SOPA/PIPA isn’t a business problem; it’s a culture problem

January 22nd, 2012

In the wake of this week’s remarkable SOPA and PIPA turnaround in Washington, Christopher Dodd, the former U.S. Representative turned U.S. Senator and now chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, thinks that Hollywood and Silicon Valley need to meet. ”Mr. Dodd said he would welcome a summit meeting between Internet companies and content companies, perhaps convened by the White House, that could lead to a compromise,” according to the New York Times.

Prominent New York venture capitalist Fred Wilson essentially accepted the invitation, saying we need a new framework that is based on a shared set of goals and objectives. “The PIPA/SOPA framework was litgation heavy and very invasive,” he wrote. “It was “we are going to do this to you.” It’s not surprising the tech industry didn’t like it one bit.”

As much as I respect Fred Wilson, this is a clever way of positioning “the problem” as one between two industries, entertainment and technology. Okay. That’s fine, but “the problem” is really between the MPAA and RIAA and the people formerly known as their customers. If you think Fred Wilson speaks for the people, you’re mistaken. Fred is one of the genuinely good guys, but his view is quite business-centered. So who speaks for us in these negotiations?

This isn’t a business problem; it’s a cultural problem, and it must be framed as such in order for these businesses to get it right. It is indeed a legal issue, but it tends to get framed in an archaic setting. That’s the real problem here. If you really want to understand the scope of the issue, take the 14 minutes necessary to watch Clay Shirky’s explanation or read his take here.

Shirky notes that the copyright cartel wants to eliminate the sharing of creative works, just as they’ve wanted since creative works first became an “industry.” As a creative person who’s published books and songs and performed those songs as well, I don’t believe the arts are industries, so they shouldn’t be treated as such. The only fiscal beneficiaries of the arts should be the artists and that begins with being seen, read, heard, watched, etc. I oppose the suggestion that the sharing of works costs artists jobs, and I resent it when this is used to justify arguments that prevent people from seeing, reading, hearing, watching, etc. I further reject the suggestion that a self-serving “professional” hierarchy should the sole determinant of what is seen, read, heard, watched, etc. We’ve  gone nuts with deep pockets needing to protect their status, and this has blinded everybody to the revolution that’s taking place around us.

I have a lot of books in my library and continue to obtain both printed and electronic versions. But I’ve given away more than I actually possess, for I believe that artistic works should be consumed. That’s their purpose. The copyright industry tells me, however, that if my friends who “borrowed” those books wanted to read them, they should have bought them for themselves. This is why I’m so vehemently opposed to legislation such as SOPA or PIPA. At core, such thinking is unnatural, for the artist benefits in ways beyond monetary compensation.

Besides, the harm that these companies are experiencing is self-inflicted, because these industries profit by manipulating and gouging the very people their products are intended to entertain. Treating customers as “eyeballs” for profit is not only disrespectful; it is contrary to the very essence of creativity’s gifts. We hear about how artists are   disrespected in our culture, but that disrespect begins with the industry that exploits their gifts for profit alone.

People have had enough, and the disorganized, chaotic demonstration against it last Wednesday evidenced a dissatisfaction far beyond what a simple business negotiation can deliver. Copyright is not property. Period. Let’s get that right, and the rest will fall in place.

Posted in Copyright, Culture | 3 Comments » |

A postmodern lesson in deconstruction

January 16th, 2012

A great many people (e.g. here, here, here) have commented about Tim O’Reilly’s dramatic question in response to a White House weekend blog entry about legislative efforts to stop online piracy. The blog entry/press release includes the assumption — as stated by the copyright industry — that legislation is needed to give them the power to control “their” intellectual property, because it’s harmed theirs and the nation’s economy. O’Reilly, however, isn’t so sure.

“In the entire discussion, I’ve seen no discussion of credible evidence of this economic harm. There’s no question in my mind that piracy exists, that people around the world are enjoying creative content without paying for it, and even that some criminals are profiting by redistributing it. But is there actual economic harm?”

I wish to point out that this question is an outstanding illustration of the philosophical concept of deconstruction, a key process involved in postmodernism (to which this blog is dedicated). Deconstruction is the great threat to our hierarchically-driven culture, because it proves that much of it is based on unproven and self-serving assumptions, like the one to which O’Reilly is referencing. In the one-to-many media world, it was easy to get away with this, because the channels available to dispatch sweeping narratives was extremely limited. Today, that’s not true, and it’s only just begun. The essential function of a hyperlink is to practice deconstruction, and a culture armed with this ability will not sit still for anything resembling bullshit.

