There are two reasons why I left the newspaper business and, at the moment anyway, have no intention of going back. The first was that many of the people controlling the business today do not care all that much about journalism. The second was that, among those who do care, hardly any have a clue about what has hit them, or what to do about it.

I don’t have any magical suggestions, but it’s clear the future of most newspapers is paperless, free, and heavily local in character. But these are very broad descriptions; there is still an enormous range of possible outcomes, good and bad, even with those preconditions.

For instance, the “hyperlocal” idea is useful but inadequate if taken literally, given that we’re in an era when categories of local and global are increasingly blurred. Virtual communities know no geographical boundaries. Both economic globalization and climate change have serious local and global effects, and political/policy fixes will increasingly have to straddle those categories. The more “hyper” the local in newspaper coverage, and the more it becomes just a buzzword, driven by business models that don’t incorporate an understanding of the community or the world, the more blinkered and navel-gazing the local newspaper will become. Not good, given where they’re starting from.

Lee Abrams is Tribune’s new innovation director, coming from XM Radio and a long, highly successful career as a radio executive, and he’s made a practice of writing long, stream-of-consciousness memos about what’s wrong with newspapers. His latest is up on Romenesko. (Speaking of, why did Tribune - apparently - make Abrams abandon his blog? Seems like exactly the kind of reflexive, decidedly non-innovative corporate diktat that is killing the business.) It’s great to see an outsider and proven innovator looking critically at the business. But I’m not loving what I’m reading:

*Changes are made but they are SO subtle that no-one outside of the building notices.

*Writers and Editors content is undermined by a generally dated and tired look, that is tweaked but not noticeably evolved.

*Are rife with assumptions. That people will find great stories…that the paper will get credit for breaking stories…that the writers are known commodities…that the paper is the center of the local news universe. Well—-not necessarily. Historically yes, but in 2008, not a given. Gotta REALIZE WAR HAS BEEN DECLARED by the Google’s and Fox’s…and FIGHT BACK…RECLAIM YOUR TURF! Ain’t gonna happen by osmosis.

*Are not very aggressive. At least by today’s standards. If a radio station had the circulation declines facing newspapers, all hell would break loose and you’d see the big guns pulled out. I don’t see that in newspapers. When AOL started declining, they blew up the company. My point is that we gotta fight back….fight back to reclaim. It’ll never be 1938 again, but there’s no reason newspapers can’t aggressively get in the 2008 competitive groove and grow again.

Well, yeah. But all of this has been obvious for years. If Tribune needs to spend big bucks to hire a proven innovator to come in and write memos telling its employees what any reader can see, things are worse than even I imagined. And while a little old-fashioned fire in the belly can’t hurt, it’s not a solution. Abrams mentions Fox and Google as the competitors, the enemy newspapers must gird themselves to battle. But if you’re at at a medium-sized, Tribune-owned paper, are Fox and Google really your chief competitors? How are newspaper execs, editors and reporters supposed to get lathered up for a fight when they don’t even know who or what their rivals are anymore? (Blogs? XM Radio? iPods? Jon Stewart?)

Again, no brilliant solutions here. But newspapers do need to blow things up. The current model, with its layers of editors, copy editors, classified ad reps and pillar-of-the-community caution, has to go. Papers need to experiment, try new formats, new models. There’s the open-source idea advanced by newassignment.net, or by local startups such as Paul Bass’s New Haven Independent. That’s one way to inject both new perspectives and some buzz into the business at the same time. But papers also have to protect and nourish two things they already have - reporting and the newspaper “brand.” Original voices and journalistic credibility are pretty much all papers have left - and they’re good both for making money and for the healthy functioning of society.

www.johnmcquaid.com/blog

The Star Tribune’s decision to eliminate James Lileks’s column and reassign him to a beat as a local reporter is so self-evidently dumb, an Umbridge-worthy example of the bureaucratic mentality run amok, that you have to wonder if newspapers – especially the once-robust, medium-sized daily paper – have indeed reached some kind of suicidal turning point.

