From the ever-wonderful Hugh Macleod at Gaping Void.

Last year I attended a dozen newspaper conferences adding up to over a month’s time, and spent another several months and several dozen trips talking to newspapers. Enough.

I’m sitting out this week’s Newspaper Association of America conference in Orlando, and limiting my attendance at these things for the balance of the year. My time is better spent talking to people who have more of a grip on reality than newspaper executives.

If you want a simple index of how loopy these people have become, compare the descriptions of their award-winning Web sites with the Web sites themselves. Thanks to PaidContent for bringing the awards to my attention.

The NAA looks, for example, at a strange ghost town named Bakotopia and sees “a vibrant social community." It looks at a nearly useless new home search in Jacksonville and sees a newspaper “solidifying its crossmedia appeal." It looks at a prep sports site where 80 percent of the stories have no photos and sees "innovative multimeda storytelling."

Newspapers have mastered the art of seeing what isn’t there. They need to begin seeing what is.

Boing Boing points to an article on John Frum Day, February 15, in the Smithsonian Magazine.

The John Frum Movement is a "cargo cult," and I’ve long thought that you get a clearer understanding of many newspapers if you think of their behavior as cargo cult behavior. Physicist Richard Feynman describes cargo cult thinking:

In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas — he's the controller — and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.

Newspaper people, on the editorial as well as the business side, follow all the "precepts and forms" that they believe built their business to its current state. But, "they’re missing something essential" because the results don’t come. The planes don’t land.

What’s that essential something that newspapers are missing? I have my thoughts, and others will have theirs.

Within the past 10 minutes I've visited two newspaper sites that served up pop-under ads (my popup blocker kills the popups).

Both of the pop-unders were for different varieties of what appears to be spyware masquerading as a recommended "registry cleaner" or some such.

Have these newspapers investigated these ads, or are they just happy to trash their readers' computers and their trust as long as they're paid for it? My guess is that they're purely in it for the money, which they need to finance their sanctimonious lectures about trust.

Whether my guess is right or wrong, many people will make the same guess, and conclude that the newspaper site is untrustworthy and to be avoided. But hey, making goal is more important.

We've never knowingly served up a pop-up or a pop-under and never will.

Over at Publishing 2.0 Scott Karp is wondering whether “the long tail is a lit fuse."

Does every ever-expanding universe eventually slow or collapse? Of course it does, including the rapidly-expanding universe of online journals that the more pretentious among us (you know who you are) refer to as “the blogosphere."

Karp has some interesting stats that suggest that this universe of legitimate journals may already be contracting, if you carve “spam blogs" out of the overall numbers.

He suggests that this is no surprise, given the difficulty of writing an online journal over a period of time, and the absence of any financial reward for most of the writers.

How is all this relevant to Yo Chicago’s business model, which depends on enlisting large numbers of unpaid volunteers to write about their neighborhoods and on topics they know well?

We expect that most of our volunteers will be volunteering with the goal of making a buck, in one way or another. Some will see a return; many won’t.

I think that there are far more opportunities for journal writers to benefit economically and non-economically than Karp seems to have factored into his thinking.

People writing about their neighborhood may be seeking to accelerate the appreciation in their property, or slow its depreciation if we’re in a bubble, or simply connect with like-minded people. Smart real estate agents will be looking to learn new ways of marketing their services and their listings in an increasingly fragmented and dysfunctional media universe. And so on.

Karp’s coming at this, though, from a different perspective: hoping for the survival of media brands as quality content reasserts its dominance in a less-cluttered universe. Not gonna happen, in my opinion. A lot of people are willing to invest a lot of energy over a long period of time in seeking an elusive reward, if it appears to be large enough.

An e-mail correspondent, to whom I'd sent a link to Yo Chicago, suggested that it "looks a lot like a next-gen real estate site."

I prefer to think of it as a gen-after-next-gen site, but wonder whether that leaves me where I've been too often in the past: too smart, too soon; too bad.

This time around, I don't think so. Too soon becomes too late in an eye-blink today. Too smart? No such thing any more, unless you're trying to sell to newspapers.

If we’re able to realize even a tenth of Yo Chicago’s audience and revenue potential, it will spawn imitators around the country. Our innovations will then come to seem commonplace. Many of them will vanish, as we imitate the imitators who find better ways of doing what we’re doing.

