Kathlyn Clore

I watched several top-notch golfers implode today, beaten up by unyielding greens and cliffside fairways at Pebble Beach Golf Links.

But while watching the final round of this major championship, as well as during the hours I spent at Pebble Beach helping with local newspaper coverage of the U.S. Open, I saw an unspoken storyline playing out.

And that’s the continued self-destruction of traditional media outlets.

Where to begin….

At home during today’s final round, I tuned into NBC’s coverage while keeping an eye on Twitter. I monitored the hashtags #usopen and #pebblebeach, as well as the commentary of a few sportswriters I follow via my own account. All afternoon, Twitterers bemoaned the wonky weird commentary of Johnny Miller, a former PGA great who is now synonymous with odd golf announcing. An AP writer picked up on one especially bizzare comment:

Did anyone at NBC respond to this and many other Tweets about the announcers’ odd deliveries? Did the broadcasters respond?

Of course not. Would it have been difficult to tune in to what their viewers were saying? No. Would it have been difficult to plan ahead and perhaps solicit and take questions from folks at home via Twitter? No.

Lest we get too down on the TV boys, a look at newspapers.

All week at the media tent, I felt somewhat in awe of the big-name newspaper guys. Most are old enough to be my dad (I say “dad” because there were something like 10 women in the media tent) and they work at big-brand papers: The Washington Post, the Chicago Sun-Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today, The New York Times. Heady stuff.

Mind-boggling, though, is that they’re all sitting next to each other, each writing slightly different versions of the same stories without realizing that portals like Google, Yahoo and MSNBC are aggregating all their work in the same place anyway. When are journalists going to realize that the only “on ramp” to their work isn’t their brand’s website or printed product?

I have no idea why they all didn’t talk to each other - especially newspapers who share owners - to determine who is writing what, and how not to overlap.

Oh yeah. And extra weird is that the paper dudes sit right next to the dudes from AP - who, by the way, work for a wire service nearly every other newspaper represented at the U.S. Open pays to provide copy.

And they’re all.writing.the.same.thing.

The night before the final round, nearly every outlet I named above carried stories on the following topics:

- Tiger Woods’ big jump up the leaderboard and his quest for a comeback

- Phil Mickelson’s implosion in Saturday’s round

- Dustin Johnson’s lead; the fact that he’s a two-time winner at the PGA Tour’s annual stop in Monterey

- The little-known Europeans in the hunt: McDowell and Havret

- Tom Watson playing all five U.S. Opens at Pebble Beach

….and aside from various notebook items, that about covers it. So, what’s the problem here?

Think Google.

Here’s the Google News page for Sports, as seen about two hours after Graeme McDowell laid up for par on 18 to become the first European in 40 years to win a U.S. Open:

You can see that the national papers trump regional content providers, which is somewhat of a shame in this case. Consider the case of Dustin Johnson, who had a horrible Sunday round after playing well all week and owning the lead going into the final round. He’s won the past two AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am tournaments; the regional media are quite familiar with him and prepared to write good stories about him. He comes from South Carolina; the reporters from that state probably also have a lot of local knowledge on him.

But because regional newspapers - like the Monterey County Herald and San Jose Mercury News - are typically part of newspaper chains whose owners reside states away, they’re not able to quickly adopt to new media … and consequently don’t do things that would bump them up in Google rankings.

For example, neither the Herald nor the Mercury News have a policy of including many (if any) outgoing links. Further, their archive systems are terrible; most stories expire in two weeks. so it’s not really worth linking back to them. This complete lack of participation in linking culture seriously hurts them when it comes to helping their copy stand out on Google or on Yahoo homepages.

Also, it’s just kind of sad that sports writers from different mediums don’t link to each other - especially when many are friends (as I saw this week). Why don’t newspaper and magazine writers link to each other, for example? Trust me, the staff writers for Golf World and Golf Digest and the rest were all online writing the same storylines as everybody else, but their writers will usually have additional time to write even longer features on the tournament. Wouldn’t it be nice if, via linking culture, newspapers like the Monterey Herald could make their readers aware of a golf magazine writer’s blog - where he will likely post his longer and more insightful or golf-specialized posts - and for the magazine writer to link back to the paper (because some of his readers could benefit from the quick-hit stuff that newspapers live off of?).

This morning I read a New York Times article about real time search.

I got to wondering: Do regional and local media workers realize how extremely search engines like Google and Bing have changed consumer habits? Or how real time search is making keywords and the atomization of content even more important?

I don’t think so.

At this year’s edition of the Online News Association annual conference, I chatted up a copy editor who works on the front page of the Washington Post’s website. I asked her about workflow issues: How do stories get from a reporter to the Web?

She described a very traditional newsroom workflow: journalists work with their immediate editor to perfect a story, and then it goes through two other layers of editors before reaching the copydesk. There it is packaged for the print product.

Afterward, it is bounced - virtually - over to the Web copy desk. There, this copy editor told me, the Web team will then put a new headline, insert keywords, perhaps recraft the lede to better optimize it for search engines.

This struck me as an extremely vintage way of doing business.

Why isn’t the Web team working with the reporter earlier? And why is the priority on the print product - i.e., why does the story go first to the print-edition copy desk? Why not Web first?

I would imagine that some breaking stories do flow first to the Web copy desk.

To be fair, this copy editor did tell me that the Washington Post will be making some changes to this workflow soon.

First, a most obviously needed change, it will merge its Web staff with the print staff. Print people work, this copy editor told me, in downtown digs. Web people work elsewhere.

Print-edition copyeditors are unionized, too, she told me, and typically make more money. The Web people are not unionized. The Web people make less money, I was told, and are often initially hired on six-month contracts (without benefits).

