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I'm generally a big fan of the Poynter Institute and I often quote Roy Peter Clark, but not in the case of "Your Duty to Read the Paper," in which the great writing coach transforms himself right before our eyes into an Internet troll.

He says journalists should read more newspapers because they have a duty to do so.

I say they should read less.

Toss print aside.

Get out of the office.

Start talking to real people.

Discover that we entered the 21st century more than seven years ago.

The Cleaver family doesn't live here any more.

Quit blaming the Internet. There's nothing wrong with paper. It's your journalism that isn't relevant.

Clark doesn't believe there's an online business model. He's wrong.

I've previously described how newspapers don't have an online revenue problem, but rather an online audience problem. Just to put a point on it: I spent today with yet another newspaper new-media director whose biggest problem is sold-out ad inventory. The site needs people and pageviews.

You get people and pageviews by providing meaningful content and services.

We're not going to get meaningful content and services from journalists who spend their time reading each other and sniffing around each other's scents like a pack of dogs.

Don't compare your journalism with that of another newspaper. Compare it with the needs of the community.

Larry Magid has a warm and fuzzy piece about Linux on the desktop on nytimes.com today.

I previously wrote about how my elderly mother is now running Linux on her laptop, which was unusable under Microsoft Vista.

My mother-in-law also is running Linux as a result of a hard disk failure on her PC. I stuck an Ubuntu Live CD in the disk drive and let her run from CD for a couple of weeks, then installed a new hard drive and made Linux permanent last weekend.

In terms of day-to-day usability, there's really no difference between Vista and Linux (or for that matter Mac OSX), except for Vista's habit of bombarding you with security warnings.

A web browser is a web browser. Email programs are pretty much all alike. In fact, we generally run OS-specific versions of the same software on all three platforms.

Last weekend was Middle Daughter's 15th birthday, and she got an Acer 3680 laptop. I was surprised that it took over 30 minutes to run Vista for the first time. I started grandma's Linux hard disk installation at the same time, and Linux won.

Linux came up fast and snappy on an aging desktop with 256 megs of memory. Vista came up slow and squishy, full of popups and bearing a prominent warning (probably from antivirus banditware) that the system had serious security issues.

The Acer has "only" half a gig of memory, so Vista is slow. It's not as bad as my mom's dual-core Toshiba was (which is to say: useless), but both Microsoft and Acer should be ashamed.

So I installed Linux on a second disk partition. Installation was fast, easy and automated.

Up and running. Fast and snappy. Tons of software.

Then a problem arose: wireless networking.

Linux has excellent networking software, but the Atheros wi-fi hardware comes from one of those companies that doesn't provide Linux drivers, or cooperate with Linux developers. Worse, they revise their hardware in ways that break perfectly good drivers.

So the developers have to guess. I managed to get the wi-fi working using some guessware that I tracked down using Google, but that introduced some nasty bugs that occasionally lock up the laptop. Not good.

These problems undoubtedly will be fixed soon, probably without any help from Atheros, but in the meantime Middle Daughter is stuck with slow-and-squishy Vista and its security and usability problems.

The bottom line is pretty much the same as Magid outlined in his NYT piece. Linux is ready. Grandma can use it. Kids can use it. Installation is not a problem. In many dimensions, especially performance, security and nagware-free user experience, it's superior.

If you don't collide with hardware that the manufacturer won't support on Linux, you're set.

If you do, you're stuck, at least until the Linux developers guess their way to success.

Alan "Newsosaur" Mutter is one of my faves, and his brain drain post was a classic even before the comments started rolling in.

But the young net natives, for the most part, rank too low in the organizations that employ them to be invited to the pivotal discussions determining the stratgeic initiatives that could help their employers sustain their franchises.

“In most organizations, the people with the most online experience have the least political capital,” said one mid-level online editor at a newspaper. “It seems like the pace of change inside media is slowing, tied up in politics and lack of expertise in managing technical projects – while the pace of change is continuing apace outside our windows.”

This political-capital issue has long been my greatest concern about the organization fusion that's happening at many newspapers. I've seen it happen many times already: Newsroom resents not being in control of website. Editor maneuvers to gain control. Smart, creative new-media director is thrown overboard (or jumps overboard). Website takes a great leap backward, and only three or so years later does it begin to do creative work again.

There are many editors from the print side who are smart, thoughtful, observant and well grounded in the principles of operating on the Internet. There are others like this one cited by an anonymous poster on Mutter's site:

There's a story circulating about how the AME of online didn't know you could type a URL directly into a web browser... and there was that discussion on whether to include a blurb above a story describing, "what the blue underlined words were for".

Apocryphal, perhaps. But chillingly believable.

