Seven Answers for Entrepreneurs

Seven Answers

We took Fernando's great idea and turned it around a bit. First, we decided to focus it in the US. Then, we decided that one of our core competencies would be mico-lending rather than promotion or marketing for micro-borrowers. Here are our answers to the seven core questions that we will use to form our first straw man:

1. Who is our target audience (hint: Don't try to be all things to all people)
New Orleans Detroit USA recession-specific - Experience qualifies - Laid-off people getting back on their feet.
Investor community in target cities and in DC area.

2. What is the competitive landscape? (hint: Sites that do it well)

Kiva -
Local investment clubs -
Government investment programs -
http://www.spot.us/ - people make micro donations to support the story ($10 a point).

3. How do we differentiate ourselves? (hint: Secret sauce) -
Focusing in the USA
combined investor pool
Mentor - level - Mentor-level people get a "glow factor" return.
Public micro-loan level
Make stronger relationships between lenders and borrowers and mentor, inspect, advise.
Wikinomics - approach to larger group of mentors.

4. How do we create our site? (hint: Staff and schedule)
Paid staff and volunteer force to build organization.
Put together beginning social network
Phase 1 - 2 - 3. Start with simple but effective site and build up as interest grows.

5. How do we get our content? (hint: Pre-built, manual, automatic, updated)
Investors - advice
Static advice and resources and links
User-generated
Reporting from businesses started
Pull in business stories for our niches

6. How do we market our site? (hint: Spread the word)
Audience to the small niche business stories.
Press coverage
Email marketing - Build lists of site visitors
Social Networking - large group of investors post on S/N email friends, get press,
Other volunteers who have marketing expertise.

7. How do we sustain the site? (hint: Show me the $$$)
Non-profit
Go after donors.
Look for a return. Hopefully look for a 10% annual return on all investments.
Membership fee for entrepreneurs.

Quick pitch - The Newspaper of Tomorrow

The fact that people crave local news, even as local newspapers are dying, offers a tremendous media opportunity. Our Newspaper of Tomorrow business plan teams a few experienced and web-savvy journalists with hundreds of people in a locality who are eager to contribute news - and read news. The professionals train and guide, while the residents contribute and read; providing a user base, a market and a source of content filtered by seasoned editors. The business plan leverages low overhead and cheap Internet delivery with proven digital advertising models and lucrative video advertising and advertorial opportunities, along with a premium subscription model that is topped with a weekly magazine.

How to build local community around content

Developing community around content is, in many ways, similar to geting people into a group conversation physically. They have to be enticed in, feel comfortable to open up, find listeners, and share. Then as others find the conversation lively and helpful, they join in, even if only as listeners. I have been involved in a number of online communities that were successful in doing this.

I will focus on the work done at the Capital newspaper in Annapolis, where I served as Internet Director. www.hometownannapolis.com

One of our major goals when I started at the paper (March of 2006) was to transform a rather stale, 'shovel-ware' presentation of the exact print copy of the day's paper into a living, breathing local community site.

Here are some of the things we did first:

We built on the community events calendar, which was a web-only thing anyway (ran parallel with the community calendars in print but we had another editor and ours was, frankly, more usable). We expanded it, and,most importantly, databased it so it would be search-able with many filtering possibilities. It was already very comprehensive, because our editor had many contacts and good "stuff" but we made it even more colorful and useful. We also made the database available to other sections of our site, so that subsets of the calendar (like kids events) could be reiterated in a live callout box on the childrens' page etc.).

You can see the present version of it here. Be sure and click the show / hide details to see the real goods. It was wildly popular and remains so today. Since then it has been integrated with the newsroom and feeds the print as well, and has the added resources of the traditional calendar reporters feeding it.

Another thing we did quickly was add commenting to our stories and set up local rules to get the right people into the commenting structure. Once we opened that up we (again through database magic) made it possible for viewers to chase down different subsets of comments made by local people. A good example of that is the global "Your Say" page which shows the most recent comments (a live feed) anywhere on the site. It is also very popular.

Comments per story are, of course, mainly attached to the story they are posted on, but the extra ways to find them allows local people to follow the greater 'conversation' of their fellow citizens about whatever.

It took us a while to get blogging going (a sportswriter and I were the first bloggers) but once it got going, the staff did a great job of getting the community very active in the process. Annapolis has many very passionate and articulate citizen writers and they shine on the site. It also adds a lot of the true Annapolis 'flavor' to the news and features coming over from the paper.

