Here’s a little prediction that’s been spinning around my head lately. I’ll release it here on my blog to leave room in there for something else.

As newspapers (especially the larger metros, which face the worst declines) continue to lose staff, lose ad revenues, and in general get lower in quality, their loyal older readers will get fed up. Flashy designs (like those at Tribune Co. papers) will be seen as merely masking the decline of the product, and we’ll see newspapers’ core older audience of print readers and subscribers flee in significant numbers.

Of course, that demographic (I’m talking mostly about over-45) will still want news, but the quality decline of print newspapers will force them to look elsewhere. The decimation of print editions will move older news consumers — many of whom have resisted the siren call of digital news — to adapt to the digital media lifestyle, at last.

Newspaper companies of course will have the opportunity to retain these older readers. But they’ll need to put most of their resources into improving digital news delivery and innovating further there, rather than focusing majority effort on modernizing the print edition.

I’d love to get the reaction of Tribune Co. folks to this prediction, since they seem to be investing so much into resurrecting their print franchises. (We haven’t heard as much about Tribune’s digital innovations, so I’m curious to learn more about their thinking there.)

What do you think? Am I being too pessimistic? Or do you think this is how the newspaper situation will play out in the next year or two?

As a cyclist and runner — and iPhone 3G owner — I’ve been eagerly trying out several new fitness trackers that utilize the iPhone’s built-in GPS to track the trails and routes I ride and run. Like a “real” GPS unit, they record speed, pace, distance, elevation gain and loss, and at the end of the workout send the data to a website where you can later look at a map of your route. It’s pretty cool stuff, for a phone.

The first app I tried (and one of the first introduced) was RunKeeper, for which I paid $9.99 to download from the iPhone App Store. I’ve also tried out several free competitors that do pretty much the same thing: Fitnio, Trailguru, and Path Tracker. Peruse the Health and Fitness category of the App Store, and now you’ll find even more fitness-tracking applications, some free and some that cost anywhere from 99 cents up to several dollars. It’s getting really competitive in this little segment of the iPhone apps market.

So I was interested to receive an e-mail yesterday from RunKeeper’s developer, announcing that the app is about to become free. The reason is obvious: The company wants to become a dominant player in the mobile GPS tracker space and build up a large user community. The best way to do that with so many competitors is to give away the application.

Developer Jason Jacobs of Fitness Keeper Inc. says the company will shift to a business model based on selling advertising and possibly premium paid features (to be determined). For now, “We are … foregoing short-term revenues with the hope that our community will get to massive scale.”

I wonder if this will become a trend in the mobile-phone application community? Sure, you can charge if you’ve got an application that’s unique or has very few competitors. But for segments where the phone app market gets flooded with competitors, developers may be forced into the free model.

Well, it’s certainly a nice thing for consumers. We’ll see if companies like Jacobs’ can figure out how to make money from free and survive.

A colleague at the Chicago Tribune was kind enough to send me a few print copies of the newly redesigned paper. I’ve looked over many editions online, using both PressDisplay.com and the Chicago Tribune Electronic Edition for digital replicas of the print pages. But that online viewing just isn’t the same thing as what Chicago readers who still pick up the print edition see.

My first impression at seeing the physical product: No doubt it’s a nice design, put together by a team of talented designers and editors. But I don’t find it to be, as advertised, all that “radical” or “revolutionary.” It’s more like taking a couple steps along the evolutionary ladder for newspapers.

But here’s the big thing that struck me: Here’s this nice design, with lots of fancy graphics, layout tricks, and color … but the whole things looks dull and flat, because it’s on dingy newsprint, and the ink coverage isn’t particularly bright. Despite all that excellent work, the paper still looks like something out of the past because of the printing and paper quality!

Perhaps I’m just so used to seeing sharp and colorful content on my computer screen, and of course on the print magazines I still read, that the newness of the redesign on top of thin, grayish newsprint was a disconnect.

I don’t have a good solution for this, frankly. I’m sure than improving the quality of the paper and increasing the ink brightness are costly tweaks that the floundering Tribune Co. isn’t eager to institute. But for a “reinvented” newspaper that’s supposed to represent 2008 and beyond, it looks to me more like the 1980s.