Others have said it, and I’ll repeat it: Lileks is a unique talent. He is a clever and funny writer on the cheesiness and delights of pop culture and a keen observer of life in the American suburbs (mainly, his own). He also writes on politics and has been a prominent warblogger (though on those fronts I rarely agree with him). So he stands out in a medium whose adherence to convention and tradition are slowly strangling it, pushing it out of the boundaries of general interest and relevancy.

Lileks could be a great resource for the Star Tribune or any newspaper trying to homestead various niches on the web (as he notes himself). He is already “branded” and read widely (are Strib editors even aware of this?) and smart about the plastic ways of the new medium, from design to photos to video. His website is an interesting, ever-changing repository of words, images, impressions.

(In the 1990s, I worked in the Newhouse News Service bureau along with Lileks, then – and now – an NNS columnist. I can’t say we were close; at one point, I wrote a rather cutting parody of a Lileks column, and I don’t think he ever forgave me for it. But I wouldn’t have bothered if there wasn’t something distinctive and rich there. How many of us can even write recognizably enough to be parodied?)

So why constrain Lileks’s talent within the stilted conventions of reporting and newswriting, rather than harnessing it? The dynamics of such decision-making are invariably opaque to anybody not in the room. It sounds like somebody said, “we have too many columnists,” and went from there.

Perhaps they did have too many columnists – five is an awful lot. Being a columnist doesn’t imply academy-style tenure anymore, nor was it a good thing when it did. But if you’re making decisions about your paper, and the starting and ending point is a box on a checklist that says “reduce number of columnists,” rather than “how can we use the resources we have to do new things, because our survival depends on it,” then you clearly don’t have a clue that your survival is, indeed, at stake.

The recent roundabout discussion about the nature of the journalism interview has been interesting, but not very edifying. Briefly: Fred Vogelstein at Wired wanted to interview Jason Calacanis, who said, can we do this by email? Vogelstein declined to do it that way. Jeff Jarvis declared it was time to reinvent the journalistic interview. Jay Rosen recounted his frustrations at being interviewed at length by a reporter for New York Times, who then cherry-picked a single quote to illustrate his predetermined point – with which Jay disagreed.

Shorter version: thanks to the Internet, there’s plenty of ways to do an interview. And journalists are (take your pick) luddites, sticks-in-the-mud, or asses.

I concede both points. (Or, at least, that some journalists fall into each of the above categories.) But before we consign the traditional q-and-a to the ash-heap of history, we should weigh some of the pros and cons.

First off, there is simply no substitute for the give-and-take of an actual, verbal conversation in which words fly, in real time. Ever watch My Dinner with Andre? It’s a movie that consists entirely of a conversation, over dinner, between Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory, apparently “playing” themselves. They range far and wide over questions of philosophy and art. It’s absolutely riveting, in part for its unexpectedness – you don’t know quite where Gregory (who takes on the role of the interviewee to Shawn’s curious questioner) is going to go next. (Yes – it’s scripted! But let’s not go down that rabbit hole.)

For a journalist trying to fully explore a topic, this kind of give-and-take is ideal. (Dinner and wine are optional, but can’t hurt.) Having a genuine conversation helps paint a complete picture of what the person you’re talking to really thinks. It can also show how they think. It can generate insights and unexpected digressions that help shape your own thinking on the topic at hand. The personal dimension is also revealing: does someone give straight answers? Does s/he keep to a “script”? In the broadest sense, is his/her thinking interesting?

A blog post or an email exchange won’t do all this. Just as a phone interview will convey less information than a face-to-face encounter, email eliminates some of the human dimension from an interview. And it all but eliminates the promise of spontaneity. It assumes there is a concise, single answer to each question, something that tends to cut off new lines of inquiry, not expand them. If someone already has a script, a message he’s trying to get across on the topic, it’s easy to be lazy, to cut-and-paste.

