digital publishing at the University of Missouri. “But digital allows us to continue to be a viable information medium that people will continue to use.”

But looking at the generally sparse attendance and the mostly white male, mostly middle age demographic of the attendees, one has to wonder whether this industry is capable of saving itself.  Where were the young people who are most comfortable and knowledgeable about these emerging technologies, the digital natives who have never had an emotional attachment with print newspapers?

Where were the news-side people? At one session attended by more than 300 attendees not a single hand was raised when a speaker asked if there were any representatives from editorial. Two executives from the Fargo, N.D., Forum told another audience it took them 18 months to get editorial to begin tagging articles with keywords so that they could be matched with similarly-tagged advertising - and this was one of the success stories!

I’m not suggesting editorial should abandon its independence or surrender to publishing advertising-friendly copy. But if we don’t start working better with the business side, there will be no business left.

As James Jackson, vice president/new media and product development for the Cincinnati Enquirer, noted, moving to digital requires a profound cultural shift. Journalists have to think in terms of a wire service-like 24-hour publishing cycle. Marketing and ad sales have to develop a platform-agnostic approach to “sell audience, not products.”

Jim Jackson, Cincinnati Enquirer

Fittingly, company culture was also the theme of the opening keynote speech by Zappos’ Tony Hsieh.

Zappos’ offbeat, anti-hierarchal culture has made the company legendary for customer service: honored as one of the best companies to work for (Fortune magazine) the most innovative (Fast Company magazine) and, with $1.1 billion in revenue in 2008, fastest growing private companies (Inc. magazine).
Hsieh joined Zappos nine years ago after selling his previous start-up, the ad broker Link Exchange, because he had so failed to pay attention to the culture of the company as it grew that he dreaded going to work. It had lost the fun, family atmosphere it had in the beginning.

Now, Zappos subjects each prospective hire to two interviews, one to screen for skills and experience, the second to determine whether the individual has the right personality.  No matter what their ultimate job, each new hire undergoes four weeks of training and work in the company’s call center and a week at their warehouse. At the end, they are offered a $2,000 bonus to quit. The idea: those who are just there for a paycheck will take the money and run. Those who remain buy into the culture.

And while most retailers seek to minimize costs and contact with their customers - hiding their phone numbers and outsourcing call centers to India - Zappos makes its Las Vegas call center the centerpiece of its marketing strategy and offers free shipping and 365 days to return unwanted items.

Such creative and counterintuitive thinking is sadly rare in the newspaper industry. Newspapers face what Clayton Christenson identified as “The Innovator’s Dilemma:” the companies that rose to success with one technology and business model are often kicked to the curb by new companies when the industry is hit with a “disruptive” technology. Because they have so much invested in the old technology and generate large revenues from them, incumbents often fail to seize on new technologies and business models until it is too late.

A few speakers here spoke with urgency the situation requires. Roger Fidler predicted: “I believe that ink on paper will not be a viable alternative for much longer.”

Dave Hunke, CEO of the Detroit Media Partnership and publisher of the Detroit Free Press, declared: “If we don’t talk about things that are controversial we are wasting our time here.” Beginning March 30, the Detroit papers will abandon home delivery except for Thursday, Friday and Sunday, delivering their content over the web and through 32-page “express” single-copy-sale print editions the rest of the week.  The papers also hope to distribute via the Plastic Logic eBook by year’s end.

Dave Hunke, Detroit Free Press

“The Detroit News and Detroit Free Press are fighting for their absolute survival right now,” Hunke said. “We are absolutely not going to stop (the changes). We are not going to sit here and die.”

Chuck Peters, CEO of the (Cedar Rapids, IA) Gazette, said the industry shifts left his company “stunned and immobile.”

“A year ago I walked in and said we have 600 people who are doing the wrong things to the wrong end with the wrong attitude, he said. “We were a franchise. Now we’re a start-up.” His new strategy is “Complete Community Connection,” which he writes about here.  Peters says the company’s success will depend on its ability to become more transparent and less authoritarian and focus on a network of products and services rather than trying to be all things to all people. Peters doesn’t claim to have found all the answers. But “now we’re able to stumble somewhat in the right direction.”

Some other takeaways from the three-day conference:

NAA Study

Jim Chisholm, principal of iMedia Advisory Services, offered a mix of good news and criticism in summarizing the results of a study he did for NAA on future business models:

• Newspapers are making inroads in display and classified advertising, increasing their share of ad spending from 29% to 40% in the last four years. But papers are still not doing well on search advertising and referrals.

• Some papers are diversifying their revenue sources; the London Telegraph, for example now generates 11% of revenues from retail products including books, wine, travel, event tickets and financial services using their database of  “high-value customers.”

• Chisholm chided U.S. newspapers for failing to raise circulation prices in pace with inflation, saying papers are sacrificing revenue they could be capturing without risking incremental circulation losses.