What do others who’ve seen the physical Tribune since the redesign debuted think?

On LATimes.com today, Andrew Malcolm posted this on the site’s political blog: “After Sarah Palin VP debate, Joe Biden to step aside for Hillary Clinton?.” It’s a long analysis of an Internet rumor that, near as I can tell, has no solid basis for taking seriously. (See Snopes.com’s analysis.)

Hmmm, a mainstream media outlet has devoted 23 paragraphs to an unsubstantiated Internet rumor. The author is “a veteran foreign and national correspondent” who has served on the Times Editorial Board and was a Pulitzer finalist in 2004.

Now contrast that to the Internet rumor that surfaced a few weeks ago, first on DailyKos.com, that VP candidate Sarah Palin’s new baby was not hers, but actually was her’s eldest daughter’s (ergo, cover-up). At first blush, the rumor appeared potentially credible, since the DailyKos author presented a bunch of photographic “evidence.” The rumor was eventually debunked.

What did mainstream media outlets do with that one? Mostly left it to percolate and grow in the blogosphere, keeping their hands clean because the rumor was “too sensitive” to touch. When the din got loud enough, there were a few mainstream reports about the brouhaha. No one in the mainstream press, to my knowledge, dived into this rumor with significant coverage. (We can discount the National Enquirer crowd. And there probably were some mainstream reporters digging around to confirm or refute the rumor, but since nothing was found there were not major mainstream-media stories.)

So, ummm, what’s the difference here? In both cases, the din rises online, and people start to wonder. Is Trig really Sarah’s baby? Is Biden really going to drop out? Both rumors could and should have been treated similarly. But the Palin routine was considered off-limits, while the Biden rumor was not.

I’m still annoyed by the Palin rumor and how the press handled it. Most editors and reporters felt the rumor was too politically charged to go after; they’d get accused of “left-wing media bias” for going after a story that was perceived as belonging in the gutter. Bullshit. It was blowing up and spreading widely, and mainstream reporters could have served the public by getting to the truth.

With Malcolm posting such a detailed piece on the Biden rumor, I sense some press hypocrisy. Yeah, Malcolm is one writer and does not represent the mainstream press. But the LA Times chose to publish his thoughts, which were based on an unsubstantiated rumor. One of the top mainstream news organizations just went crazy with an Internet rumor. Why didn’t it treat the Palin rumor in the same way?

To offer a more constructive thought, perhaps the press would do well to take a look at what Snopes.com does so well: confirm or deny Internet rumors. It seems to me that that’s a pretty good thing for news organizations to be doing. Ignoring some rumors — even when the conversation about them has reached fever pitch — while covering others is strange.

Finally, here’s Malcolm’s response, e-mailed to me earlier today:

“It’s a fully qualified article about rumors and how/why they stick sometimes. In this heated election climate 40 percent of the country takes turns wanting to censor articles on itself. Too bad. This is now the 72nd ranked blog in the world and second highest newspaper politics blog. Millions of people are reading our unexpected items and we’ll keep writing them.”

(Just to be clear, I’m not criticizing Malcolm’s piece; I am criticizing the press for avoiding addressing the Palin baby rumor.)

My latest column is up over at Editor & Publisher Online: “Newspapers First Need to Redefine ‘News’ to Move Forward Online.”

I’m very curious to see the reaction to this one, as I think I’m hitting some significant new ground. And if anyone can point me to examples of the global-to-micro-personal news service that I’m imagining, please do.

I was tickled to find my name on Robert Scoble’s list of top tech blogger/FriendFeed/social media people. He’s got a huge following, so by appearing on his list, I’ll pick up some new followers on FriendFeed, Twitter and my blog, I’m sure. (I’ve noticed some already.)

Scoble is publishing the FriendFeed URLs for the folks on his list, so most likely that’s where people will start following them. The tech blogger and gadfly’s recommendations carry weight, so we’ll all get somewhat of a boost from this.

