We are not simply complaining about that article. There is a pattern heavily in the New York Times, but also in other major newspapers, of condescending to and insulting mom bloggers. I am here to say that it is time we take a stand against it.

Here are but a few snippets from the latest New York Times article about the Bloggy Bootcamp conference in Baltimore:

ON a brisk Saturday morning this month, a dedicated crew of about 90 women, most in their 30s or thereabouts, arrived at a waterfront hotel here, prepared for a daylong conference that offered to school them in the latest must-have skill set for the minivan crowd.

Teaching your baby to read? Please. How to hide vegetables in your children’s food? Oh, that’s so 2008.

And this is in reference to my friend Tara’s session on SEO (something, incidentally, many companies have budgets for in the thousands annually):

Heed the speaker’s advice, and you, too, might get 28,549 views of your tutu-making tutorial! Whereas so-called mommy blogs were once little more than glorified electronic scrapbooks, a place to share the latest pictures of little Aidan and Ava with Great-Aunt Sylvia in Omaha, they have more recently evolved into a cultural force to be reckoned with.

Why is it so shocking that moms would discuss something besides parenting? How ridiculous. Why was this even in the Style section? If it were a tech conference for men the tone would be entirely different. It would go in business. It would not mention minivans. And I won’t even get into “glorified electronic scrapbooks.” I know many moms who have blogged about topics such as business and social media and politics for years that go well beyond that little dig.

Yes, mom blogging is an industry. It isn’t something cute we adorable widdle mommies do to share diaper stories. Whether we’re making money or not (mostly not), it is an industry. There are plenty of industries in which many workers in it make little or no money, such as writing, fine art and acting.

We get marginalized for a few reasons, including:

• We are women who are, perhaps for one of the first times, far better at something than men in many cases and far better in an industry that is making a major impact. I should explain that I know many, many men who are talented, brilliant bloggers, but that isn’t surprising. For women to stand out in an industry that major corporations are clamoring to get involved with just sits wrong with some people.
• We are excelling in the media landscape, which doesn’t sit well with traditional media.
• We are turning our backs on the mold that has been created for us.
• We are threatening to traditional publishers, mostly old white men who couldn’t write a blog or use Twitter if you put a gun to their heads.
• Newspaper circulation keeps declining, while blog readership and authorship keeps growing.
• Writing snarky articles about mom bloggers encourages mom bloggers to share links and drive readers to the newspaper’s web site. (Here’s a hint, New York Times… we would share positive coverage just as much, if not more).

We are trying to make a living by creating content, and for that we get demeaned, criticized, talked down to, made fun of, and stereotyped as unethical money and swag grabbing whores.

I know of a few other organizations that make their money creating content. Namely, mainstream media.

Mom blogging is a new media revolution.

Many moms blog because we have found the current establishment unacceptable in many cases. How many mom bloggers were once career women? How many have a day job but hope to one day make enough from their blog to leave it? How many found it difficult to balance career and family? How many found it even more difficult to convince their employer to give an inch to make it easier: allow working from home, allow flex time, allow job sharing?

In the midst of this down economy, how many blogging moms kept food on their children’s tables or a roof over their heads?

Mom bias begins in the newsroom.

I left newspapers after 15 years, despite loving my work and being a third-generation journalist raised by two journalists because the field was so family-unfriendly. In fact, another layer of this bias against mom bloggers in media is that the same bias exists in many newsrooms against moms who work there.

Newspapers want employees who place their job above all else in their lives. Moms just won’t do that, and that is a problem. There is this sense that moms, who can’t be on call 24-7 because they have children they need to care for, have it easier than childless reporters. Anyone who thinks being a reporter and a parent is an easily life is a fool.

Women blogging is a revolution, a rejection of the status quo. We have been forced into a box for centuries, and we refuse to accept it. We refuse to be told we have to choose between success and motherhood. We refuse to follow the unbending rules of corporate jobs that in many cases make you prioritize job over family. Most of all, we refuse to accept that mainstream media, with its quality decline and clear bias, should be the only source of information.

