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?).

Three years ago, journalists were frantically reporting on a complex credit crisis they would eventually be critiqued for failing to predict.

Dutch reporters reported day and night on the “kreditkrisis.” Spaniards were busy covering the “crisis de crédito.” French speakers were abuzz about “pénurie de crédit.”

Changing vocabularies
Nomenclature for the crisis that burst on to front pages around the world in 2007 has evolved as the scope of the crisis itself developed.

As housing prices fell in the United States, the credit crisis began. Words like “subprime” and “adjustable rate mortgaged” danced across front pages.

As housing prices dropped and pink slips flew, we realized we were in a time of financial crisis. The European Central Bank and US Federal Reserve added billions of euro into the financial markets, prompting the need for many charts, graphs and explanatory stories.

We began talking about a economic crisis. Photos of Britons lined up outside Northern Rock ran across wire services everywhere. World leaders like Gordon Brown, George Bush, Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel kept op-ed writers in business with their support – or lack thereof – for national and international bailout schemes.

Employment data and a lack of consumer spending started to indicate we were in a recession, a tricky term economists like to argue about.

Later, it became the global recession.

In February, the Associated Press, a ubiquitous wire service that produces a style guide considered in the United States to be “the journalist’s bible,” went so far as to give the crisis its own title: the Great Recession.

A crisis by any other name
Many European publications and wire services have rejected the term.

“Let the historians, not the sub-editors, categorise major historical turning points,” Lisbeth Kirk, editor-in-chief of the EUObserver, said via e-mail.

Reto Gregori, chief of staff at of Bloomberg News, said journalists at Bloomberg are loath to use capital letters when it comes to characterising the economy.

“Historians and economists will determine whether the recession that started in December 2007 should be called the Great Recession,” Gregori said via e-mail. “At Bloomberg News, we’re sticking to ‘a recession’ at this point.”

Bloomberg News is a 20-year-old initiative of Bloomberg L.P., an American company data and software company well-known for the news terminals it sells to financial firms. It says about 350 newspapers and newsmagazines subscribe to its newswire.

Tim Quinson, executive editor of the Europe, Middle East and Africa bureau at Bloomberg, said Bloomberg may reconsider its position in the future. When doing so, it will take cues from academia.

“We have decided that we won’t change our wording until the National Bureau of Economic Research at Harvard University declares that the recession is over. Then analysts can review the landscape with more of historical perspective,” Quinson said via e-mail.

“Until then, we will call it a recession.”

Ditto at The Economist, the increasingly influential weekly newsmagazine from Westminster. It has gained in circulation in each of the last four years, unlike competitors like Forbes or Business Week.

Tom Standage, the business affairs editor at The Economist, said journalists there do not use the “Great Recession” unless quoting sources who use the term.

In the past, the Economist has tracked the use of the term “recession” in the business press.

“Typically we say “the recession” for the rich world and “the downturn” when talking about developing countries, many of which did not go into technical recession,” Standage said via e-mail.

The term “Global Recession” has been discussed in the newsroom and smaller meetings dedicated to updating the Economist’s in-house style guide, Standage said.

Generally, he said, it is disliked and not likely to find its way into the Economist’s style guide.

“We dislike jargon and other terms of art,” he said.

David Marsh, who edits the style guide at The Guardian, says the term “Great Recession” appeared in print 17 times in the past 12 months.

Guardian reporters included the term mainly when quoting sources and usually qualified it with a date range, “Great Recession of 2007-09.”

“The fact that it needs to be qualified by suggesting when it took place demonstrates, in my view, that it is not yet a widely accepted definition,” Marsh said in an e-mail.

Marsh said it is unlikely the term will be included in The Guardian’s style guide.

Nor will it crop up in style manuals at the Financial Times, executive editor Hugh Carnegy said.

Carnegy said he finds the term “rather portentous” and added that he prefers to let historians name the era.

“Once adopted, there is a danger it would proliferate in an irritating way,” he said in an e-mail. “In fact, thanks to the AP, it already has!”

Crafting constructs
Great Recession is an obvious throwback to Great Depression, which began in 1929 and lasted until the Second World War.

The term Great Depression was not used during those years, though. The then-president of the United States, Herbert Hoover, did use the phrase “a great depression” in speeches as early as 1930. But the term didn’t become popular right away.

It took until 1934, when a British economist Lionel Robbins published a book called The Great Depression, before a definite article and capital letters were added.

While most historians and stewards of journalistic style – including the Associated Press – readily use the phrase to describe what is widely accepted as the worst economic downturn of the last century, at least one is more cautious.

The Economist does not use the phrase Great Depression, preferring instead “the Depression.” The capital letter helps distinguish from other depressions.

“The lesson of history is that after the Great Depression, people found a new term for depressions (recessions),” Standage, at The Economist, said.

“Might the same happen again now? Will the Great Recession catch on, and subsequent recessions be referred to as downturns?”

Standage added that he hopes not; downturn is a euphemism used in countries suffering a recession.

