Heck of a game ...

And now, if you will allow this minor show of partisanship -- Go Gamecocks!

That was a heck of a national championship game no matter who won, but it was sweet that South Carolina did win the last game at Rosenblatt Stadium (2-1 in extra innings over UCLA), coming back from the elimination bracket to do it. Hats off to both teams.

But, please, enough already with the ESPN commentators' "first major championship." Any national championship is major - I don't care what the "commonly accepted" nomenclature is, and I think it's disrespectful to the women's track and field team that won the school's first NCAA national championship.

Now back to our regular programming.

Number silliness

Came across this today in an AP story by Harry Weber about BP station owners angry at the company and demanding discounts in gas to make up for what they say are customers boycotting because of the oil spill:

In recent weeks, some station owners from Georgia and Illinois say sales have declined as much as 10 percent to 40 percent.

That's just silly wording that I see too often. "As much as" defines the outer limit, and with a range where the difference is a factor of four (10 to 40), it's pointless to say it could be as much as 10 to 40. Sales have declined "as much as 40 percent" or "sales have declined 10 to 40 percent" (no need under AP style to repeat "percent" anymore).

In cases where the range is tight -- something like "sales have declined as much as 35 to 40 percent" -- it might make sense. Otherwise, no need to double up on the weasel words. Simply listing the range or using "as much as" and the outer limit, depending on the precision you want to show, is enough.

Gannett's paywalls

A low-key announcement buried in the business briefs of my local (McClatchy) paper this weekend alerted me to the impending pay wall going up at Gannett's Greenville News beginning Thursday.

It's an interesting experiment by Gannett that hasn't gotten the play I think it probably deserves -- and that's probably because everyone has long since tired of the pay wall debate. But this is one of the world's top media companies, and I suspect the paywalls going up in Greenville, Tallahassee and St. George, Utah. portend an experiment that not only Gannett, but also the entire industry, will be watching closely. (The announcement was followed in St. George by promises of a lot more great material in print online.)

As Steve Buttry rather acerbically points out - and right on target - each announcement buried the lede, telling people how much their paper spends to do great things for them instead of getting to the point that they would now have to pay a minimum of about $120 a year for basic online access. (I also find myself dryly wondering if the papers will leave those announcements up and out from behind the paywall.)

The Salt Lake City Tribune article that Buttry points to at least gets the important news in the lede - this is an experiment by Gannett, a seemingly desperate one from the sound of it, to figure out if some - any - kind of pay wall will work.

That Greenville was chosen makes sense to me. It's a midsized paper of nearly 100,000 circulation in a middle-class city with a stronger economy than most these days, an economy that also has an international flavor with the likes of BMW and Michelin.  Tallahassee, being a state capital town, has a similar if slightly different profile. I don't know enough about St. George to comment other than that it is a smaller paper in an isolated area, but from what I read it seem to have an above-average income and high online use.

Greenville allows Gannett to test this in a somewhat more competitive market. Along with two TV stations with robust news departments (a third station is in Asheville, N.C.), there is the nearby daily Herald-Journal of Spartanburg, a smaller but nonetheless substantial alternative source of news. It is a N.Y. Times regional paper that also has a smaller paper under its wing in Hendersonville, N.C. (about halfway to Asheville). While the Herald-Journal does not normally cover Greenville (25 miles to the east) regularly, it could conceivably look at doing more regional news. There also is the Greer Citizen, a smaller twice-weekly paper between the two cities that covers Greenville County.

In other words, there are plenty of alternative sources, but it's a smaller market so Gannett does not have to risk the potential of a "failure" that could bring more unwanted publicity it done at one of its larger papers, such as Indianapolis, Rochester or Phoenix (or in a major media area like White Plains, N.Y.).

(Greenville also has been a good place to experiment with other things. It was one of the first of Gannett's bigger papers to be almost entirely copy edited and designed elsewhere - Louisville, Ky.)