Here is the current blogging home, which shows the different ways to see what is going on in the blogging dialogue.

Part of the process of getting this started was in educating the community that we wanted them in the conversation. Once they heard that, they responded well.

Here are some posts I wrote in my blog at the time to encourage the process:

• The Voices of Annapolis
• Annapolis 2.0

These are just a couple of the several dozen major strategies we implemented between 2006 and 2008 (when I left the paper). They went a long way to help form an entirely new community platform that combines a dynamic physical community with a vibrant and developing online one.

Concise Elevator Pitch for The Newspaper of the Future.:

Here is a concise elevator pitch for the media business plan outlined below:

It has 14 elements, but listed in 15 bullets. That is because many buildings which have elevators have no 13th floor.

So think of the elevator pitch this way - one bullet per floor. It is a moderately slow elevator, so there is time for about 30 characters per.

In the bullets I also address the points brought up in reviewers' comments.

• Lobby - Meet the Local Newspaper of tomorrow.
• Floor 1: - Aggregated and original news from 100's of citizens in area.
• Floor 2: - Led / trained by small team of trained journalist - mentors.
• Floor 3: - More than "local forum" - has pointed editorial voice.
• Floor 4: - Optimized for local breaking news, mobile video, real-time chatter.
• Floor 5: - Digital media rich - social networking-style posting
• Floor 6: - Advertisers part of "the conversation" - reviewable and responsive.
• Floor 7: - Advertorial copy part of the story - but clearly framed as such.
• Floor 8: - Sponsorship by institutions and companies attractive and rewarding.
• Floor 9: - Print summary published as local magazine following digital
• Floor 10: - Print delivery, premium features and recognition to paid subscribers.
• Floor 11: - Start with (or buy) existing local social networking site(s).
• Floor 12: - Develop with minimal investment, a few select "pros" and passionate amateurs.
• Floor 13: - Does not exist.
• Floor 14: - Expand to regional platform but keep each local site intensely local.
• Observation deck.
  

Small town newspaper of the future

Preamble: How we got here

I believe in newspapers.

I grew up in a family that subscribed to 3 of them each day. All were dailies - one morning newspaper and two afternoon papers. Our hometown paper was The Oak Ridger, owned by an irascible local journalist-businessman and very edgy. People loved it, hated it, blessed it and cursed it.

Only one of them, The Knoxville News Sentinel ( a Scripps-Howard newspaper at the time) had a Sunday paper. I loved reading all of them, from a very early age. It was one of my real windows on the world - especially the local world in which I lived and operated during those tender years.

The area now has two daily papers. The Sentinel is a shadow of its former self. It became milquetoast about 20 years ago. The same happened with the Oak Ridger. When the journalist-publisher who owned it sold it to a consortium in the early 80's, the locals started calling it 'The Mediocre Ridger'. It also got called 'The USA Today of our valley' - (not a compliment) - with apologies to any Georgetown professors some might know.

The Knoxville Journal, loved by many, died in the mid-80's. It was by far the best source of really discerning thinking on state, local and even national government issues. I knew one of the reporters. During some state issues of importance, he would literally go to Nashville and live there for weeks on end and write fascinating daily posts. A Vanderbilt graduate, he wrote with a unique Tennessee-homegrown-intellectual style that was winsome, engaging and still piercing. When you finished reading, you understood.

The Journal was killed by The Sentinel, and by the growth of a generation that didn't put as much stock in the kind of writing that Bob did.

When I visit family there now, the only reason I pick up one of the skinny, onion-skinned papers is if I am there during Thanksgiving. I want to see the 'Black Friday' deals and see if it is worth getting up at 4 AM to snag a real deal. The real local journalism I loved died during the late 80's and early 90's.

When I finally got to work for a paper, The Capital in Annapolis, I found some of the elements I had missed from the papers of my youth. I attributed a number of these to the same quality of journalism (and character) that I remembered from those days.

One of my most admired writers among those at The Capital made a statement that really gave me pause: "The saddest thing about local papers dying is the fact that in small towns all across America people have lost their way of seeing what others are doing."

The wisdom of that statement struck me with the force of a tornado. That was what I had seen die 20 years earlier. The ability to "see" locally. 'News' was there, but the seeing eye was different.

That was it.

Even if the paper continued, it continued with a sort of journalistic glaucoma. And, for many localities, there was total blindness. A half-page section in a semi-nearby metro did not cut it. Might as well turn out the lights.

Fast forward to 2009.

