The intro on Jeff Jarvis’s Digital Media column in the Guardian today had a familiar ring. It was, given a bit of subbing to sharpen it up, the same as one on his blog on July 10.

Is this testing the argument or, in the web jargon, some form of “crowd-sourcing” or a kind of informal “wiki”? It certainly has the merit of not rushing into print with the first thought that comes into your head.

There were 77 responses on the original Buzzmachine post – Google as the new pressroom — although some were from Jarvis himself and at least one person left two as the debate progressed. It is fascinating debate and a very important one about whether online newspapers should give up trying to sell ads and managing the technology to concentrate on the journalism.

This sort of testing saves confusing Guardian’s readers through refinement of the argument and the clearing up of ambiguities. As Jarvis said of his original post: “I’m causing confusion aplenty.” I commented: “He sure is — thinking as the responses to his latest post come in. Not unusual for Jarvis.”

The tradition of journalism has been to think before you write. You know that any inaccuracies or weak arguments will be quickly exposed. The web now provides a means of testing before launching your thoughts on the larger audience.

This may be a good thing. Imagine Polly Toynbee at the Guardian itself, or Melanie Phillips at the Daily Mail submitting their ideas to an informed blog audience before writing the final version.

Besides the obvious problem of delaying publication on topical issues, it is an idea. Whether it is a good one or not, I don’t know. One thing I am fairly sure of is that readers of the print edition and the online paper should be told if an article has been subjected to a public “peer comment” process. Perhaps the paper’s readers editor Siobhain Butterworth should look into this.

PS: If Google (or possibly another internet giant) is so good at hosting (eg Blogger) and ad sales that it should provide a platform for newspers, I wonder why Buzzmachine is a self-hosted Wordpress blog and, in  addition to Google ads, uses (and actively sells) Blogads. Maybe the point about the supremacy of Google is made when I look at the Buzzmachine post adorned by a Blogads contribution selling pants (UK meaning not US).

Stephen Glover in the Independent yesterday was rightly concerned by the growth of free newspapers produced by councils. “State newspapers are rivalling the free press — right under your nose,” was the headline.

I am just as concerned with a council run website. But the arguments are similar to those of Glover:

Just when many local newspapers are fighting to stay alive, and the shares of some of their owners such as Trinity Mirror and Johnston Press are reaching new lows, this development threatens to finish off the weakest among them. Councils who publish their own propaganda rags are taking no risk, since local council taxpayers are effectively putting up the capital. If their giveaways don’t attract much advertising, and go on losing moderate amounts of money, that is hardly going to matter to them.

This is surely an abuse of state power, albeit on so small a scale that it has barely provoked any criticism, though The Newspaper Society, which represents regional and local newspapers, is up in arms. If the Government were to start producing publications to rival the national press, there would be an outcry; when the same thing happens on a local level it is deemed acceptable behaviour.

One Suffolk website is a partnership of the county and district councils, the police and a health authority and is Government funded. The about us page says:

onesuffolk is primarily a website providing local government services through the internet. However, a section of the site will be dedicated to the community, enabling parish councils, community and voluntary organisations to participate by contributing information about their particular area. We need everyone to be involved in contributing to what will be an innovative and exciting development!

The first purpose, providing local government services through the internet, is unobjectionable. That would be rather like Directgov which carries the tag line “Public services all in one place”.

But One Suffolk is nothing like that. Five items are highlighted on the front page:

1. A review of a touring company production of “We didn’t mean to go to sea” by Arthur Ransome,
2. A story about a new arts association in Hadleigh,
3. The monthly village feature, this month on Levington,
4. A plug for the free websites offered to local clubs and organisations by One Suffolk,
5. And a reminder that smells, abandoned cars and noisy neighbours can be reported through the site.

The last one is an example of the site meeting its objective of providing local government services. There are also “traffic alerts” but those all turn out to be information about where mobile traffic cameras are to be positioned. To find out about road works there is a link to Suffolk County Council where the latest information is dated July 11.

Finding out about many local government services is not easy. There are no obvious links from the front page, but a menu link to business provides options such as licensing, planning and abnormal loads. Clicking on planning eventually produces a search of the site for all stories with “planning” in them. There are no links to the planning departments of the various councils, let alone a combined database of applications.

There is very little evidence that One Suffolk is doing much to achieve the purpose of providing local government services. It is more like the plaything of some people who can set up a community news site without taking any risk.
That would not matter so much if getting traffic was not crucial to the future of independent local media.

While councils have a duty to make their services known to tax payers, it is not their purpose to provide theatre reviews and village features at the tax payers expense. That is the role of newspapers, parish magazines and independent community websites who do it without dipping into the public purse.

Dying elderly readers has long been one of the problems for the Telegraph’s circulation department. Now the paper seems to have found a way of making money out of them. Today I received by post a special offer of 50 quid off a funeral plan. I can’t find the same offer online.

Jeff Jarvis, in the most recent addendum to his latest polemic, Google as the new press room, says: “I’m causing confusion aplenty”. He sure is — thinking as the responses to his latest post come in. Not unusual for Jarvis.

