Disqus - Latest Comments for howardowens

Re: It’s Time to Eliminate Political Parties

howardowens — Tue, 16 Jul 2019 15:04:25 -0000

I've been speaking out against political parties for 25 years.

But you can't just "eliminate" political parties as this column suggests.

People have a right to assembly, per the First Amendment.

What you can do is disentangle political parties from the government.

Eliminate partisan staff in the legislatures -- no more majority staff/minority staff. One legislative staff that is non-partisan.

Eliminate part primaries -- parties are private entities. Taxpayers should not fund the method by which they choose candidates.

Eliminate all ballot access rules.

Eliminate gerrymandering.

Eliminate the government registering party affiliation. This is really a violation of privacy anyway since registration records -- properly so -- are public record. The government shouldn't disclose what private organizations a private person is affiliated with.

All of that would greatly reduce the role of partisanship in our politics and our policies.

Re: Nixon and Cuomo spar over school funding

howardowens — Tue, 05 Jun 2018 13:51:46 -0000

New York pays more per pupil than any other state. For mediocre results.

California pays 60 percent of what New Yorkers pay for comparable results.

Utah pays 1/3 what New Yorkers pay for better results.

Re: Why DNAinfo’s Shuttering Isn’t a Reflection on the Hyperlocal Digital Opportunity

howardowens — Mon, 13 Nov 2017 15:43:46 -0000

Thanks, Scott.

Re: Borrell: Too Many Local Newspapers Remain Stuck in Their Newsroom ‘Church’

howardowens — Fri, 26 May 2017 08:40:28 -0000

"Advertisers don't want to be around news readers." Then how does Goran explain our 166 local business paying to be on our site?

Google doesn't dominate our market. Facebook doesn't dominate our market. We dominate our market.

Newspapers are failing online not because there isn't a market for what the do, but because the have subpar approaches to local digital news and local ad sales. They need to stop using Facebook and Google as an excuse for failure and get smarter and get to work.

Re: #SFSW16: What VCs Are Looking for in Local Startups

howardowens — Thu, 09 Jun 2016 09:56:47 -0000

Not a word about the most important piece of local -- news.

Re: Local Media Companies Need to Decentralize to Survive

howardowens — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 16:51:55 -0000

Absolutely right, Terry.

Re: if you want to see whats wrong with print journalism today, look no further than TJ Simers

howardowens — Tue, 10 Sep 2013 19:30:43 -0000

The way the LAT does things now means eventually there will be no LAT, neither in print nor online.

Re: if you want to see whats wrong with print journalism today, look no further than TJ Simers

howardowens — Tue, 10 Sep 2013 19:29:50 -0000

By expecting the print staff to do online, you weaken both products and you give the online product no opportunity to grow wings.

Print will die eventually anyway. Let it die a glorious death. Build a separate online business that doesn't rely on print to sustain it. It can be done. I'm doing it.

If newspapers had taken this approach a decade ago, they would have more print readers and be making more print money than they do now. And they would have more online readers and be making more online money than they do now.

Re: if you want to see whats wrong with print journalism today, look no further than TJ Simers

howardowens — Tue, 10 Sep 2013 19:17:39 -0000

But see ... I wouldn't make any of those guys post to the web (or tweet or facebook or pinterest) EVER. I'd hire all new people for the web.

That "Riptide" thing out today reminded me of this piece I wrote in 2009 ... the original sin of newspapers wasn't putting up a paywall (though I'm sure that's what TJ would say) it was trying to do the web as a newspaper operation. http://howardowens.com/2009...

Re: if you want to see whats wrong with print journalism today, look no further than TJ Simers

howardowens — Tue, 10 Sep 2013 18:57:55 -0000

Tony, you know I'm a digital media guy ... but I'm kind of with TJ on this one. One of my critiques of newspaper companies is they stopped letting the newspaper be the newspaper and instead tried to fashion the web into a newspaper. I think there needs to be a place for the TJ Simmers of the world to just be old newspaper hacks and nothing more. There's value in that. There's money in that. There's a place for that. And if the LAT isn't the place for that to happen, he should leave.