In a recent speech to the Arizona Newspaper Association, Tim McGuire said:

One last comment about innovation. It ain’t coming from anybody in this room. The chances of one of us here at the Scottsdale Chaparral going out of here an inventing a Google or even a viable innovation for newspapers is the same chance as all of us flying out of here on brooms. –None. So where is that innovation going to come from? Young people who, if we are smart, work for us. We don’t get the digital age and they do. And, that’s why its stupid, yes stupid for you to try to make every decision in your shop and act as if all wisdom resides in your office. It does not. If you want to foster true innovation in your organization involve your staff. Show them you trust them and build an environment which allows them to innovate.

Note that McGuire did NOT say "let them do whatever they want."

The role of a senior leader and manager is to cherish, coach, teach and grow talent. We need everything we can get from smart young people in our organizations. And we need senior leaders who know how to support them, how to clear middle-management roadblocks, how to say yes and when to say no.

We are at a critical turning point for American newspapers. We can't afford to drive away our smartest and most creative voices. The Internet not a publishing system, a Web site is not just another channel, and digitizing the thing we've been doing for the last century is not going to work. We need to think new thoughts, and pushing new thinkers out the door is a fatal mistake.

Writing for OJR.com, Robert Niles argues: “There's no need for professional reporters to fear user-generated content. Someone needs to lead the Web's content communities, and journalists make the ideal candidates.”

While I agree wholeheartedly that newspaper journalists should engage as leaders in the community conversation, I think it would be a mistake to overlook the shortcomings and handicaps we inherit from our past.

So here’s a counterpoint to Niles’ essay.

It doesn’t start with your source list

One of the reasons newspaper readership has been declining for decades is that the news values and news definitions of print journalism are out of sync with society.

It’s hard to see this from the inside, but the beat structures, source lists and organizational priorities of the average daily newspaper reflect a mid-20th-century worldview. Sources, journalists and audience are neatly organized and carefully segregated. Institutions and processes are the stars. Just look at political coverage: organizational strategy and horse-race poll reportage eclipses any discussion of issues that people care about.

A healthy Web community leverages the passions of individuals and activists and chaotic self-organizers, and that’s a completely different world than you’re going to find reflected in your source list.

You can go through institutions (clubs and organizations, for example) to find your “seed corn” community leaders, but they're often not the people running those organizations. You’re going to have to get out of the office and in front of a lot of people, explaining your goals and your mission, and asking for their help. Prepare to be surprised by the ones who step up.

Journalists don’t know how to ask questions

It seems counterintuitive to say that a reporter isn’t good at asking questions, but you have to consider the context.

Print reporters ask questions all the time: quietly, one-to-one, in the corner, but rarely in the spotlight. Sometimes you have to ask dumb questions to get smart answers.

When it comes to writing, the reporter shifts gears. The goal becomes : Tell the right story. Most newspaper writing has an authoritative voice, and to many people it seems authoritarian. This is a great irritation to many people in print and can be a genuine offense online.

There’s a real cultural chasm here that you shouldn’t underestimate. Some reporters will take to the online conversation like ducks to water, and some will need a lot of coaching. From the editor? The most painful transitions can be those of an editor, whose entire DNA is focused on avoidance of error, a distrust of sources, and in many cases a “command and control” approach to the workplace.

Journalists don’t know how to promote

TV is shameless about promotion (to the degree that it takes up 20 percent of some newscasts) but print journalists suck at promotion. The kind of promotion a participative website needs is promotion that sells, not promotion that merely tells. In a business where “pandering” and “sensationalism” are high insults, promotion just doesn’t come naturally.

This is a place where some coaching from the marketing department can help ... if you have a marketing department. Most newspapers do not have a marketing department, and most reporters don’t know the difference between a marketing department and ad sales.

Be afraid, but do it anyway

You’re going to make mistakes. You’re going to struggle. People will post items that are wrong, mean-spirited or intentionally misleading. Politicians will astroturf and spammers will make your life hell. You’re going to have a day when you wonder whether any of it is worth the effort.

But if you persist, if you humble yourself and stay focused on building, leadership and (most importantly) learning from the community, you have an opportunity to reconnect with real people’s lives. You’ll discover issues that have become lost and you’ll begin the long, slow process of rebuilding the machinery of your reporting. You may even have an epiphany and declare that everything you’ve been doing for a decade has been all wrong. It won’t be painless. It will be worth it.

Jump in.

According to E&P, Bank of America analyst Joe Arns says the value of an online reader to a newspaper company is on the rise:

Based on the total ad revenue per reader, in Q2 Bank of America estimates that on average, newspaper publishers generated about $25 to $38 of ad revenue per daily online reader compared with $70 for each print daily reader. This suggests that online readers are worth about 36% to 55% of the value of print readers, up from 28% to 42% in Q2 2006.

I'd like to see the full "show your work" calculations. I continue to believe that the readership claims of newspaper websites are inflated by irrelevant, drive-by traffic that bloats the unique-user count and depresses derivatives such as revenue per user.

