Now without getting into the sordid details of what makes a blog carnival, and [INSERT CRACK ABOUT HOW NOBODY BLOGS ANYMORE BECAUSE YOU ALL HAVE THE TWITTERS AND WHATNOTS], it was a relatively pleasurable experience. A topic, a deadline, and the shared experience of a bunch of people writing about the same thing at the same time.

Superfluous Creative Commons stock photo of the 2009 Alameda County Fair, by WHardcastle.

And it’s back, thanks to Digidave’s revival:

One of the Knight Commission‘s recommendations is to “Increase the role of higher education…..as hubs of journalistic activity.” Another is to “integrate digital and media literacy as critical elements for education at all levels through collaboration among federal, state, and local education officials.”

Okay – great recommendations. But how do we actually make it happen? What does this look like? What University programs are doing it right? What can be improved and what would be your ideal scenario? Or is this recommendation wrong to begin with?

Big question!

I’m planning to attack it from a completely hypothetical angle, outlining what a proposal for a San Jose State University School of Journalism & Mass Communications partnership with the Mercury News might look like, although my knowledge of both institutions tails off violently after 2007 or so.

We’ll see. The deadline is in 10 days, so I have a few minutes to gather some thoughts, or even (shocking as it may be) new information.

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That phone call hasn’t happened yet, but hey, here’s a story about Koci put together by Cal Poly journalism student Lauren Rabaino.

The text is cool enough…

“When asked if he made the switch to get out early before the journalism industry goes up in flames, Koci Hernandez said, ‘Kinda, but not really.’ He’s a newspaper optimist and said he still believes in a strong future for journalism.

‘I guess I have a naive vein in me,’ he said. “But I thought I might actually be able to “save” journalism or do something positive in my new role here at Berkeley, more than I could have by staying at a newspaper.’”

…but be sure to check out the slide presentation Lauren created to tell the story.  It’s embedded in her post, and there’s a bigger version up on Google Docs.

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RIP Mercury News – Michael Bazeley

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In the Spring of 2006, when Knight Ridder was up for sale and the bidding was winding down, I was lucky enough to sit in on a talk that Jerry Ceppos gave to some faculty members and a few students at the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at San Jose State.

Ceppos, a former VP of News at Knight Ridder, spoke (off the record) about the possible outcomes of the upcoming sale of the company and the future of the Mercury News.

I had my own ideas, but really, the worst-case scenario that Ceppos presented has come to pass.

McClatchy bought Knight Ridder, spun off a set of papers that didn’t fit their model to cut down on the debt they were taking on, and then they were buried in debt anyway.

MediaNews picked up the San Jose Mercury News; the sale closed while I was interning on the ANG regional desk at the Oakland Tribune. A few of my best stories landed on the local front of the Merc, and I was proud.

___

I’m not going to go into great detail here about the many rounds of downsizing and layoffs at the Mercury News in particular or MediaNews in general.

While I agree with the people who say that MediaNews cuts with too wide a thresher, I also believe that most major metro papers have newsrooms bloated with role-players from a previous era.

I don’t believe your restaurant critic has better taste than the people on Yelp.

I don’t believe that local movie, TV, or music critics have a great amount of unique local value in the era of Rotten Tomatoes and Netflix. I don’t believe that a newspaper in San Jose needs a national issue on its front page every day, with few exceptions. I don’t believe in the Editorial We. I don’t believe that the best newspaper columnists can keep up with the best bloggers in the niches or styles I care about.

So given all that I don’t believe, I don’t believe in 800-person newsrooms, or even 400-person newsrooms.

But at some point, if the Merc is going to start moving substantially in any direction at all as a force in local online news, the bleeding has to stop.

___

But it doesn’t.

Matt Mansfield is taking a buyout.

Dean Takahashi left for VentureBeat, which started as SiliconBeat at the Merc before Matt Marshall took the concept on the road.

Mike Bazeley left, too.

Editors have left, and publishers have been replaced, and their bosses at CNP have rotated, and I’m not sure anyone left after Friday is going to have the time or morale (or approval from MNG) to Rethink much of substance.

I’m writing this a few days before a scheduled round of buyouts and layoffs at the Merc.

And at the same time, I’m on my way out of town, moving away from the Bay Area a few short weeks from now. So this is my send-off to hand-wringing that goes on here, in the part of the country where newspapers have probably been hit the hardest by the effects of the Web and the economic changes in the news industry.

I’ll miss seeing the Merc and the SF Chronicle and the Sentinel lined up in the racks around downtown Santa Cruz, but I’m looking forward to reading the D&C and the local GateHouse papers. Heck, we might even take a print subscription of the weekly in the town we’ll be living in.