The centre of his argument is that newspapers are bad at technology so they should get out of it and Google is brilliant at technology (and selling ads) so it should be left to them (and others who whom work can be outsourced). He writes:

Newspapers are in the wrong businesses. They should no longer be in the manufacturing and distribution businesses — which have become heavy cost yokes — and should no longer try to be in the technology business. They’re bad at it.

It is an important argument and you really need to read the whole post, the three (at the moment) later additions and the comments. As the debate develops the Jarvis’s argument become clearer, as in this:

LATER STILL: Adrian Monck fears that we’re setting up journalists as merely suppliers and then — as he knows from the TV biz — that becomes a business of controlling costs. I didn’t express it well enough then. In this view, Google would not run the site; the paper would run the site and still control the content, advertising, brand, and relationships. Google would just be the backshop, the infrastructure.

Now we are getting somewhere. Many newspapers, particularly the smaller ones, have not been able to get the technology right but also, I believe, have been too tied to conventional ideas of audience and a flow of editions to tell web developers what they really need.

But I doubt if the solution is to hand the manufacturing and distribution to the biggest space buyer in the business.

Roy Greenslade says the New Zealand Press Council has warned that outsourcing production and subbing reduces local oversight bringing an increased risk of errors and offending local sensitivies.

A story in the Independent today suggests that Dispatches on Channel 4 tonight will be well worth watching. The programme, on the third anniversary of the 7/7 bombings, is called, “I shouldn’t happen to a Muslim”.

The Independent story is from a pamphlet by Peter Oborne, who presents Dispatches this evening, and James Jones. It tells of a Sun splash about a “Muslim hate mob” which had daubed obscenities over a house in Datchet, near Windsor.

The Sun suggested local Muslims were waging a vendetta against four British soldiers who hoped to rent the house after returning from Afghanistan.

But, says Oborne, there was no Muslim involvement of any kind. Eventually the Sun published a correction:

Following our report “Hounded out” about a soldiers’ home in Datchet, Berkshire, being vandalised by Muslims, we have been asked to point out no threatening calls were logged at Combermere Barracks from Muslims and police have been unable to establish if any faith or religious group was responsible for the incident. We are happy to make this clear.

Dispatches also commissioned an examination of the reporting of Muslim issues. What is included in the Independent story makes very sad reading.

I have no doubt that the coverage of Muslims and Muslim affairs in Britain is biased and negative.
But politicians must accept some of the blame. The Tory MP for Shipley in Yorkshire was quoted in the Sun story saying: “If there’s anybody who should fuck off, it’s the Muslims who are doing this kind of thing. Police should pull out the stops to track down these vile thugs.”

Why a Yorkshire MP should want to comment on an incident in Berkshire I can only guess

Milking mature business that have tipped into decline for maximum profits is an age-old strategy. We have been watching it for some time in newspapers but I have seldom seen it put so clearly as by Alan Ruddock in the Observer today who describes it as, “probably the only sensible approach“.

Ruddock, who is standing in for Peter Preston, says the decline will be slow and asks why people still buy the Daily or Sunday Express. At some point the weakest will fail and even the worst of the [national] titles still have a readership measured in hundreds of thousands. He writes:

Newspaper groups that invest in their content will prosper longest. Trinity Mirror does not fit in that group. Like the Express titles, Trinity’s have long suffered from what Lord Stevens, the former Express supremo, called the management of decline. While offensive to journalists, it is probably the only sensible approach for companies with shareholders to satisfy and whose titles are so poor that cash extraction is the only realistic option.

Neither the Express nor the Mirror could ever invest enough to mount a credible challenge to their nearest rivals; any money spent would be wasted. The trick is investing just enough to smooth out the decline, so that the cash extraction can continue for as long as possible.

But I wonder whether the current state of advertising and the stock market could hasten the end for some titles. On the previous page of the Observer, James Robinson writes about the regionals and suggests that when the economy improves some of the classified advertising lost will return to online rather than print.

That is not good news for those titles that have been managing decline by providing high levels of return to shareholders. Trinity Mirror, Johnston Press and Gannett, the US parent of Newsquest have all seen huge losses in value in the past six months. DMGT, which includes the Northcliffe regionals as well as the Mail titles, has done rather better.

If they cannot regain the advertising revenue revenue they are losing at present, the share values are unlikely to recover. The end of some titles could come faster than Ruddock suggests.

Trinity Mirror’s newspapers are getting close to worthless but the web business is worth buying, Peter Kirwan argues in the Press Gazette’s Media Money blog. From the company numbers he arrives at a figure for digital revenue and then makes a five year forecast on the basis of current projections for the growth in online advertising.

He says anyone considering buying Trinity Mirror should think in terms of paying for its digital operation and picking up print for free as a part of the deal.

The description of the person needed for an internship at the St Louis Post-Dispatch looks like “the job description for a 21st century journalist”, says Alfred Herminda who uncovered it.

Audio, video and stills are all part of the job as well as the “ability to write cleanly and create engaging, informative blog entries, captions, web teases and headlines”.

Nothing about finding and researching stories.

The World Editor’s Forum asked five newspaper designers to pick their Top 5 newspaper website designs.  Two were from the UK — the Guardian and The Times. Via Mindy McAdams who would like to add BBC News although its not a newspaper site.