Rural broadband needs a little less hooey and a little more Huey

You know, it's not necessarily cool to idolize the late Louisiana Gov. and Sen. Huey Long, who was assassinated at the peak of his power in 1935. Most people don't know who he was and, technically speaking, he was a corrupt despot. But he took a poor state, Louisiana, and brought it from one century into the next when most folks thought it'd be stuck back there forever. How? He just did it. He got the money and he built the roads, schools and hospitals. It was ugly. He fought powerful interests and used rough tactics. But his name is still on all the stuff in Louisiana.

Today, we have paved roads in northern Minnesota. They're not always great and should be improved, but they are paved. No one could fathom forcing rural Minnesota to go without paved roads just because they weren't close to the Twin Cities. Without these paved roads, we'd be mired in poverty forever just as Louisiana seemed to be in the 1930s when Long was governor and the rural roads were so bad farmers couldn't move their crops.

Well, today, the most pressing issue isn't unpaved roads. The issue is affordable high-speed internet access for every Minnesota (heck, American) at work and at home. It's the new utility that will bring us from one century into the next. It is a very expensive concept with millions of miles of cable to install. There are a lot of reasons not to do it, but those reasons will all seem pretty silly when the Internet -- and thus the economy -- is controlled by other countries in the future, counties that invested in high-speed internet throughout their population.

Here's a practical op-ed by the Blandin Foundation's Jim Hoolihan that ran in Wednesday's Pioneer Press regarding rural broadband. This is the first step toward what must be done. It's what Huey would do. We have access to as much or more resources in northern Minnesota than Huey did in Louisiana 1930. We could build the best rural internet network in the country. Not because our retiree population demands it (they don't), but because that's what needs to happen to make this region competitive in the future.

A one paper state?

Mainstream media, especially newspapers, continue to struggle in the Internet Age. As I've said before, there remain many questions about what will happen to the mainstream media this decade and beyond. But one things seems clear: The Twin Cities will probably be a one paper town sooner than you'd think. Minnesota will have only one newspaper that reaches a statewide audience. What it will be called, who owns it and what political agenda it may push remain to be seen. What I do know is that we'll be told that the change is good for readers and that investigative and political reporting will remain fair and deep. This will be a lie.

CBS/CNN deal would further blur media lines

According to a report from the New York Times, CBS is considering a partnership with CNN that would have the cable news network provide content to the network once represented by Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow. If you read the story you see that these talks are very preliminary and that there's plenty of room for this to unravel. I bring it up because it connects to some of my theories about how media changes are playing out.

We're already seeing the blurring of lines between cable and network TV news. MSNBC started that process and this CBS/CNN deal would keep it going. Eventually, the lines between TV and Internet news, indeed the line between TV and the Internet, will blur until we have a new kind of screen in our house that serves both functions.

I don't know if Katie Couric will be on this FutureScreen but I guess we'll all find out soon enough. All I know is that they need to figure out how to keep this screen humming when God drops two feet of snow on Balsam Township, Minnesota.

UPDATE: CBS and CNN are denying the reports, or at least downplaying them. I'm betting they were talking about this but that it leaked way too early.

The future of small town media in 1,000 words

A really interesting comment about local newspaper websites crossed the blog yesterday morning. As you may know, the ACM family of newspapers on the Iron Range now require readers to sign up for a free account to use its newspapers’ websites. A MinnesotaBrown blog reader responded to the change in this way:

What the hell are they thinking with this "free account" crap? I refuse to register. I find their sites difficult to use, and damned annoying in that they don't include all the articles. In fact, I've pretty much quit going to the sites at all because they try to make it hard for me to use their sites, in the apparent hope that by doing so, I'll buy a paper.Well. I don't. I am not a newspaper reader. I don't buy newspapers, and I'm not about to start buying them. I DO go to websites to read news. Presumably they derive ad revenue from the advertisers on their website who count on me to buy their goods and services just like those who advertise in the paper assume there is a connection between readers and sales.

I feel the Range papers are marginalizing their online readers. They are marginalizing the potential of their online business. And they are marginalizing their future existence.