___

Here’s what I would do if I were in charge of where the Merc goes online after this Friday:

1. Abandon NGPS and rebuild the site in Drupal with proper commenting, registration, user profiles, blogs for all users.
2. Take blog posts and podcasts out of the little ghetto-ized boxes on the homepage and feature them as you would feature any other piece of content.
3. Make your multimedia players as big and bold and featured as the Las Vegas Sun. The work your staff is doing demands and deserves it.
4. Recruit local bloggers from neighborhoods around San Jose to lead local social networks – if you built the site with Drupal, this wouldn’t be complicated. They can moderate, manage, and cheerlead as necessary. Give the readers/users a sense of ownership of their neighborhood coverage.
5. Don’t feature national/world news on the homepage unless it happens in San Jose, with few exceptions.

I’m perfectly aware that very little of this is easy to do, given the development and design situation at MNG, but #4 could be launched quickly with Ning or (less quickly) with WPMU if you can identify the right bloggers. They don’t have to be writing about their neighborhoods already. I don’t write about living in Santa Cruz or local politics on this blog, but I was very excited about Citizen Santa Cruz while it was running. (I’ve been told it will be back soon – stay tuned, locals.)

These aren’t revolutionary ideas – they’re happening at other papers in towns with less economic, organizational, and environmental pressure to change.

So change. Or die.

___

Obviously, I’m curious to hear what present and past Merc reporters and editors think about all this. I’m sure there will be plenty of stories and blog posts and handwringers in the next few days as the lists of buyouts and layoffs circulate.

I’ll leave with this thought:

If a start-up were to hire 10 of the most talented people who left Yahoo and the Mercury News in the last short while, they could build a kick-ass innovative local news organization in any two towns in Silicon Valley.

___

[UPDATE: Mike Bazeley is in a much better position than I am to write an obituary for the Merc, as he worked there for 11 years. He's written it here.] 

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I’m going to throw a monkeywrench at the Rethink works here, just to air out something that’s obvious to anyone who reads both the Merc and a raft of blogs about things like Silicon Valley, venture capital, and green technology.

This is part of the problem that Rethink and Matt Nauman’s role as a beatblogger will need to solve:

Merc reporters get their butts handed to them by blogs on a regular basis.

I don’t mean to put any reporter down when I write that, but the Merc’s audience for stories like “Al Gore joins Kleiner Perkins” read the story hours — sometimes days — earlier in their feed reader.

In fact, the Merc used to have the best blog on the topic — Silicon Beat — before Matt Marshall and company left the newspaper and it was reborn as Venture Beat, which I subscribe to, regularly reading timely, clear, well-researched reporting on green tech in the Valley.

Add to the mix the sources that fuel TechCrunch, Scoble, Engadget, Gizmodo, and even the swarm of rumor-powered Apple-adjacent blogs, and you get a social network that is well ahead of the Merc’s curve.

In my opinion, the Rethink strategy of a renewed emphasis on business and technology in Silicon Valley is a Quixotic exercise.

But I don’t live on their side of the hill, and I didn’t hand out Starbucks cards in front of Fry’s in an extended but informal Newspaper Next market research project, and I didn’t talk to their readers to find out what they want from their local paper.

If it were up to me, I’d take a rethought Merc in a direction heavy on neighborhoods and light on beats that already get saturated with blog coverage.

I’m off-topic, and I didn’t answer Jay’s question yet, so here’s how I think this fits into the beatblogger framework:

A Mercury News beatblog+network on green technology should aggregate the best of what’s already out there in the wild. Trying to shoehorn sources on this beat into temporary roles as ‘commenters’ or ‘members’ of a network or ‘friends’ or ‘fans’ won’t go as far in the long run as linking out to them. Don’t try to duplicate an existing network already saturated with coverage.

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Plea:
Jay Rosen has the beatblogging with a social network thing worked up pretty clearly at this point, but if the project doesn’t leave behind tools (a WordPress theme, a Drupal module, a useful set of forms — something more tangible than good ideas that other news organizations can use), it’s just twelve more reporters with a blog and a bunch of know-it-all commenters. [UPDATE: Wow, that sounds pretty harsh, doesn't it? I'll write something more practical about it later and add a link here.]

More:
The NYTimes.com tech aggregator thing is cute, but first of all, isn’t this space a little crowded? And second of all, can’t you just use the frigging Blogrunner algorithm to add headlines to your stories from blogs that link to them? It was doing that when you bought it.

Seriously:
Why did my house get two calls in one day from circulation salesfolk from the Mercury News? Could it be because there was an earthquake on their front page for the last two days and someone thought it was a good time to blitz Santa Cruz? Or because the local paper moves out of downtown this weekend? Or do they just hate children and want to wake up sleeping babies every chance they get?

Fact:
I have worked in a newsroom where the circulation employees (not their fault – I blame the software) would call newsroom employees — at their desks in the same building — trying to sell them a subscription.

Opinion:
Scott Adams is a wonderful, wonderful man.

Thanks:
To Rex for the clue about Hype Machine when he blogged (or twittered?) its redesign launch. If all I got from it was the song stuck in my head right now, that would have been enough.

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