Moving the two groups of people into the same office would likely (hopefully?) be accompanied by a discussion about this disparity, she indicated.

Also, the Post will soon switch to a better content management system, or CMS. At present, I was told, print and web copy editors work on different systems. It’s hard to collaborate on story trimmings (like headlines, etc) working between these. But a new CMS - which both print and Web people will utilize - will help rectify the situation. It will allow for easier collaboration on headlines and SEO.

I was honestly surprised to learn how clunky the Washington Post’s system is - or, at least this copy editor’s description of it as such. There seems to be little communication between the Web copy desk and the original reporter.

If I were running a newsroom, I’d be asking reporters to think about keywords and how to write in a way that promotes the online visibility of their work. That way it isn’t left entirely to the copy editor (who has not been part of conferences between the reporter and various editors). I’d also be making sure there easy flow of ideas between Web and print copy desks.

Why is this so important? Because we are in the age of 1: one story, one song, one mp3, one article.

It is individual articles and songs and videos that are passed around on Facebook and Twitter. And these sites each have their own search functions. And their contents will be increasingly indexed by the Googles of the world.

Newsgathering operations and production work flows must be structured in a way that reflects this reality.

Yes, it can be frustrating to have to worry about guessing at how to publish work in a way that most advantageously manipulates algorithms so that stories stay on top of Google News (and, hopefully, Web) search results. Having to kow-tow to Google’s view of the world is tremendously frustrating.

On the other hand, that’s just how things work.

On the surface, it’s easy to sympathize with folks like Wall Street Journal managing editor Robert Thompson, who had this to say on a Web 2.0 panel with Googleicious Google VP Marissa Mayer:

“‘Right now, the most burden falls on the originators,’ he said, referring to costs such as having foreign correspondents reporting from hostile areas. ‘Google and Huffington Post are clever at what they do, but they are reverberation; they are not creation.’”

Right on, Bob.

What I’d ask you is when the creators of content - like your staff at the WSJ - are going to become so clever as to follow the lead of these online behemoths. You gotta be findable (Google) and produce in 1s (like Huffington Post, which derives an increasingly significant amount of traffic from Facebook).

Danny Sullivan produced a smart in-depth post exposing the lack of logic in some of Robertson’s further groans about Google, which included:

“Google wants to be the home page or wants to be the front page, and Marissa unintentionally encourages promiscuity. It’s about digital, the whole Google model is based on digital disloyalty. It’s about disloyalty to creators.”

I agree with the Columbia law professor who says “To love Google, you have to be a little bit of a monarchist.”

But I also agree with this comment Marissa Mayer made during this month’s U.S. Senate hearing on the future of journalism. I had not read Mayer’s testimony until editing this summary of her talk, written by an Italian entrepreneur for the EJC.

It’s one of those comments that helps you view today’s media landscape through a smart lens. Mayer does not suggest any actual steps news publishers should be taking, but she describes a useful way for them to think about the content they publish.

This comment and its use of “basic atomic unit of consumption” is one of those that leaves you smacking your forehead ala Homer Simpson and wondering why you didn’t say this yourself. So obvious… But like they say about contemporary artwork, “Yeah, but you didn’t do it…”

Mayer said:

“Changing the basic unit of content consumption is a challenge, but also an opportunity. Treating the article as the atomic unit of consumption online has several powerful consequences. When producing an article for online news, the publisher must assume that a reader may be viewing this article on its own, independent of the rest of the publication. To make an article effective in a standalone setting requires providing sufficient context for first-time readers, while clearly calling out the latest information for those following a story over time. It also requires a different approach to monetization: each individual article should be self-sustaining. These types of changes will require innovation and experimentation in how news is delivered online, and how advertising can support it.”

Yesterday I edited a synopsis of a most disturbing bill working its way through the Italian legislature.

A center-right Italian senator from Sicily is backing a bill that would give the country’s Ministry

of the Interior the power to demand ISPs in Italy block sites which host content seen to incite or condone crime.

Facebook seems to be the primary target. The American social networking platform allows registered users to form fan groups around just about any idea. Among the most offending groups to these Italian lawmakers are groups honoring big-name Mafia bosses.

Unless Facebook would agree to take those groups down - and the Ministry of the Interior would indeed have to give sites like Facebook time to take down the offending content - the entire site would be blocked inside Italy.

Deleting entire websites because of a bit of offensive material seems an entirely arcane practice for 2009.

But the situation does for me beg the question: In today’s linked-up world, should multinational sites like Facebook (and, to be clear, while all websites have the potential to be multinational, few truly are) have to abide by the laws of countries other than the nation in which their servers sit? Which is to say,should a website based in the United States, like Facebook, have to regulate its content with Italian law in mind?

I’m reminded of a November, 2008, New York Times article about censorship at Google.

In the Republic of Turkey, a nation of 71 million people, it is illegal to insult Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. He is the founder of modern Turkey.

Google, apparently, has dedicated the hours of many staffers to screening the contents of YouTube videos that are reported to violate Turkish law. The videos which Google decides are in clear violation of Turkish law are then blocked in Turkey.

The article chronicles similar cases in Europe. In France and Germany, for example, Google blocks Holocaust denial sites because it is illegal to deny the Shoah in those countries.

But is a California-based company like Google - or a Ministry of the Interior in Italy - the best body to decide what to censor?

Germany has a government agency whose responsibility it is to gather URLs of sites that host illegal content (content including hate speech, for example, would be illegal in Deutschland). Is this a better way to go? Why not get a judicial system involved? Or would that take too long, particularly when considering the warp speed that dominates the World Wide Web?

These questions become even more difficult - or perhaps just less relevant? - when considering the many initiatives to circumvent censorship. One of the best initiatives is the Tor project, which helps Internet users surf the web anonymously.