The story, “Threat to Globe triggers flood of feelings” (yes I’ve run into horrible A1 headlines in the Globe before) comes off as narcissistic and self-important.

News that The New York Times Co. might shut down the biggest newspaper in New England if its unions don’t swiftly agree to $20 million in cuts sent a shockwave throughout Greater Boston, sparking an outcry from places as disparate as the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Johnny’s Luncheonette in Newton Centre, and voices as varied as US Senator John F. Kerry and Peter Wolf of the J. Geils Band. To some readers, such a loss seemed unimaginable, but others said the transformation from paper to the Internet is inevitable.

OK, that was rough but not too bad. But hey Globe reporters, what did citizens say to you when you asked them how important they think you are?

Losing the Globe is more than the shuttering of a company, readers said. It would be, they said, the loss of something essential to Massachusetts’ very sense of itself — and one of the few forces for public accountability in the region.

Heaven’s be!

They recalled articles exposing corruption and waste in government and other institutions, and stories giving voice to those who otherwise would have no power at all.

Surely some people disagreed? Yeah, but thankfully they’re idiots.

Critics of the Globe, especially in anonymous comments posted on the newspaper’s website, said the newspaper was falling victim not just to turbulent economic times but what they called its own “liberal bias,” though they did not provide specific examples. Some complained about ink stains; others about perfumed inserts in the newspaper. Still others raised deeper concerns about customer service.

After the jump the story becomes somewhat less exaggerated, with readers giving pretty much every argument for keeping the paper, from “I want a real paper,” to:

“Could you imagine our kids going through life not knowing what a paper is?” said…Suzanne [Locke], who teaches at a Cambridge private school.

I don’t quite understand her argument (without the Globe they wouldn’t know what a paper is?), but here’s the kicker:

Still, the Lockes admitted, they don’t get the paper every day. Mornings are consumed with getting the boys ready for school and rushing off to work, where Steven Locke reads Boston.com, the Globe website.

This one comes right at the end:

Peter Wolf, the front man for the J. Geils Band, said losing the Globe would destroy readers’ connection to the region.

Destroy connection to the region! Can we get a quote on that?

“I can’t say it starts my morning but it starts my afternoon and it’s an old friend,” [Wolf] said. “Unfortunately people don’t get the impact till after it’s done. And when it’s gone, it’s gone for good.”

Oh. Not quite the rending of the flesh I was expecting.

Now, I understand that it’s tough to hear your favorite hometown paper might be going under (especially if you work there). I know that if the Washington Post I’ve been reading for the past eight years were to be threatened, or if word that my childhood paper the Tampa Tribune was closing got out, I’d be disappointed.

But if either then ran a self-indulgent story like this on the front-page the next day, my eyes would roll out of my head. This could have passed as a column. It’s not the kind of thing to be bandying around as journalism when you’re about to go out of business.

I generally think the Globe is a great paper. I love The Big Picture, the Ideas section, and the Reporters’ Questions section of this page down on the right. I would really rather they not go out of business (though going online-only wouldn’t really affect me here in DC). However, they really need to check themselves next time they decide to run a story about how important they are.

****

Misaligned Richter scales: While the Globe reports that news of a possible closure “sent a shockwave throughout Greater Boston, sparking an outcry,” the Boston Herald reports sources saying the “dire message sent a shockwave through a newspaper that has been battered by bad news and decimated by layoffs.”

All the focus on the campaign led to record numbers of viewers/readers for print and television news, with websites seeing some of the largest gains.

Which is to say the larger media outlets loved the election. It got people to read, to watch, to debate and to be involved with their news sources.

Also, though, the election showed the weaknesses of the mainstream media. As they got hooked, news consumers looked first to the large media for their news. There they found slow, tentative coverage with little of the analysis they craved. So they branched out, found political blogs, rumor sites, and even to a greater degree began watching the speeches and debates first hand in order to form their own opinions.

We’ve been told that new media is weakening the old guard, but during this election cycle we saw just how new media would finally break the press.