Mobile

Many speakers talked of the potential of mobile content delivery and advertising. Cost per thousand advertising rates (CPMs) for mobile applications can run in the high double digits, even triple digits for special events.

• The Tampa Tribune generated “five-digit profits” over two weeks leading up to the Super Bowl with its “mobile concierge,” telling visitors where to play, eat, drink and shop.

• Traffic on newspaper mobile sites is heaviest after 4 p.m. and on weekends - exactly the opposite of the traffic patterns for papers’ main websites, which are get most of their traffic during the day from work computers. Mobile sites also attract an audience “who never touched our products before,” said Tim Repsher, marketing director for the Tampa Tribune’s tbo.com.

• The Cincinnati Enquirer’s Jim Jackson compared the maturity of the mobile web today to the web in 1997.  “We’re not so much pushing information onto phones, we’re positioning ourselves for the long-awaited emergence of e-Readers and digital ink.”  Jackson said.

• Mobile page views for the New York Times have increased from 500,000 in February 2007 to 14 million in February 2008 and a reported (but unconfirmed) 50 million for December 2008, according to Chisholm.

• The Palm Beach Post sold a supermarket exclusive sponsorship of its mobile hurricane alert service for $40,000 per year.

Video

Video was another hot topic. Several speakers recommended publishers use syndication services or turn-key solutions to overcome their limited resources.

• Shannon Dunnigan, director of online revenue for Gatehouse Media, said her firm is earning 60-70% profit margins on video recruiting ads, which helped boost total online ad revenue at one small paper by 25%. “Video doesn’t have to be broadcast quality as long as it’s timely and relevant,” she said.

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What is most poignant about the piece is that it demonstrates how powerful — and potentially, profitable — newspaper websites can be when they embrace new media, in this case, broadcast-quality video.

Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.

The economics are compelling: Despite the recession, research firm eMarketer predicts spending on online video advertising in the U.S. will grow 45% in 2009. 15-second video ads can command CPMs (cost per thousand viewers) of $25 to $35, while the display ads found on news sites are typically priced at no more than $5 to $10. (And ad space the newspapers can’t sell is filled by ad networks at even lower rates.)

Local news organizations (formerly known as newspapers) that want to survive need to make their websites the #1 Internet destination in their region — a place the audience (formerly known as readers) will spend more time and national and local advertisers will want to sponsor.

That means not articles with a handful of amateurish videos (typical of newspaper websites) nor TV with a little text (typical of local TV affiliates’ sites). It is a third animal altogether, combining the power and immediacy of video, where appropriate, with the depth and analysis found in the best newspapers.

It is a site that has a multimedia tool chest and uses those tools in the most appropriate way to tell the story: Event stories (parades, community celebrations) may be best told as videos or photo slideshows. For more complex stories (e.g., the economy) video adds little if the only pictures are B-roll footage. (Does anyone need to see what a gas pump or a supermarket checkout line looks like?). For these stories, print or audio combined with charts and graphics, particularly interactive graphics (e.g., a calculator showing how the new tax law will affect you), can be extremely effective.

Local news websites will never generate the revenue newspapers did in the monopoly days before the Net. They will be smaller. They will be less ambitious. (Foreign reporting will be the province of national publications; lengthy investigative projects will require some form of non-profit model.) They will be less profitable. But there is a business model to be created here.

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As it turned out, the case resulted in a settlement that - while requiring the Times to change its practices — did not set any clear legal precedents. And while the outcome may influence future disputes, the debate about what constitutes “fair use” on the web remains unresolved.

The background: Last fall, the Times’ Boston Globe launched “Your Town” Web sites covering three Boston suburbs, the first in a series of more than 100 “hyperlocal” sites the Globe said it plans. GateHouse, publisher of 400 daily and weekly newspapers, complained that the Globe’s sites were reprinting headlines and lead paragraphs (ledes) verbatim from its own “Wicked Local” websites.

The settlement, announced January 26, prohibits the Globe from “scraping” the headlines and ledes from Gatehouse articles via RSS feeds or other automation. But it allows Globe staffers to write summaries of the Wicked Local content and post links to the original articles.

“To put it in the language of online-journalism theory, they have to shift a bit from raw aggregation to something closer to curation,” wrote Joshua Benton, director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University.

At the heart of the dispute is the “fair use” provision, which allows one to quote excerpts of another’s work without permission or payment. Section 107 of the Copyright Act lists four factors for determining what constitutes “fair use.”

1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

2. the nature of the copyrighted work;

3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and

4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

Gatehouse alleged that the Globe sites did not clear these hurdles because the hyperlinks sent readers directly to “Wicked Local” stories, bypassing the ads on its home pages and creating confusion on the source of the original reporting. And because online readers only scan the headlines and ledes of many articles, the practice deprived Gatehouse of any benefit from its reporting on that content, Gatehouse complained.