It is getting to the point that I am frankly embarrassed for the traditional media. They are making fools of themselves. They are abandoning all of their allegedly dear principles, such as bias, fair reporting and serving readers, in their need to belittle moms and women, in their desperation to remain viable and profitable. They could devote that energy instead to pursuing real journalism, investigative journalism, interacting and hearing their readers, and learning the social media landscape so they could cease the deterioration of their industry.

It amazes me how many commented at Liz’s post that mom bloggers should just be happy to be getting coverage. We don’t need coverage. We are far better masters at building buzz and engaging with readers than newspapers are. Thanks, but no thanks.

When I was a reporter, even covering controversial beats (which is really all I did cover), I always balanced reporting even of cops, courts, politics and business with a mix of positive and negative articles. That, my friends, is lacking bias. You should cover the whole picture, and represent the beat comprehensively.

Liz did a fabulous job of listing the many amazing stories from the mom blogosphere that are being missed, so I won’t try to replicate that. Major newspapers missed the entire story of Jaeli, where mom bloggers joined forces to save the life of a baby. Apparently, that isn’t newsworthy. Most missed the amazing and inspirational story of Anissa Mayhew, a fellow mom blogger whose stroke motivated an entire community of hundreds of bloggers to rally in her support.

If you think this post is about one snarky article, or even just one snarky article by the New York Times, I would like to offer a collective of their so-called fair and balanced reporting of the mom blogosphere. (I use so-called because I find it amusing, considering how many times news articles have referred to us as “so-called mom bloggers,” like it’s some sort of scam).

Here is just a small sampling of mainstream media coverage of mom bloggers. I’ll start with New York Times:

There was Drinking in the Land of Mommy Blogdom (and yes, it’s about what you think it is).

Then there was Approval by a Blogger May Please a Sponsor, which goes so far as to insinuate that moms get kickbacks:

The proliferation of paid sponsorships online has not been without controversy. Some in the online world deride the actions as kickbacks. Others also question the legitimacy of bloggers’ opinions, even when the commercial relationships are clearly outlined to readers.

And the Federal Trade Commission is taking a hard look at such practices and may soon require online media to comply with disclosure rules under its truth-in-advertising guidelines.

A short two months later, the New York Times writes about dad bloggers getting in on this action. You can read the two articles for yourself to compare tones, but this one has but a brief mention of FTC guidelines. Instead, this is mentioned:

Sony emphasizes that the products it is sending daddy bloggers are on loan, not gifts, and bloggers are not being pressured to write positive reviews. “We expect the reviews to be very honest,” said Marcy Cohen, a Sony spokeswoman.

I believe the title of this one speaks for itself: Beauty Blogs Come of Age: Swag Please!

Ah, and he is an oldie but a goodie. Mom’s Mad. And She’s Organized. Noteworthy quote:

A BABY was passed around like the hors d’oeuvres.

Nice. Clearly, this was an article about something cute and trite, right? Not so much. It was about MomsRising, an organization to empower and give political might to moms.

The only nugget of wisdom about moms I found on New York Times has such irony, especially when you consider their coverage of an industry of women bloggers. The Anti-Mommy Bias isn’t specific to mom bloggers (that must be how it slipped past editors), but it sure is enlightening on this topic. Just replace employers with journalists for a snicker.

Employers sometimes assume that women with care responsibilities will be, and should be, less committed to their jobs. Such assumptions and beliefs can influence employment outcomes even when caregivers work just as long and hard as everybody else…

In one experiment, about 200 undergraduates were asked to rate paired applications for an imaginary midlevel managerial job. Both female and male students rated mothers lower on competence and commitment, recommended lower salaries for them, and judged them less worthy of promotion than childless women.

In an even more convincing audit study, fictional résumés and cover letters were sent to employers advertising midlevel marketing and business job openings at a large Northeastern city newspaper. Childless women received 2.1 times as many callbacks as mothers. Fathers, however, were not penalized.