From early in the primaries, the candidates saw this happening to differing degrees, and responded in kind. From the WSJ:

“This year’s campaign…has marked a change in the role the press plays. The prominence, readership and influence of online political sites has mushroomed, taking away some of the prominence of the mainstream media — traditional television networks, newspapers and news services. Campaigns have taken to getting out word of pending shifts in strategy by leaking them to political websites, and both parties catered to bloggers at their conventions.

“For example, when word first circulated that the McCain campaign was about to launch its first TV ad linking Sen. Obama with former Weathermen radical William Ayers, the Obama campaign promptly told the political website Politico.com…that it intended to counter with an ad calling Sen. McCain ‘erratic in a crisis.’ … [W]ord of the Obama team’s planned countermove was circulating among politicians and journalists before they had even seen the McCain ad that prompted it.”

After years of getting scooped by the Internet, large media outlets now found themselves being routinely scooped in political coverage, a market they were supposed to have cornered. How did this happen? After all, it was the big guys who had the credentials, who were there on the campaign planes flying from stump to stump with the candidates.

In the Internet, candidates saw something hard to control and impossible to predict, but something where the plurality of voices lead to stories rising to the top based on the strength of the message. The candidates also saw a place that, if they hit first and well, might be won over.

Mainstream news outlets began to respond. From Time:

“As politics has expanded to more platforms–blogs, YouTube, comedy shows–the old press has followed, raising its metabolism and sharpening its tone to compete. And following it all has been by turns thrilling and exhausting.

“This is not to say that the souped-up cycle has rendered the election trivial. In a way, just the opposite. This election and its stakes are so significant that people’s appetites are insatiable. They want their voices heard, their issues resolved, their lives bettered.

…

“The traditional press, then, had more competition for scoops, influence and audience as the election became the biggest pop-culture event of the year. So the news media — all chasing the same ad dollars in a bad economy — learned the value of putting on a show. Formerly straitlaced outlets gave themselves an attitude makeover to keep up with the blogs and Comedy Central. CNN hired comic D.L. Hughley to do a late-night show, and even the stodgy Associated Press started injecting bloggy potshots and analysis into its wire stories. If you didn’t snark, you didn’t exist.”

From the Washington Post:

“Just as the Internet is changing newspapers, so it is also changing the AP. In its efforts to survive the tectonic shifts destabilizing most daily newspapers and to brand itself online…the wire service is evolving into the world’s largest virtual newspaper and a direct competitor to the papers that own it.”

Later:

“‘It’s enough that we’re expected to always be first, this incredible pressure to break the news,’ one AP political reporter told me. ‘But now we also have to magically find a brilliant and nifty lead, the unique angle, while still beating everyone else. I feel like I’m competing with Politico, the New York Times and Reuters simultaneously.’ And, indeed, they are.”

The media splintered. Analysis came quicker and reporters found their voices; instead of pretending reporters are robots transcribing events verbatim, we read them knowing they may be wrong (sometimes expecting them to be so). The robot work we’ve passed on to the video streams, the transcripts, we can compare. And in this election many did.

The media became less about trust, and more about depth. It was great.

Was great, as it turned out. TV networks pulled back on election night. For all the streamlining and sharpening they mustered in the months leading up to the election, they pussyfooted at the last second.

The NYT admits:

“It was clear long before 11 p.m. that Mr. Obama had won, but anchors were skittish about saying too much too soon.”

In fact, “Barack Obama’s victory was told tentatively, elliptically, less with numbers than with a pan of the camera as his supporters, crammed into Grant Park in Chicago, exploded with joy. Throughout the night, the obvious was hinted at with gauzy video clips filling the screen. As states toppled in Mr. Obama’s favor, news programs ran lyrical pictures of the Obama family that looked as iconic as a Kennedy scrapbook.”

