A penny for my thoughts. Maybe even less?

More than a year ago, Pasadena Now's editor and publisher, James Macpherson, caused a minor media stir after hiring a couple of reporters in India to write up the Webcast meetings of the local city council for his online newspaper

In the year-plus since his decision, many of Macpherson's peers have had an increasingly hard time of it. (In a speech delivered earlier this month, Rupert Murdoch warned of even worse times ahead -- in no small part because of the emergence of the Internet and the haphazard way in which publishers have responded to the shift in technology.)

I haven't kept up with Pasadena Now. But in Sunday's New York Times, Maureen Dowd writes up her interview with Macpherson, who has now outsourced the work formerly done by the seven Pasadena staffers he fired.

"Everyone has to get ready for what's inevitable -- like King Canute and the tide coming in -- and that's really my message to the industry," the editor and publisher said. "Many newspapers are dead men walking. They're going to be replaced by smaller, nimbler, multiple Internet-centric kinds of things such as what I'm pioneering...I have essentially been five years ahead of the world for a long time, and that's a horrible address at which to live because people look at you, you know, like you're nuts."

He's not nuts. But I wonder whether he's addressing the symptom instead of the cause. Part (most?) of the turmoil in the industry is a function of the loss of trust, as Murdoch noted in his speech, at the same time that there are now a multiplicity of alternative, trusted sources of information.

Ignoring users has exacted an unfortunately high price, something Dave Winer correctly noted in a recent post:

Listening is hard. But all people who create products for users must listen if they want to do well at making products. That includes doctors, bus drivers, mailmen, entrepreneurs, programmers, and yes, reporters and editors too. Because if you don't listen you might miss a corner-turn and end up going off a cliff, just like the news industry is doing. They see the cliff, they know they're headed for it, but they don't ask how to turn the car. They don't really want to know. I think sometimes what they want is to be missed when they lie dead in a crumpled car at the bottom of the cliff. But we don't want that to happen. Not because we love them, but because life without them is pretty hard to imagine. They should turn the corner, no matter how painful it is. But in order to do it, they're going to have to look out the front window and the mirrors and listen to the person in the passenger seat.

How long will it take for them (us?) to get it? Beats me. CNN's experiment with user-generated reporting is going through predictable growing pains. It's an encouraging harbinger but I'm reserving judgment until the likes of the Times and The Wall Street Journal offer something similar.

As if the industry needed another sign how quickly times are changing, the lightning speed with which information about the Mumbai attacks was tweeted (and "retweeted") should serve as the catalyst for creative thinking about the future.

[solitare_pax]

If having writers from half a world away cover essentially local events is the future of the news as he believes, then true journalism is dead.

But wait - it's a crappy little online newspaper - so he doesn't need to live up to any real standards while living out on the bleeding edge of innovation. He just has to convince big corporate brands like Jif peanut butter and Circuit City that web traffic driven by his robo-web browsers that he has real eyes watching his site, and he can go laughing to the bank. Seen it done pretty well before, but that's another old story.

Yep - that's progress all right.

[Davvy2]

What a perfect title for this post, especially if you're the Indian writer hired by Pasadena Now, or the Indians hired to replace you, Coop, and the other CNET writers should CNET take your advice and follow in Macpherson's footsteps, replacing its writers with outsourced workers paid--literally--a penny or less for their thoughts.

Let's hope editorial trust outweighs financial considerations at CNET for many years to come. We'd all miss you.

[nicmart]

It's Maureen DOWD, and her syndrome is Reflex Liberalism.

[MSSlayer]

???????

The comments she wrote were quotes.

Go back to freeptard land.

[MSSlayer]

BBC had an interesting article about the media(and law enforcement) reaction to the tragedy in Mumbai. Speed of information is not necessarily a good thing.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7755684.stm

[whas8020]

Good piece, also read over at the AlleyInsider.com who report regularly on the "toastness" of Old Media in general, and newspapers in particular (just do a search for newspaper from their search box).

A well-put comment on there the other day: "There is NO reason for companies to hire hundreds or even thousands of people and spend millions of dollars to deliver yesterdays news", and I'd add: "and print one-time-use-only (at best) hard-copies of same...". Case closed.

The notes on Twitter's role in the Mumbai reporting remind me of Twitter tweets/users forming a sort of nano-bot army of news reporters. What is still missing now is an overarching intelligence to digest/sort/edit this news beyond the current format of the raw (keyword based) feed.

[JoshMiller79]

And people wonder why consumer spending is down. What will happen to the economy when no one has a job anymore? Sure, you're making 100% on your sales since you don't have to pay anyone to design or produce or sell the items but who will buy it if we're all living on the street?

[MadLyb]

As a person who spent a fair portion of my adult life self-employed, and a one person shop, it is obvious that you don't have a clue. There are many different business models and a one person shop is a valid one and not detrimental to the economy. I don't have to retain a workforce to provide a positive impact. I do that through my other expenses and purchases...just like the guys with lot's of workers.

[JoshMiller79]

@MadLyb A one person shop is certainly viable, when there is a handful of them.

The entire country can't become self employed. It would over saturate every market with thousands and millions of people offering the same "one man shop" offerings. And all it takes of a thousand people offering the same service is one percent of them to undercut the others by half the price to put the other 9900 out of business. Especially in this easy access online world we live in.

Yeah, such a business model would have worked even a hundred years ago when you HAD to get "Service Y" from the guy within walking distance. But now, everyone is within "walking distance".

Just look at all of the bloggers online trying to "make it big". For every blogger that actually makes a living writing online there are a hundred thousand that don't make any money. Even if you leave out the large sector of bloggers who don't care about making money and ad revenue and SEO and all that, you're still looking at a large number who aren't making it.