If I were publisher of the Times, I'd run it very differently than it's being run and the TJs on the staff should love it.

Re: Grasping for a New Way Forward at Local Media Conferences

howardowens — Tue, 27 Aug 2013 14:03:38 -0000

WTF? Why is that utopian? Why the sneer? Why is scale the end all and be all? Just, wow.

Re: 6 Hyperlocal Failures That Foreshadowed AOL Patch's Woes

howardowens — Tue, 27 Aug 2013 13:58:16 -0000

It's rather unbalanced to merely list just the failures without also listing the successes, which are numerous. Failures in any start up industry are hardly a surprise. There will always be mistakes in execution or strategy. These are false starts and hardly remarkable.

Re: The Neighborhood Watch

howardowens — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 10:14:18 -0000

There's a whole raft of successful local online news publications -- making good money, turning out quality journalism, and proving that the local journalism model does work online. Just because clueless, soulless national chains are failing doesn't mean there isn't a business model there. Shame on Adweek for not digging deeper on the topic.

Re: Political Soothsaying

howardowens — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 08:38:37 -0000

Thanks for the write up, Alan. You're a peach.

Re: Hyperlocal Start-Ups Say They Can’t Measure Their Engagement. Huh?

howardowens — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 14:42:11 -0000

I can't remember the last time a local small business owner asked me, "how are you measuring engagement?"

Oh, wait, I remember: NEVER.

Hell, any more no advertisers even asks about page views or visitors.

Why? Because everybody in town knows everybody reads The Batavian.

That's real engagement, the kind of engagement that doesn't need measured.

Today, while covering an event involving a group 3rd, 4th and 5th graders, one of them asked, "Are we going to be in the paper?" Another piped up, "no, on The Batavian." I said, "yes, on The Batavian," and the whole class cheered.

On a daily basis, adults stop me at events and tell me how much they love The Batavian.

A couple of months ago, an advertiser was in the local Verizon store and the doors opened on the fire hall across the street and the fire trucks rolled out. Every customer in the crowded store immediately pulled out their mobile devices and checked the site. One person said, "Howard hasn't updated the site yet." My advertiser said, "give him a minute, guys."

Last summer, some guy drove past my house while I was outside watering the lawn and slowed, stuck his head out the window and yelled, "Keep up the great work, Howard. I love The Batavian."

How is Kissmetrics or Mixpanel going to measure that kind of engagement -- the engagement that really mattes? And why I should I spend money on a service that will do NOTHING to help me make money?

Re: AOL's Patch: Big Losses on Hyperlocal News

howardowens — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 16:52:41 -0000

Just to add some facts to this fact-challenged story, as my fellow indie publishers have done.

The Batavian has 132 committed small local businesses who supply us annual revenue well into the six figures, and our revenue and SMBO base is growing.

In a city and town of less than 24,000 people, Quantcast says 26,000 people in the past 30 days have visited the site. GA says the site has been visited more than 275,000 times.

Patch proves nothing about hyperlocal. What it does prove is this segment of industry isn't ready for the cookie-cutter, top-down, high-cost management of big corporations.

No newspaper chain started out as a chain. The chains were built through buyouts of once small, independent newspapers that later became profitable enough to both be attractive as acquisitions and generated enough cash flow to cover up the inefficiencies of "scale" in the local news business.

Re: A Big, Not Easy solution to the journalism crisis in New Orleans

howardowens — Thu, 31 May 2012 10:27:09 -0000

First, thanks for the mention; second, please don't lump me in with the FON crowd. There's much that they and I disagree about.

As for the digital divide, the elephant in the room is the poor penetration rates for newspapers among lower socio-economic groups, especially young and poor. No matter how much broadband you provide, you're not going to turn those people into print journalism consumers if you keep providing the same type of journalism they've already rejected.