When he left Gannett earlier this year, the company's chief digital officer, Chris Saridakis, warned against paywalls implemented in the traditional ways, as this seems to be. He pushed for charging, but for specialized packaged delivered how the user wanted them.

Gannett is not known for being loquacious about its business, but I hope some information on the results of this do come out and with a bit more publicity than I've seen about the initial announcements. If these are successful, they could have a major impact on newspaper sites throughout the country because, as we know, other chains have never followed Gannett's lead ...

I thought this was an interesting observation from "Partisan62" in the comments to the Greenville story:

This so called business model is like charging us to enter the store to browse. How about charging for access to GN original content (like those wonderful sotries on the symphony or the phony writeups of local homes) and leaving the comments and forums free? We post our thoughts and generate that content (not GN) while we look over those great rollover ads and banners.

(Update 7/2): Checking the Greenville site, it appears the comments are remaining under free access.

A lot of the comments on all three sites basically come down to this - we're willing to put up with the ads to read what is there because it isn't all that compelling. Start charging, however, and the content doesn't measure up to the value.

Update thought: In recent years, AP bureaus have come to rely on newspaper and broadcast Web sites as a quick way to pick up stories throughout the day, instead of having to rely on the old, weirdly named "electronic carbons," which were direct feeds into AP's system from member computers. I wonder if Gannett will grant AP continued free access to the sites.
Update 7/2: Bill Mitchell's Poynter column on the experiment.

CSJ recognized

While I've been away or mucking around (see previous post), the folks at Guide to Online Schools saw fit to name this one of their 50 inspiring journalism blogs (what it inspires was left unsaid ...).

Many thanks.

Mucking around

You might have noticed a scarcity of posts lately. It's because I have been mucking around - figuratively and, it turns out this week, literally.

My summer "off" - first one in a long time - has meant hanging crown molding, painting, laying a brick wall, and, in a few days, tearing apart a closet and rebuilding it. (It also has meant a trip to Indiana and Arkansas.)

And I have been mucking around literally - much to my dismay - as I fill a long-neglected garden with dirt (after laying that wall). This involves several cubic yards - well, many cubic yards - of topsoil, which involves many 40-pound bags. One finds a certain existential meaning in tossing dozens of such bags around in 90-plus-degree heat. (The meaning that most likely comes to mind is "fool.")

Now, it might be easier to have all those cubic yards delivered, but the dirt still has to be hauled back in a wheelbarrow, etc. And at $25 or more a cubic yard, I'm sure the landscaping places have fine dirt, but at that price I also expect to be able to pan for gold in it.

So we go with the bags at about $10 a cubic yard. Now, I'm not expecting the finest loam from that. But when you open a 40-pound bag from Home Depot and out comes not some granulated dirt, but a wet, sticky mess more suitable for making pottery than spreading about a garden, there is this vague sense that you are getting slightly ripped off - like maybe you are paying for 30 pounds of soil and 10 of water. Even the motorized tiller I've borrowed has trouble getting through it, with the stuff sticking to the blades and the wheels.

Which makes one wonder. How hard is it to sell a decent bag of dirt?

So it's off to Lowe's for the rest. So far the dirt I've bought there, for the same price, has been good, granular, black stuff, if not the finest grade, and it has the advantage of being sold in cubic foot bags, which is easier to calculate for what I still need (which I fear is many more bags).

Quick interesting reads

I'm on the road, so just a quick hit. Allow me to suggest two items from today's Paid Content. Both involve the shift happening in the traditional Web as mobile and apps become more prevalent:

The first discusses how traditional publishers are turning back to more of the print-type experience online and how not only apps, but also the Safari browser's new '"reader" view are aiding and abetting that.

The second is an interesting follow-on, with Scribd suggesting those publishers might do better using robust HTML5 coding instead of sinking many dollars into multiple apps.

I touched on some of this on a recent press association panel and in this month's Common Sense Journalism column.

I am just fascinated by what I expect to be the next digital evolution, powered by mobile, apps and geolocation - a Web without websites as we know them