What did I say about bias against moms in the newsroom? Yeah.

To be fair, New York Times is not the only newspaper to show bias against moms who blog. Here is a sampling of some of the oh-so flattering coverage in other major newspapers:

• Paid to Pitch by Wall Street Journal
• Is a Crackdown Looking for Parent Blogs? by Wall Street Journal. Just FYI, WSJ, but the FTC regulations were for bloggers. I’m not sure where parent came from there.
• To Create Buzz, TV Networks Try a Little ‘Blogola’ by Wall Street Journal
• Blogging Moms Wooed by Firms: Food Giants Provide Lavish Goodies, Parents Provide the Buzz. Is it Ethical? by LA Times.

I know this is a long post and I know these are a lot of links. But I have a reason for that. This is not an isolated incident. This isn’t even just one major newspaper. This is a pattern.

I would say that we should boycott newspapers, but are we even reading them? I mean, except when they write this drivel? And we are forced to either ignore it or drive readers their way by criticizing it.

We need to take a stand. So what are we going to do about it?

Edited to add: I think we are all at a loss as to what to do about this. I wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Times, and I highly recommend you also write one. There are instructions here. I would also recommend emailing the Times’ ombudsman at public@nytimes.com. His name is Clark Hoyt, and this is the paper’s description of his role: “The public editor works outside of the reporting and editing structure of the newspaper and receives and answers questions or comments from readers and the public, principally about articles published in the paper.” We may not be a big corporation, but our voices are our might.

Photo of man with newspaper and woman with laptop, © FaceMePLS on Flickr.

Now I will be the first to say that I know many traditional journalist don’t follow all of these 100 percent of the time. I also think in many ways traditional media has forgotten what’s most important, and has strayed from their path. These, however, are ideals that were instilled in me as important while a reporter, and they are just as important to me as a blogger.

Check Your Facts

Blogging is instant gratification. You can get on your computer and publish whatever is in your mind in a matter of seconds. We as bloggers have no editors, no copy editors, no night desk. We just have ourselves. That makes it all the more important to fact check. If you are about to publish something and you aren’t sure without a doubt it is true, check first. Often that only takes a few minutes with Google. Sometimes it means contacting someone to ask.

If something is a rumor or unverified and you still want to run with it, be sure to state that.

Get Both Sides

Blogging by nature is biased and one sided. If you saw my post, “Guess What News Business? Bias Was OK After All,” then you will see I feel that is fine. Many blogs function more like a traditonal newspaper column than a front page article.

Still, that doesn’t stop you from telling both sides of the story to present something balanced to your readers. It will be a better post for it! Are you ranting about a company? Take five minutes to shoot the company an email asking for a response. Send them a list of questions. And their replying doesn’t mean you can’t run the post. Run it with their replies.

Create Original Content

I see many instances of huge blocks of a post or story being republished, or pictures being used that are clearly not the property of the poster. You cannot use copyrighted material on your blog without permission. There are many great places to find photos that can be used (stock.xchng, Flickr Creative Commons or a company’s online press room), and even then I recommend attributing the source at the bottom of the post with a link to the original picture.

For content, anything beyond a quick 1-2 sentence blurb with a link to read the full post on its original site is probably a bad idea. Besides copyright laws, if you are pulling half of someone’s post are you really offering much of value? Better to come up with your own words to discuss a topic than to pull from the work of someone else.

Keep Editorial and Advertising Separate

This one is tough for bloggers, but still important to strive for. In old media, there are whole departments who handle editorial and advertising. They rarely cross paths. For many blogs, there is one person. You can still do what you can to handle the two worlds with integrity.

If a post is paid for (I don’t especially care for that, but that’s another topic), then it should be clearly labeled as advertising. If you notice, in newspapers and magazines when this happens, the disclosure content is paid is the first thing you see. It should be that way in blogs as well.

