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If you, newspaper publishers, wouldn’t sell ad-space above your masthead in your print edition, why on earth would you do it on your website?

I’m looking at you, Washington Post and Economist.

For some time now, I’ve been contemplating starting a new website. Unlike this site, which is my all-purpose soapbox, this new site would be more focused in its scope. That would not only allow me to create a more focused forum, but it would give me the opportunity to practice other skills, such as marketing and promotion.

My first instinct is to write about law and technology issues. After all, this is where I have the most training and experience. I also enjoy researching and writing about both. Of course, I also need to figure out who my audience will or should be. Do I want to appeal to technology geeks, law geeks, the general public, or some mix thereof?

One of the aims for the new site would be a more “professional” style and appearance, whatever that may mean. What sort of standards would I need to follow? Should I try to create something on par with a traditional media outlet, or should aim for a more “blog” like approach, preferring breadth to depth? Should I try to engage in original journalism, such as attending court or regulatory hearings? Do I simply take the Huffington Post route and copy/paste content from other sources?

What about issues of cross posting? Do I share content on both sites, or do I link between the two? How do I address issues of intellectual property? Do I want to try and have multiple contributors? Do I really think this site could become a serious media outlet, or would I be better served creating a site for my own amusement, like my current website.

These are early issues I am trying to work through. If any of my readers has any useful suggestions, I am open to your wisdom.

Newspapers are in trouble, so report the newspapers. So does network television, also facing new challenges from both cable television and the internet. This week, NPR’s On the Media posed the question on how to save newspapers. They played excerpts from a recent Senate commerce committee hearing on the future of journalism. After pointing fingers at one another, with Google News and the Huffington Post on one side and greedy media conglomerations on the other, the consensus seemed to be that the newspapers in particular and “old media” in general needs special help to survive.

Of course, there is an inherent conflict of interest in the media debating the virtues of the media. Journalism is a profession and a business, with its own history, customs and practices. Like all businesses, it has little interest in seeing reform or change come to its time-honored traditions. Unfortunately for the Fourth Estate, the barbarians of new media are at the gate and reform is coming to the industry, whether or not it is welcome.

The media like to use “bloggers” as a straw man to attack when discussing the woes of the current state of journalism. These ambiguous, amorphous figures sit behind laptops and anonymity, publishing the first rumor and hearsay to reach their inbox. Bloggers, according to the media, have no respect for journalistic practices and do not know how to write a story. One key question seems to go unanswered in this discussion — what is the difference between a journalist and a blogger?

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This is part one of a multi-part commentary on the next generation of internet communications. In this article, I will be exploring the problem of the “walled garden” and closed communications systems.

Twitter. Facebook. MySpace. What do all these systems have in common? They all use isolated, closed servers.

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I opened my browser today to get a check of the headlines from the Washington Post, using their “mywashingtonpost.com” custom portal. I was quite disappointed at the message I received today:

Thank you for being a loyal reader of washingtonpost.com and a user of our customized mywashingtonpost.com page. Over the years, washingtonpost.com has developed new technology and methods to customize the delivery of our news, features, multimedia and more. As a result, we will be discontinuing mywashingtonpost.com as of February 23, 2009.

[Links omitted]

Thank you for your understanding as we offer more ways to get you the washingtonpost.com content you want quickly and easily.

Sincerely,

David Heyman
Director, Customer Care

Anyone who had accessed the site in the last several months would have guessed this was coming. The articles on the site were often stale or out of date. The weather widget never reported accurate information. In fact, the site never really developed after its initial launch. The feature I enjoyed most was that mywashingtonpost.com allowed me to strip down the sections to what I wanted most: international, metro, politics, and technology.

As newspapers have struggled to cope with the new era of instant information, a number of different models have come and gone. The NY Times, for example, tried to charge a subscription fee to accesses much of the site’s content. This model, of course, doesn’t work with casual observers, but it was worth a try.

There is a real danger, in my opinion, of the WP’s lack of innovation will only hurt its position on the internet. As news aggregator sites and other third-party sites continue to pull headlines, the relevancy of visiting the WP’s site is becoming more and more diminished.

I will, however, miss mywashingtonpost.com. In fact, I’m not sure how I’ll access the Post’s information in the future. While I have a number of RSS feeds in my aggregator already. I deplore the main page layout — it’s too overrun with adverts, cluttered and poorly organized, and focuses too much on “fluff.” I especially hate the WP’s overuse of poorly written, browser slowing javascript. And don’t get me started on “autorefresh.”

Of course, I may just be complaining unnecessarily. I haven’t spent much time on the WP’s main page. I could very well adapt to using the site in this way, or give the RSS another try, or some combination of the two.

A painfully funny commentary about McCain supporters.

I love that Sarah Palin not only cannot backup her foreign policy experience with Russia. It shows a level of evasiveness we haven’t seen in politics in a long, long time. Commentators have tried to call her out on this, late-night humorists have mocked her. Now, she has gained a new enemy: Russia.

Turns out, the Russians aren’t buying this claim, either. They are attacking not only this claim, but her entire qualifications to serve in office. One outlet has even dubbed her “Mrs. Nobody Know-it-All”.

If she thinks the NY Times hates her, wait until she feels the wrath of media outlets who could care less about winning her approval. She’s losing credibility at home; abroad, it seems, it’s already gone.

[From SAIS Next Europe: PostGlobal on washingtonpost.com]