Breaking News!
NEWSPAPERS ARE DYING

Yawn... They died in the 80's.

I had already started getting my news online by the 90's.

Proposal: The newspaper of the future.

• Create a platform where local news and happenings can be displayed, searched, edited, rated, commented on and spread with vigor.
  
• Make it an open-ended, real-time digital communications platform using all sorts of input - video uploads from cellphones, citizen Twitter posts, FaceBook scrapes, fax machine scans, carrier pigeon-note scans - whatever. Bring back the meaning of the word "post."
  
• Get locally-involved and locally passionate people writing about local 'things'. Pay some, accept all. Allow them to network with each other on the platform.
  
• Train them. Have a core of professionals and an army of amateurs - passionate amateurs - who want to tell their own stories in their own ways.
• Accept the amateur self-publishing/social networking revolution that is sweeping the world. Much of the world's time and energy is focused on this. Go where people are.
  
• Select and lead amateur publishers into some of the disciplines journalists have had to learn over decades, to enhance the product. Train the amateurs who will accept it.
  
• Allow local self-publishers to link to their own platforms, but aggregate them, draw them out and edit them on a central platform - "The Newspaper"
• Gain credibility from openness and respect for the amateur journalists a well as from the wisdom and seasoned discernment a few really good journalists can provide the platform.
• Select the very best and print (yes I said that word) them in a weekend, coffee-table-able, summary on good stock. This will be available for those who want it and will pay a significant subscription fee. Make it a work of pride.
  
• Make the platform (and the resulting print product) regional in the sense of combined technology but granularly local in the involvement (and digital delivery) by impassioned residents of multiple small towns in the region. People in a town or a community will be able to publish - and have access to - intensely local news. People within the entire region can go granularly local in digital search (if they want to) or they can read selected stories from throughout the region in the print summary.
• The business model will be
  

1. Subscription to the print product and to select high-quality writing by the best of the pros and a few paid amateurs.
   
2. Display advertising on the digital site and select, high quality ads in the print summary. Use video advertising in an effective Internet mode. Short, advertorial, and some user-produced (like Google's TV experiment).
   
3. Re-invention of classifieds in the digital platform with powerful digital search, mapping and a rating system.
   
4. Sponsorship by local institutions of value, with strong advertorial content digitally (also open to ratings) and strong image in the print summary. Use video strongly here.
   

Vision:
Developed thinking will find a refined medium and again become a premium product, both in print and online. Digital news will be treated as a commodity.

People in small towns will know what each other are doing again. There will be both a place for popular (and regular-person-produced) news as well for a more professional journal of record - in both print and digital media - for every town.

© 2008 Alan Eason
This business plan is copyrighted. I wrote most of it in similar form in 2008.

President # 44 - Politico's diary

When I first started watching the publishing “cycle” for Politico44, the president and his family were still in Europe. The page seemed to be filled with little stories about Paris, the family running around the Eiffel tower, and other such magazine-type content. I did a screen shot of the content, fully intending to update that daily for a few days and watch the changes.

The plan was to do a screen shot daily and compare, but with my work schedule that didn't happen.

Honestly I thought it looked like a PR site for the administration. Maybe like adayinthelifeof.potus.org. It seemed to have very little opinion from the "other side." It mentioned Newt Gingrich a few times, but mostly in the context of him taking down the conservatives. I wasn't too impressed with the balance.

The whole thing reminded me somewhat of some of the media from the Camelot days of the Kennedys in 1960. I was very young lad then, but I remember it well. The media was all caught up in the fairy tale of JFK, Jackie (especially Jackie), John-John and Caroline.

See the screen shot of that first look (when the family was in Paris) on the left.

Fast forward to Thursday, June 11. I am glad I did. I was a lot more impressed with the site from a balance point of view.

I liked the news links. This issue had more contrarian reports - much more than I thought it would have, as the first issue I looked at had seemed so pro-administration.

A sample: The Cantor - POTUS looking like Putin by Alexander Burns. The article quoted minority whip House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) in a strong statement about the president’s handling of the auto industry bailout policy.

Another article: Common sense in the age of Obama RealClearPolitics by Mark Salter. This was a good link to an article by the former chief of staff of Senator John McCain on how the spending record of the present administration and some of the “pay-as-you-go” words in recent speeches by the president don’t really match up that well.

There were a number of video links with good-looking open screens, promising a news-clip-on-demand type of service. The problems came when two of the clips I tried to watch said “the video you are trying to watch is not available” (after showing the commercial pre-roll, which certainly WAS available)!

