First, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) unleashed its draft policy recommendation “to support the reinvention of journalism.” While the document suggests the IRS recognize novel small-business structures for nonprofit tax breaks, it also pitches ideas that would keep small media outlets from doing their thang.

A tax on large broadcasters would relieve them of obligations to provide “public-interest programming,” like the kind a hyperlocalist would produce. A 2-percent tax on advertising sales would add a layer of meshugas to a small content producer’s books, as well as add an extra charge on local advertisers. Increased postal subsidies and a tax on accessing the mobile web would favor large print publications over hyperlocal newspapers and websites.

These proposed taxes would go towards establishing a national local-news fund, doling out university grants for investigative journalism, and tax breaks for hiring salaried journalists. Personally, I oppose government money in the media piggybank, and while a tax credit for hiring journalists is nice, hyperlocalists generally rely on freelance or volunteer contributors. The FTC document doesn’t do enough for small media.

And then there’s what Apple CEO Steve Jobs had to say at The Wall Street Journal’s D8 conference. The appointed messiah of media told conference participants, “I don’t want to see us descend to a nation of bloggers myself. I think we need editorial more than ever right now,” PaidContent.org reported Wednesday.

One might quip that Jobs’ disdain for blogs stems from the Gizmodo iPhone fiasco, but I think there’s another reason. While bloggers (and the online hyperlocalists who have that title hanging over their heads) create oodles of content, they probably don’t have the financial resources or tech savvy to distribute that content through an iPhone or iPad app. That’s money out of Jobs’ pocket and control out of his hands.

According to PaidContent, Jobs followed his swipe at bloggers with: “Anything that we can do to help The New York Times, The Washington Post and other news-gathering organizations find new ways of expression so they can afford to get paid so they can keep their news gathering and editorial operations intact, I’m all for it.”

Sadly, Jobs doesn’t recognize the original news gathering that hyperlocalists and bloggers do, and how some of those large media outlets base their “reporting” on a smaller outlet’s original stories. Again, I suspect this elitism stems from the lost potential of app sales: The iTunes store sells iPhone apps for The Times and The Post, as well as a Times app for the iPad.

Where is the love for hyperlocalists? When did innovation and imagination (the kind that Apple touts in its advertising) fall victim to monopolies? Instead of encouraging new voices and new investment, the FTC stifled them to preserve the industry’s collapsing status quo. And instead of lending Apple’s devices to new experiences with content, Jobs whittled them down to technological troughs for whatever iTunes’ gatekeepers deem worthy of consumption.

My advice to the FTC and Jobs: Beware of false profits.

Images courtesy of Flickr users 1Happysnapper (photography) and reelsinmotion.

Even in the most isolated rural villages, where modern plumbing doesn’t exist and electricity is unreliable, everyone owns a cell phone. Gone are the days when Ma Farmer clangs a pot with a wooden spoon to draw Pa Farmer in from the fields for supper. Now it’s just a matter of flipping open a phone and dialing his digits.

The cell phone and other mobile devices have also affected American life beyond the traditional 3:30 p.m. call to ask the spouse what’s for dinner. According to the Pew people pollsters, these devices are erasing the digital divide between white Americans and their black and Hispanic counterparts. Check out these numbers:

• On a typical day, 59 percent of whites hit the web through a hardwired computer. Only 45 percent of blacks do the same.
• However, blacks and Hispanics hit the web through their mobile devices about 42 percent more often than whites, despite equal ownership of such devices.
• Altogether, blacks and whites did the same number of activities online, regardless of how they accessed the net.

This leads me to ask: If a hyperlocal news outlet delivers content — including pretty pictures, big graphics, and Flash video — strictly through mobile-unfriendly websites, then who’s actually receiving the news? If the hyperlocal beat consists mostly of people who can access the web by a desktop or laptop computer (regardless of race), then web design doesn’t matter.

But for those outlets operating in communities where residents tend to access the web on mobile devices (particularly cell phones without full HTML browsers), then it may be time to consider a phone-friendly layout that can be delivered without the benefit of an app. That means fewer photos, zero multimedia, strictly text content. It also means tighter, more concise writing, shorter leads, and perhaps use of the standard “inverted pyramid” format instead of a conversational, bloggy style of writing.

I haven’t done research into how a hyperlocalist would create a phone-friendly layout, but it seems any common web-publishing tool will do as long as the content’s structure and layout are simple enough for a phone to digest. (This does NOT include Google’s Blogger, which tends to have painfully slow download times on mobile devices.)

I’ll touch on news distribution via text message tomorrow.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user kristi-san.

Technology is not the game changer that marketing experts want journalists and consumers to believe it is. Sure, news distribution and patterns of consumption have changed (or not, depending on how one interprets data from the Pew Research Center), but journalists must still hold themselves to the standards of their profession.

Take a look at technology’s impact on the way physicians practice medicine. Back in the day, doctors diagnosed disease with a quick look and immediately prescribed leeches as a remedy. Now they use CAT scans and MRIs and an alphabet soup of imaging techniques to diagnose the problem, and treatment usually consists of some sanitary pill or sterile injectable.

Yet most of today’s physicians have the same priority as their eye-balling, leech-loving predecessors, and that is to do no harm. Technology altered the ways in which they practice medicine, but their ultimate goal — to preserve life — has persisted over the centuries.

That goal-oriented zeal should be the same among journalists, but sometimes it’s not. There’s panic at the thought of online and mobile news distribution rewriting the rules and triggering further job instability or content dilution. But don’t blame technology for the journalist’s woes — blame the publisher.

It’s always been the publisher’s job to ensure a news outlet’s solvency, but too many of them ignored or even shunned innovative distribution routes and the possible revenue streams they posed. For years, they hung onto the advertising model and passed on online subscriptions. (Shout out to the Wall Street Journal, which has had its head on straight since day one.) Now publishers must depend on the likes of Apple’s iBooks or (even worse) Amazon’s content-distribution system for a pittance of the online and mobile market.

Technology did not cause this financial pallor in the newsroom. Don’t expect technology to cure it, either. Instead, technology should be seen as another tool in the craft of journalism. It can do good. It can do bad. But it all depends on if and how one uses it.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user tizzie.