The comment prompted this thought on my part. If and when the storied “e-Media Revolution” that people keep talking about happens (the time when the Internet finally and fully absorbs the functions of "old media" like newspapers and broadcast TV) the first wall that crumbles won't be the big city daily papers or CNN, but the small town newspapers and local TV news affiliates. This massive change will happen from the ground up.

These are my own thoughts based on my experience as a college communication instructor, former Iron Range small town daily newspaper editor and current writer and blogger. I still write for the Hibbing Daily Tribune, so it's important to note that I'd like to keep that job and that I'm not picking on that publication (or its parent company and affiliates), nor can I reveal any trade secrets (if I ever really knew any). But I can talk generally about the struggles that small town papers face in the Internet Age.

Here’s the problem. Let’s consider a hypothetical small town newspaper that had a circulation of, say, 15,000 in 1988. This paper has probably lost half its readers since. Today’s circulation, 6,000-7,000, consists of people disproportionately older and less Internet savvy than the population at large. Meantime, new readers were learning that they could get a good deal of what they wanted from this hypothetical paper’s website. Papers without a website were openly mocked by the Web-proficient members of their community, to the point where all papers adopted websites. As these websites developed, enthusiastic news people realized that the Internet is a really great medium for the written word and the websites grew in popularity.

But web readers got the product for free, advertisers weren’t willing to pay much to get on the website and the whole effort was costing the industry gabuldyjillions of dollars (an approximation). Newspapers were well aware this was happening and their leaders held numerous meetings (believe me). Some tried password protecting their web versions, but few would pay to read the papers online. Others tried making their web versions so awesome that they could entice advertisers to buy online ads. Some customers did, but this still didn’t make up the revenue.

Let me crystallize the problem: More people (and most young people) are using the Internet to receive news, but no one has figured out how to make as much money operating an online news site as newspapers USED TO be able to make before the Internet. Because media consolidation has driven up the debt service on your average small town paper to well above what is financially prudent, the old revenue figures are crucial to maintaining company stock prices. Unless this problem is figured out (and that ship may have sailed) we are trolling toward a total media realignment that will begin not with the New York Times, but with all the small papers about the size of the Anytown Whig-Observer. When these weeklies, small dailies and mid-sized papers in competitive markets realize that their revenue has fallen so low that it is equal to what they could make off the Internet alone AND when a majority of their readers are already on the Internet (two things not yet true, but coming), they’ll reconfigure. Add in the fact that many newspapers are now either owned by or in some kind of partnership with a local television network affiliate, and we’re talking about united, multi-media news operations functioning with the same editorial staff and disseminating news on TV and high-end websites, or perhaps a yet unknown combination of the two.

Oh, but there will be hundreds of bankruptcies and tens of thousands of layoffs before this occurs, so let’s not get too excited.

I teach blogging seminars for the KAXE Community Journalism Project. I’m not speaking for them either when I say this. But there is an efficiency argument that the Internet is a much more cost effective way to gather and share news in small towns. Over time, I could easily see community news websites that combine video, audio and print content replacing the old media. We definitely aren’t there yet, but nonprofit community journalism operations like KAXE are way out ahead of commercial companies in small towns. Streaming media on the big sites like http://www.cnn.com/, http://www.msnbc.com/ and http://www.foxnews.com/ is great – and will remain the standard into the future. But the “revolution” won’t really be at hand until the dams break in small and medium markets. When it happens, the results will be part chaotic, part fascinating and most assuredly remarkable. And while people in today's media industry will be affected negatively at first, it's important to remember that we will still need journalists, editors, technicians, graphic designers and photographers in this new media.

Now, there’s no reason that my current employer (I hope still current after speaking this heresy) and its sister publications on the Iron Range can’t survive or even thrive through all of this, but doing so will require a nimble approach when the majority of their readers make the leap to the Internet. None of this will happen next year, but I expect that it will happen before long. And it will happen in every corner of the world.

Even, perhaps especially, here on the Iron Range of Northern Minnesota (U.S.A., the World, the Universe).

PS: And for those who prefer political posts, I'll leave you with this: the biggest uncontrollable variable in the budget of a small town paper is the cost of employee health care. Guess what happens as a result? Layoffs and a gradually crappier health care plan.

