Robert LaHue

Maybe it’s because I’m still only five years removed from my Chico State days (and the hangovers that came with it), but I have a big spot in my heart for college journalism.

Inside that big spot, a significant chunk holds itself firm against attempts by colleges to stifle and censor their campus newspapers. This probably has to do with the fact that I was a senior when the Hosty v. Carter case was at its most active. I was representing Chico at the Society of Professional Journalists national convention that year, and virtually every student journalist there was pretty worried about that.

So, when a situation comes down like what is going on at Southwestern College in Chula Vista, I’m paying attention.

This story from the San Diego Union-Tribune gives a rundown of what’s going on. Basically, the college administration claims the paper cannot print again until they adhere to a policy that went unenforced for two decades. Conveniently, this policy is enforced right before a particularly contentious board of trustees election and the paper has no chance to get it’s printing contract approved before the election.

OK, so this technically isn’t a First Amendment violation. Saying, “You can’t print because we don’t like you” is a violation. But saying “We aren’t saying you can’t print, but we’re going to suddenly drag up an old policy we’ve never bothered to enforce in 20 years and spring it on you in order to keep you from printing, which is the primary way your message gets out, and by the way, we really don’t like you” isn’t.

There’s the letter of the law, and there’s a spirit of it, and the second one is being violated big-time here.

There’s not much doubt that the college’s trustees don’t have a lot of love for the paper. Look at this interview with a trustee:

Student journalists have been too negative, Roesch said.

“Scores of negative articles in the Southwestern Sun has stripped the paper of the dignity it once possessed and we want to restore the confidence in the quality of education,” she said. “The quality of the newspaper is indicating the need for better direction from the editors and staff. They have a responsibility to put the college first. The writing needs to be more professional. If they feel they have to write something negative, let them do it with respect.”

Translation: Don’t be a newspaper, be a cheerleader. This attitude infuriates me so much. Be negative with respect? How oxymoronic can you get? They don’t have to be respectful or positive if they don’t want to, because THEY DON’T WORK FOR YOU.

Not to mention, this is far from hack journalism going on at Southwestern. The Sun has won National Pacemaker Awards (college journalism’s equivalent to the Pulitzer) in 2003, 2005, 2006, 2008 and 2009. If anything, this says The Sun better now than ever.

Staff is fund raising to print an edition independent of the college. But, having taken a look around, I think something else the Sun needs to do is ramp up it’s online presence, big time. Not only does it give a giant middle finger to the administration and board (which is badly needed here), but it better prepares Sun staffers for what’s happening in the professional field. Here’s a few things they can do to start:

Website: The Sun actually has a very nice website. Now it’s time to use it more, and start using tactics to drive traffic to it. Put the link on all the now-empty newspaper racks. Obtain a QR code, get it printed onto stickers, and put them up around and near campus guerilla-style to give people quick access to the site with smartphones. Put up something new every single day.

Facebook: The Sun has a Facebook page, but there’s only been one brief statement put up since this whole hullabaloo started. Facebook is great for quick updates. Beg more people to follow it, and then start posting more items on it so people have something to follow. Link to the stories other media are doing on the situation.

Twitter: There’s been some stuff on Twitter, but they can do more. Link out to other stories. Make sure the Tweets say what the updates on the situation are, don’t just say “update on the situation”

Solicit money: If there’s not a PayPal of some kind set up for people to donate money toward the printing of the paper, for crying out loud, get one going!

Make a phone call: to State Sen. Leland Yee’s office, if it hasn’t happened already. He has a history of being aggressive in defending student journalist’s rights.

I’ll conclude with a story: Two years ago, I went back to Chico to give a critique of The Orion to the staff. Didn’t get much time to chat with my old adviser, Dave Waddell, because he was busy giving a tour of the university and the journalism department to a group of JC journalists. After my critique, I ran into some of that group down by the Bell Memorial Union. I was blown away by the kind of enthusiasm they had for the craft.

That group of JC journalists was from Southwestern College. So maybe I want to see them win not just to fight censorship, but because I kind of liked that enthusiasm that’s missing so much in the pro field.