The day’s news played a good bit on the note the president offered to write (and did write) for a young lady taken out of school by her parents to come to the Green Bay town hall meeting. I first read about it on the white board, and then, when I saw it on a video clip, had to see what it looked like in “real life.” I doubt if that student will entrust it to her teacher. It might be worth more in the safety deposit box at a bank. Not sure it would have worked for me in my day, though. I had a chemistry teacher who still would not have excused my absence!

There was another photo clip: FBI director visits White House, by Amie Parnes: "Spotted at the W.H. around 1 p.m.: FBI Director Robert Mueller. Was he meeting with someone about the Holocaust Museum shooting?"

It was sort of a High School Yearbook ploy of 'what if'. My worries here would be that someone might take that fun little riddle and interpret it as news and out it goes to the world! Politico said it!

One thing was that was a bit annoying was the fact that the still shots looked a lot like the video shots and they were mixed around on the page. That made it a bit hard to tell at a glance what was video and what was simply an enhanced story line.

One thing I do like about the pics though is the fact that the pic was really the lede and the lede was the story. It was very brief, punchy, and web-scannable.

It was for-the-web righting for sure. Content was played in several buckets (like the school-excuse-note). I saw it appear in three places with different permutations – all short, snappy and appealing. That is true web writing.

The daily calendar, which looks like an Outlook calendar, is very appealing. Even I was tempted to look across days and see just how full his calendar really was. (I wanted to see if he had more meetings than I did at work). Some days he won - some days I won. (JK).

It WAS tempting, though, to try and find an open slot and schedule myself in. I can see it now: 12:30-1:30, Friday, June 12. Subject: Lunch in G-town. Location: TBD.

As far as a deconstruction goes, from my experience doing news on the net with a newspaper, I'd say they have a weekday staff of about 5 for this page.

One probably scans all news reports on the web, the wire services and lots of other sources and then gets the updates (links, wire reports, press releases) into the central editing mill. There is most likely one textual production person - also an editor. The text content is not toooo heavy, but this writer(s) seems to be a VERY good writer for the web because they write in content batches - short and punchy - and bulletin-style.

I would imagine there is another person gathering video content constantly and doing editing to get the files into the size they need. I would guess that person also handles the optimization of the still photos.

Add an overall editor and you have a good crew. That editor may also be the one gathering all the daily calendar-type info from whatever source they have and making sure it is current and accurate (but most likely has a helper who does both admin and fact-checking).

Take this all to a 24/7 coverage with very light crew in the late evenings to wee hours of morning and a larger crew on the weekends and you have a staff of about 10.

The site in many ways plays like an aggregator site with little original content, mostly links, short briefs and bulletins. That keeps the staff load lighter and limits the depth they can go after. But for an aggregator site, it is pretty thorough.

An interesting site, even if not one for deeper thinkers.

(Update Saturday, June 13, 2009).

Thanks for bearing with me on the earlier version. Written in haste and unedited, it was not easy reading. Hopefully my work schedule will slow down this week.

Back to the New York Times

Yep - next assignment is to dissect a day or so of Politico.com. That will be fun. But in the meantime I am still blogging.

If you saw my post Watching Giants Struggle, you heard me talk about how so many in Journalism just don't get what is really happening these days. It was so refreshing to read a NYT journalist who DOES get it. Got this through the Romenesko link on Carlos' class blog. The headline was The media's become a kind of reverse roach motel. (Headlines are more important than ever in Internet writing, BTW. But they have to be even shorter and punchier than in a 7 column spread newspaper - this one was an exception but it worked). Well it did the trick and I read the article. Fantastic.

'Media Has Become a Kind of Reverse Roach Motel ...'

And Other Thoughts From New York Times Columnist David Carr on the Pursuit of Truth ... and What Happens Next

Straight to some talking points from David Carr: and his interviewer Simon Dumenco, media columnist at Advertising Age.

Carr: Well, if you're asking if I was surprised, the answer is yeah. In terms of the wholesale collapse -- the combination of secular and cyclical changes, to the point where the question is not who will survive but will the whole thing burn down and be replaced by something else? -- I did not anticipate that. I find it shocking...

Carr: If I didn't fundamentally believe in The New York Times building and leveraging its way through, I couldn't stick with it. I think the fact that we've got 20 million uniques, 3 million of whom are there all the time, that's gotta be a business. Part of what I wonder about is people keep saying, "Well, when things get better ..." What if the combination of secular and cyclical change that we have -- what if this is normal? What if all the money that was sloshing around was in fact from the housing bubble, from easy credit, and that credit does not return? I think that's a much more difficult and scary problem. I haven't seen the money coming back yet.

