I’m with ya, but I think you knew that. I don’t understand how we can live in an era of Twitter and Facebook and such, and still be surrounded by people who are convinced the best way to tell a reader about, well, ALMOST EVERYTHING is to write 12-15″ of copy about it and ship it on down the assembly line. Every day, I see us living and dying by old habits while praying for change and whining about the state of the industry and bitching about the workloads. Churn, churn, churn. Plug, plug, plug. Whine, whine, whine. It makes me crazy. It really does.

I, too, let my SND membership lapse. It had expired a few months before, but I had intended to re-up when submitting entries for contest this year. But when I went picking through my best work of the past year, there wasn’t much there I thought “SND worthy,” which really bugged me because I had done some interesting things that year. I had coaxed some reporters out of the box, and it generally left me with exceedingly little time to make anything fancier than cleanly designed pages, CPs, and whatnot. Our “crunchy boxes,” as we like to call them in our newsroom, beg more for clean organizational types of design over conceptual artful wonders.

In a way, I see it as getting back to basics. Embracing that fundamental corollary any half-decent designer remembers from their first design class: Form follows function. At such a crucial time in our industry, in our economy, in our very Society of News Design … how can anything else win out?

We don’t have to make majesty out of the mundane; we just have to get the message across.

***

Anyway, thanks for humoring me here. I might be packing up my little soapbox for a while as I’m about to be swamped with a major project at work, a self-imposed deadline on a major personal project, a quick trip back to the family farm, and culminating with the Big Ideas/Best Practices conference at Poynter in a few weeks. (I’ll probably be incorporating some of the stuff above into my mini-presentation since I can’t stop thinking about it.)

Keep fighting the good fight, my friend.

Please, bring on your addendums, critiques, big ideas and questions.

Journalism is going through some crazy changes. I feel lucky that things are changing so rapidly while I am at the start of my career. I agree with your point, but I really feel for journalists who have been in the business for decades now and have to deal with such uncertainty. I don’t think you can blame them for perhaps not knowing where to direct their frustration.

Also, glad you plugged Ernie, he really is doing something different and interesting!

That cuts out a lot of ordinary folks, though, who don’t have $349/year to spend on each area they’re interested in.

Now is a great time for creative business models for journalism (and journalists). Hopefully some of those will come from, and will benefit, the folks who are finding themselves displaced from the industry.

Food for thought RE media business models…

http://www.stratfor.com/
(timely, in depth analysis not found elsewhere)

and

http://www.mediabistro.com/
(integrated community and jobhunting + news + networking)

Best wishes!
Christie

Which is not entirely unwise, perhaps. So much of what we’ve been selling has been hogwash. Not everything can be a Brand Name; people can only remember so much out of the clutter. What works for Coca-Cola is not necessarily right for that guy who makes Web sites, or the brake and muffler shop.

So I think you’re going to find more and more businesses that used to advertise in newspapers and magazines looking for other means to sell their wares — even mom-n-pop businesses.

That said, all advertising is not equal and it does have its place in almost any business’ marketing arsenal. Hopefully, folks will realize this.

Newspapers are crashing and burning because they are built on a publication model that is about 600 years old, which is exactly why we started, instead, from scratch. We hope we’re providing a new paradigm for the industry, with our efforts.

Clearly, Google is an essential tool for organizing the Web.

My concern is they’ve got a monopoly on that, and own the secret algorithms to do so — which makes the rest of us dependant on their good will for receiving all the traffic we do receive from them. Can we afford to give them that much monopoly power? (And what difference does it make if we say “no?”)