The California Newspaper Publishers Association is featuring my blog post “Journalism: Less job, more action” in the Fall edition of their newsletter, California Publisher.

You can view it online here, on page 4.

My thanks to Joe Wirt at CNPA for the opportunity to be published in the Publisher.

There’s a lesson when a local news story from your community newspaper becomes more popular on the website of a different community newspaper than your own.

Here’s what has happened: Two days ago my newspaper, the Appeal-Democrat in Marysville, ran this story on a fatal car accident.

I was doing rounds on various Nor-Cal newspapers, when I noticed that this story, just after 2 p.m. on Sept. 9, was actually the second most viewed story on the website of the Chico Enterprise-Record, but the fifth most viewed story on our site.

In other words: News local to us wound up more popular in another community 45 miles away.

How? Here’s a few theories:

1) Chico is currently Dean Singleton’s test gerbil: The E-R is owned by MediaNewsGroup. It’s also one of two newspapers (along with the paper in York, Pa.) that drew short straw were chosen by MNG to be the test sites for a paywall system. This setup also brought with it a redesign that prominently features headlines of stories from other papers in northeastern California, including the Appeal-Democrat. I say “headlines” instead of “links” because if you click on one of those headlines, you’re taken to a ChicoER.com landing page that gives you the first paragraph of the story, then you get the link to take you to the actual story on the other paper’s website. Also called “Dirty Little Pageview Spiking Trick #17″

But is it the paywall that made our story so popular? I’m not so sure. That was only one of two non-Chico stories in the Top 10 most viewed at that point, and as far as paywalls go, Chico’s is far less restrictive to the casual reader than, say, Stockton’s (which I talked about a couple months ago)

2) Morbidity knows no city limits: It’s simple, in Internet news, people like death and crime. Fatal car accidents are guaranteed traffic drivers. Maybe it doesn’t matter where the fatal is.

However, if I had to pick a reason, I’d go with this:

3) Abstract headlines rocking it: Our headline didn’t give anything about the exact location of the accident. It just says “Driver killed after flipping truck into rice field.” When Chico took the story for their site, they didn’t adjust the headline. Chico is in Butte County, which like all the counties we cover has a decent amount of rice fields. Quite honestly, people casually scanning the E-R’s website could look at the story and assume it was talking about a fatal accident in their community, not ours.

So, what’s the lesson here? Paywalls stink? Gratuitously link destruction? If you’re re-purposing other’s copy, don’t be afraid to tinker with the headline? A combination of the above?

Let me know what you think.

A couple of months ago, I had a great “original” idea. Newspapers should develop mobile apps that would allow people to scan barcodes and QR codes with their smartphones at local shops. Those codes would earn the user points, which could be redeemed for cash, special offers, etc. Newspaper sales staff would manage these barcodes, thus developing a new source of ad sales revenue.

As is the case with many of my “original” ideas, somebody thought of it well before I did and is doing it even better than I imagined.

So kudos to Shopkick, a new startup with millions in venture capital that takes a “reward customers actually in the store” concept to a whole new level of fun, convenience and effectiveness.

In short, Shopkick uses a in-store device to work with a smartphone app that allows people to earn points and special offers by simply walking into a store. TechCrunch has a solid video from a demonstration of the app by Shopkick at a Best Buy in the Bay Area on Aug. 3 showing just how the app would work.

I think the Shopkick concept has great potential (so long as there’s a seat at the table for us Android users in the future in addition to the iPhone). And I think, in order to maximize their potential, the sales staffs at local media outlets could (and should) become their best allies.

This New York Times piece gives detail on Shopkick’s revenue model. If I had to translate it with alphabet soup, it’s an IRL CPC system. For every person that comes into a store and utilizes Shopkick, that store pays Shopkick a set amount of money.

Right now, Shopkick has agreements with some national retailers like Best Buy and Macy’s and shopping mall operator Simon Property Group. But as the company grows, Shopkick will want to drill down into more and more communities, and possibly work with local non-chain stores in addition to national retailers.

