Why Schultz is Wrong About Anonymous Comments

Anonymous comments are dangerous, Connie Schultz wrote yesterday on Cleveland.com. They lead to poison and vitriol.

Plus, she said: "Anonymity on the Web offends most journalists I know, and not just because their own names go on everything they write. It breaks every rule newspapers have enforced for decades in letters to the editor, which require not only a name and a city of residence, but contact information to confirm authorship."

Schultz's preferred prescription: Get rid of anonymity and require commenters to identify themselves.

But she's wrong. This is just another example of the kind of faulty thinking that gets in the way of newspapers' ability to move successfully into the new digital era. Two reasons:

• It fails to recognize that the online world is a world of its own--one that is much bigger than just news organizations. News organizations that try to force that wider online world to behave according to its preferred standards are going to fail. Successful organizations are the ones that try to learn the local ways and adapt themselves accordingly.

• Those who take the time to do this--to understand the local ways--quickly realize that it's not anonymity that leads to uncivil discourse in forums. It's poor moderation. The way you encourage civil behavior in online communities is to have clear rules of the road and then to enforce them. Online community experts have known this for well over a decade.

So today's takeaway: The key to helping news organizations survive and thrive in the digital world is not to try to make that world conform to newspapers' ways of doing things. Instead, the key is to understand the digital world and its ways of doing things--and then to use those insights to help you accomplish your goals.

Photo courtesy of: gregmote. Creative Commons License

Pulitzers measure nothing about a newspaper's viability

An investor at last week's New York Times annual meeting complained that the Times seemed to have plenty of money to send reporters all over the world but couldn't manage adequate coverage of the city's five boroughs. "Send these people to Brooklyn! Send these people to the Bronx!” he reportedly said. “You will increase circulation."

Times Co. chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. response? That the Times had just won a Pulitzer for local reporting. Yes, well, here's the problem: Pulitzers are handed out by other journalists, based on how much those other journalists like specific stories. They have nothing to do with whether a newspaper is delivering a product that is valued by its customers.

This is important to remember. As news organizations look forward, they need to forget about using prizes as a metric of their future viability. The only metrics that matter are circulation--and whether those numbers are going up or down.

Photo courtesy of terren in Virginia. Creative Commons license.

Newspapers are over, but news is not

The Chicago Tribune is going into bankruptcy. Detroit papers are reportedly considering limiting home delivery. The Cincinnati Enquirer is the latest to announce layoffs.

For the last few years, journalists have protested that, all signs to the contrary, newspapers are so essential there's no way they could disappear. But there is no other way to interpret the above events, except that newspapers are disappearing.

Don't believe me? Pull out a piece of paper. Plot these latest developments on a graph. Then plot all the other recent developments in the newspaper industry: declining readership, plummeting revenue, layoffs. Plot a trend line. And now ask yourself: Where is the arrow headed? It's not ambiguous. The end point is the disappearance of newspapers.

But this is not cause for despair. The disappearance of newspapers is not the same thing as the end of news.

This is a difficult point to grasp, if you are one of the folks who believe that newspapers and the news are the same thing. But they're not, no more so than "horse and buggy" is the same thing as "transportation." Newspapers are merely one kind of delivery vehicle for news. The news will continue, even if this particular delivery vehicle disappears.

"Really?" you ask. "If you're right, show us the new vehicles, the 'motor cars' that will replace the 'horse and buggy' newspapers."

Ah, yes. Well that's the thing. The new vehicles haven't been invented yet.

Sure, there are a bunch of experiments out there. Voice of San Diego. spot.us. outside.in. Some people look at them and mistakenly believe that, because they are the only alternatives out there, they by definition constitute the future forms. They look at those incarnations, see all the ways in which they fall short of what newspapers provided, and conclude that their position is correct: Newspapers are so essential they cannot fail, because only they can provide the public services so essential to a democracy.

But this is faulty thinking.

To look at Voice of San Diego et al and believe they are the final forms is to misunderstand how innovation happens. You don't go from one fully designed form to another. Rather, as you evolve from one to the other, you go through a series of iterations, a series of experiments, a series of throwing stuff up against the wall and seeing what sticks. From those series of experiments, from those series of learnings, you eventually develop the final forms.

Anyone who has worked in Silicon Valley understands this. Very few of the ideas we had about how to use the Internet back in the 1990s--and the websites and businesses we developed based on those notions--still exist today. (Pets.com, anyone? Space.com? ExciteAtHome?)

But every website that does exist today is a descendent of those experiments. Every website, every contemporary use of the Internet is built on the learnings of those prior experiments.

And so it will happen in the news business. The new forms won't appear before newspapers die completely. (I actually believe it will take 20 years before the new forms are fully baked.) But the new forms will appear, eventually.

Again, it's experience in a place like Silicon Valley that gives one that certitude. New forms always emerge to satisfy needs. And there is a desire for news. Just not in the form that it's currently being delivered. People once liked and found value in the newspaper delivery vehicle. Just as they once liked horses and buggies. But no more. The old delivery vehicle no longer meets readers' needs and expectations. Which is why they are abandoning the form, even as the need persists. And given the persistence of the need, entrepreneurs and other problem-solving types will continue tinkering with forms until they figure out the new ones.

And that's why there's no need to worry. Newspapers are dying. But the news will survive. Just not immediately. And definitely not in any form we are used to seeing.

Photo courtesy of mrpattersonsir. Creative Commons license.