“The issue here is whether the unauthorized borrowing deprives the original author of some substantial income stream or opportunity,” wrote UCLA law professor Douglas Gary Litchtman in a report filed in support of the Gatehouse suit. The Globe’s sites “target the same audiences, and the same advertisers, for the same purpose of furnishing news and information for and about a specific local community, each and every day.”

According to Gatehouse’s complaint, the Globe was scraping 10 to 30 headlines per day from its sites. A February 14 search of the Globe’s Your Town site for Needham, Mass. found no Gatehouse links on the home page. But Gatehouse content represented 8 of 16 headlines on the schools page and 14 of 24 headlines on the sports page. (The Globe has until March 1 to remove the copied links from their website archives.)

Although the Gatehouse settlement created no legal precedent, David Ardia, director of Citizen Media Law Project, told Nieman the case could have “persuasive power” — used by news organizations for guidance in future disputes and by judges looking for evidence of  “common practice.”

The Gatehouse case was the latest legal skirmish over web sites linking to other publisher’s content. Google has been paying the Associated Press for use of its content since 2006 and it settled a similar dispute with news wire Agence France-Presse in 2007.

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A promise Philly fans probably won’t keep

God bless Charlie Manuel for winning the world championship with my beloved Phillies. But he was not the most articulate manager in the World Series. That would be the Tampa Bay Rays’ Joe Maddon. Even though his young team - the worst in baseball a year ago — didn’t win the Series, Maddon said their experience would change them forever: “The mind, once stretched, never returns to its original shape” (my paraphrase of his paraphrase of a quote attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes).

That’s been a philosophy I’ve been pursuing at the TreeHouse Media Project. I don’t expect myself or anyone visiting this site to necessarily become an expert in video, audio, podcasting, website design or search engine optimization. But once you’ve learned some of the basic skills they remain forever part of your multimedia toolkit, even if you turn to experts to execute them for you.

It was in that spirit that we launched My1stTime, a guide to the presidential race for first-time voters. Our hope was that by incorporating some fun features - pictures and video of the celebrities supporting McCain and Obama; Facebook applications such as Sarah Palin, Guardian of the Northern Frontier - we would lure young voters into reading comparisons of the candidates’ positions on energy and health care.

In the process, we hoped to learn something about shooting, editing and posting videos and promoting our content through social networking sites. On the first point the project was an unqualified success, though the videos I shot won’t win any Emmys - not even those crappy local ones.  It was my first experience using Macintosh’s iMovie, the easy-to-learn video-editing program.

We learned that you can shoot decent-looking video interviews with a simple consumer camera under the right conditions. We also learned the shortfalls of these cameras: because they have no inputs for microphones you are limited to the audio picked up by the on-camera mic. That means you will hear lots of background noise, such as the concert and speakers that threaten to drown out the subjects I interviewed at an Obama voter registration rally headlined by Bruce Springsteen.

We also learned how to use a terrific free tool called TubeMogul, which allows you to upload a video to more than a dozen video-hosting sites at once and provides statistics on viewership. We also learned that while there are many competitors out there, YouTube still generates most of the traffic - three-quarters of our nearly 500 views to date were on that channel. We also learned that if someone you don’t know says they want to “friend” you, it’s probably a porn site. (Strangely, most of the viewers on YouTube were 34-54, not the teens and 20s featured in the videos. And 70% were men. Are these just a bunch of horny middle age guys with nothing better to do than look at college coeds?)

We also learned some of the fine points of WordPress. We started with a 3-column German Newspaper template (a “Theme” in WordPress parlance) and modified it by changing typefaces and some of the layout.

On the second point, using social networking sites to publicize our content, we were decidedly less successful. First I was booted from Facebook for using a fake name, Barack McCain, for a profile I hoped to use to drive traffic to the site. Second, we didn’t launch the website until Oct. 24 - less than two weeks before the election and not enough time to build much of an audience. And by the time we did launch, I was  so exhausted from a series of 18-hour production days that I had little time or energy to promote it.

But I’m happy to have done it.

So, what are you doing to stretch your mind?

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For me, it was 1976, Jimmy Carter vs. Gerald Ford. I was a junior at Penn State, earning beer money covering the local city council for the school daily and still feeling my way at it. Now, I was being asked to help decide the future of our nation. Although I was more politically aware than most of my peers, I felt completely unqualified for the task – the same way I would feel 13 years later when the hospital sent me home with my infant son.

This year, my son and my twin daughters will be voting in their first presidential race. So, too, is my friend Paul Zingone, who shoots video for this site. I decided to try to capture the passion, angst and confusion among this new generation of voters and to provide them a way to educate themselves about the issues before they step into the voting booth.

