Let the ideas come

I think there is a synergy going on among journalists across the country. No sooner had I thought about iTunes type downloads. Then it occurs to me that the Net could be a base for tapping the slice of society, and it is a big slice, that still loves newsPAPERS.

Try this out

Go to Yahoo! and enter the name of a city -- any city -- into the search box without hitting return. Picking at random I entered Alamogordo. The first suggestion offered by "search assist" is Alamogordo Daily News. That suggestion is followed by nm, new mexico, county and high school. I tried this pulling various and sundry city names out of my head. Invariably, the newspaper was in the top 5. Actually, the only city that didn't suggest a newspaper is Brunswick.
Paul Gillin tells of a Boston Globe online group meeting in which it was asked:

Is brand important? Maybe The New York Times brand is, but does the Boston Globe’s brand strike enough of a chord in people’s minds to distinguish its value? Brand may be the only thing newspapers have left in the long run, so that’s a critical question.

This little experiment, if it is, like the Yahoo site claims, based on actual searches, tells me people are looking for newspapers when searching a city.

Self-aggrandizement

One can never be 100 percent sure, but I believe I may have merited a mention in Jeff Jarvis' BuzzMachine. Note the comment that

I am accused by some of dancing on the graves of journalists’ jobs, of being happy that papers are dying.

That accusation may have been leveled elsewhere, which would underscore may impression of Jarvis. He, of course, denies the fact. But what he does admit is blaming journalists alongside business managers for the newspaper depression.

If I have an emotion associated with newspapers’ fall - and I’m not sure I do - it’s anger and disappointment at what Shafer describes as papers’ failure to think past a world seen in their own image, to bring news into the future and give it adequate stewardship.

Mr. Jarvis writes as if resistance to turning a newspaper into just another silly blog is ego. It's not ego, it's principle. It's what we were taught for decades in journalism schools. Those principles may no longer be profitable, but they are no less valuable. By his own standard, why is he using the term "adequate stewardship?" The Net, by it's nature, has no individual, only a collective stewardship. And the blogosphere, for all its popularity, is neither a place where much real journalism nor much profit goes on. Lots of news Web sites are popular, but not many of them, not even, as far as I can tell, HuffingtonPost, make money.