But they wouldn’t say it. After Ohio came in they wouldn’t just say that Obama was the winner, was pretty much the winner, that it the chances of McCain winning Virginia, Florida, and California (one of the only ways he could have won after that) were between slim and none.

Watching CNN, I remember two anchors coloring in states, showing how many electoral votes McCain would have if he won various remaining states.

“I’m not going to be dishonest and say it’s possible McCain could win California, Washington, or Oregon,” one anchor said, leaving McCain woefully under 270 votes. “So?…” the other anchor led. “Yeah,” he replied.

Obama’s victory was only a formality of tallying votes and closing polls, but no one on the networks would go so far to even say Obama had a pretty good chance of winning at that point.

This pulling back is going to continue. Newspapers will take a break and a deep breath before bemoaning the inevitable decline of print again, and cable news will begin throwing scandal after scandal up on the screen, seeing which kinda sticks before beating it to the ground.

But the next time something captures the culture’s interest and imagination like this election did, those news agencies that took the lessons of the last two years to heart and those that change the way they cater to the journalistic needs of their audience will have the advantage.

The blogs and rumormills and social media sites aren’t going to go away, but the news sources that can provide the most timely analysis, with updates and changes and refinements, they’re the ones that’ll get through this alright.

The way journalism is made changed in this long election cycle, and people loved it. As we pared the candidates to one, they became real people with flaws just like us. Their supporters also became real people, as we saw beyond them as symbols and discovered they had motives, morals, insecurities, and virtues. But best of all, reporters began showing us their sense of humor, their opinions, and at times their fallibility, and they began to become people to.

Let’s keep that going.

I had been into videogames for a few years, after I got my first Game Players, my love for videogames would quickly become second to my love for videogame magazines.

And I found it! That first one had been sitting in my basement in a box for years and years. And then I scanned it.

All these pictures link to large image files so you can enjoy the scans as much as I can enjoy the mag in real life. Sorry for the size.

Anyway, July, 1995, Issue 73 was a pretty great issue in general, right at the dawn of a new generation of consoles. Unveiling the PlayStation, first look at Nintendo’s Ultra 64, Diddy Kong and Fulgore down there in the corner representing SNES, and who I think is Mondo from Toshinden blasting the PlayStation. And Earthworm Jim 2!

Contents

The crowd-sourced encyclopedia of record, Wikipedia, calls Game Players zany, wacky, and crazy. The magazine’s page layout was a mix of MTV and a strobe light made of knives, the Grunge was palpable, the humor juvenile, and I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

E3 had just wrapped up when this issue came out, and without blogs there was not much other way to get gaming news until the magazines came out (imagine!). Game Players wouldn’t have a website to call its own for another six months.

Letters

Letters were always my favorite part of Game Players. I didn’t quite understand the STD jokes, but they said damn! And hey, jokes about monkeys and violence! Actually, in the Game Ideas section of this issue (page four below), the guy’s idea for a game called Violence is pretty close to what GTA III turned out to be.

What I never got, even back then, was the Connections section, where kids write in to ask for pen pals.  Why would I want to write a letter to someone about Sonic? Plus, printing the names and addresses of eleven-year-olds would not fly nowadays.

And some of these just sound creepy:

I’m 11 years old and love animals. I own a Sega and a SNES. Any age will do.

-Sam

Thanks Sam.

These pages were usually the most enjoyable read of the magazine. Sorry for the missing top part on page two, I must have cut something out for a poster I made at some point.

Hit Lists

Top X lists are always fun snapshots of history. They’d usually drew the first gasp of my reading of Game Players, as some Nintendo game would be at or too close to the top for my taste. They never had the Genesis or PlayStation games I was playing where I wanted them to be. Also, I hated Nintendo (though we’re cool now).

Info Trak

Info Trak I didn’t pay too much attention to, I wanted to get to the reviews! But this is a gem: after E3 ‘05, Game Players reports the delay of Nintendo’s Ultra 64 (later to become the Nintendo 64) and the early release of the Sega Saturn.