Does it make sense to develop their own sales staffs for this program, or would it be better to outsource the heavy lifting on the sales side to an already-established sales staff for a rev share? Like say, at a newspaper? Or television station? Or a web-based organization like TBD.com in D.C. (Shopkick’s not there yet), where you could even possibly develop more special features through cross-app promotion?

Plus, by having the sales staff at news orgs, which are already getting plenty of experience dealing with third-party vendor involvement with ad sales, deal with the sales and customer relations end of things, Shopkick could devote more of its resources to continually improving the technology involved. Thus, the app gets that much better, more people and stores use it, and the more everybody makes.

I think it would be a win-win.

Talking about the relationship between Google and newspapers is hardly an original topic. The Google-newspaper discussion tends to fall into two distinct categories.

Category 1: A shouting match between old printies screaming how Google’s aggregation is destroying the bottom line as they clutch their Underwoods while Google folks say, “No, no, we want to help you” while writing code for world domination.

Category 2: Random people offering their thoughts on how Google should go about helping newspapers transform their business model since they claim they want to do exactly that.

This post will solidly fit into Category 2. But I bring it up because I feel my suggestion covers something that has been under-discussed in the conversations of newspapers developing digital revenue. In fact, what I’m talking about is the situation where I, Mr. No Paywall of Northern California himself, would support newspaper content only being available for a cost, but doing so would require the help of a large, technologically adept, media-gathering organization like Google.

For the sake of creativity, we’ll call my idea Project LeadType. It would simply be the largest, most user-friendly news archive system the planet has ever seen.

My theory here is based on one primary belief: The content printed on a news page is an appreciating asset. There’s some value in fresh news, but there’s limitations on it. That’s why it makes sense to make it available for free or near-free to the public and get revenue through advertising.

But older news is tougher to obtain reliably. The older the news, the harder it is to find. Newspapers are a reliable source for historical information, giving them a special value. Really, even more value than when that content was fresh. It’s like wine, getting better and more valuable with age.

Newspapers have robust archives in print and microfilm, either on their sites or, in many cases, local libraries. But their online archives, in comparison, are relatively small. This is where Google comes in.

Google is currently undertaking the Google Books project, which scans book pages, then uses OCR software to allow text searching.

So, the plan is simple: Google uses their resources to scan historical newspaper archives. Large papers, small papers, everything in-between, use this to create a massive online database that is paywalled at a reasonable price, and share that revenue with the publications being searched. There would be options for searching specific publications at a lower cost, or a larger rate that would allow searching across all publications Google has helped archive.

This is being done already though, right? Yes, some larger newspapers have already developed what I’m suggesting, through a company called ProQuest. For example, with ProQuest, the Los Angeles Times has an online archive going back to the 1880s. But there’s three serious flaws with ProQuest’s current system.

First, there’s not enough publications involved. Anything besides a large city metro and you’re screwed. Google is in a better position to drill down to smaller papers in a community.

Second, it’s too expensive to access. One day of access to the Los Angeles Times, with the ability to print off four articles, costs $10.95. Printing off a single article is $3.95. That would drive away a casual viewer. There’s no reason somebody should have to pay $11 for one day of searching an online archive. Google’s skills in this regard would help drive the price down, making it more appealing for the casual researcher.

Third, ProQuest’s search system is too academic in feel. Using it makes me feel like I’m in LexisNexis or Pacer. A search on Google Books feels much more comfortable and laid-back. There’s an appeal in that.

Simply put, Google can do what ProQuest is doing, but better.

Is this the ultimate solution? No. A robust Google-built archive will not provide all the money a digital journalism business would need. But I think, at minimum, it could drive off the need for paywalling fresh content, meaning whatever other monetizing efforts a publication undertakes would be that much more effective. Plus, it would also fill a community need for customers in having an affordable, easily accessible historical archive. The simpler something is made to use, the more likely people will use it.

That’s my contribution to the Google talk. Where’s the wine list?