If you receive an item to review, that is not working for a company, as was discussed at length in comments on my post about mom bloggers deserving pay. A review is done for your readers. It requires not feeling beholden to the company or agency who sent it to you. Reviews should have both good and bad. I would even consider telling companies right from the start that you only do fair reviews.

Be Discriminating About Pitches

In any newsroom, station and magazine office on any given day, they easily receive hundreds of pitches. Of those, maybe one or two (or maybe even none) get any attention. A pitch is just that, a pitch. Saying no to it is not only acceptable, but it is standard for many who are pitched to not even reply much less write about the topic or product.

You certainly can reply to be polite, but saying no to a pitch that makes no sense for your readers or that you don’t have time to cover is perfectly OK.

Just like in traditional media, the best PR people will build a relationship with you and not simply pitch you when they want coverage for a client. So next time you say no, maybe initiate some conversation with the PR person and see where that goes.

Be a Skeptic

Many journalists are cynics, and that is a trait that serves them well. It means not taking anything on face value. It means wondering someone’s motives if they want coverage. It means always asking why.

Bloggers could stand a dose of this as well. Don’t assume what you hear or read is true. When you hear a statistic or survey results, look to see who funded that survey or what the source of the statistics are. Always be looking for the wizard behind the curtain.

Edit Your Copy

I see many blogs that have many typos and grammatical errors. It really isn’t hard to edit your posts to clean them up. If you don’t already, get a copy of the AP Style Book and read it through. If you can’t do that, at least have a mental style policy (like you always call it blog and not weblog). A simple spell check can be very helpful, but it doesn’t catch everything (for example, words that are words but the wrong word… or misuse of its vs. it’s).

If bloggers want to command respect as an important part of the media, having copy that is error-free goes a long way towards looking professional.

Even though most bloggers don’t have editors, consider pairing up with a blog friend to read over each other’s posts and look for typos and errors.

Be Ethical

There is no official blogger code of ethics. But Mommy Niri nailed it when she spoke out during the Type-A Mom Conference’s Town Hall Meeting. “If you live ethically, you’ll blog ethically.”

What I read into that is this: we should each have our own barometer to tell us right from wrong. Use it. There was a general rule that we used in newspapers that applies just as well to blogs. If you wouldn’t mind it being published on the front page (translate: home page), then it’s probably OK to do. So that means if you are doing something, ask yourself how you would feel (or your readers would feel) if you posted what you did on your home page. At the top. With H1 tags. Flashing.

Be Transparent

To the last point, always be transparent. I honestly don’t think traditional journalists do enough of it, but we can certainly set the bar for them. Yes, it’s all fine and dandy to have a disclosure page somewhere on your blog. And you always read the fine print, right? Yeah, thought so. Disclosures should happen on any post where they apply, and prominently. That will comply with FTC guidelines, but also ensure your readers really know what is going on.

You can put something at the end of your post to say, for example, a company sent you the product you just reviewed. But there are also natural ways to work that into the copy. Something like, “When Company X sent me the Widget…” This doesn’t have to be rocket science.

Think of Readers First

This is last, but most important. This is one where I think traditional media has dropped the ball, and it is part of the reason I got out of the business. They started caring more about profits and advertisers and statistics about demographic who weren’t reading newspapers anymore and they stopped thinking about the most important priority: readers. The important investigative stories readers need have been neglected so reporters could churn more 5-inch no-brain-cell-required stories into the newspaper machine.

The Watergate story would never happen today.

Your readers should always come first. Without them, you have no blog. Whenever you struggle with a decision, ask yourself what your readers would want. If you’re really torn, ask them on your blog.

Just never forget that the readers are what it’s all about. They are your community, so much more so than with traditional one-directional media. Your readers don’t just read you, they talk to you. They are important.