Thus, the TreeHouse Media Project is about to launch a website for these first-time voters. It will include interviews, summaries of the candidates’ positions on the issues and links to interactive features (e.g. the Wall Street Journal’s Electoral Compass) and truth-squad sites such as factcheck.org and Snopes. (No, that’s not really Sarah Palin toting the gun in the flag bikini.) If we can figure out how to do it in time, we’ll also solicit user-generated video.

Surprisingly, few major news organizations offer comprehensive side-by-side comparisons of the candidates’ positions. NPR has a terrific series of audio reports and articles. The New York Times and CNN have comprehensive sites. But USA Today has comparisons of only six issues. And I haven’t been able to find any comprehensive issue comparisons on the sites of the Washington Post (though they do have an excellent fact-check blog), Newsweek, Time, the L.A. Times or the Wall Street Journal.

That was one rationale for embarking on this project. The other: doing a site for a potential audience of 13 million – the number of people coming of voting age this presidential cycle – would give us an opportunity to learn some guerrilla/tipping point/social media marketing skills.

Yes, we will embarrass ourselves along the way. At an Obama voter registration rally in Philadelphia – my inaugural attempt at shooting video – all but 17 minutes of the 40-minute tape was either black (must remember to open the lens cover) or of my feet (must remember to shut off the camera, also). I only botched one interview on my second shoot, at a McCain-Palin rally at Lehigh University last week (though there are several inartfully-framed shots, a consequence of using a light, consumer camcorder and of attempting to film people while walking).

You, dear readers, will be able to read about our successes and failures in near-real time. (Those of you taking our web-based WordPress class – beginning Wednesday Oct. 15 – will see it in real-time, as I ask instructor Brandon Maddox for help in designing and troubleshooting the site.)

I’m willing to risk embarrassment because I hope we’ll all learn from the experiment. So come by the construction site at http://my1sttime.treehouse-media.net/ and tell us what we’re doing wrong. Suggest ideas on how we can promote the site. Old-media dinosaurs like me need guides.

Or watch this spot for an announcement of our formal launch and for updates on our marketing efforts.

And don’t forget to vote.

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I had owned a Palm Pilot phone years ago when I was traveling regularly between Philadelphia and Houston. Having my calendar and all my contact information with me at all times simplified my life greatly. But when I tried to download my email, the phone had a nervous breakdown. I never tried email on it again. Then I dropped it one too many times and the screen cracked.

In the several years since – with a job that required less travel — I’ve made do just fine with a series of ordinary cell phones. But now that I am traveling every week between Washington, DC (where I work) and Bethlehem, PA (where I am helping to shepherd my twin 17-year-old daughters through their final year of high school) returning to a smartphone made sense.

The new iPhone 3G handles email easily, even multiple email accounts. But that’s just one of the things I’ve done on this gadget that I couldn’t do before. Here are a few others:
• In Barnes & Noble, searching for a novel my daughter needed for her English class, I was able to Google the author and find the book myself rather than wait for an overworked salesperson to access the store database.
• On my Thursday night drive to Pennsylvania, I used the GPS and Google Maps to reroute myself past a traffic jam on the Baltimore beltway.
• I’ve made my seven-hour DC-PA roundtrip more productive by listening to podcasts of sessions from this summer’s New Media Expo (more about that later).
• At a bar for a local band’s CD release party, I kept tabs on the National League pennant race – and watched video highlights of a victory by my beloved Phillies — thanks to a $4.99 iPhone App from MLB.com.

• On my daily commute in DC, I could watch an episode of The Wire and not care if the bus was late or the Metro was too crowded to open a newspaper. Or I could listen to my custom “station” on Pandora when I tired of the songs in my iTunes.
• I read the latest on the presidential race on NYTimes.com while waiting to renew my driver’s license at the Maryland DMV.
• Since my daughters rarely return my calls, I’ve even started text-messaging.

There’s no question: with the faster web access the 3G affords, the new iPhone is a game changer. The introduction of iPhone imitators from Sprint and Verizon, and the open-source Google Android phone, ensure this is just the beginning of the innovation cycle.

Even if you feel no need to be connected to the web at all times, this matters to you. Why? The mobile web represents a huge frontier: there are 3 billion mobile phones worldwide, versus 1.5 billion TVs and 1.1 billion personal computers. (Source: Omniture White Paper: Mobilize Your Marketing.) You have an opportunity to stake a claim on this platform before it gets too crowded with content creators.

Think about how previous technological changes have affected news habits. Newspapers stopped printing Extra! editions when radio and television provided a quicker means for delivering breaking news. And while old media brands like the New York Times and CNN have huge online readerships, millions of people choose to go get their news from Google and Yahoo! Meanwhile, newspapers – the creators of most of that content — have generally struggled to make use of the interactivity and multimedia capabilities of the web.

Formatting pages for the small screen is just one of the adjustments the mobile web will require. The big opportunity for newcomers is to create content that not only can be displayed on the small screen but also can take advantage of the way people uses these devices.