Dumenco: Yeah, I don't think it's coming back. Certainly a lot of the sloshing within media was just the pure, unadulterated monopoly money -- monopoly-power money, which is gone or going away.

Carr: Who benefited from that monopoly? It wasn't just the owners....

Carr: Yeah. It's like, what will The New York Times be? Will they need me? Will they want me? I just think things are gonna be shifting rapidly. They make it clear that in the current paradigm they value what I do, but I think things will change very rapidly.

You have to read the whole thing -

My analysis - I'll do it in bullets

• When you have the web traffic like the NYT does - there is a business there. I'm an internet guy. Traffic like that is "to die for."
• You gotta get rid of the spoiled-ness. Carr has it right, the media may not have been paid like kings, but they lived like kings. They were a privileged class. It was a bubble that has burst.
• The business paradigm was built upon newspapers, television, and other types of media holding a monopoly on public communications. That monopoly is gone.
• Summary. There IS a business there. A huge one. It will not be the old monopoly recovered. The media class will not revert to its previous privileged status (at least in Manhattan). The business will change. The people in it must change. Those who do not, will leave and probably not return.

These guys get it.

My favorite multimedia sites - for today.

After my last post I got some comments, like "Don't you have any favorite web sites?"

Well, I guess my answer is that, other than the kinds of sites I mentioned in my previous post, sites that help me operate in the vast cloud called the 'space,' I really don't have enduring favorites.

But I do come across sites that wow me and I return to them for a while.

I'll list 2:

• Both are video-heavy (I'm into video-impact on the web right now).
• Both have high drama in them - one more on the comic side - but showing regular people stuff really well, the other very dramatic real life stories.
• Both have religious tones.
• One is Jewish humor (and life) style I love to listen to.
• One is Christian. Very Christian. But, above all, very real. (I have warned you). Stories in video interview (state of the art) style with people from all walks of life, including Joe Gibbs.
  

Site 1:

Old Jews telling Jokes

Funny, warm, charming, and more.

Site 1:

I am second

Has some of the most amazing video I have ever seen, anywhere. Watch the Karen Green story. A mix of the 'reality' style video - jerky, un-smooth editing - and the state of the art methods used for compelling video interviews on the very best sites. Light years beyond the 'talking head.'

Some of the best web design I have ever seen - anywhere. But definitely for broadband. 3 years ahead of where most of us are.

After the video is over, you get to go horizontal navigation and hyperlink with dynamic links to text versions of her life, montages of photos, many more ways to look at her story. Amazing. What I want my web storytelling to be. My capstone ideas are already spinning very high and this is one way I can develop them.

Tell me what you think.

Multimedia - lost in the cloud.

Class assignment was to talk about our favorite sites and especially reference multimedia online, listing the reasons we thought some were effective and some not.

As I got to thinking about multimedia "sites" I realized I didn't know many. Yet I pay attention to so much multimedia online - communications of all sorts. I watch videos. I listen to interviews. I read blogs. I read - and write - as here. I twitter on several accounts and also start new networks of people on sites of their own. I am pretty involved.

Why was I not able to really think of my favorite multimedia "sites"?

I realized it was because I usually do not go to web sites to engage. I get into the cloud. I enter "The Space."

Let me explain a bit. Last fall in the same Georgetown program the present class is in, I took another class called "Web Soup." It was taught by Bill Allman, who is a Web pioneer. He was the one who first launched US News and World Report online (on CompuServe - pre-internet) and then launched the Discovery Channel sites and much more.

I well remember the first class. Bill said the Net had changed. It had become "a cloud." Our job was to enter the cloud. Sites could no longer be defined as "sites." The whole Web was becoming like one big Web site. Google is the home page. YouTube is one of the multimedia pages. Amazon is the shopping cart..etc. Oversimplification? yes. I thought so at the time. I agreed with him, in part, but still had a pretty site-centric undestanding of the Web - perhaps because my profession was building sites and getting traffic to them.

Then this assignment came along. Favorite sites? Hmmmm -- twitter search. Not a site - a way to find tweets out there in the cloud. Google Earth - a place to find maps of the places I liked. Not a web site. A tool. Technorati - a way to search Blog content. Quantcast.com - a place to see what millions are doing in the Web 'space' across many sites.