_{Photo of journalist, © Erik Stabile}

So when I saw the amazing and impressive Guy Kawasaki on Twitter talking about the L.A. Times asking Alltop for its own page there, I knew I had to seek out an interview. I sent him a direct message on Twitter and he responded quickly with his email address. He sets an amazing example, by being a total weblebrity (he only has, oh, almost 70,000 followers on Twitter alone) and yet being completely accessible. Others who social network should follow his example (I certainly do). I emailed him questions, and thought it was interesting he has the same concerns I do about the fate of investigative journalism (and the need to keep it alive).

Guy Kawasaki is arguably one of the most impressive and innovative players in Web 2.0, business and technology. He is a founding partner and entrepreneur-in-residence at Garage Technology Ventures. He is also the co-founder of Alltop.com. Previously, he was an Apple Fellow at Apple Computer, Inc. Guy is the author of nine books including Reality Check, The Art of the Start, Rules for Revolutionaries, How to Drive Your Competition Crazy, Selling the Dream, and The Macintosh Way. He has a BA from Stanford University and an MBA from UCLA as well as an honorary doctorate from Babson College.

Here is the interview:

Question: What prompted the idea of having newspaper-specific Alltop pages?

ANSWER: It was a late night email session with the folks at the Los Angeles Times
who are such big supporters of Alltop. I thought to myself: How can I really
show them some Alltop love and came up with the idea of creating an Alltop
page just for them.

Question: Did newspapers approach Alltop to ask for this, or did you approach newspapers?

ANSWER: Once we did LAtimes.alltop and saw the positive reaction, it was natural to
continue down the path of doing NYtimes.alltop, Washingtonpost.alltop, and
USAToday.alltop. Several more newspapers have expressed interest, and we’ll
do them too.

Question: Are there plans to add more newspapers to Alltop or a main Alltop newspapers-only page (distinct from the news page you currently have)? Can you say which newspapers we might see added soon?

ANSWER: If asked, we’ll do more. Our goal is WWDOR (“widower” worldwide domination
of RSS), so we want to cover all the topics eventually. I would love to do
more foreign newspapers and media sites. I tried to find multiple feeds for
Al Jazeera but could only fine one general feed.

Question: Have you encountered newspapers that are opposed to having an Alltop page or being in an Alltop feed?

ANSWER: Not yet. Frankly, I doubt that the New York Times and Washington Post even
know that we exist. Theoretically, we bring more traffic to them–at least
that’s the way we look at it.

Question: How do you think the way readers are consuming news is different now than it was just a few years ago?

ANSWER: Yes, for sure. An analogy is that many people are eliminating landlines and
just having cell phones. It used to be that when you moved into a new place,
you got a landline and newspaper subscription. Both are no longer so true.

Question: Where and how do you get your news?

ANSWER: It shouldn’t surprise you, but various Alltop sites, Twitter, and several
email-alert subscriptions.

Question: What do you see as the future of newspapers if they are to survive? Will the print newspaper become extinct?

ANSWER: Good question. I think that foundations should start online newspapers to
foster hardcore, investigative journalism. Imagine if the MacArthur
Foundation created the MacArthur magazine made up of all the Pulitzer-prize
winners who got laid off from magazines.

My greatest fear with the challenges that newspapers face is the lack of
lengthy, rigorous investigative reporting. I doubt that the next
Woodward and Bernstein will be Twitter users: “OMG, R. Nixon’s flunkies
broke into Wtrgte Htl.” Somebody has to pay for this kind of reporting, and
if the public won’t, I hope foundations do.

_{Photo of Guy Kawasaki by Bryn Colton.}

Tomorrow, newspapers will sell out because they will be a collector’s item. The newspapers featuring big front page spreads of Obama’s inauguration will catch the eye of people walking past newstands and newspaper boxes. They will grab them to save for their children and grandchildren. They will be momentos for pocket change.

Which brings me to a point I have made over and over again (OK, maybe not hear, but I do say this). The newspaper’s future is as the specialty publication. The demographic of readers will be dying. The ones who still read papers were alienated by most newspapers doing repeated redesigns to appeal more to young readers (who aren’t reading newspapers, and don’t plan to) and appeal less and elss to its core customers, the 40-somethings, 50-something, 60-something and 70-somethings.