For example, iWant uses the iPhone’s location-sensing technology to give you the closest drug stores, gas stations, banks, cafes, restaurants, movie show times and more. G-Park uses GPS to mark where your car is parked. And the Android-powered T-Mobile G1 phone has an inner compass.

Worldwide smartphone sales were 124 million in 2007, the year of the iPhone’s introduction. By 2012, those numbers are expected to nearly triple to 363 million. 3G subscribers are expected to increase seven-fold over the same period. (Sources: IDC, Worldwide Converged Mobile Device Forecast, June 2008; Juniper Research, Mobile Games: Subscription & Download 2007-2012, Nov. 2007)

Marketers are falling in love with mobile marketing because of campaign response rates that have reached as high as 15% — versus less than 1% for traditional direct marketing. Mobile internet banner campaigns are reporting click-through rates three to four times that of the fixed internet (though that is due in part, no doubt, to how easy it is to hit the wrong hyperlink on a small screen). In five years, it is projected that more than half of all brands will spend 5% to 25% of their marketing budgets on mobile. So there will be a growing audience for your mobile web content, and advertisers willing to support it. (Source: Omniture White Paper: Mobilize Your Marketing.)

Whether you’re talking about web video, the mobile web or podcasts, it’s still early in the game. Edison Media Research reports that 60% of the U.S. doesn’t know anything about podcasts. The number of podcast listeners, now 18 million, is projected to grow to 65 million in 5 years. And the tools available now make it easier than ever to do. “You’re not too late,” podcast producer Mark Linder told the fourth annual New Media Expo in Las Vegas this August. “You’re right on time.”

But you have to start learning now. That’s why I spent $149 to buy the recordings from the Expo. Now, $149 is a lot of money, but it’s far cheaper than it would have cost me to attend in person (though I plan to be there next year). And it was a bargain for what I received. The audio recordings — 47 hour-long sessions — are a crash course in the cutting edge of new media production techniques, best practices and business models.

Over the next several weeks I’ll be sharing with you some of what I’ve learned (and perhaps publishing interviews with some of the best speakers).

In the meantime, I encourage you to begin your education today. Start by signing up for our upcoming class: Launch Your Website the Easy Way with WordPress. You’ve still got a week to take advantage of the discounted pricing.

It may be early in the game, but the other players won’t wait for you to catch up.

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Wednesdays 8-9:30 p.m. ET, Oct. 15-Nov. 5

Want to establish a presence on the Internet but don’t know anything about web design? Are you technologically challenged? Then this course — the first from TreeHouse Media Project — is for you.

When I left The Philadelphia Inquirer for the wild, wild web in 1999, it cost us tens of thousands of dollars and weeks and weeks of programming to create a very rudimentary news website.  Now, thanks to free, open-source software, you can launch a more sophisticated site for next to nothing in much less time.

WordPress is a popular, free software application used by bloggers and other websites (including this one). It’s easy enough to learn that you can launch a website in minutes.  But it’s also flexible enough to allow great creativity and customization. And it’s sophisticated enough to serve as a content management system (CMS). It can incorporate video and podcasts. And it has built-in SEO (search engine optimization) tools that will help you get your site noticed.

Even big media, such as CNN’s Political Ticker and Dow Jones’ All Things Digital, use WordPress. Here are just a few examples of sites built on WordPress platform. And here’s an article that makes the case for using WordPress for non-blog sites. And another.

But it takes some help to do this fancy stuff. And even if your plans are simple, it helps to have someone to hold your hand on your way up the learning curve.  You couldn’t have a better guide than the instructor for this course, Brandon Maddox.

Brandon is the Web Administrator for the National Association of Social Workers and an experienced and dynamic teacher. I’ve taken two of Brandon’s web design courses at the USDA Graduate School in Washington, D.C. and I can tell you he’s terrific.

This web-based, 4-week course includes 4.25 hours of self-study video tutorials from Lynda.com plus six hours of classroom review and instruction by Brandon via a WebEx video conference link to your computer. Every Wednesday night for 90 minutes, Brandon will review the topics covered in the videos, answer questions and provide troubleshooting for problems you may encounter along the way.

If you’ve got an idea for a website, you won’t find an easier or more economical way to get started than with the instruction and consulting you’ll receive from Brandon. He will walk you through the entire process of building and maintaining a blog, from setting up an account to using advanced customization techniques. He’ll explain how to create and organize posts, pages, and links.  He also will introduce you to the use of WordPress as a content management system (CMS). (Later courses will cover more advanced CMS programs such as Drupal and Joomla.)

The course syllabus is below. To preview the tutorial videos click here.

Launching Your Blog or Website Using WordPress

4 weeks/10 hours

Wednesdays 8-9:30 p.m. ET, Oct. 15-Nov. 5

Week One - Installing WordPress and Setting Up a Blog

•    Defining a Blog

•    Buying a Web Address

•    Find a Host to Run WordPress.