Of course, this doesn’t mean email or other forms of electronic communication are useless for interviews. Internet-based conversations can be complex and fascinating, such as the recent debate over the nature of faith between Andrew Sullivan and Sam Harris. If an emailer has time and the inclination, you can get a truly stimulating back-and-forth going. Inspiration that you might never get in a phone interview may strike at 2 a.m. and pop up in an IM.

It’s also important to note there are different kinds of journalistic interview. For a reporter trolling for quotes for a daily story (perhaps the most common type of interview, but not a true “interview” at all), email may be the most efficient way to get something. If you’re after a particular quote that illustrates your point, why force someone talk for a half hour, then ditch the 29.5 minutes you don’t want? Journalists cherry-pick quotes all the time. Sometimes they take stuff out of context. Sometimes that’s sloppy and stupid. Sometimes it crosses the line.

But the basis for the complaint may also just be that the journalist had a different perspective on the topic than the person he/she interviewed.

Sometimes people I’ve written about didn’t like the way they came off in the finished product. Is it because I was stupid, or didn’t get it? Maybe. But it might also be because I saw things differently than they did. Maybe I was true to their point, but I also undercut it somehow. When I was in college, I took a nonfiction writing seminar from John Hersey. The first day of class, he noted that a journalist has three responsibilities – to him/herself, to the audience, and to the subject. These responsibilities are rarely in perfect alignment.

Or, as Janet Malcolm wrote, journalism has the qualities of a confidence game; every story has an element of betrayal – because it’s the journalist’s story, not the subject’s. (Cf. Capote.)

The game has changed profoundly, because if anyone can publish on a blog or website, the exclusivity of the journalist’s control over/access to the publishing medium has been eliminated. That’s all to the good; if someone misrepresents you, you can respond and let people judge for themselves and respond. The conversation expands.

But journalists still provide access to a wider public. Calacanis writes, “I own my words.” That’s absurd. By definition, published words slip our grasp, whether they appear in a personal blog or a Wired story. By the same token, the notion that the conversation is all about control - that journalists cannot be trusted, and that if one contacts you, you should exercise the strictest form of message discipline (whether through email, interview-by-blog post, or sheer terseness) is a recipe for the worst thing in the communications world: boredom. “Message discipline” is one of the most insidious – and overrated – ideas of our time. Do we really want a public discourse that sounds like presidential debates?

I had a strange experience the other day. I was on a plane leafing through the New York Times, when somewhere over Connecticut I had the sudden sensation that I was reading through a kind of haze.

By “haze” I mean the inevitable fuzzing effect of mainstream media conventions - the assumption of a distant omniscience, and the fealty to “balance” that is now so easily manipulated by media-savvy interests in politics, business, or entertainment. The result is a seemingly contradictory sense that, in spite of all the quotes, facts and context, reality is not being accurately rendered but obscured.

This haze has enveloped traditional media stories on politics, rendering the form increasingly useless, except as a venue for punditry and gossip. Politics is inherently a subjective business, of course, and accelerating trends of the past few years have taken political coverage almost completely round the bend: MSM cluelessness about the changing media environment, the rise of the conservative press and the netroots, and the Bush administration’s determination to transgress traditional rules of journalism, politics, and government to further GOP advantage (the last, as we know, has now backfired spectacularly).

Sure enough, the lead story in the Times on that day (last Wednesday) was headlined Bush and Cheney Chide Democrats on Iraq Deadline. The story reported some Bush and Cheney spin as straight-up news, the most important event of the day in the judgment of Times editors. The story ends up telling us nothing about the underlying dynamics of the faceoff - what this really means. The paper as a whole is moving away from this formula. But it’s not happening fast enough.

Thankfully, there’s still less haze surrounding your basic, on-scene reporting - whether it’s from faraway locations or the NY area. Ditto with science, business, maybe sports. Traditional journalism still delivers on those things better than anybody else, and the Times that day had a good assortment of stuff - an interesting, if predictable, story on the foxes guarding the OSHA henhouse; a story by the talented Dennis Overbye on the discovery of an earthlike planet outside the solar system; a report on Islamism in Turkish politics.