The extra development time they refer to in the article turns out to be a good move by Nintendo, as Mario 64 becomes one of the most lauded games ever. Also, Nintendo at this point has a fanbase so rabid and loyal that they’ll easily wait a few more months for the new Nintendo console. Back then things were serious, it was a battle.

Sega, on the other hand, pushes the Saturn out more than three months early, leaving many developers behind. They never really get the game makers back on track, and everyone jumps ship to Nintendo or Sony.

So here, on one page, the disappointment that turns out to be a big boost for Nintendo, and the beginning of the end of Sega as a console maker.

Next time, (in Memories of Game Players, 2), I’ll have the cover story, the unveiling of the PlayStation! Also reviews, previews, and codes. It’s pretty funny in hindsight reading reviews raving about PlayStation graphics. But they were good! They were..

“…but what’d I’d like to read is a comparison of the biggest, most successful of these blogs, Gizmodo and Kotaku, with their Weblogs Inc. equivalents Engadget and Joystiq and maybe some of the other popular tech blogs like Slashdot or something. How have these blogs, which get upwards of 4 million pageviews per week, changed the technology/computing industry? Have they actually broken any ground or are they just mouthpieces for endless PR departments? … I understand it’s a totally different article, but it seems more relevant.”

Well, I kinda got my wish in Wired this month with a throwdown on the rivalry between Engadget and Gizmodo, even better, staged at the 2008 International CES.

Carlye Adler’s article nicely characterizes the rivalry and is a great read for anyone who reads techblogs Engadget or Gizmodo or is just interested in how these two behemoths of blogging conduct themselves. It doesn’t have all the discussion of the implications to traditional media I was looking for, but it does have a good section where it recounts Gizmodo’s TV-B-Gone stunt:

“Jeremy Dale, Motorola’s vice president of global marketing, was demonstrating two new mobile phones to a preshow crowd at CES when his teleprompter suddenly clicked off. Seconds later, the display screen behind him went black. When he moved to another screen, it clicked off as well. Throughout the course of the week, similar things kept happening to other companies. TVs went dark at Intel, more went out at Dish Network, and a whole wall of monitors went dead, one by one, at Panasonic. (The 150-incher stayed on.)

At the time, no one knew that Richard Blakeley, a cameraman for Gawker Media and Gizmodo, was the puppeteer behind the prank. Armed with a little device called TV-B-Gone, he prowled the floor, extinguishing the demos and displays that are CES’ lifeblood.”

Later:

“…some argued that with TV-B-Gone, the Gizmodo gang had crossed the line from irreverence to hostility.

…

Other bloggers were similarly unamused. For years, they had struggled to earn the respect accorded to members of the traditional media. Now one of the most prominent bloggers — one of the few to win a broadcast media pass! — was squandering that hard-earned credibility.”

Gizmodo editor Brian Lam defended the actions (it’s “an important part of the tech culture that isn’t sold in a can.”), but the videographer responsible for the deed was banned from CES.

Gizmodo’s joke (crappy, unprofessional is how I’d describe it) illustrates how blogs are separating themselves from traditional media, as they in some ways supercede it and out-report print. Even Engadget, with its “cool and straightlaced” style, isn’t above posting a bit of badly-sourced news.

“Last May, Engadget published news that the release of Apple’s iPhone and Leopard operating system would be delayed. Apple stock plunged, causing a $4 billion drop in the company’s market cap. But Engadget’s only source, an email purportedly sent to Apple employees, turned out to be a fraud.”

Despite their faults, “Lam, 30, and [Engadget Editor Ryan] Block, 25, are influential forces in the $161 billion consumer electronics industry, more powerful than most of the mainstream media outlets they compete against,” according to Wired.

There’s still a strong sense, however, that now that these blogs have found success, they’ve found the formula, how do they fit into the media industry? Some bloggers don’t feel they’re bound by the same rules as traditional media, whereas others are trying to play by the rules without sacrificing what makes blogging great: the immediacy.