•    Setting Up the database

•    Download WordPress

•    Install WordPress

•    Editing your Profile

•    Writing Posts (intro)

Week 2 - Writing and Managing Posts

•    Writing Posts (contd.)

•    Setting general options

•    Basics of posting

•    Using the Write Post

•    Setting writing options

•    Adding links

•    Setting categories and tags

•    Previewing and publishing

•    Introduction to categories and tags

•    Managing categories

•    Managing tags

Week 3 - Advanced Posting Options

•    Advanced post options

•    Using the more tag and excerpts

•    Password-protecting a post

•    Creating pages

•    Setting page options

•    Previewing a page

•    XML/RSS Feeds

Week 4 - Customization

•    Using themes

•    Downloading and installing a theme

•    Adding users

•    Inviting a friend to be a user

•    Adding another WordPress.com user

•    Customizing your blog’s appearance

•    Adding widgets

•    Customizing widgets

•    Installing plug-ins

Fee: $95 (discounted) until Oct. 8, 2008; $125 after Oct. 8.

I know money is tight, so we’ve made this course as inexpensive as possible: If you sign up by Oct. 8, your cost will be only $95. In fact, if you and a friend sign up together, your cost will be only $65 each. Or, you can attend classes for free by becoming a contributor on the TreeHouse Media Project website. Contact us to find out more.

Sign me up! I’m ready to become a publisher. $95

I’m signing up with a friend. Give me that extra discount! $65

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The respondents were nearly evenly distributed between full-time journalists and freelancers with smaller groups working part-time or working in unrelated fields (but, presumably, still seeking journalism work).

Asked about their goals, nearly 70% said they are interested in collaborating with others as a part-owner of a blog or website.

We’re now asking additional questions to help us develop our curriculum and website. To take the survey yourself, please click here .

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Is there life after the newsroom? Is there a future for newspapers? Is the beer cold?

That was what was on the minds of 300+ colleagues from the Gene Roberts era of The Philadelphia Inquirer (1972-1990) as they gathered for a reunion on a hot, sunny day outside Philadelphia last weekend.

The answers: Yes! Sort of … and, oh yeah!

It was an Irish wake for the sort of swashbuckling journalism I was lucky enough to be a part of during my own tenure at the Inky (1982-1999). Surprisingly, there was much sweet, and seemingly little bitter. It had something to do with the beer, no doubt. The fact that most of the attendees no longer work at The Inquirer, which has been decimated by rounds of buyouts and layoffs since 2005, also was a factor.

But most of the good cheer at the gathering was due to the creativity, camaraderie and sense of purpose that Roberts and his deputy, Jim Naughton, nourished in The Inquirer newsroom — and the journalism that flourished as a result. “I think for at least 10 to 12 of those years we were putting out the most interesting paper in America,” said former Metro Editor Steve Seplow. “[It] may have not been the most complete – but it was the most interesting, the most imaginative, and did some of the greatest journalism. And it’s amazing how much warmth is still here, how much commitment there was to doing it. And you can feel it here.”

Those Were the Days

The talent in the picnic pavilion where we gathered was jaw-dropping: At least 16 Pulitzer winners attended, along with alums who have gone on to author best-selling or award-winning books, including Buzz Bissinger (Friday Night Lights) ; Sharon Wohlmuth (Sisters , Mothers and Daughters and Best Friends ); Mark Bowden (Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War ); Tim Weiner (winner of the National Book Award for Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA ), and Hank Klibanoff (who, with Roberts, authored The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle and the Awakening of a Nation , winner of the 2007 Pulitzer for history).

We hugged, posed for pictures and caught up on our former colleagues’ careers and families. There were skits acknowledging both our triumphs – 17 Pulitzers in 18 years of Roberts’ tenure – and our foibles: specious “trend” stories and series whose length far exceeded their importance or readers’ attention spans (e.g., a four-parter on the endangered black rhinoceros). Former Managing Editor Gene Foreman, the fastidious member of the Roberts’ triumvirate, was ribbed for his memos citing violations of The Inquirer style manual. (“In this morning’s paper a sentence in Italic type was followed by a period in Roman type.”)

In “Dead Tree Media Blues,” set to the tune of Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues,” we acknowledged the seismic changes threatening the industry:

Dead Tree Media Blues

Known affectionately as The Frog, Gene Roberts was an unlikely personality to inspire the cult that grew around him. As former Inky columnist Clark DeLeon wrote in his own blog post on the reunion: “Gene Roberts communicated like a Buddha. Not only did we get it, we couldn’t even explain it to each other without quoting him. I have never heard anyone explain the philosophy of journalism that we all embraced without a little red book quote from Chairman Gene. `News doesn’t always break,’ Gene said. `Sometimes it oozes.’”

