This may come across as tooting my own horn, but to heck with it.  If you’ve been reading this blog for a while (there may be two of you…Celeste and Mom) you know that I was a tad bewildered by the lack of attention the main stream media was giving the story that has now become "The Downing Street Memo Affair."

I first heard/blogged about the whole Downing Street thing on May 9, 2005 after reading on RawStory.com about 88 Congressmen who signed a letter asking the president to react to the London Times story of May 2, 2005 that started the whole thing.  At the time I didn’t find it too odd that I’d found the story from an online source, and I figured I’d read about it in the paper in the following days.

On May 12 I posted about it again wondering why no major outlet in the US, except for a brief headline on CNN.com had carried the story.  Granted the story had a UK genesis, but once the members of Congress sent the letter shouldn’t it have become at least mildly interesting to the press?

Now Jay Rosen at PressThink has put together a great piece that outlines how the non-starter of a story in the US became so big six weeks later.  The time-line of events, and the comments from editors who missed the story the first time, and regretted it, are interesting in and of themselves.  What’s more interesting to me is Jay’s hypothesis that unlike the old days there is now a "Court of Appeals" in news judgement.

As Jay points out, in the old days this story probably would have died.  But because of the noise that was generated online, some by bloggers and some by emails to the editors from pissed off citizens, the story wasn’t allowed to die (apparently it is still in the top 10 stories on the London Times site).  The media was forced to re-examine the story and eventually it picked up some steam.

Frankly I’m still shocked that this story was missed at all.  Some people are retrospectively saying it really wasn’t a story because the memos only confirmed what we already knew (the Bush administration had declared war on terror, they believed that Saddam Hussein was harboring terrorists and might give them WMDs, etc.).  I’m gonna call bullshit on that one.

What made the memo so stunning is that it points out that the administration, with the help of Blair’s boys, needed to "create" conditions to justify the war. It also made clear that in April, 2002 the Bush administration had secured Blair’s support for an invasion. That was a year before the start of the war and during a time when the Bush and Blair folks were all denying that war was afoot.  That’s what led to the Congressmen’s letter to the President, which asked these questions:

• Did you or anyone in your Administration obtain Britain’s commitment to invade prior to this time?
• Was there an effort to create an ultimatum about weapons inspectors in order to help with
  the justification for the war as the minutes indicate?
• At what point in time did you and Prime Minister Blair first agree it was necessary to
  invade Iraq?
• Was there a coordinated effort with the U.S. intelligence community and/or British
  officials to “fix” the intelligence and facts around the policy as the leaked document
  states?
• Do you or anyone in your Administration dispute the accuracy of the leaked document?
• Were arrangements being made, including the recruitment of allies, before you sought
  Congressional authorization go to war?

Now the memo COULD be hooey, although no one that attended the meeting from which the memo emerged has denied its accuracy.  For our purposes here it doesn’t matter whether or not it’s true.  What matters is that there was a damning document from a very important source that led to dozens of Congressmen to publicly calling out the President. That alone made it a story and the media certainly missed it.

Gannett had some positive things to say about their online ventures at the newspaper association’s mid-year review.  Click here to see a webcast of their review here (good until June 29, 2005).

Some of the numbers: Online and non-daily products are critical for our future… The
current annual online ad revenue run rate of $200 million dollars for
this year..this revenue is from domestic websites. Last month, online
advertising accounted for 6 percent of total revenues.

Why am I interested?  I have family that works there, although he probably doesn’t want to admit relations!  Hey bro.

In my previous post I talked about how broadcasters are as vulnerable as newspapers to the threat of the evolving online media. I also said that I thought that newspapers posed an imminent threat to local news broadcasters because "Newspapers have the reporters and the editors, they just need to add
some audio-video production staff and some decent video editing
software and they’re good to go." With this post I’d like to expand on this point a little more.

As you probably know most newspapers and broadcast outlets are owned by large media conglomerates.  Think Tribune Company, Knight-Ridder and Gannett.

For regulatory reasons (in the US at least) media companies could not own a
TV station and newspaper in the same major metropolitan market.  Now, with some decent software and a digital video production staff you could have the newspaper property of one media company going
head-to-head with the news operation of a local TV station owned by a
rival media company.  You could argue that since the newspaper wouldn’t
be broadcasting, per se, that it’s an apples-oranges thing.  But if you look down the road to what media consumption will probably look like in five or ten years you can see that it’s more of a tangelo thing (tangelos are hybrids of grapefruits and tangerines).