It's been a couple of years since I did any heavy-duty behavioral analysis on a newspaper website, but I don't think the numbers have changed all that much. What I found then was an easily identifiable, but small, group of habituated users and very large population of one-hit drive-by visitors.

If you ignore the drive-by traffic and divide revenue by habituated users, you get a pretty powerful story about the potential of local Internet advertising revenue ... and you can see that our challenge is to build that habituated readership.

As I've said before:

... the problems are much more driven by a weakening ability to deliver an audience in any medium than by any inherent weakness of an online advertising model. At the end of the day it comes down to a simple question: Are your content and services relevant to consumers in your market?

On the day of 60 "early retirements" from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, columnist Bill McClellan feels like a dinosaur witnessing the end of his era, and he points to two meteoric events. One is the arrival of the Internet. The other is corporate ownership.

That's probably a popular viewpoint in most newsrooms these days. And there is some truth to it. But in the big picture it's wrong.

Newspapers, particularly the flagship major metros, aren't in trouble because of the Internet and corporate ownership. They're in trouble for a whole lot of reasons that all too often get overlooked. They include:

• Journalistic arrogance, the dark side of the professionalization that took place in the 20th century. The arrogant authoritarianism of newspaper journalism set us up for a fall. A lot of people just plain don't like us.
• Big changes in consumer retailing. Local department stores like St. Louis' Famous, Barr & Co. and Stix, Baer & Fuller are no longer around to buy those big full-age ads on A3 featuring women in their underwear. We shop now at suburban malls, Wal-Mart and Best Buy. National chain-store branding and physical location have displaced local merchandise advertising as a primary marketing tool. Much of the retail advertising that newspapers still get has moved from high-dollar ROP to low-dollar inserts.
• Explosive growth in broadcast and cable TV. Sometime in the 1990s, newspapers lost their grip on the morning, replaced by television, just as newspapers lost their grip on the evenings in the 1970s. As the eyeballs have migrated from print to TV to cable, so has a lot of small-business advertising. Pretty much every cable carrier has a sales force (or is contracted with one) that's out calling on sole-proprietor businesses in strip malls and shopping centers. A lot of those folks never see a newspaper ad salesperson.
• A long, slow slide toward irrelevancy through the loss of readership driven by generational change. Using General Social Survey data, Philip Meyer has documented the decline of newspaper readership since 1970, and it's easy to see that something other than the Internet is at work. Even if the Internet had never happened, newspapers -- especially big-city papers -- have long been headed for a dangerous inflection point at which their market penetration would not be sufficient to sustain a mass-media business model.
• The iPod, the Xbox, the DVD player and every other electronic toy and gizmo that sucks up time and attention, ultimately competing with the act of reading and the very concept of being involved in
  local civic life.
• Market fluctuations. I'm the first person to point at longterm trends and ignore the short-term cycles, but in this case we're experiencing both climate change and very nasty weather. There is a deep malaise in the American economy right now, and it's much worse than any of the spinners in Washington will admit. Maybe if we hadn't wasted $455 billion in a fit of neocon world-domination arrogance, we wouldn't be facing a wrecked economy.
• The Internet, and the corporate ownership model. I don't want to let them off the hook entirely. I just want to point out that it's not one or two meteoric events that have put us where we are today.

(Note: I worked in St. Louis in the 1970s and 1980s at the Globe-Democrat, which went out of business in 1986.)

I've been repeating myself a lot lately: "It's not about technology. It's not about technology." Nevertheless, I find myself being drawn back into the technology frequently, and last week I spent a day at the Barcelona Drupalcon, surrounded by a bunch of really smart guys (mostly guys, anyway) half my age.

I was "in the neighborhood" because BDZV, the German federation of newspaper publishers, had asked me to speak at an annual meeting. I hopped a cheap flight to BCN and slipped in a day at the four-day Drupal conference.

If ever you're in doubt about the power of the community-driven open-source development process, I'd encourage you to take in a conference like that one. There were 492 people registered for more than 80 sessions, and all of the sessions were nominated and chosen by the attendees in an open online process in the weeks before the conference (in other words, applying open process to the conference itself).

As you might expect, the hallways were full of high-energy conversations, and many of the developers skipped an evening or two of partying to write code in marathon sessions in apartments and hotels scattered around the city.

I appeared on a panel discussing participative news sites, probably the least technical panel at the whole show, and the room was packed. My panel was organized by our own Ken Rickard, who was involved in half a dozen other presentations through the course of the conference. Ken was vacationing with his wife in Spain and performing, as usual, above and beyond the call of duty.

Online journalism is not a matter of technology, but we need to use technology to do it. Tapping into a global community of thousands of really smart developers is a powerful way to get there.

Presentation notes and videos are being collected at Drupal.org.