But this got me thinking about the people who start to follow me but don’t know me. With Facebook, my “friends” learn about both my professional and personal activities; but those are mostly people I know at least casually. It’s a closed social network, under my control. By contrast, with Twitter, I have “followers” who know me, as well as many who don’t but follow my tweets (probably) because they’re interested in my work or media-related opinions. Ditto for FriendFeed, but they’re getting not only my tweets but also my blog posts and photos posted to Flickr. Those systems are open, in that anyone can follow me; it doesn’t require my permission.

The thing is, I (and most of the other people I know who use Twitter) post professional as well as personal stuff. On Friday I posted to Twitter about media and political topics; today I posted a tweet about my daughter’s birthday party. While I primarily tweet on media topics, I also tweet when I go mountain biking (one of my passions); my Flickr photos are usually personal.

To my “friends,” the personal stuff is perhaps of interest; I know I enjoy reading personal tidbits not only from my real friends, but also professional colleagues who I consider to be casual friends. But for these new non-friend followers, I guess they’ll have to put up with my occasional personal ramblings interspersed with the professional-related stuff that I post.

It’s a bit odd, really. I mean, why would anyone who doesn’t know me give a hoot that I mountain biked on this really great trail? Or am currently hanging out at The Cup on Pearl Street in downtown Boulder? A FriendFeed that mixed personal and professional would be fascinating to follow for a movie star, football quarterback, politician or celebrity. It’s probably not so scintillating for all we non-celebrity types.

But perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps it is interesting to learn little personal bits from normal people we follow but don’t know and have never met. I see a lot of that from people who I follow on Twitter but don’t know well, or at all. The bits are short and easy to skip over. Yet I actually find it interesting and read them, when I’m in the mood. It’s a bit of modern-day voyeurism.

What’s your take on this? Do you enjoy seeing personal glimpses from people who you follow on Twitter and FriendFeed? Or do you find it annoying?

Over at ReinventingClassifieds.com we’ve got a couple competitions going on, both soliciting ideas for newspapers to help turn around their stumbling classifieds operations. While we have some good ideas (we think) for helping the situation — and we’ll roll them out in the months ahead — we don’t profess to have all the answers. Ergo, let’s tap the collective intelligence of seasoned media and advertising professionals and innovative-thinking students worldwide.

So, two contests, one for college students, and one for media and advertising pros.

I hope you’ll spread the word — or enter yourself. Deadline for both competitions is December 31, 2008.

I’ve been playing around with exercise/trail tracking applications for the iPhone recently. All of them are weak, though I think it’s the phone’s GPS and not the software that’s mainly to blame. I hope that some day a smart phone will replace the need to carry a stand-alone GPS unit, but we’re not there yet.

This morning I took a mountain bike ride on the Walker Ranch trail near Bouldler (CO), and I had TrailGuru.com’s iPhone application track the route. The software worked well, and when finished I uploaded the track to the TrailGuru website. Here’s it is:

Steve and Pete’s slow tour of Walker Ranch

There are several problems with the track:

1. Maximum speed: 46mph (umm, no; 20mph hour would be more like it).
2. Total ascent: 4268ft (that would have been a great workout, but the actual trail ascent is around 1750ft).
3. Distance: 8.15mi (my bike odometer and the trail map agree that it’s really 7.5mi).
4. A chunk of the map route shows as blank; that section is in the trees, where GPS didn’t work.

Also, the battery on my iPhone was nearly dead at the end of the trail.

My trusty Garmin GPS unit would have done a much better job — more accurate, and the batteries would last for a much longer ride.

It’s exciting that we’re starting to see smart phones that can work as GPS devices. But at this point the hardware isn’t up to the task even for the short ride that I did this morning, though the software is already getting pretty good.

I especially like TrailGuru, since its website collects tracks from the iPhone as well as tracks uploaded from traditional GPS units. I may still track some short rides with the iPhone, but for long ones I’ll use the Garmin. With TrailGuru, I can store everything in one place.

I’ve also tested RunKeeper, which is similar but not as full-featured as TrailGuru. RunKeeper’s big drawback is that it doesn’t track elevation gain/loss; for me that’s an essential thing. Its developers say they’ll add that soon.

It’s no fault of those app developers, but the other thing that’s a pain is that the application must be running to collect GPS data, so you can’t use the iPhone for anything else (other than to answer a call, which puts the apps on hold while you talk; and you can listen to music using the phone’s iPod functionality, as long as you launch iPod before starting the trail app). The iPhone will work better as a GPS at the point the iPhone operating system supports running more than one application at a time.