A year from now, even I will have forgotten many of the elements in the metropolis of “firsts" that Yo Chicago and its content represent. It’s difficult enough now to track the firsts, and even if it were possible to enumerate them all, there isn’t enough time to do so – or enough value in the effort. If you doubt that, just try describing a new city sewer pipe by sewer pipe, house by house, alley by alley, block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood.

Know us first and best by our ambition: we’re out to build a dazzling destination metropolis. It helps to think of the process we’re in as playing SimCity.

I like the SimCity analogy because it picks up some continuing threads in my life. There’s the Master’s in Urban Planning program that I began and didn’t finish, but that left me a lifelong disciple of Jane Jacobs and Saul Alinsky. There’s my son Jordan, who’s been a SimCity addict / adept for more than a dozen years. And, any game I’m in I’m in as much for the serendipity of it, and to pass the time, as for any other payoff that might result.

Think of Yo Chicago as a sim city. Thus far, we’ve passed some enabling ordinances and sketched out a plan to generate high revenues from low taxes. Until other revenues begin, we have a business that pays enough in taxes to pay the bills and provide funds for investment.

We’ve laid out some water and sewer lines, provided a lot of electricity, built some traffic and communications infrastructure, added a few parks, a decent library, some photo galleries, the plot plan for a public square, the foundation of a school …

We have to build wider before we can build higher. As we get further along in our metropolis, we’ll have some twisters, some lightning bolts, possibly even a meteorite impact. We’ll have to learn to cope with pollution – and hopefully with congestion – and will need to call in the fire and police departments on occasion. Some of our vacant lots will never be developed. Some of our buildings will become distressed and need to be demolished. Development will proceed in directions we don’t currently anticipate, and will cost more than we expected.

We have some proven guidelines to follow. We’ll begin to draw some tourists and some curiosity-seeking transients, and convert some of them into temporary or permanent residents before we can attract much commercial development.

We can maintain focus, because our competitors are languishing in their Detroit while we concentrate on building our New York.

What do newspaper executives have in common with Winston Churchill?

As the war heated up, they gave their people this message: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat." And “Poor people, poor people. They trust me, and I can give them nothing but disaster for quite a long time."

Has anyone heard a large newspaper company articulate anything but a blood-letting strategy lately?

Why are newspapers doomed? They’re doomed (among other reasons) because the people running them no longer understand – if they ever did – a critical role their papers play in people’s lives and how “readers" use newspapers.

Take Jeff Jarvis’ recent posts, and the comments on them, as an example. The posts, and the responses to them, add up over time to a serious, carefully considered and far-ranging attempt to understand the reasons for newspapers’ decline and venture prescriptions to reverse it by an individual and an audience who genuinely care about newspapers.

The whole effort is as irrelevant to the real reason for newspaper decline as newspapers are becoming to their readers.

Not a single commenter has noted one of the simplest and most basic truths about newspaper readership: people need, want, value and use local advertising and commercial content. Skimp on the ads and the readers go away.

As much as anything else a newspaper is, or used to be, a catalog of local ad info that’s relevant to people’s daily lives. There’s an enormous convenience to having the marketplace delivered to your door, or thrown in your front yard or available around the corner for a few coins.

The dominant local newspaper used to be the most efficient (hell, the only) search engine for the daily drill of going about living: deciding what to do this weekend, seeing who has sofas on sale, learning which grocery store has what on special, discovering restaurant openings, finding an apartment, finding someone to tutor your kid, etc., etc., etc.

Why don’t young people buy newspapers? No apartment ads. Too few ads for the events they’re interested in. No wedding or engagement announcements. No cheap used sofas. No ads for new restaurants or coupons from old ones. Keep spinning out the list on your own. It’s a long one.

Fat margins have made newspapers lazy, so instead of focusing on increasing ad content that people care about, they diddle themselves with things they can easily affect: increasingly irrelevant editorial content.

Fat margins have also allowed newspaper executives to become ignorant, stunningly ignorant about how and why people use newspapers. A newspaper is not just about the stuff on the back of the ads. And making it more local won't make a difference.

Listen up: it’s the ads, stupid. If you don't believe me, go ask Craig. You do know who he is, don't you? The guy who's taking your readers?

According to a home buyer and seller survey released today by the National Association of Realtors, 31% of home buyers used real estate agent sites and 15% used local newspaper sites.

Sad? Of course it's sad for newspapers.

Saddest of all is that the NAR survey is more credible than the stupid blather about being # 1 that one hears at newspaper conferences.