The fact that most tech-heads use one of these blogs (or both) as their primary source of news might prove that that question is moot. Readers don’t care about the relatively infrequent mistakes (as long as they’re corrected quickly), they don’t care about the stunts, they just want the news, and fast.

As great as that is, there’s still a sense that blogs as a whole and these blogs in particular haven’t established a place for themselves in the media industry. I just want to ask them, “Are you going to destroy the industry or become a part of it? Which ever it is, do it already!”

David Pouge, tech reviewer for the New York Times, seems to have a pretty balanced view of the whole thing, “They have to figure out what they want to be when they grow up,” he says. “And they are going to continue to stub their toes along the way.”

David Samuels has a pretty expansive article in this month’s Atlantic where he follows a team of the paparazzi that keep the Britney beat and recounts how modern entertainment news came to be.

While I don’t agree that the paparazzi have become “one of the most powerful and lucrative forces driving the American news-gathering industry,” Samuels points

“…back to March 2002, when a women’s magazine editor named Bonnie Fuller took over a Wenner Media property called Us Weekly, which had drifted along since its founding in 1977 as a rival to the fantastically successful People magazine franchise. What Fuller brought to Us was a keen understanding of her audience. ‘Every day, we’d look at tons of pictures that came in and lay them all out on a conference table,’ Fuller remembers. ‘And what was interesting to me was to look at celebrities going to the dry cleaners and pumping gas. I loved looking at these pictures of celebrities who were just like us.’”

Now celebrity photographers bring in tons of money, but with the focus on celebrities in their normal lives rather than in salacious situations, the paparazzi teams have become larger and more ubiquitous. Also, however, more news agencies have begun buying the pictures. Photo agency X17 rode this trend to the top.

“X17 licenses its pictures to celebrity skin magazines like Us Weekly, People, Life & Style, and In Touch and their associated websites; to celebrity-oriented television programs like Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood, Inside Edition, and Extra; as well as to newspapers and magazines in England, Australia, Germany, Japan, Hong Kong, mainland China, Israel, Dubai, and dozens of other countries; to major television news networks like CNN, ABC, NBC, and CBS, and nearly everyone else in the media business who needs pictures and video clips of Paris Hilton’s arrest or Brad and Angelina’s kids or Britney’s latest courtroom drama, which is to say nearly every major news outlet on the planet.”

This has happened in part because exclusives got too expensive:

“The front-of-the-book snapshots in People and Us cost $50,000 to $75,000 per issue, to say nothing of the attention-grabbing exclusive photo-features on Brad and Jen’s divorce or the latest Friends wedding, which averaged in the low-to-mid six figures. When the spending became impossible to sustain, the magazines slashed their photo budgets and stopped buying exclusives. The larger photo agencies like X17 and Bauer-Griffin then found that they could make even more money by selling a single set of pictures 15 or 20 times over, to eight or 10 magazines, five or six television programs, and websites. And so the industrial phase of paparazzi production was born.”

This reminds me of the industrial phase of news production that there’s been some discussion of lately. With local, and even national papers running more and more wire stories, papers are losing their identities. Part of this is because of budget constraints, but also it seems that news has gotten so fast that if you don’t get the story first, it’s not worth getting at all.

TMZ.com editor Harvey Levin has a different opinion, though. From the Atlantic story:

“[TMZ.com] is owned by the giant media conglomerate Time Warner and edited by a pixieish attorney and former TV producer named Harvey Levin. ‘It’s old-fashioned journalism,’ Levin says of the way that celebrity websites gather news. He suggests that the kind of aggressive Web-based coverage that TMZ and other prominent sites have pioneered has obvious applications beyond the world of celebrity, in areas like politics and sports. ‘I see lots of opportunities,’ he says.”

Maybe this divide highlights the difference between photojournalism and reporting. With photos you only get one shot. If you miss it as it happens, you miss the story and you never get a second chance. Writers, however, can go back, find more sources, ask more questions, and get deeper into the story.