Right now most of us consume our media in ways that are markedly different from 15 years ago (see my previous post for an example), and our consumption will change again over the next 5-10 years.  Right now we still watch TV, browse our computer and thumb through a newspaper. 

Soon our homes will be networked and we’ll have some sort of server type computer that manages the intake of media (audio, video, text, phone calls) and distributes them to a variety of devices.  We’ll probably have flat screens for viewing, wireless devices (probably something that looks like the Sony PSP with a stylus for writing) for interacting with the computer and then a device like a Blackberry or Treo to take our stuff with us.  Essentially all of our media will be a data feed.

Do I think all printed materials will go away?  No way.  For one most of us will never read something the length of a book on a screen, but as the hardware for PDA type things get better, and wireless networks become ubiqiuitous you’ll see less need for newsstands or TVs in airport terminals.  We’ll be able to get our news, video and audio on our devices.

To take a current example look at Gannett.  Right now I read one of its newspapers (USA Today), sometimes visit its website and watch their TV (local station).  In the near future I expect I’ll consume their content in some sort of blended text/audio/video offering. 

For a report on Congress I can imagine a Gannett reporter writing her story, recording an interview using some digital recording device and then sending the file to a production team that would then imbed links and tags to supporting audio, video or text files and package it for distribution. 

On the consumer’s end I would have subscribed to a syndication feed from Gannett for anything related to Congress.  As soon as they "broadcast" it I’d know about it and could access from that point on.

Back to the newspapers vs. broadcasters issue.  Gannett doesn’t own a newspaper in my local market (Winston-Salem, Greensboro, High Point, NC), but it does own local broadcaster WFMY. Media General and Landmark Communications own the newspapers in the market, but no broadcast stations. Landmark’s paper is the Greensboro News & Record and they are starting an initiative that is putting the power of digital video in the hands of it’s reporters.  How could WFMY not see this as a threat in the near future?

The News & Record is already experimenting with blogs, RSS, and other big changes on the media landscape.  By pushing the envelope with what I’ll call blended media they are positioning themselves to dominate the local media landscape in the future. The reason they’ll dominate is:

• It’s easier and faster for a newspaper to do this than for a broadcaster.  Newspapers have more reporters and editors than broadcasters, and they produce many more stories.  It’s alot easier and cheaper to add digital video production than it is to ramp up editorial capabilities.
• By doing this now the News & Record is training its advertisers and its own sales staff.  It’s familiarizing them with the concept of blended media.  The sales staff has already had to adjust to the print-online mix, and are doing better these days at selling the "package" rather than the pieces.  With the explosion in online advertising and the development of new technology, seemingly every day, the sales staff that best understands the new media landscape will win every time.  (Hint: to sell ad space you really need to be able to explain it as if you’re talking to a two year old. That’s why the sales team that "gets it" first will win.)

But that’s local.  On the national scene I don’t see one company having a particular advantage over another right now.  The same opportunities are open to each, just in different markets.  The advantage will eventually go to the company that is most aggressive in taking the News & Record’s lead and creating a truly blended, "tangelo" media operation.

***Update: Steve Rubel links to an NPR piece about newspapers getting into Podcasting.  The first step?***

We, we being people that think alot about newspapers dying due to the online media revolution defined by blogs and news aggregators and stuff like that, have taken too narrow a view.  We really should be talking about the impact of online media on all traditional news media outlets.

If you look at it from the consumer’s point of view in three different time-frames here’s what you see:

1992 – A Day in the Life of Jon Lowder, News Media Consumer

• 7 a.m.: Watch morning show (probably Today on NBC) while getting dressed.
• 7:30-8:15 a.m.: Listen to drive-time radio, especially for traffic reports.
• 8:15-8:45 a.m.: Read newspaper while eating a bagel at my desk.
• 9:00 a.m. – 5:30 p.m.: Have radio playing softly in the background (especially if boss is out of the office) while diligently typing away in Wordperfect for DOS, and tracking marketing results on my Lotus123 spreadsheet (DOS version of course).
• 5:30 p.m. – 6:15 p.m.: Listen to drive-time radio, especially for traffic reports.
• 7:00 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.: Watch national news broadcast, or CNN.
• 7:30 p.m. – 11:00 p.m.:  Watch prime-time TV, or do chores (other stuff) with TV on in background.
• 11:00 p.m.: Watch local news broadcast.