Respected observer and friend Jackie Danicki, Director of Social Comms for Weber Shandwick in New York, posted another assumption on Facebook yesterday. An article in her hometown paper began with this sentence:

“With the first drug-related warrant of 2012 under its belt, the Chillicothe Police Department continues to investigate drug crimes and work on making the city safer.”

This prompted Jackie to state, “How blindly these people accept and repeat the disproven idea that the war on drugs is making ANY community ‘safer’. Disgraceful.”

This is another postmodern example of deconstruction, and we’re going to see it more and more as The Great Horizontal advances. Can the public actually know more and better than it’s elected representatives? As the Wicked Witch once said, “Oh, what a world!” It’s what I call “The Evolving User Paradigm,” and it’s going to bite every institution in the rear end sooner or later. 21st Century businesses will be driven by the quality of their products and services to an increasingly hip public. You won’t be able to buy your way to the top by lobbing spit-shined horse droppings at “consumers.”

As Doc says via Project VRM, Caveat Venditor.

Posted in Culture, Disruptions, Networked World, Postmodernism | No Comments » |

Of vinyl records and 8-track tapes

January 12th, 2012

Every once in awhile a quote comes a long that’s bound to stick around for awhile, one you’ll likely see many times downstream. This one is from U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito (a George W. Bush nominee) during yesterday’s hearing on cursing and nudity over broadcasting’s airwaves. Suggesting that the market itself should be allowed to deal with the issue without regulatory interference, Justice Alito made this remarkable statement:

Broadcast TV is living on borrowed time. It is not going to be long before it goes the way of vinyl records and eight-track tapes.

What’s most remarkable here is its source, the mind of a U.S. Supreme Court Justice. If this is the way a member of the final court in the land views things, broadcasting has no hope of ever finding relief in the courts against market forces that threaten its existence. The spectrum that the government licenses to broadcast companies is eventually going to wireless broadband, and that will doubtless end up in the courts. Alito is not alone in this belief, but he’s the highest ranking government official that I’ve ever heard say it.

My friend Ethan Beute asked via Twitter “how long?” I think this is going to come upon the industry much sooner than later. It will appear like a thief in the night, although it has been visible and approaching for many years. Broadcasters have been playing defense all this time, while intruders from Silicon Valley and elsewhere have been staging guerrilla and flanking attacks with armies funded by venture capital. Lobbyists representing the NAB and local interests are at war with those representing the Telcos and others, and it will likely be bloody. In the end, though, it’s pretty hard to deny the interests of the public in the matter, and that is strongly tilted to the wireless broadband side.

My advice to broadcasters has always been to move forward strategically on two separate paths. Get as much as we can out of the mass media market available to us via those airwaves and at the same time develop new ways to make money. Mass is shrinking and fragmenting. We can’t “fix” that, but we can find new ways to replace the revenue. We must look outside our comfort zone, but we CAN drive the car and fix it at the same time.

Vinyl records and 8-track tapes evolved, and so can we.

Posted in Broadcasting, Legal | 1 Comment » |

“It served its purpose”

January 9th, 2012

Via Newsblues this morning comes word of a young reporter with a new job. He’s Syed Shabbir, and the lucky TV station to acquire his obviously brilliant services is KSHB-41-NBC in his hometown of Kansas City (Market #31). He must be brilliant, because he’s only been in the business for two years, having begun in Topeka (Market #136), where he worked for a year before jumping to WCPO-TV in Cincinnati (Market #35) a year ago.

He told Cincinnati.com that working in his hometown has been his dream since the 8th grade, and now he’s made it. He’s a big city kid. Good for him. Bad for the business.

“I came to Cincy, because I needed to get out of Topeka,” he tells Cincinnati.com. “It only took me a year before I got tired of the small market stories and small market pay (in Topeka). I knew WCPO was only going to be a stepping stone, so I only signed a one year deal. It served its purpose, and I guess I’m lucky things are going according to plan.”