It’s an impressive range and depth. But even such specialized reportage is losing its once-impregnable niche. The Times used to have, if not a literal monopoly in some of these areas, then a cultural monopoly - a presumption it was the go-to source, the ultimate authority. But now, to cite one example, there’s ever-more access to scientific information on the web. If you have a particular interest you can satisfy it much more easily on the web than via a standard newspaper article, which is meant to reach the broadest possible audience. Ditto with business stories.

So it wasn’t surprising when, on the plane, the entire NYT-reading experience went fuzzy on me. Usually, I suppose, I’d just put the paper down if I got bored, but being a captive audience drove the point home - something is palpably breaking down here. Circulation keeps dropping not just because there are other choices, but because newspapers can no longer command, or even tenuously hold, people’s attention.

Maybe you don’t think this is remarkable; maybe you never read newspapers, or had this type of experience five years ago. But I used to love reading newspapers; I am a newspaper person by training and experience, and it pains and alarms me to admit the sudden urge to pitch the whole thing, wash off my ink-stained fingers and be done with it.

On the other hand … David Carr goes to Jazz Fest, and finds time to do a quick story on The Times-Picayune, my former employer, which more than any other newspaper these days embodies the basic mission of journalism. There’s nothing really new in Carr’s piece, but its portrait captures something important: Just about everybody who has returned to New Orleans reads the paper, because their future literally depends on it.

To put it another way, New Orleans is a community in constant flux, under threat by nature, its own internal problems, and national indifference. And yet it is a community, and the newspaper plays an important role in binding it together. What’s going to do that for the rest of us? And if the answer is “nothing,” what does that mean?

Let me concur with and expand a bit on Steve’s post below, and also throw some respectful skepticism the way of Jeff Jarvis. Here’s what he says about the coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings via blogs, cell phones, and other 21st-century means:

This yields a new architecture of news, a distributed architecture. It’s what is bound to happen. Those students put their news up on their own sites because they have them and because the people they care about know their addresses and will read them. … I have no doubt that people will soon have their own live YouTubes/blog pages where they broadcast what they are doing at the moment: Twitter Video. We will all be Justin.TV. And sometimes, what we broadcast or blog will be news, big news, live news.

So what is the relationship of big, old, centralized media to this new, small, decentralized architecture of news? They need to link to reporting at its source. They will not have the time to get exclusive interviews and feeds. It’s live.

But this phenomenon is less revolutionary than it seems. Such distributed networks can be useful on the most basic level of news gathering: conveying information and impressions from the scene of an unfolding event. But they usually can’t fill the most important blank in the journalism equation: telling us what is really happening, what the story is. Who’s doing what where, and why?

Unfiltered immediacy is great. But unless it’s that rare situation where the guy with the video device is actually in the room where the event is happening (and, ideally, provides some kind of narration), unfiltered immediacy has serious limitations. It is raw material, and raw material from such an event is not only potentially incorrect, as Jeff notes, but by nature fragmentary, often incomprehensible. An unfolding news event - or, more generally, reality itself - is very complex. It resists instantaneous interpretation. Any media machine, new, old, distributed or centralized, will run into the same epistemological barriers.

Steve makes this obvious point, somehow overlooked elsewhere, in his post: you can’t tell what the heck is going on in the Albarghouti video. What is the value of something “live” if you don’t know what you’re looking at? Cable execs will disagree, but “live and on-scene” is not an end in itself.

On Monday, everybody – students, journalists, the public – were in the same boat as events played out – we all had to wait for police to investigate, for closed-mouthed university officials to open up, for some clear storyline to emerge. I stopped looking at news websites Monday afternoon because they simply were not adding much new information – the most salient detail was the rising death toll – and sometimes the information was wrong.

