Extra! Extra! Pittsburgh Old Media Adds Value!

Our compliments to both Mayor Ravenstahl and the Post-Gazette, two names that are not often praised.

Kudos to Mayor Ravenstahl, who did the right thing and attended one of the funerals of the people who drowned in the rain on his street. (snark: Luke sorta likes going to funerals, once he got a new job after going to a funeral.) Props to the Post-Gazette, who performed a public service and contributed to the discussion several times in today's paper.

Brian O'Neill did a marvelous job of adding historical detail and human perspective in his article, The Washington Boulevard disaster: Now we must Act. He provides historical facts not available to new-media Google, shifts into life-and-justice values, and ends with a clear call to action; we see too few Writers these days and we are consistently pleased by Mr. O'Neill's work.

We are enamored of Joe Smydo's article (and headline) Marked absences: Mayor Ravenstahl criticized for missing multiple major events. Mayoral defenders attempt to narrow the argument by saying the mayor's got a cellphone, it's an invasion of His privacy and family life, and it's a security risk if His whereabouts are known. The true point comes more from sampling theory than from knee-jerk parochialism; if somebody in a position of responsibility is frequently out of town and unavailable when random events occur, then they're probably out of town and unavailable more than they should be, if they're going to stay in that position.

Jonathan D. Silver wrote a great article, teased on the front page as "Other cities have flash flood alert systems", and headlined as "Flash flood warnings systems are costly" in the interior. The article approaches the question, "How come people in other North American cities don't drown in the rain?"

Paging Rich Lord, Chris Young, Chris Potter;
Call to Action for Mr. Lord, Mr. Young, Mr. Potter: We particularly appreciate the photo caption in Silver's article, Mud-covered vehicles destroyed in the Washington Boulevard flooding were towed to the Pittsburgh Police Zone 5 Police Station, and we wish that Some Journalist would consider why the Zone 5 parking lots were empty - namely, the report that police dispatchers have been in the habit of warning employees to move their cars when flooding was imminent, ignoring the safety of the people on the streets.

Bravo, Post-Gazette, and chapeau Messrs. O'Neill, Smydo, and Silver.

Post Gazette Plus Subscription

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is launching a subscription-only, value-added web presence at midnight tonight.

PG+ will not replace post-gazette.com, which will continue to offer the same breaking news, features and multimedia content as always. Rather, it will allow subscribers access to a new stream of exclusive blogs, videos, live chats and behind-the-scenes insights into the news of the day.

The new site, hosted by a team of PG bloggers, will emphasize user interaction, with commenting throughout the site. Members also will be able to create a social networking profile to keep the conversation going.

The content will be provided by some of the Post-Gazette's best-known personalities, including Ed Bouchette, Mackenzie Carpenter, Doug Oster, Gene Collier, Reg Henry and Jack Kelly.

What's Conventional Wisdom on Pay-for-Web-News?

The conventional wisdom consists of three words, three words which are even scarier than "starring Ben Affleck": Doomed to Fail. Rupert Murdoch keeps threatening to move his news content ("news content", seems like "cheese product" - its kind of cheese, but..) beyond a pay-wall. I notice that he hasn't found the right situation to actually do that, yet.


The New York Times experimented with this in their Times Select product. They moved their best content - the editorial writers, the blogs, reader comments - behind the paywall. Here's some of the talent: Thomas Friedman, Nicholas Kristof, Bob Herbert, Paul Krugman. Total web eyeballs plummeted. Web ad revenue dropped. The subscriptions were not sufficient to justify the overall loss of web advertising. The NY Times was unable to make this work. (I really liked the Times Select product. My friend Mark bought a subscription. About a dozen of us used it.)

So, on the face of it, the Post Gazette appears to be betting that (1) they're smarter than Rupert Murdoch, (2) they're more webby than the NY Times, and that (3) Friedman, Kristof, Herbert and Krugman pale in comparison to Bouchette, Carpenter, Oster, Collier, Henry and Kelly. None of those propositions is true.

Let's Refute Conventional Wisdom

The P-G may get away with this, or at least get a one-year bounce out of it. In the current newspaper era, a one-year bounce isn't a bad thing, especially if you're trying to package the paper for a sale.

What does the PG have to lose?

If the PostGazette really does keep all it's present content free, and only puts additional, value-added content behind the pay-wall, they don't have much to lose. Normal web traffic should remain the same. If the incremental web traffic for PG+ is insufficient to pay the incremental salaries (which I bet is truly a relatively small amount), then there's not a lot of risk in this experiment; they can shut it down easily enough.

What will subscribers get?

Subscribers will get blogs, opinion, and social media - comments and discussion with other subscribers. This seems like a sure attraction for office workers that can't listen to talk radio at work, but have a web connection. That can't be too many people.

Timing is everything

Will the national attention on Pittsburgh for the G-20 bring a lot of subscribers? (Hint: Yinz can just read PghComet and Nullspace n'at.) Will the national focus on "the Pittsburgh Miracle" cause people from around the country to want to read what's going on? Will the Burgh's national sports visibility (football and hockey champions, and the Washington Wild Things) bring a desirable cachet?

A PG+ Formula: Hyperlocal + Diaspora + Geezer 2.0

How could PG+ succeed? I think a winning formula would require a financial committment to establishing hyperlocal news, subscription from the Diaspora, and bringing Geezers into Pittsburgh social media.