I did not really have any real "sites" that were favorite.

The realization stunned me.

I was lost in the cloud.

Bill would be pleased.

The Feedback Loop

It's amazing that not many journalists talk about the "Feedback Loop." I have never heard one mention it, other than myself. When I was first taught communications theory, many years ago, that was one of the first concepts I was taught.

In essence it goes like this: With any communication there is a rebound - an echo - a response. Something comes back. Or nothing comes back. In either case, there is a feedback loop. If nothing comes back - then the feedback loop tells you that you bombed. Stony silence. Your joke fell flatter than a squashed armadillo on a Texas highway. You still have feedback, though. You learn from it.

Many disciplines talk about the feedback loop. You hear of it in economics, medicine, psychology, electronics, teaching (especially teaching) and many others. It is applied to about everything - it just makes sense. Take a look at Google's image search results of charts from various disciplines which reference it. The images alone give you the idea.

Important is the concept that the communicator must be a listener as well as a speaker. The feedback allows you to modulate your message so that it is properly received. Without feedback you cannot do this.

The feedback loop on the Internet is fantastic. Not only is there the option for open feedback, in the form of comments, posting of your communications on other blogs or in other stories, email to you, and so forth; but there is hidden feedback in the form of metrics which tell you how many people are reading you, how long they stay on your site and where they came from. It is an amazing advantage to the modern communicator that very few journalists use.

When it comes to multimedia, it is even more powerful. When my message is communicated with various forms of storytelling - video - blogging - transcripts of interviews - whatever - I can look and see what people are paying attention to. If I listen and learn, then I can improve my storytelling art and become a much more listened-to journalist.

Watching giants stuggle - the New York Times rejoices that it is keeping its head above the quicksand

The New York Times has an amazing article about its survival chances - one that would have been unthinkable 3 years ago. It exults in a tiny profit (actually a miniscule "plus") and the fact that it smartly positioned itself to "ride out another year of the recession, maybe two."

The article is called:

Resilient Strategy for Times Despite Toll of a Recession

The tone of the article shows how desperate things have become. For an industry where 20-30% profit margins were the norm a few years back it is a jaw-dropping shock to hear the company pride itself that it has only lost 14.2% in ad revenue in 2008, as opposed to 16% industry -wide.

The author then congratulates the company on the fact that it only has to take out small loans, rather than huge ones (hard to get) like other newspapers are scrambling for.

How the mighty are fallen.

Even more unbelievable is the sense one gets reading the article that their business plan has not really changed. Sure, they have "integrated the newsroom with the Web...added blogs and slideshows..." and tried some other digital experiments. But everything else seems the same. The author of the article seems to think that is progressive.

Well - they might have been progressive steps in 2000.

This is 2009. In Internet Years, as in dog years, that is six decades behind.

If only the business side of things were affected, they might be able to blame it on the recession. But the last 5 or 6 years have also taken a terrible toll on the Times' credibility with the revelations of several major scandals within its core journalism ethos. There is more amiss in the crystallized newspaper world than Internet competition. (That is a post for another time).

I don't exult in the demise of an American institution like the New York Times, or the newspaper industry as a whole. I do, however, find myself continually amazed that they cannot see the big picture.

American society - world society - has changed.

People are not reading newspapers, in print or online. They are reading news stories - not newspapers.

There is a vast difference.

Google, a popular hashtag on Twitter, your Facebook friends or even a good cable news blog can link you up in ten minutes to dozens more news stories you really like than your newspaper can in a total read.

It is not just that it is free. It is the fact that the filters are different. You can choose your own set.

But the giants can't see it - or won't.

Their editorial model and business model have to accomplish a lot more for them than just getting by.

If I may make a prediction - the end of the recession will not so much witness the end of problems for the NYT and other big papers as it will the huge success of their competition.

The real competition is news and opinion coming from everywhere, professional and amateur, aggregated online.

Welcome and Let's Begin!

Welcome to my new blog. If you poke around on the Internet (or on this site, as it grows), you'll find a number of other blogs I host or participate in. I love to be a part of what one editor I knew called, in roundabout terms, the blathering masses.

We differ on the importance of such. I actually believe that is one reason that so much of traditional media has a problem today. They are stuck in a box that calls this blog and millions like it "blather" and they are not real fans of listening to the masses. They would rather the masses listen to them.

Which type person are YOU?

• Thinking inside the Box
• Thinking outside the Box
• What is a Box?

Good food for thought.

More to come!

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