In the end, the newspaper never appealed to the young readers and it rejected its loyal readers. Newspapers still are reluctant to accept that print is dying and online is the real business model they should have developed. But there is still hope:

Newspaper as specialty publication.

Here are just a few examples where it could work:

• Major events such as the inauguration. Newspapers should consider not just having one print run, but having a few runs (how do you like the idea of getting people to buy not just one, but four, newspapers from a set?). All a newspaper would have to do is create content and reset the front page, maybe a jump page, and redo the print runs.
• Specialty newspapers in large print. Obviously, it would be cost prohibitive to do this daily, but a condensed version of the week’s news in large print is one way to woo back those alienated older readers. It’s also a whole new advertising product to sell to local companies who have that customer base.
• Specialty newspapers by interest or neighborhood. Now, this is one area where I think many newspapers have done well. I think they need to revamp the approach a little, however. Many times, specialty publications by interest become big ads with a dash of copy from unenthusiastic, overworked journalists who consider that type of reporting a joke. Neighborhood specialty publications tend to be treated like rags. Take pride in these specialty publications! Up the level of integrity and journalism. Farm the work out to freelancers or bloggers who are enthusiastic about the topics or neighborhoods.
• Create the future of newspapet boxes, where a reader can select five topics that interest them (maybe travel, sports, stock quotes, their local small town, and editorials), swipe their card or drop in a couple quarters, and a pdf custom newspaper prints. collated and stapled.

One day, the online news will be the primary product. I hate to say this because I know it will upset many journalists, but there really is no reason to be upset if your employers would just get it. But since they don’t, I will say it again.

Your product is the news. It is not the newspaper.

Journalism will always be needed, important, and valuable.

_{Photo of newspaper © Sanja Gjenero}

You are doing it all wrong. All of it. Wrong. Just stop.

Newspapers are running the wrong way.

Hey, it happens. We all can panic when we’re confronted with change. It’s called the fight or flight response. And newspapers have taken the flight route. Sad.

Step back five years, maybe 10. Newspapers see their penetration levels dipping, just a little, so they all do a redesign. They all switch to an a.m. cycle. (Is there an afternoon daily left? I’d love to hear about it.) They realize young people are not reading newspapers, so they decide to revamp to be alluring to said young people.

And don’t think they were, like, losing money. In fact, they were still making money. A lot of it. A fellow newsroom reporter characterized it perfectly. They used to make money hand over fist. Then, they were just making a shitload of money.

“Why, oh why, won’t 20-35 year old males read us?” they lamented! (Psst: it’s because they don’t like you, and they don’t have time for you, and they have wives and families who keep them far too busy to spend time with you.)

Flash forward to today and you can see how this strategy worked out for newspapers. Umm, yeah.

So here I am going to break down each thing you newspapers are doing, and why you should be doing the exact opposite to survive and even thrive.

So I’ve decided to start a series, one just for my own amusement because I know there isn’t a newspaper executive who is actually listening (or even knows what a blog really is). But hey, if you’re still working in newspapers you could, like, print this on paper and fax it to your editor. Maybe then they will listen to it. Let me know if you need a masthead.

I would worry this is burning bridges, but I pretty much set a torch to that bridge a while back anyway. So expect me to be quite blunt, open and frank in this series.

In this issue, one of the biggest, baddest, panicky things newspapers are doing: newspapers are going shorter when they should be going longer.

If people want short news, if they just want to know what happens when it happens, they are not turning to newspapers. Why would they? They can get it online or on TV faster. In this day and age, they can find almost anything one can possibly think of written sooner from a source other than the print newspaper.

There is only one thing the newspaper has to offer that a newspaper can do better than anyone. The long story. The investigative, special project story. The story that (now don’t sprain yourself) takes time to report. It takes time to craft it into an amazing piece of compelling writing that someone will read from lead to inch number 50.