The celebrity photojournalism industry has become industrial, with “gangs of immigrant kids with digital cameras purchased on credit from Best Buy [doing] the work of the heroic lone photographers who once lay in wait with telephoto lenses, stalking Jackie O,” according to “traditional Hollywood paparazzi.” But are we ready to have print journalism do the same?

Will our demand for fresh news become so immediate that once an event is over it’s considered old news? I hope not. Having time to reflect before publishing a story can do nothing but improve the story.

Photographers envy writers for the time (however short) they have to polish a story, but now those on the front lines are finding that sometimes you do get a second chance:

“X17’s photographers say that Britney Spears frequently comments on the pictures they post on their website. They also suggest that the pop star sometimes goes out a day or two later and restages unflattering shots. ‘Forever, she has been in on the joke,’ says Harvey Levin of TMZ. ‘She has also been severely mentally ill for a while.’”

This cool story in Forbes tells the business repercussions:

“For a site that’s averaged around a million page views a day lately, the results were stunning. NYmag.com recorded a total of more than 40 million page views Monday and Tuesday, more than 34 million of which came from the Lohan portfolio, [NY Mag spokesman Lauren] Starke said.”

That translated into about $500,000 over two days from banner advertisements, or “about as much revenue per day from its online slideshow as it would from four $64,500 full-page color ads in its print edition.”

That’s pretty amazing. Shows just how out-of-control popular celebrity news nowadays.

Reminds me of Gawker bravely hosting the Tom Cruise Scientology video in the face of litigation, clocking an easy 2.3 million pageviews. From NY Times:

“Some former Gawker bloggers have criticized a new compensation system that on top of a base rate pays $7.50 for every 1,000 views that posts generate. If one of [Gawker editor Nick] Denton’s bloggers had posted the Tom Cruise video, his or her haul thus far would be more than $17,000.”

These are all impressive numbers, but where does the journalism fit in?

Well, as you may have heard, newspapers have been on the downs recently, as circulation has been falling along with advertising revenue. These big paydays have surely caught the eyes of some editors looking to get their websites making money.

Will newspapers be able to break these sensational stories before TMZ? Who knows, but it’ll be interesting to see how these big paydays entice editors.

Personally? I think they should be focusing on the long tail, but we’ll see how that works out.

Forbes ends with a disturbing thought:
“Hmm. Makes one wonder: What’s Britney up to these days?”

Here’re the entirety of his remarks, but one passage jumped out to me in particular:

We must tell people what they want to know and — even more important — what they might not want to know, about war, politics, economics, schools, corruption and the thoughts and deeds of those who lead us. We need to tell readers more about Barack Obama and less about Britney Spears. We must give a voice to those who can’t afford a megaphone. And we must become more than a marketing slogan. I know I can rely on this newsroom to do this.

Now, I may have just written on this, but I think O’Shea may be a little off base here.

Firstly, I think people do want to know ” about war, politics, economics, schools, corruption and the thoughts and deeds of those who lead us.” But to say that we need to “tell readers more about Barack Obama and less about Britney Spears” may be disingenuous, I think.

The truth is, I don’t think we can’t have both.

When I say that reporters should think about what the public wants when choosing stories, it doesn’t mean they should choose the easy stories about Britney Spears over probing profiles of psychological heavyweights like Barack Obama. What I’m saying is that we need stories where the psychological aspect is up front. Stories based on press releases and incremental coverage that doesn’t go anywhere won’t cut it.

There are interesting stories buried in many of the easy-skippable articles covering our newsprint now-a-days, but the truth is that with daily deadlines is a lot harder to take the time and find what’s going on beneath a Barack Obama story (generally) than one about our train-wreck friend Ms. Spears.

People flock to the Spears stories because they know that there’ll be something interesting there, we need to find what resonates with the public in every story. Alternatively, cover something else.

To get all up on the O’Shea firing, I suggest starting with the Los Angeles Times‘ story. The New York Times and Reuters have further coverage (and the Wall Street Journal, if you’re a subscriber).

