Kudos to Lee Abrams, chief innovation officer of the Tribune Group, Sam Zell's Chicago-based giant which owns the Chicago Tribune, New York Daily News, the LA Times and about US$8bn worth of TV, radio and dead tree media, for his enthusiasm for investigative journalism.

Having made the move from radio (he's known as the "most influential radio guru of his generation") you'd have thought the man who invented the adult-oriented rock show might have gone for light, bright, cheap 'n mainstream, but not a bit of it. In conversation with Jeffrey Goldberg, Abrams insists that the Tribune Group has a taste for harder-edged and intensive journalism but bemoans the fact that not enough editors understand that you need to promote the hell out of your more difficult stuff:

JG: Can you envision, in one of your newspapers, a reporter taking three or four months to work on a single series or on a single story?
LA: Oh, absolutely. We have to get back to that real deep investigative reporting and then let people know that we’re doing that. Newspapers have a tendency to under-promote themselves. I was talking to one paper out in Allentown, or Baltimore, or somewhere out East…and they had done this investigative story, but they were kind of burying it. I said, man, why don’t you, you know, call it exclusive, hit people over the head with it?

Read the interview here

Best bit is where he spells out the market's appetite for variety and different levels of sophistication:

JG: Do you think there’s room in the world for magazines like the Atlantic and The New Yorker?
LA: Absolutely yes! I’ve seen a lot of musical equivalents. You look at the music world – if you’d just landed from Venus on Earth, you’d think we’d live in a Britney Spears world, but for every Britney fan there’s a Bob Dylan fan. So I think there absolutely room for all flavors and all depth.

God love him.

Fun with Google

Is there nothing Google isn't good for? The latest is this internet porn case where the defence lawyer is seeking to invoke results from  Google Trends to show that, in Pensacola at least, people are more interested in "orgy" than they are in "apple pie" or watermelon".

Have a play with Gogle Trends. Check out the waxing and waning of various of our valiant news sites. The Australian has had a bumpy ride over the past yaer as this graph suggests, while the SMH's gradual downward trend must surely be of some concern in the Fairfax bunker. Meanwhile, somebody's been doing something right this year at the Courier Mail, by the looks of these numbers. Meanwhile this Walkleys graph suggests what self-obsessed so-and-sos Australian journalists really are... yes, that's right - award results are posted in November!

The  debate over the pay-per-view model continues. Andrew Keen told an UK industry conference that the Gawker model, where journos are paid - and fired - based on how many page views they get, is "the future of journalism".

Keen is ambivalent: I'm not criticising technology, but this so-called personalisation and accuracy of technology will lead to this," he told the conference. "When you have more and more ability to define how many people are looking at your work, you'll be paid accordingly and it’ll result in you writing to be popular."

Reed Busines Information boss, Jim Muttram, has said he would consider such a model . Reed owns a lot of properties in Australia, so keep an eye on what Muttram says. 

Check this out

Can't resist this: a dived onto Jim Muttram's blog to see what he had to say about the last item and instead got sidetracked by this new app, which I think is completely fab. Mind you, surely the oil price timeline could have worked better as a graph showing the actual pricing, rather than a flat scale with events as it is now...

My dad, the silver surfer, finds nirvana in the Times Archive

A few years back my old man, 86 and still able to bowl a mean googly, asked for my help with a bit of genealogical research. He wanted to find out why my great-grandfather was listed on the 1881 census as resident in Holloway Prison (all the more weird because it's a women's jail). me and the missus trogged over to the UK's National Archive in Kew to sift through the public records and see if we could find out what he'd done. We had a fascinating time (did you know you could be sentenced to imprisonment in the 19th century for being an "incorrigible rogue"? How have I remained at the loose?).

Anyhow, we came up with a blank, even after a full day of searching. Then the Times put its whole archive of newspapers online. Bingo. He discovered that the old boy, while not being an incorrigible rogue, was - in fact - guilty of minor embezzlement.

What's great to look at, though, is how the layouts and design of newspapers have changed over the years.

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