Yes, I said time. So you need to quit doing what you call “beat shuffling” but all the reporters know is really downsizing. I was working at a Gannett newspaper, a reporter who was skilled at advanced computer-assisted reporting (as in building databases from scratch, followed by analyzing them, and then reporting, and then writing). I was told I would be the assistant business editor with loads of time for projects.

By the time I left (and left the news business entirely), I was expected to do the following in a typical week:

• Edit the business section when the business editor wasn’t in (as in, daily)
• Edit the real estate section
• Cover a small town
• Cover the transportation beat
• Be a business reporter
• Do business briefs
• Do some dorky weekly construction report thingie (mindless BS)
• Attend numerous staff meetings
• Attend editor meetings when the business editor wasn’t in (again, quite frequent)
• Post breaking news update to the web site (and they would get on you if they discovered you were slacking to less than 2-3 daily)
• Write 2-3 special project stories per month

Yes, you saw the last one correctly. How hilarious is that? At my previous job, my entire job description was that last bullet although, of course, in reality I did much more… such as getting yanked off reporting and running a local news desk for a couple months. That kind of ate into my investigative reporting time.

Needless to say, with newspapers operating this constant “feed the beast” mentality in some vain attempt to keep up with the myriad faster news sources, that doesn’t leave much time for, well, journalism.

But newspapers should be embracing what they are. They are the perfect spot to do the opposite. There are few things in life better than kicking back with a Sunday newspaper, sipping on coffee, and reading an in-depth investigative piece and news feature. Nothing.

And that is the one thing newspapers have on all their competition. And it’s the one thing they flat-out refuse to do because it takes commitment to real journalism against all odds, commitment to real journalism because readers should be more important than profit margins and studies and demographics and penetration rates.

Part of the reason I got on this tear was something I read by the Queen of Spain blogger Erin Kotechi Vest, who is a fellow journalist turned blogger. If you haven’t yet, go read the full post, Damn You Harry Shearer.

Rarely was I able to dig any further, as the news cycle was short, the attention span of listeners shorter, and I had an average of 30 seconds to tell you everything you needed to know.

That is not journalism, that is marketing packaged as fast-food news and information.

On the few occasions I approached news directors and asked them for the time or leeway to dig a bit further, I found myself in that real journalism world where you are looking and striving to hold someone or something accountable. To find out what really happened, and make it public.

Damn brilliant.

So what is the solution in an industry that is laying off and consolidating left and right, even outsourcing local news to India? How can you do more with fewer reporters?

Well, I have a confession to make. When I was temporary editor for a Lee Enterprises newspaper, reporters would often tell me about a bigger, better story they could write if they had just a few days. You can ask any of those reporters, and they will tell you. If it sounded like a cool story, I told them to go for it. I told them I would much rather have a kick-ass Sunday story than a lame Tuesday story. I just made sure I didn’t have the whole newsroom doing real journalism at the same time.

Nothing bad happened. The beast didn’t attack. The newspaper was printed, and all the news holes got filled. Shoot, I rarely even used AP copy. But you newspapers can. If you really think 90 percent of your readers distinguish between AP stories (or an AP story with a local lead) and your own reporters’ stories, you are seriously deluding yourself.

If I’d told the powers that be about my strategy, they would have flipped. After all, this is a newspaper where we were told in-depth stories should be no longer than 10 inches. This is where I was working as a special projects/CAR reporter. Not good. I totally swear I am not making this up. This is not a joke. You can read the full internal memo sent to Romanesko if you don’t believe what you are about to read. Or if you don’t want to believe. This was a directive:

Routine stories need be no longer than 6-8 inches. In-depth stories should be within the 10-12 range.

Our technique must be – tell ‘em what the story is about, tell the story and get out quickly.

Wow. Yeah. Take a moment and just soak that in. This is what has happened to a business that once brought down a President.