For different takes on the story, Mark Fitzgerald has a good column on the whole thing over at Editor and Publisher, and I enjoyed Howard Owens‘ critique of O’Shea’s comments also.

“Now and for the foreseeable future, virtually everything involving Britney is a big deal,” Frank Baker, the [AP's] Los Angeles assistant bureau chief, wrote on Tuesday morning.

I was talking (arguing) with a friend of mine the other day about the goals of newspapers, and how they decide what is important. He was saying that important news stories were chosen by journalists without considering how interested the general public would be in the story. I said that considering what’s going to be popular, and what’s important to your readers, is a good gauge of what news stories in your area are important.

“Won’t this lead to newspapers being content-wise indistinguishable from supermarket tabloids?” he asked.

“Initially,” I said, “maybe. But I have confidence that popular opinion will swing back, and we’ll find a happy medium. People do care about what’s happening in their towns.”

This NYT article reminded me of that conversation.

In a memo Tuesday, Baker, the AP’s assistant bureau chief for Los Angeles, reminded his reporters that Britney Spears’ ongoing meltdown is news, and they should be covering the newsworthy aspects of it.

…“we want to pay attention to what others are reporting and seek to confirm those stories that WE feel warrant the wire,” [Baker]wrote, adding, “And when we determine that we’ll write something, we must expedite it.”

People want to know what’s happening to Britney, and as LA AP reporters, it their job to report it. And quickly.

I don’t think this is “Not a good day for journalism as a discipline.” as is quoted in the article, but I do think that this is where we need to go if we’re going to have a backlash against insubstantial reporting.

But guess what? The backlash may already be beginning. In a previous post on Gawker, I mentioned that journalists probably like taking the piss out of bloggers who snark about them all day, but after a bunch of Gawker editors quit, there seems to be some well-thought-out misgivings about the blog family’s new direction.

On top of that,a few bloggers from Gawker’s Gizmodo tech blog recently got banned from the largest tech show in the country, the International CES, after some crappy stunt.

It seems like the division between blogger and journalist is re-widening, and people are realizing that newspapers offer something that a lot of these popular blogs to not. At the same time, newspapers are looking at theses blogs as test cases, to see what people are really looking for, and what’s important to people today.

2007 has been a popular year for redesigns, as a handful of newspapers and magazines have updated their online and physical designs. I checked out some of the more recent website redesigns to see if I could glean any ideas.

It’s surprisingly hard to find screengrabs of sites in previous design iterations, so some of my shots may be a little out of date. They serve mostly to give an idea of what the site came from before its present form.

The Los Angeles Times

The LA Times recently updated its site, and it takes on a notably Apple-inspired look, especially in the header. I’m not super excited about the 50% gray background, though. On the article pages and sub pages — pages without the big blue header — the gray is a little overwhelming and makes the page look bland. I do like the contrast between the old-timey LA Times logo and the clean, modern page design.

Grade: B-

The Boston Globe

What I like best about the Globe’s redesign are the changes made to article pages. Check it out, it’s bigger! Bigger fonts, more room for the text, overall much easier to read. In fact, in a lot of these recent redesigns webdesigners have begun defaulting to larger screensizes. No longer is 600×800 the standard anymore, which is strange because I figure if old people (or those who are generally more behind in technological adoption) go to any websites they’d be newspaper sites, so newspapers should be the last to embrace larger screen sizes. The boston.com mainpage has been cleaned up aesthetically as well as made larger. All around I’d say this is a very successful redesign.

Grade: A

ABC News.com

ABC News made a pretty rare decision by choosing a dark color scheme, and I think they pull that off pretty well. Their new site is also an improvement from the tab-addled multimedia onslaught of their former layout, but it still suffers from many of the same problems. There’s little flow on the front page, for instance. It’s just a mess of headlines, and there’s no delineation by importance. Also, I’m not a big fan of having lot’s of movement on a front page, and ABC News’ sliding top stories gets annoying. But what I like least about ABC News’ site are the story pages. Three column article pages are hard to get right and probably shouldn’t be done at all, and ABC News gets them totally wrong by making each column huge, save the one the reader cares about.