Thanks ... now the work continues

A belated thank you to all the people who have attended the KAXE Community Journalism Project blog sessions across the Iron Range. We held our third session in Virginia last night and a great group of people spurred a good discussion of community blogging. The work continues. Stay tuned for news about future sessions and the next stage of the project.

For more information, see www.kaxecommons.org.

Internet changing the nature of news?

Here's an interesting column from Swampland's Michael Scherer on how the Internet has changed the ebb and flow of the national news media.

Here is a basic shift that has occurred in the news business: Because of the Internet, you, the reader, no longer have to buy information in pre-fabricated packages like “newspapers.” You can just go online and individually select the articles you want to read. And there are lots of websites and blogs to help you out. Every day, Matt Drudge, the Huffington Post, Yahoo, Google, Swampland, or a hundred other different bloggers, will pre-select articles for you and provide links. You choose your own adventure.

There is a corollary effect here: As the value of the package declines, the value of the individual article increases. Online, news organizations charge advertisers based on the number of hits they can get on a site. And since the hits are often coming for specific stories, and not the entire site, a blockbuster story that gets linked to, say, Drudge, is money in the bank.

This means that the competition on the level of the individual story is more intense than ever before, and there is enormous pressure to distinguish yourself from the pack. Assume, for instance, that 12 news organizations do the same story on the same day about how Hillary Clinton has a tough road ahead of her to get the nomination. Which story is going to get the most links and therefore the most readers? Is it the one that cautiously weighs the pros and cons, and presents a nuanced view of her chances? Or is it the one that says she is toast, and anyone who thinks different is living on another planet?

Iron Range high speed internet at crossroads

Public investment in high speed Internet on the Iron Range should be among our highest priorities. Whether we use this method or another, we need to make tech infrastructure happen. It's not for the people who are here now, it's for the people we need to come here and stay here.

Range fibernet project at a crossroads
By Marshall Helmberger, Tower Timberjay, March 15, 2008
The effort to bring an ultra-high speed fiber optic network to 11 Iron Range cities is exploring a new direction after a contentious meeting in January left some once-active members expressing doubts about the proposed project.

The Iron Range Network Joint Powers Board had planned to give presentations to the city councils of the 11 member cities in February, but those presentations have been put on hold while supporters try to determine their next step, a decision they expect to make at a meeting in Hibbing on Thursday.

High-Speed Rail: worthy goal for the Iron Range

My big goal in life is to participate in the modernization of the Iron Range. We've got a lot of work to do and I've often said that our current "economic development" funds should be spent on infrastructure and community enhancement rather than endless incentives for private companies. I've already written plenty about the need for an affordable network of high-speed Internet on the Iron Range. This would provide new opportunities for e-commuters and new tech businesses. Today I'm charged up about high-speed rail.

The Duluth City Council voted down funding to continue studying a high-speed rail between Duluth and Minneapolis. However, there is still hope for the project, as evidenced by a Brandon Stahl story in today's Duluth News-Tribune. The council will revisit the issue and I hope they fund the continued study. Critics point to the failures of rail travel in recent decades, but I believe those failures don't reflect societal changes that are happening right now. Read this excerpt from Stahl's story:

First, the older train line dropped riders off in a part of Minneapolis where they would have had to rent a car, take a cab or ride a bus. The new line would drop riders off at a central hub across from the new Twins stadium in downtown Minneapolis, connecting to light rail and other train lines that travel the Twin Cities area.

Higher train speeds would beat drive times to Minneapolis. The train would make up to eight round trips a day, and all train cars would be equipped with wireless Internet.

Most importantly, the train probably would make at least three stops: in Superior; in Hinckley, where the Grand Casino brings in 3 million to 4 million people a year; and in a northern Minneapolis suburb. Those riders would make the train feasible, the study says.

Travel time is now more than just traveling. A train ride like the one proposed is shorter than a drive to the Twin Cities and offers Internet access. This allows people to convert their current drive times into potential work time, which is a crucial efficiency in the modern economy.

Why am I so concerned about Duluth? Because high-speed rail to the Iron Range won't happen until Duluth demonstrates feasibility. One day this state will be connected by a rail network that runs fast and clean. There will always be cars, but repetitive commuting between cities should begin converting to mass transit.