It’s predictable, but here it comes: facts, ideas and impressions must still be assembled into an understandable narrative, and radio, TV and newspaper newsrooms still have the resources to do that faster and better than anyone, or any group, out in the field. And that takes time – sometimes minutes, but more likely hours, and maybe not until tomorrow. Or next week.

An emergent ecosystem of on-site bloggers, videographers, amateur and professional news gatherers will spontaneously appear around any big event now, and the best stuff will quickly rise to the top, guided by CNN or Drudge. That’s a big change from what cable networks have been doing, mostly by themselves, for 20 years. But like he web itself, even the “best stuff” is going to be random and variable in quality, and that makes it more of a challenge to find the good stuff, the true stuff — and the core of the story itself.

The lines between traditional media, new media, and politics continue to blur. Bloggers are covering the MSM reporters testifying at the Scooter Libby trial. After the Edwards blogging dispute, bloggers thinking about careers in politics are now scanning their archives, wondering what hidden time bombs they may contain.

We’re on the cusp of something new, especially with a presidential campaign getting underway that will produce unprecedented amounts of online coverage and chatter. With the formerly clear dividing line between “media” and the rest of us rapidly disappearing.

Rick Perlstein has a piece in TNR Online in which he notes the rough treatment that Jay Carney received when he made some mistakes in a post on Time.com’s new political blog, Swampland. A swarm of commenters, many directed his way by Atrios, quickly pointed out the errors. Though they were right on the facts, Carney lashed back at them. The Swampland blog is interesting in part because you can see the journalists adjusting, at times awkwardly, to the demands of blogging.

Dan Froomkin, who writes the White House Briefing for washingtonpost.com has stirred up controversy at times with his skeptical take on the Bush administration. After Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell called him “opinionated and liberal,” the Post hired a conservative blogger for balance. That didn’t work out, but Froomkin’s daily roundup of White House coverage was more clearly labeled as an opinion “column.” For the purposes of newassignment.net, I was less interested in his take on the White House than on the media; Froomkin was a newspaper journalist who became an early convert to the Internet. (Full disclosure: Dan and I worked on the college newspaper together; I worked in the Newhouse bureau when Deborah Howell was bureau chief. I consider them both friends.)

After working for a decade at the Winston-Salem Journal, Miami Herald, and Orange County Register, Froomkin did the University of Michigan journalism fellowship in 1996, where he decided that he didn’t simply want to cover the Internet, but to work in the new medium. After helping to set up Education Week’s website, he moved to washingtonpost.com, where he worked as a politics producer, metro editor, and number two editor at the site. He recognized one advantage of the Internet over dead tree publications was the utility of its endless digital space. “What attracted me a lot about the Internet was not really the interactivity or the immediacy of it, although I liked those,” he told me. “It was the endless news hole. It was the endless shelf life.” Whereas news stories typically glossed over the core debates going on in favor of some incremental advance, websites could provide the context, an explanation of, say, what got us to the point we’re at in the Roe vs. Wade debate. Excerpts from our conversation follow.

Q: We began by lamenting the rapid implosion of the newspaper industry. How can newspapers - and all journalists - use the Internet to open up their coverage?

Froomkin: The big reason why newsrooms and newspapers are undervalued right now in the Internet age is because they don’t brand them. They hide behind the boring byline.

Clive Thompson is examining the idea of radical transparency for Wired, and naturally he’s throwing open his own notebooks and computer files, and has a post up on his blog soliciting thoughts on the topic. Here are his three central ideas:

-Secrecy Is Dead: The pre-Internet world trafficked in secrets. Information was valuable because it was rare; keeping it secret increased its value. In the modern world, information is as plentiful as dirt, there’s more of it than you can possibly grok on your own — and the profusion of cameraphones, forwarded emails, search engines, anonymous tipsters, and infinitely copyable digital documents means that your attempts to keep secrets will probably, eventually, fail anyway. Don’t bother trying. You’ll just look like a jackass when your secrets are leaked and your lies are exposed, kind of like Sony and its rootkit. Instead …

