The personal blog of Paul Krohn, writing in San Francisco.
So this particular video has gone completely viral amongst the newspapers-are-hilariously-dead crowd:
To-dos for you:
Once in a while I get the urge for a old-skool stew. Today, with a high of 9 degrees, goulash seemed perfect.
I started with a recipe from Ms Stewart. A not terrible rule of thumb for this particular source is to double anything that looks vaguely like a spice or a vegetable. I doubled the carrots, potatoes, and garlic.
The first step is to flour, season and brown the meat:
the important part: the meat!
Half the beef, gettin' warm
mmm partially cooked beef. irresistible!
Next stop: the onions. I used pearl onions for the whole shebang, due to an ordering mix-up (no deliveries on Mondays) wherein Safeway was out of carrots, mushrooms, and fresh oregano. I put back my onion and headed to a neighborhood store, and forgot about the sweet onion I wanted. None of this stops me from blaming Safeway.
pearl onions start to smell good!
After adding diced tomatoes, tomato sauce, tomato paste and broth, it starts to look like goulash. I let that simmer a bit (OK, 90 minutes) and pan-fired some stuff to add later.
Vaguely goulash-like
Everything is better with bacon!
After I poured off two thirds of the bacon fat ...
Pearl onions, about half cooked
Pre-sauté mushrooms
Not much oil is needed since, cooked over medium-low heat, mushrooms give off water faster than it evaporates.
These mushrooms have given off most of their moisture, and evaporation has caught up. Therefore, they are done!
Pan-fried bell peppers await being tossed in the goulash
Pearl onions, sautéed in a covered pan in bacon fat until translucent, ready to be added to the goulash
carrots ...
Quartered Yukon Gold potatoes
The recipe directs you to add the carrots and potatoes with only 30 minutes to go on the simmering. This is a terrible idea! I added mine with an hour to go and they are a bit firm for my liking.
By the time it was all cooked, it was nearly 11 p.m. Good thing Jacquie ordered Melisa’s, or we might have perished!
Six containers of goulash, ready to go!
3. The culture of newsroom leadership contains a fatal 20th century flaw: A fundamental belief that equates all new trends with dangerous “fads.” Newsrooms don’t trail the leading edge simply because they’re too dumb to keep up: They’re behind because their editorial leadership believes that keeping pace with rapid change is a fool’s errand. Many senior editors don’t simply fear change — they resent change that succeeds without their endorsement.
This is spot-on in a weird way. I am afraid maybe the executive class can’t separate keeping up with the latest versions of various productivity applications from real technical change. On top of that, some pretty substantial changes, such as adding comments to news stories, did nothing to change the economics of online publishing: Pluck is just another bill to pay at the end of the month. It’s no wonder managers are skeptical!
Rapid technical change is difficult to achieve on a major news site. It might have dozens of blogs, all individually skinned, and as many as a hundred page types. Usually the vested interests around the paper require that their section doesn’t fit the cookie cutter and it has to be custom built.
However, none of the managers I interact with thinks online publishing is a trend. All are convinced it is “the future”. Were they late to the game? Yes. But that isn’t even the problem, which is that they don’t see that the future is now.
I’ve been trying to put together some thoughts on a new model for news businesses. I’ve run in to a couple problems:
The publication I work for is privately owned, so financial information is hard to come by. I’ve looked around for what other “knowledgeable” people might think, and it turns out all they can do is spew meaningless jargon. Phooey!
I found a bit of info in the form of estimates of newspaper publisher revenue by the US Census Bureau, but the links have gone, at least momentarily, dead. In any case, it wasn’t broken down well enough for my purposes.
One pertinent detail is that online advertising revenues are on the order of five percent of print advertising revenues. In an industry facing twenty percent year-over-year revenue declines, five percent does not look like salvation.
The first thought that occurred to me is that online advertising revenues are irrelevant. This conclusion was supported by a manager at work, who saw things even more starkly: the amount of revenue per reader of the print product has historically been about $1,000. The available revenue from online readers is – wait for it – about $1. Very few businesses can absorb a drop in revenue of three orders of magnitude and survive. What to do?
The only other source of revenue at hand is readers (unless you are the Christian Science Monitor, but that particular solution does not scale). I can see no escape from the necessity of charging readers to get news online. However I can see the outcome that keeps news organizations from doing this: the fear that readers are o allergic to paying for online content that the revenue generated could turn out to be less than the advertising revenue foregone due to the drop in page views.
If that is what news executives are afraid of (and they certainly aren’t sharing this with me), then it is high time we had a frank conversation with our readers about what they want and expect from the news sources of the future. Here are some conversation starters:
The crew that is in charge now simply cannot fathom how to break us out of the current downward spiral. Radical action and experimentation are needed. What we are getting is incremental changes to a doomed business model.