In a January, 2008, column, the late linguist William Safire posited that the crisis would soon come to be characterized by a phrase starting with “the Great.” His column contemplated possible follow-on nouns like “Fall,” “Reckoning,” “Devaluation,” “Unwind” or, indeed, “Recession”.

Like the editors at The Economist, FT and Guardian, Safire warned against prematurely naming the era.

“…a national or global economy takes longer to sink deeply into recession. That’s why it is premature to settle on a word or phrase for whatever it is we’re going through today. An extended credit crunch or credit crisis? A “recession that would curl your hair,” in the Eisenhower-era phrase? Or just a run-of-the-mill recession, a mere “bump in the road,” the inexorable exhaling during the business cycle?”

Although the AP has taken a stand and assigned a special moniker to the era, it is quite evident that other editors are more cautious about using potentially inflammatory language to describe the crisis.

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Flickr images from users alexthepink, Herschell Hershey, mike d’ leo

Despite the fact that we are well under 65 years old, my boyfriend and I are subscription people.

Delivery people visit us almost daily, materializing out of Monterey Bay to bring us everything from the Wall Street Journal to Yoga Journal. There’s also Men’s Health, Sierra Club, New Yorker, Vanity Fair and AAA magazines (come to think of it, I think our magazines are cooler than we are!)

They also bring us coffee.

Yep: We subscribe to coffee. (If Amazon should ever start selling beer, we would never leave the house!)

Three different kinds of espresso, no less:

First, there’s Lavazza Caffe Espresso Ground Coffee. In our house, its name is the “jar one” or sometimes “the black one”. It’s fab for cappuccino, which I somehow manage to make every morning before even waking up. I don’t know how it happens, but one moment I’m sleeping and the next moment I’m standing in front of the coffee machine. Sometimes I suspect Dave is somehow responsible for this, but I’m never sure.

Next there’s Lavazza Qualita Rossa. In our house, it’s known as “the red one” (which although I don’t speak Italian, I think is a fairly accurate name!) Its job it to be our after-dinner espresso. (Seriously, how else could we stay awake to watch all those Criminal Intent marathons? duh).

Finally, we have added Lavazza Crema e Gusto, a.k.a “the blue one”. Its job is to kick our butt should the other coffees not be enough to get us through the afternoon.

I should note here that we also enjoy Illy coffee from time to time. We’ve also tried Cafe Bustelo. So don’t think we’re brand-focus snobs (only pro-Italy, anti-drip snobs. Sorry Folgers, but ICK).

(To be fair, Bustelo is apparently the hippest espresso north of the equator and is available on subscription. But Dave prefers Italian over Mexican coffee. So as Heidi Klum’s tacky tacky producers would say, Bustelo got “Auf’d”!)

One of my favorite bloggers (who I sometimes comment to but never e-mail responses to (sorry Vrabel! It’s not you, it’s me and my horrible horrible lack of focus)) recently wrote an entire blog post just to made me feel a lot about better about all these subscriptions:

“a study…published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, a title that it’s very difficult to not make a childish joke about, involved two large studies that followed professionals for over two decades. And it found that people who drank at least five to seven cups of coffee a week — around here we call that “the crossword puzzle,” but whatever — had a significantly lower risk of dying from anything compared to those inexplicable freakshows who didn’t drink any at all. Those who drink four to five cups a day had even better protection, although it’s difficult to congratulate them on it, because they’re in the bathroom all the time.”

In other coffee-related fabulousness, are you familiar with Lavazza’s super cool yearly calendar? It’s so exclusive and hip that it seems impossible to buy anywhere on the entire Internet.

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.”

Margot Wallström this week stopped by the press room at the “Berlaymonster” to highlight the launch of PressEuropa.

In her opening remarks (video below), she says the site is one of many Commission attempts (there was a government tender out on this project, which means it is funded by EU taxpayers) to foster the European public information sphere.

I think the idea behind this website is a sound one. I enjoyed my first looks at the site itself, which aggregates the most interesting news sites from the top newspapers in the 27 member states. It is indeed a fun, magazine-like read. The aggregation is done by hand, as I understand it, as is the translation. Articles are translated into 10 EU languages.

The site begs two questions:

1. Are the newspapers from which stories are culled offered compensation for the repurposing of their content?

2. The stories are all selected by an independent team of journalists, but must reflect - according to the site’s editorial charter - topics of interest to the “European Project”.

I wonder if promoting wider circulation of stories involving Europe isn’t “EU propaganda”; ie, pushing the concept of “Europe” down the throats of folks residing in the member states. And if so… Is that a good thing, or a bad thing?

Further, is it effective propaganda (if it is)? Or is this the creation of a multilingual echo chamber?

This is the perfect chance for journalists to form a collective and buy a newspaper.

As Michael Rosenblum writes:

“The wealth and power that accompany ownership of the media only come to those who have the courage and the desire to take it.

Now you can.. but only if you want…”