-Tap The Hivemind: Throw everything you’ve got online, and invite the world to look at it. They’ll have more and better ideas that you could have on your own, more and better information than you could gather on your own, wiser and sager perspective than you could gather in 1,000 years of living — and they’ll share it with you. You’ll blow past the secret-keepers as if you were driving a car that exists in a world with different and superior physics. Like we said, information used to be rare … but now it’s so ridiculously plentiful that you will never make sense of it on your own. You need help, and you need to help others. And, by the way? Keep in mind that …

-Reputation Is Everything: Google isn’t a search engine. Google is a reputation-managment system. What do we search for, anyway? Mostly people, products, ideas — and what we want to know are, what do other people think about this stuff? All this blogging, Flickring, MySpacing, journaling — and, most of all, linking — has transformed the Internet into a world where it’s incredibly easy to figure out what the world thinks about you, your neighbor, the company you work for, or the stuff you were blabbing about four years ago. It might seem paradoxical, but in a situation like that, it’s better to be an active participant in the ongoing conversation than to stand off and refuse to participate. Because, okay, let’s say you don’t want to blog, or to Flickr, or to participate in online discussion threads. That means the next time someone Googles you they’ll find … everything that everyone else has said about you, rather than the stuff you’ve said yourself. (Again — just ask Sony about this one.) The only way to improve and buff your reputation is to dive in and participate. Be open. Be generous. Throw stuff out there — your thoughts, your ideas, your personality. Trust comes from transparency.

Here are a few thoughts. In general, transparency is a powerful, revelatory thing. When I was working at a newspaper, I was bewildered by the peculiar customs surrounding corrections.

Both George Will and Frank Rich (the latter alas, behind the TimesSelect wall) – among the preeminent pundits on the right and the left in America – have treated us to their ruminations on the Internet in the past week, specifically the Time cover story naming “you” the magazine’s Person of the Year.

It’s always easy to mock a newsmagazine for yet another goofy trend story, and Time’s is exactly that. But in this case each pundit seizes on the story as an example of social ills that simply don’t exist.

Rich’s message is that we’re retreating into navel-gazing in the virtual world to escape, like the president, from the harsh reality of Iraq:

As of Friday morning, “Britney Spears Nude on Beach” had been viewed 1,041,776 times by YouTube’s visitors. The count for YouTube video clips tagged with “Iraq” was 22,783. Not that there is anything wrong with that. But compulsive blogging and free soft-core porn are not, as Time would have it, indications of how much you, I and that glassy-eyed teenage boy hiding in his bedroom are in control of the Information Age. They are indicators instead of how eager we are to flee from brutal real-world information that makes us depressed and angry. This was the year Americans escaped as often as they could into their private pleasure pods. So the Person of 2006 was indeed you — yes, you.

First of all, Rich shows just how clueless he (or his assistant) is about YouTube. This appears to be the clip he is referencing. It’s a joke – on people who skim YouTube looking for this type of thing.

I’m going to veer off from open source journalism for a minute to focus on the MSM.

There is a more than a hint of ridiculousness in the media’s handling of President Bush’s pronouncements on the war this week. Media conventions – anything the president says is news, and any incremental rhetorical changes by this particular president are really big news – are simply inadequate to the task of rendering what is actually happening.

Tuesday, the president gave an interview to three reporters in the Washington Post in which he admitted for the first time that “we’re not winning” the Iraq war (he also said, “we’re not losing”). The Post devoted major space to the fruit of this 25-minute interview, doing two new stories, an analysis, and publishing a complete transcript over two full pages in the printed edition. That also included a bunch of photos, three of the president sitting in a chair in the Oval Office, appearing to be enjoying himself mixing it up with the press, and a third of the him greeting the three reporters (not available online).

My first reaction was, come on – you’ve got to be kidding.