Newspapers became economic powerhouses by serving first and foremost the poor and disadvantaged, the immigrant class of urban areas. That was the great disruption of the penny press.

With the professionalization of journalism came a great disconnect between the interests of journalists and the interest of lower socio-economic neighborhoods.

That said, your suggestion of hyperlocal start ups helping to fill the gap in New Orleans is a good one. Local publishers in local neighborhoods, who really understand their neighborhoods, have a better chance of turning today's non-readers into readers.

There are already independent neighborhood/local news sites in NO. I don't know anything about the neighborhoods they serve, but the model and the opportunity is there.

And don't forget, that even some of the poorest people in our communities now own and use phones with web browsers. The opportunity to reach people supposedly on the other side of the digital divide exists now and is substantial. It just takes the right content and business model.

Re: 6 Platforms Hyperlocal Publishers Can Use to Fill Unsold Ad Inventory

howardowens — Wed, 23 May 2012 07:48:12 -0000

If you're doing hyperlocal advertising right, you don't have any unsold inventory.

Re: The changing role of the homepage and why your website is not a newspaper | TheMediaBriefing

howardowens — Mon, 21 May 2012 16:08:21 -0000

First, be careful about drawing conclusions from a magazine site about how a newspaper site is used.

Second, it's quite possible that a lot of interior page site traffic is misleading a site manager as to the true value of the site's core traffic.

Core traffic, repeat traffic, the traffic that most values what you do -- and is therefore most valuable to advertisers -- always, always, always starts with the home page.

The home page is where all of your ads need to be, and all your content (not just headlines and links, cause -- people don't read web sites front to back -- but they will read the whole product if it's all there).

Re: Prescription for Patch: Become an All-in-One SMB Marketing Solution

howardowens — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 14:26:58 -0000

"I think there is a lot of value in the network approach to hyperlocal news. Many small startup publishers are challenged by the technical details of web publishing — and by the need to offer the kind of polished, powerful, digital product that online readers have come to expect. Tech and design can suck up huge amounts of time and resources. "

I'm calling bullshit on that one. There simply isn't a lick of truth to this unsubstantiated statement.

Yes, the smbo is looking for a lot of help in digital marking, but they're also looking to do business with people they trust -- advantage local publisher.

Re: The newsonomics of hyperlocal’s next round: Patch, Digital First, and more

howardowens — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 09:18:29 -0000

Ken, $2,500 a month from a single market is hardly impressive and not a "rocket boost of revenue." A rocket boost would be going from $0 to $4,500 per month in three months, as The Batavian did.

And compare that $2,500 to what the typical successful indie publisher does, which is excess of $10K per month.

If Patch were any where close to work as a revenue model, those are the kind of numbers and growth you would see.

And, btw, $120K annual revenue (which is the low end of a successful indie), is $103.7 million, still below Patch's operating expenses.

Indies have shown how to get to this level and a bit more of revenue; the question isn't how to get there (and it's reasonable to doubt that Patch ever will). The question is now to get to the next tier. That's what we're working on now.

Re: Farewell, Wonkette (2006-2012)

howardowens — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 22:39:03 -0000

Nice post. Long before this net thing, I remember sitting with Layne and some mutual friends in a Pizza Hut on El Cajon Blvd. as he played "Wheels." Another CD from Layne and co. would be nice.

Re: 5 Network Models for Serving Up Hyperlocal Advertising

howardowens — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 10:41:52 -0000

Local publishers need to be very careful about the ads they allow to appear on their pages. If they're accepting non-local ads, they endanger their brand and their reputation with locally owned businesses in their market.

Re: Best Photos of 2011 by JMG-Galleries Blog Readers

howardowens — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 09:41:58 -0000

I feel left out ... here's mine. http://howardowens.com/2011...

Re: 4 ways to start researching the market for your new journalism venture

howardowens — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 10:37:53 -0000

Here's the only two things you need to know: Is this really something you want to do, and are there at least 300 locally owned businesses willing to advertise in your chosen market. The rest of it will just help you refine what you do.