Hyperlocal news has been profitable by subscription. Hyperlocal news would, for instance, give us a news feed down to the specific neighborhoods. Instead of carrying Pittsburgh news and identifying it by neighborhood, "hyperlocal news" would have a blogger and a forum specifically covering Lincoln-Lemington-Belmar - and every other neighborhood. Perhaps you could configure your PG+ page to cover the neighborhoods that you live in, and the areas you and your spouse work in. In a city with such diverse and well-established neighborhoods, a hyperlocal news approach might succeed.

Will the Diaspora Subscribe?

If the Pittsburgh Diaspora (the legions who have left {for work, mostly} but still consider themselves Black and Gold) subscribe, this could be a successful adventure for the P-G. Just look at the list of Steelers' bars around the country.

Geezer 2.0

AOL was successful (for a decade) because it brought the web and webbish things to non-geeks. Your Aunt Mary could surf AOL and do email. The Geezer Demographic (which looks a lot like Pittsburgh) isn't tweeting, and they aren't into Facebook. If PG+ can bring "social-media-light" to the Geezers, they may have another profitable niche.

So, we'll see. Snarky prediction: Absence of a "two-day pass", like Salon uses, will keep people from buying something they cannot see; expect to see a "free look" option in 45 days. Unless they pursue the options above (hyperlocal, diaspora, geezer 2.0) this will struggle for eighteen months and then go away. Pundits will start referring to the "free" Post Gazette website as PG-Minus.

I wish them luck and success. They're not "too big to fail", but success of a local newspaper is important.

Click here for other Post Gazette Plus posts.

Allegheny Alzheimers and Post Gazette Search Results

I don't know anything about Politics, but I do know about Search Algorithms.

When I write a blog entry, I like to embed links when I use an obscure term, refer to an event, or mention something that I might assume the reader knows about - because I hate it when I read something and the context isn't evident.

I have a bad habit of considering my blog posts a work in progress for the first few days after I've posted them - I re-read them, edit them, try to fix the flow, and add links when necessary.

So I was reviewing my previous post about Pittsburgh bicycle politics, looking at the line where I mentioned that Hizzoner Luke Ravenstahl used a Dept. of Homeland Security SUV to go to Star Lake Amphitheatre for a country music concert, and I thought to myself - Hey, that's an obscure reference, you should put an explanatory link in there!

I went to the local paper, The Pittsburgh Post Gazette — whoa, did I say I went to the local paper? Sorry, I went to their website, which I suppose is part of the problem newspapers face nowadays — people go to the website for free instead of the newstand. But I digress.

I went to PostGazette.com, which is a nice website - sometimes slow to load, but that's okay - and I searched for "Ravenstahl Star Lake". No results. I searched for "Luke Ravenstahl SUV". Nothing.


I went to the Tribune Review and got good search results.
I went to Google. Lots of results.
I went to the Burgh Blogosphere. Lots of results: MacYapper , I Love Luke, Tube City Online, Pgh Comet, Pist Gazette, Daily Kos.

I went back to P-G.com's search page and searched for:
Ravenstahl concert : nothing
Ravenstahl SUV : nothing
Ravenstahl scandal : nothing
Ravenstahl ethics : 1 return-- "Ravenstahl, DeSantis stick to the script as ethics issue isn't raised"

I used the P-G's search function to search on "Mona Wallace", which is a name from the Star Lake scandal that came up in the Google results. Shazzam! — lots of stories about the Mayor and his SUV in the Post Gazette. You just can't find them when you search for them directly.

I tried parsing the Mona Wallace headlines into phrases, and searched for them on the PG site:
Mayor SUV : letters to the editor, no news
Ravenstahl personal use SUV : nothing

I thought, maybe I'm spelling it wrong, so I searched on: "Ravenstahl" : this produced all sorts of results. For a while there, I thought that when Luke changed his last name to Steelerstahl, maybe the Post Gazette did a search/replace in the archives. There's still a lot of Ravenstahl responses in the Search function, just none about the SUV brouhaha.

I tried the above search queries in Google and got lots of results. I found a Wikipedia page on Hizzoner the Mayor, and it contained some other stories I tried to search for in the Post Gazette.

Institutional Infonesia *

* Infonesia: the condition of having read some info, but cannot find or recall the source.

Based on the Wikipedia entry, I used the P-G search page for the following terms--
ravenstahl Lemieux : nothing
Ravenstahl stadium : nothing
Ravenstahl New York : nothing
Ravenstahl Burkle : one letter to the editor about the Penguins
ravenstahl oakmont : nothing
ravenstahl tiger woods : nothing
ravenstahl KDKA poll : nothing
Ravenstahl US Open UPMC : nothing

And yet, when you search those terms in Google, all sorts of results show up.


Having said all that, I don't often use the P-G.com Search function; maybe this is par for the course.

I'd like to repeat (sorry) a quote from Milan Kundera in another post:
The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
How do people struggle against power when the Search function forgets? What's the Post-Gazette's value proposition when they don't contribute to public discourse?

What was it George Santayana said? Those who cannot <something something> are condemned to <something>? It was a bit like that. Hey, how about those Steelers Penguins?



This is a puzzle for me, and if anybody has any comments about what's up I'd love to hear them. Also, if you find other PostGazette search terms that should produce local news about Hizzoner but don't, please kick in a comment. If any P-G folks would like to weigh in, I'm open to feedback and correction.