Team Manning was hunkered down for a week in and near the Moscone Center, the site of the American Bar Association’s Annual Meeting.  Mitch, Mike and Doug spent long days and nights shooting, editing and posting video clips to the group’s primary communications site www.ABANow.org.

Photo by Phil Coblentz

Our team was kept busy with quick turnarounds of video content such as Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, new ABA president Stephen Zack and David Boies, the attorney who successfully challenged California’s ban on same-sex marriages. It was a fascinating time to be in San Francisco considering this ban was overturned while the meeting was occurring. Not that we had a great sense of what was going on outside of our edit room. Our late night work schedule limited our opportunities to get to see the city. So while there were few cable car rides, we were able to have some amazing Chinese take out.

The upside of all this hard work is the traffic to ABANow.org skyrocketed during this event. This clearly establishes ABANow as THE source for news of the ABA’s two yearly meetings. The number of visitors was nearly 6 times greater than a year ago at the 2009 meeting when ABANow was launched. And the number of visitors for the 2010 Annual meeting was nearly double that of the group’s midyear meeting in February.

To prove they were actually there, Mitch and Mike took advantage of their one day off to shoot this little travelogue of Mike in San Fran.

Mike is Cinematic from Mitch McLachlan on Vimeo.

But next trip here are a couple of the places recommended by fellow Manning staffers:

• Curtis’s recommendation was the Toronado with more than 80 beers on tap
• Amy’s recommendation was the Slanted Door for the view of the bay and amazing Vietnamese food

During an interview with CNBC, Zell was asked about the future of the newspaper business. What is his visionary prediction? PDFs. That’s right–the staggering problem of remaining profitable in the newspaper industry could be solved if only we could figure out a way to deliver PDF versions of publications.

“going forward, it’s going to require all kinds of different approaches, including probably most significant, the elimination of home delivery and the replacement of it by PDFs.”

To be fair, no one has really figured out a good way monetize online news.  Print circulation and ad dollars continue to drop as a majority of readers now get their news from the web. But my guess is that the solution is not going to be simply digitizing news content in PDF form.

The reasons that newspapers are struggling to remain relevant are pretty obvious:

1. Slow to React – By the time a story gets to the printed page, it’s not news anymore. In 2010, news can be broken almost instantaneously through social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Who wants to wait until the next morning for this information?
2. Static Content – Once a paper goes to press, it cannot be updated. A story cannot evolve over time, even if the facts do.
3. No Multimedia – The best online news sources include audio, video and interactive graphics. None of this is possible on the printed page. (with a few exceptions)
4. No User Participation – Sure, you can write a letter to the editor and hope it gets published. But that’s about as close as you’ll come.

So let’s think about how the mighty PDF will solve these problems:

1. Slow to React – The process for producing a PDF is essentially the same as it would be for the printed version. You’d only be knocking off the time spent at the press and delivery.
2. Static Content – A PDF may be digital, but it’s still static content. The only way to update would be to send a new version.
3. No Multimedia – It is possible to embed multimedia in a PDF. But I hope your inbox doesn’t have a file size limit, because those would be some biiiig files.
4. No User Participation – I have yet to see a PDF that allowed user comments.

Verdict? The PDF will save print journalis….errrrrrr … this is about the dumbest thing you could propose as the chairman of a newspaper empire. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by these comments considering how crappy the design and usability of www.chicagotribune.com are. (And the Tribune’s attempt at an iPhone app (iTunes link) was also a spectacular failure.) This is clearly not a group with good prospects for surviving in the digital age. (Don’t worry Trib– the New York Times has a similarly firm grasp of these technologies.)

So what do you do if you want to maintain relevance in this changing media landscape? You embrace the possibilities that this new technology provides to  give your readers added value. Case in point: www.abanow.org

Watch Zell’s comments on CNBC:

For the past few years, we’ve had the honor of working with the American Bar Association’s Division for Public Eduction on interactive projects to educate students about the relevance of the U.S. Constitution in their lives.

In light of the presidential race, this year’s project deals with constitutional amendments that relate to the right to vote. It’s a scrapbook game, so check it out and see how well you know your rights!

You can also sign the Constitution on this same site if you’re so inclined.  We got an Adobe Site of the Day award for our work on this one.