Since John McCain has stated that he doesn’t know how to use a computer, his campaign’s reaction to someone hacking into running mate Sarah Palin’s Yahoo Mail account and spreading the contents around the web should come as no surprise. (It appears that the e-mails are legit.) His campaign manager, Rick Davis, appears to be as equally clueless about “the Internets.”

In this Gawker report on the hijacked e-mails, Davis is quoted:

“The matter has been turned over to the appropriate authorities and we hope that anyone in possession of these emails will destroy them.”

Oy! Perhaps they still use typewriters over at McCain campaign HQ. Davis must be thinking we still live back in the day when the news media could be persuaded to squelch something like this. If the media decided to hold back (because, after all, this was an illegal act committed by someone, and old media probably wouldn’t touch a story that’s so ethically and legally challenged), then the public wouldn’t see the e-mails.

Sorry, Mr. Davis, but we don’t live in that era anymore. Even if your lawyers convinced Gawker to take them down (unlikely), there are copies popping up on websites all over the place, and all over the world. Any attempt at playing digital whack-a-mole with Palin’s personal e-mails would be fruitless. Many Internet users will take it as a challenge to spread the e-mails even further if you try to (pointlessly) tamp this down.

I’m not saying that I condone someone breaking into Palin’s Yahoo account. What I am saying is that now that this has happened, the McCain camp is basically screwed.

My advice to the campaign: You’ll look foolish and demonstrate your lack of understanding of the Internet if you try to get everyone to take down those purloined e-mails. You’re in a lousy place, so put your focus on dealing with the content of the e-mails, and explaining why it was OK (if you can) that Palin was conducting official business using Yahoo.

The other dilemma here is for traditional news organizations. Will they publish the e-mails? I doubt it, and I certainly wouldn’t encourage them to. But they should report on the brouhaha taking place online about Palin’s e-mail account, and can address the personal account used for official business controversy.

Lately, NYU journalism professor and Pressthink blogger Jay Rosen has been urging his Twitter followers (more than 1,600 of them) to point out examples of reporters “growing a spine” when it comes to pointing out and documenting untruths by the McCain presidential campaign.

He’s asking Twitter users to include #spinewatch in their tweets along with links to such coverage. Here are a couple examples of such stories from Rosen: McCain on the spot as Palin defends earmarks requests - Wheels come off Straight Talk Express?

Lots of journalists follow Rosen, and if those people take his advice, their Twitter followers will see their #spinewatch posts, too. The meme will spread.

Do you think this could have an impact? Could it actually influence reporters to tread less lightly on campaign lies and aggressively report them?

Absolutely, I believe it can.

Online social communities built around niches can be quite effective in forcing changes. While Twitter isn’t a niche social service, the networks that build up around individuals tend to be niches; ergo, Rosen’s followers includes hundreds of reporters, editors, academics, and the media “elite.” When that group gets to talking amongst themselves about important issues, social change within the group is possible.

This power of niche online communities was first demonstrated to me 17 years ago (or thereabouts), when I was graphics editor at the San Francisco Chronicle. I used Compuserve, the old proprietary online service, and there was a “forum” on it just for newspaper graphics folks. it’s so long ago that I can’t remember the specific issue, but I was annoyed by a policy of the Associated Press graphics department, which fed us syndicated infographics. I griped about it and a discussion with my co-horts around the U.S. ensued, with others sharing my complaint.

It wasn’t long before the director of AP Graphics chimed in and agreed to change the policy, based on our online group gripe session.

That was my introduction to the power of online community. I think that it can be demonstrated here on a much larger issue with Rosen’s #spinewatch initiative.

And it looks like I’m not the only one who thinks so…

(Addendum: Hmmm. I’m already thinking I may have to reconsider my optimism for this specific attempt at using social media for influence. It may still work, but already some folks with Twitter accounts who take issue with the goal of #spinewatch are starting to use the tag to post disinformation and disrupt the intent of the effort. You might call these people political spammers, since they invade channels with unwanted information.)