What newspapers should do instead is feed the beast crap instead of tying up your reporters’ valuable time regurgitating press releases or compiling information for cutesy graphics or writing briefs. Use the wire for filler, not real reporters with real brains. Shoot, let the beginners do that.

But those reporters who want to do more, who have the skill and passion to do more, let them loose! Let them be newspaper reporters. Again.

And for those of you who just like newspapers, and miss them, go read real journalism where you can still find it from time to time. And when you do, write the publishers of those newspapers and tell them you want more of it.

“We’ve got nothing against TechCrunch, but it seems crazy-crazy to us that the Washington Post, a paper known for the sort of reporting that can take down U.S. presidents, is publishing content written by a dude who invests in the companies he writes about. But what do we know.”

First of all, I want to make a point. This is an important one, so do pay close attention. This is tied so closely to why I’m embarassed for journalism that it just isn’t even funny. This is tied to why I left the business after 15 years. This is why, despite loving and adoring the kind of investigative journalism that moves mountains, I gave up on that passion. This is why people don’t even bother reading newspapers anymore.

When was the last time the Post, or any paper for that matter, did anything remotely as significant as take down a U.S. President? Oh, yes. In the 1970s. Thank you.

This is just a case of old school vs. new media in my opinion. For years, journalists have obsessed about being unbiased. It’s been banned, disallowed, the worst thing humanly possible for a journalist to do.

Here’s the problem with that plan. First of all, everyone is biased. Yeah, I said it. You can report and write fairly, but you can’t be a robot. Sorry, guys.

Second of all, and this is the really amusing and interesting part, no one cares! Little did they realize, and blogger popularity now proves, readers don’t care IF you are biased. They just want to know how, full disclosure.

In fact, the popularity of bloggers simply proves people like bias, they want bias. They want to find people with the same bias, because they believe them more. They want to find people with the opposite bias so they can get really mad and leave nasty comments.

They want humans, not journalists. So even though this is an insignificant spat between two sources of news, it speaks volumes of a larger issue that old school journalism just isn’t facing. We don’t care if you’re biased. So what? We’re biased, you’re biased.

Just use full disclosure, don’t be sneaky, and write fairly. Be upfront. And for crying out loud, don’t be afraid to write boldly, without censure and without falling to the whims of advertisers, government officials.

We don’t really care if your journalist is a liberal or conservative (well, I don’t), as long as they say so. I care a lot more whether you’re axing stories because the newspaper’s publisher is buddies with the mayor, or an advertiser squawks about an unflattering biz story. I care when bias stops real stories from being told, no matter who’s telling it.

People are usually pretty surprised when they hear my print experience (yeah, I’ve written for pretty much every print medium). I did 15 years hard time as a newspaper reporter, and I have written for national magazines and even did a book (only to be told after I was done that there’s not a big enough market for the corner of France and Spain I wrote about).

I finally cut the cord entirely with print a couple years ago, and I’ve never looked back. I still to this day talk with journalists and freelance writers who still see print as The Ultimate, particularly a sweet spread in a major national mag. Or they think a book is The End All, Be All. Usually, they say it’s just because they “like to see their name in print.” Um, OK. Print that web page then.

Personally, I have been doing the nasty, naughty web writing thing on the side for a long time. Instead of it just being a dirty little habit, it’s finally grown to the point where you can make a buck and focus on web writing.

I don’t have to cover night meetings about which chair the local goverment should buy, or churn out daily junk 8-inchers for well over 40 hours, just on the off chance they might actually let me have a spare 10 minutes a week to work on a real investigative piece on something that matters.

I don’t have to waste 90 percent of my time begging magazine editors to think about thinking about letting me write for them. Oh, and hey it would be really cool if you pay me for that piece sometime this decade.

Now when I want to write, like now, I just write. Instant gratification. And if I want to see my name in print, I click “print.” Done.

_{Photo © Rodolfo Clix on stock.xchng.}