Grade: D

Detroit News

I think I’m going to ignore DetNews.com’s red on black color scheme. I dislike it, but it’s a unique choice. What I’m going to focus on here is DetNews’ former eyeblight of a website. It was extremely terrible. They did right by first removing the long and cluttered left menubar. Also I like how the content boxes are clearly defined on the main page. The article pages are nice and big and give the reader the option of — get this! — choosing which font size to use. It’s a good redesign, save the red-black-gray color scheme, which wasn’t implemented very well.

Grade: B+

Now back to designing my own site, I’m thinking electric-yellow on purple?

Most of the speech is a rousing call for editors and reporters to get off their butts and start adapting, or die, but the other half doesn’t really resonate. In fact, it makes me think that Curley still doesn’t get it. He doesn’t understand what all this Internet stuff is about.

“The portals are running off with our best stuff.”

Huh? First of all, “the portals” he’s speaking of are sites like MSN, Yahoo, AOL, .com that aggregate and link to news stories from multiple news sources. But I don’t see how he thinks they’re running off with his, or any news organization’s, stuff. The AP recently signed a deal with Google in which Google pays to reprint AP stories, and from what I understand most of the other news organizations who reprint AP articles have permission to, so I don’t see how this is cutting into their bottom line. Secondly I don’t understand how he thinks non-wire news organizations are hurting from the bevy of news portals. Isn’t the norm to link to the original article, on the content-owner’s site? Unless he’s referring to how the portals are driving down newspaper subscriptions by being more convenient and timely, I don’t understand his point here.

But he goes on. Later in the speech he mentions how to deal with these portals:

“Great content always has needed great distribution. These days that means deals have to be done with portals, especially those with promising new ad models and capabilities. But the deals have to be good deals.”

I think what gets me most about this speech is that Curley thinks portals are something to be dealt with. Newspapers are portals. And they have the advantage, they are producing the news coverage. Newspapers, and their websites, have another advantage too, they’re local.

Newspapers do need to compete with portals, but they can’t do it on their own terms. They do have to adapt, by giving their visitors (no more readers, just visitors) more value, let them “captain their information ships,” as Curley puts it. But “regaining control of distribution” by wrenching it away from portals and thinking of yourselves as those who “rule content” isn’t going to work. Let people focus their news, and help focus it for them with more timely, more in-depth local coverage.

I don’t want to see a newspaper doing a deal with a portal in which the portal is begrudgingly allowed to reprint the newspaper’s content. I want the newspaper to buy the portal and integrate the portal’s cutting edge technology into it’s homepage.

I agree with Curley that ” The perfect paper or newscast is becoming possible — at least in the reader’s or viewer’s eyes. What is it you really want to know? We can personalize content now. ”

“Think of it as a mix from news radio to The New Yorker all under one roof with the New York Public Library thrown in — for a really great data base and interactive programs with the public. Sounds crazy, but it could be a lot of fun.”

It could be a lot of fun, and let me tell you, it is. I could make this resource in about ten minutes using Netvibes or any other RSS reader. Maybe switch NY Public Library with Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg, but it’d be just as useful, and I could add more of anything I could think of! From news on just the Redskins to a feed on global trade news, I can already get my niches scratched.

What I want from a newspaper is to make it easy for me to find what I want. Newspapers already have their sections of the long tail cut out: give me what’s happening in my city or town or neighborhood. And add in the analysis of wider stories. I like the columnists and the personalities, and I like it when I can relate, when I know that they struggle with the same traffic I do and go home and watch the same sports teams I do. Give me the New Yorker, the public library and the news radio, but also give me the watercooler and bar conversations. By then I won’t need to go to the portals, and you can have all the ad revenue from me you want.