In his first 12 years, Roberts and company transformed the little-regarded Inquirer, forcing the closure of the once-dominant Philadelphia Bulletin. With The Bulletin gone, The Inquirer expanded its ambition, hiring reporters by the dozens and opening foreign and national bureaus. There were Pulitzers for local coverage — investigations of the Philadelphia police department and coverage of the Three Mile Island accident -– and for national and international reporting.

Even then, we suspected it was too good to last. When Roberts, worn down by the annual budget fights with Knight-Ridder management, retired from The Inquirer in 1990, he nonetheless assured us that the budget cuts had not “struck any arteries.” But the financial pressures increased under Knight-Ridder CEO Tony Ridder, who had as little talent as a business leader as he did experience in journalism.

The decade after Robert’s departure was bumpy. Although the paper still did a lot of excellent work under editors Max King (1990-1998) and Robert Rosenthal (1998-2001), there would be only one more Pulitzer and many of its stars began departing for places like The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. (See The Inquirer’s Midlife Crisis , American Journalism Review, Jan-Feb 1995.)

For the next five years, the paper was headed by two outsiders brought in by Knight-Ridder. Walker Lundy (2001-2003), made little mark on the paper and left after a year and a half. Amanda Bennett (2003-2006), presided over buyouts in 2005 that led many longtime staffers to exit (now referred to as the “Great Escape”).

In 2006, Knight-Ridder sold The Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News to McClatchy Co., which quickly sold it to a group of Philadelphia investors led by advertising and public relations executive Brian Tierney. Tierney, a Republican activist who had clashed with The Inquirer years before over its coverage of the Philadelphia Archdiocese, was viewed warily by the newsroom.

Tierney won some goodwill with the newsroom by replacing Bennett with Bill Marimow, a two-time Pulitzer winner for The Inquirer who had gone on to stints at The Baltimore Sun and National Public Radio. But barely a month after Marimow’s arrival, the paper announced the layoff of 68 newsroom employees, 16% of its editorial staff.

Marimow convinced two former Inky stars, Mike Leary and Vernon Loeb, to return as top lieutenants and lured a third, Atlantic Monthly national correspondent Mark Bowden, to write a weekly column.

Last November, Tierney celebrated a 2.3 percent increase in The Inquirer’s weekday circulation. But with advertising revenue in a free fall, Tierney’s ownership group reportedly fell into default on its debt covenants last month and the paper announced it was eliminating its Neighbors editions – the cornerstone of its suburban strategy for the last 25 years. The paper also announced it will combine the Sunday Arts and Entertainment section with the Image section, which the paper had launched when it folded its Sunday magazine in 2003. Tierney also is considering sharing editorial functions of The Inquirer with the Daily News, the feisty tabloid which often refers to its larger brother as the “Inqwaster.”

So it was, that when I asked reunion attendees to offer unsolicited advice to Marimow, I got a mix of gallows humor, pep talks — “Keep up the good fight” was a recurrent theme — and serious critiques.

Two alums, former staff writer Murray Dubin and former executive editor Jim Naughton, voiced similar critiques regarding Philly.com , the web presence of The Inquirer and Daily News. Naughton said The Inquirer and other newspapers need to gravitate to the web in a way that still respects their print readers’ interests. Dubin said Marimow should try to make the home page more like the front page of the print paper. (The paper recently launched a hybrid product that attempts to do just that.) Max King praised Marimow and the current Inquirer staff for continuing to produce the kind of enterprise reporting that has been its trademark since the 1970s.

Unsolicited Advice for Bill Marimow

Indeed, the paper still publishes some of the best writers in the business, including feature writer Karen Heller (Pulitzer Finalist in 2001); architecture critic Inga Saffron (Pulitzer finalist in 2004 and 2008); editorial writer Chris Satullo; and political columnist Dick Polman, who left The Inquirer staff in 2006 but still writes a regular column .

And, as Dan Rubin, another very talented Inky journalist, pointed out, the paper proved last week that it is still the definitive news source in Philadelphia. It did it with a comprehensive package on news that the Spectrum — former home of the 76ers and Flyers — had been slated for demolition: “Next to Frank Fitzpatrick’s main obit … Bill Lyon conjured the soul of the place of triumph and dashed hopes. Bob Ford complained about the bathrooms. Dan DeLuca took us back to his favorite show there: Bruce Springsteen on Dec. 9, 1980, the night after John Lennon’s murder. Time lines hit a wealth of its highlights: Joe Frazier knockouts, Sinatra and Grateful Dead shows, Christian Laettner’s buzzer-beater, Flyers and Sixers banners,” Rubin wrote. “Those filled just a few of the 50 pages of news about Bush’s bullishness on the economy, trends in big-cup bras, and grabby scoops like the one about Canada’s coming to recruit our recent immigrants. It’s a bargain still for 75 cents.”

A bargain indeed. And under the high reporting and ethical standards set by Marimow and his team, the paper will maintain its professionalism regardless of economic constraints.

