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I’m the Director of Information and Semantics Management at the Tribune Company, and I just wanted to let you know that the LATimes shared with me information you regarding analysis of topics, page rank, and so on that you provided them earlier this year.

I think your findings are very interesting, and I’m sorry that, being at the enterprise level, I wasn’t aware of this analysis engagement in order, perhaps, to provide you with additional information, context, and background regarding how the LATimes is leveraging the Tribune Company’s automated indexing resources as well as comprehensive information regarding the company’s larger enterprise efforts in this area.

I will be sharing your analysis with corporate management here at the Tribune Company as I think it’s insightful and will certainly help us as we move forward in our on-going efforts to improve our processes not just for the one LATimes market but all our news and broadcast sites across the U.S. In the meantime, thank you and all the best.

Regards,

Keith DeWeese

As a user of google Chrome I have installed the no-flash application. This way when I visit websites with flash content, I can choose to view it by clicking play (such as a video), or not (such as an annoying add).

It’s much faster too

I would love to see ClickToFlash or a similar plug-in for Chrome.

Since using Click-to-Flash, I’ve realized how many sites use flash for elements, which I found odd, but it’s prevalent. I certainly won’t miss it! And Windows users should pull their heads out and realize Flash affects their browser’s performance too!

Thanks for the great post and opening up my eyes to a new idea.

I do agree with you that news-for-pay can indeed be commercially viable in the future. However, despite much lamenting of the fact that old media sources such as newspapers are dying and the need to save it, I don’t think that broad-audience general-news-for-everybody publications such as traditional newspapers are viable. The reason for this is because of what we already know — we can all get that major news for free anyway through any variety of sources online or on television.

Indeed, I fully suspect that by 2015, the Kansas City Star and St. Louis Post Dispatch, in my area of the country, will cease to exist in their current forms. And, unlike some, I do not think that is a bad thing. It’s simply what it is — a fact and a reality of the times.

However, the answer to me is not as simple as simply going online with those same, boring publications that already provide information we can get for free somewhere else. No one is going to subscribe or advertise through such sources. Rather, I think what we’ll increasingly see is smaller, crisper, enterprises that are targeted at specific audiences — varying in size depending on the topic and scope — that are built largely upon subscriptions with a smaller slice for targeted advertising such as “sponsorships”.

In some ways, it will be a reversal of the merging of media outlets we’ve seen recently. We’ll no longer see huge corportations owning multiple newspapers and even TV stations. We’ll see small-staffed but quite effective operations operating out of strip malls or second-story offices in big and towns alike.

A local example of this is the Kansas Liberty — http://www.kansasliberty.com. An enterprise of some local folks I know, it is billed as “Fair and Factual”, a FoxNews of sorts in covering Kansas politics. One can get a free trial but it is a subscription service of $100 a year. And, as a subscriber myself, I can vouch for the fact it provides more in depth coverage about bills coming out of the legislature and news coming out of the Kansas political scene than any of the major news outlets in Kansas — Wichita Eagle, Kansas City Star, and the Topeka Capital Journal (which does the best job of the traditional three), and certainly a lot more than our local suburban rag, the Johnson County Sun. In additional to providing a conservative opinion alternative in its editorials to the very leftward tilt of the three major dailies, it objectively — no matter what your persuasion — provides more frequent and more in depth coverage of real issues in Kansas on the legislative and political scene than any other source — with a staff of essentially 4.

Note, and this is obvious by visiting the site of the Kansas Liberty, it is NOT blog. It is, in some ways, a combination of old and new media — a mix of opinion and hard news, targeted in a specific area (legislature and politics) and region (Kansas), but online and with a small staff — with a combination of a few free articles and a larger in depth subscription service – a service that it can charge for because, as I noted above, there is NO OTHER OUTLET in Kansas covering the bases so in depth like it does, both in terms of the actual facts of a story as well as the analysis of the event.

Though still young and still needing to prove itself over the long haul financially — which will depend on it simply becoming known through word of mouth and such — I truly believe that you’ll increasingly see outfits like the Kansas Liberty pop up all over the country, covering a myriad of issues. You’ve already seen it on the sports scene in the emergence of Rivals.com, which has a combination of hard sports news for each college team as well as both free and subscription message boards for “insider information”, all of which you can get for that familiar price of $100/year (or $10/month).

This similar model can repeat itself for suburban or small town news outlets — the last years where I actually think a printed newspaper can still be successful. If you’re offering something that is hard to find in quality elsewhere — or at all — such as local, small town or suburban news, people will pay for it, in my view, if it is affordable — and $100/year is, for most folks — as that is less than a newspaper subscription and, if billed monthly, about the cost of a couple trips to Starbucks a month.

Also, one thing about this system is that I think quality will reign — people will only pay for something that is quality and provides them something they can’t get for free. In a sense, the market will force these smaller ventures to be professional, well planned, and effective in what they do.

However, the transition will be slow and some will doubt it. This takes time anytime you have a complete reorganization of a vast area of American business, which is the print (online or paper) news business. But I think this IS the future. The small news enterprise will be back — just in a different form that we saw decades ago. It will be more niche-oriented but also more competitive, but those that take the risks and stay with it will be rewarded in the end.

Of course, the old media guard will remain stubborn and frustrated at these “small town” or “fringe” outfits stealing their corner of the world — journalism — away from them. But, as enterprising journalists wanting to make money come into the field, I think the tide will gradually turn and we’ll see a new, vibrant, print news business that at the end of the day will actually somewhat resemble what many of us long thought print news to be — in depth, unique, quality, and something you couldn’t get anywhere else — which is why we originally paid for it anyway.