2000 – A Day in the Life of Jon Lowder, News Media Consumer

• 7 a.m.: Watch morning show (probably Today on NBC) while getting dressed.
• 7:30-8:15 a.m.: Listen to drive-time radio, especially for traffic reports.
   
• 8:15-8:45 a.m.: Check news sites, read email newsletters online while eating a bagel at my desk.
• 9:00 a.m. – 5:30 p.m.: Have favorite alternative music streaming on my PC; regularly check stocks on Yahoo; IM and email buddies while getting some work done and laughing at boss’s memo reminding everyone of the personal phone call policy and the need to limit personal calls for productivity reasons.  (He thinks IM stands for Internal Memo).
• 5:30 p.m. – 6:15 p.m.: Listen to drive-time radio, especially for traffic reports.
• 7:00 p.m. – 11:00 p.m.: Surf web, email, IM, catch up on some work on my laptop while TV is on in background.
• 11:00 p.m.: Watch local news broadcast as I fall asleep (three kids now; can’t usually make it past usual bloody lead story).

2005 – A Day in the Life of Jon Lowder, News Media Consumer

• 7 a.m.: Drag myself to kitchen and make a pot of coffee, get kids ready for school.
• 7:30-8:15 a.m.: If I still commuted would probably listen to satellite radio or plug in my digital player and change over to news broadcast "on the 8s" to check traffic.  I’d also wonder why I don’t have a RSS traffic feed that updates traffic conditions for my route and that I can check with my Treo or Blackberry.
   
• 8:15-5:30: Check RSS feeds.  Start with fun stuff, and work my way to business related feeds.  Update personal blog and then start on business related blogs, which I’m now regularly using to organize my information.  Update my del.icio.us tags.

  While reading the RSS feed from one of my regional newspapers I notice that they’ve posted some audio from a contentious town council meeting last night.  Not sure if local news had it last night at 11:00, but don’t care.  Then I notice that the newspaper is starting to outfit its reporters with digital video cameras and they are teaching themselves how to integrate audio and video into their stories.  Hmmm.

  Make a resolution with myself to figure out the whole Podcasting thing, and find something I like so I can add it to my menu.

  Check my RSS feeds throughout the day. Also visit my "regular" websites CNN (old habits die hard), MyYahoo (check fantasy league stats), Fark (need a good laugh).

• 5:30 p.m. – 6:15 p.m.: See what I would have done for morning drive time.
• 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.: Give my eyes a rest, go to kids’ practices or games.
• 9:00 p.m. – 11:00 p.m.: Watch whatever I’ve Tivo’d.  No news since I can’t imagine much has changed in the last two hours.

Okay, I’ll admit some of the changes in my media consumption habits were due to my lifestyle changes.  But the big picture I’m trying to illustrate is that while we’ve beaten the "newspapers are dying" horse until it’s died twice, we’ve tended to ignore what’s also happening to broadcasters.

First, I’m tickled pink that at least one newspaper is starting to invade the local broadcasters’ territory. (Poetic justice I think).  Because digital videography is becoming cheap and ubiquitous there’s not much of a barrier for someone to come along and take the broadcasters head-on.

Now the online food chain still hasn’t changed much.  Most bloggers do little original story creation or reporting.  They compile facts gleaned from secondary sources (i.e. mainstream media), add their own opinion/spin/analysis and then broadcast it to the online universe through RSS.  While there is plenty of good, original writing, there isn’t much original reporting.

The same is true with video.  Most news video feeds you find online were originated by a mainstream media outlet and then linked to or copied and re-posted by bloggers, independent websites, etc.

What’s happening now is that mainstream media companies have determined that they can’t continue with business as usual.  They’ve also recognized that their competitive advantage is no longer the printing press, or the hugely expensive video production facilities.  Their competitive advantage is their "talent": reporters, producers, editors, etc.

The reporters know how to find a good story, the editors know how to package it and the producers know how to pull it all together and sell it.  What they are trying to figure out how to do is protect their advertising revenue stream. 

Ironically, I think the largest immediate threat for news broadcasters are newspapers.  Newspapers have the reporters and the editors, they just need to add some audio-video production staff and some decent video editing software and they’re good to go.

Just about anyone can set up a digital video production facility these days.  Much more daunting is the task of setting up a viable news gathering and reporting operation.  The newspapers already have the hard part taken care of, now they just need to do the easier part.

I’ll address what I think is going to evolve over the years in my next post.