No one would confuse The Inquirer of 2008, however, with that of 1990. The paper has fewer reporters to produce enterprise reporting and carries wire copy where it once had its own correspondents reporting from Washington and overseas. Gone, in addition to the Sunday magazine and Neighbors sections, are the book review and the personal technology sections.

Of course, The Inquirer is far from alone in its dilemma. If you want a reason to be pessimistic about the news business consider that John Woestendiek, winner of a 1987 Pulitzer for a report that helped free a man wrongly convicted of murder, came to the reunion without a job. Also newly unemployed is Hank Klibanoff, who quit his managing editor’s post at The Atlanta Journal Constitution on July 3rd, days before the paper announced it would cut its workforce by 8 percent and eliminate all of its geographically-targeted news sections.

But Marimow and others insisted they see signs of hope. “People are going to want to read great stories, whether they read them in the paper, on line, on a cell phone …[or] listen to them on an iPod.” said Marimow. “… If your organization has the best reporters, writers and editors you’re going to survive and then ultimately thrive.”

The Future

As evidence that old dogs can learn new tricks, consider Art Howe, who won a 1986 Pulitzer for an Inquirer expose of gross mismanagement at the Internal Revenue Service. Howe, a Wharton School MBA, went on to become a successful newspaper publisher and now is CEO of Verve Wireless , whose Mobile News Network — a partnership with the Associated Press — was named one of the best iPhone applications at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference last month. “I see a very bright future for publishers who can publish local content,” said Howe. “… Advertisers still want to connect with people locally.”

I wasn’t at The Inquirer for the first decade of Gene Roberts’ tenure. I did not witness the camel brought into the newsroom to celebrate Richard Ben Cramer’s groundbreaking reporting from the Middle East. I have never seen any photographs of said camel. Yet I believe it like I was taught to believe the stories of the New Testament. On faith alone.

In that spirit, I will let Jim Naughton, the man who hired me at The Inquirer, have the final word. It is his kind of optimism that inspired the launch of the TreeHouse Media Project .

“I have great faith that whatever occurs — even if newspapers like The Inquirer were to succumb — journalists will not let good journalism go to waste,” Naughton said. “They will find a place to do it, they’ll find an audience for it and they’ll make it a success — somewhere, somehow.”

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Can newspapers survive?

No, says Wall Street bete noire Henry Blodgett in Why Newspapers are Screwed .

Maybe, suggests Chuck Taylor, a former Wall Street Journal and Washington Post staffer, in How an electronic newspaper could become profitable . In another article, Woe is the future of newspapers — not, Taylor notes the popularity of the Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer web sites: “Stop the presses! Sell the trucks! Stop buying newsprint! That 19th century overhead is what’s killing newspapers, not the Internet.”

But the Wall Street Journal reported that pure-play Web companies last year surpassed newspapers in market share for local online advertising, 44% vs. 34%. (Directories — e.g. Yellow Pages — have 10%, and local television outlets 9%.) That’s a reversal from three years ago, when newspapers had 44% of the market.

Meanwhile, journalism professor Edward Wasserman provides some history in Can journalism live without ads?

Below are links to articles on some of the pioneers who are trying to invent new models for journalism.

Community News

• An article on revenue models from New Voices, a program to seed innovative community news ventures in the United States.

• Can Youth Sports Coverage Pay Off Online? The founder of a two-year-old website covering high school sports in suburban Virginia says he is earning a full-time living from advertising on his site, which attracts 10,000 unique visitors per month.

Non-profit models

• An article from Jay Rosen’s Pressthink blog on creating the non-profit New Haven Independent, which incorporates elements of citizen journalism. “The readers have definitely become part of the process. Trained journalists still play a crucial but altered role. We’re more fact-gatherers, linkers, fact-checkers, conveners and referees than pundits or editorialists telling people what to think.”

• The Christian Science Monitor, in Nonprofit Journalism on the Rise tells the story of the Voice of San Diego, which is winning plaudits for its coverage of city politics. It supports its staff of eight 20-somethings with $600,000 in contributions from donors.

• Joshua Micah Marshall, whose Talking Points Memo became the first Internet-only news operation to receive the prestigious Polk award, has used a combination of advertising and charitable support according to this New York Times profile . Marshall’s business model, as described by the Times: “Begin as a tiny operation. Manage to gain a following. As the audience grows, ask readers for donations and accept advertising. As the advertising and donations grow, add reporters and features. Repeat as often as needed.”

Recent nonprofit online, newspaper, and journalism ventures include:

• Voice of San Diego , an online daily.
• MinnPost , an online and print daily in Minneapolis.
• ProPublica , an investigative journalism group in New York.
• Minnesota Monitor , one of four statewide online papers funded by the Center for Independent Media.
• New Haven Independent , Conn., an online daily.

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