According to plan. Yep. That’s the way it is. Along the way, everything this young man did was to prepare himself for his dream, and this is the curse of the ego it requires to “be on TV.” Mr. Shabbir’s concern as a journalist in both Topeka and Cincinnati was for what those stops could do to fulfill this dream, not in serving the community. I’ve seen it a million times. The job reel is more important than serving the news needs of the community. Moreover, these kinds of people who are  just having their purpose served have no interest in the roots of their stepping stones, because they’re not really in it for the news; they’re in it for their own purposes, and one foot is already out the door at the moment the other foot steps in.

A commenter to the Cincinnati.com story, Steve Gaines, wrote: “loved being your ‘stepping-stone’ ….pls feel free to come back to cincinnati & walk on us again in the future…but honestly, i don’t even know who you are..”

I hate this about our industry. It cheapens what we do and robs smaller markets of what they need and deserve. Parochial news coverage wanted by small towns gives way to the cosmopolitan stories that look good on a young person’s reel. The retort, of course, is “pay me what I’m worth, and perhaps I’ll stay.” No you won’t. It is what it is. What you’re worth? Give me a break! You’re not in this for a “living wage” in a small town, because your definition is a better-than-living-wage. You’ll add “who doesn’t want that?” to which I’ll reply “go to law school.”

Maybe I’m the prick here. Maybe I should instead be chiding broadcast companies for not paying people more. I don’t, because I honestly don’t believe it would solve the revolving door problem. Besides, it’s extremely unrealistic economically. These people likely believe that they’re doing the Topekas of the world a favor by loaning them their brilliance for a year or two. Oh. Right.

Moreover, the egocentricity of young news people is an evolution that took place during my lifetime in news management — on my watch. People used to get into “the biz,” because it was a way to make a difference. Today, it’s all about “being on TV” or “being a star.” Watergate produced Woodward & Bernstein, and they became the poster boys for a new generation of journalists and journalism instructors. Shortly after that, trust in the press began to decline. Around the same time, communications schools began popping up to feed the growing beast known as television news, and the industry borrowed from the newspaper paradigm of small-market-to-big-market.

The Personal Media Revolution challenges all this, and I believe the day is coming when communities themselves will grow their own journalists. The Syed Shabbirs of the world — with their 8th grade dreams — will build and study their craft at home and work their ways into positions with local media companies. They will then be people with roots who care deeply about the communities they serve, whether it is governed by geography or issue. That will be good for journalism, it seems to me, because what we have now are gunslingers passing through towns, people generally who are a mile wide and an inch deep (but look good on TV).

Like Mr. Shabbir, they’re serving the purpose of self, and crapping all over the public in the process.

Posted in Broadcasting, Culture, Education, personal media | 3 Comments » |

A bluegrass miracle to start the new year

January 8th, 2012

A few days ago, something remarkable happened that I thought I’d share. It’s a testament to the wonder of hyperconnectivity for my generation. I think this kind of thing will only be experienced by those who’ve not grown up with the Web, so these kinds of stories will gradually disappear, but that’s just a guess. Here’s what happened.

Neal Lynch, the brother of a high school girlfriend contacted me via Facebook inquiring if I had been a member of the River City Singers from Grand Rapids, Michigan during the 1960s. Facebook is the source of reconnections so plenty these days that this one would simply blend in with the others were it not for the fact that I’m able to pass it along to you. Neal lives in California, and the circumstances under which he contacted me are remarkable all by themselves, but The Great Horizontal — the connected culture we’re just beginning to know — is what made this possible.

I wrote back that I was indeed a member of that band, whereupon he sent me two photographs of myself and my two brothers playing our music in his basement. He was 12-years old at the time and shortly thereafter picked up guitar and has been playing ever since. The photos were made from old Kodak slides and are the only high-resolution, digital color pictures of the three of us playing together. The ONLY ones, and I’d never seen them before. These pictures blew my mind, because I was able to zoom in and closely examine facial expressions. The experience really took me back to when I was 18-years old. All that I am, I was back then. The experiences I’ve had in the last 47 years have shaped only what I do, but all that is really me — the gifts, the spirit, the emotions, the soul — can be seen in these pictures.

I sent copies to my two brothers and heard back from older brother Jim (the guitar picker). He told me that he was so blown away that all he could do was go sit in his back yard alone and think about our lives as a bluegrass band. I knew exactly what he was talking about.

Words cannot express my appreciation for the way Life has engineered this and especially to Neal for contacting me. In the picture to the left, you can see me, as my daughter told me via Facebook, “lost in the music.” This is true, but “lost in the music” can also be a form of “hiding from everybody,” which took a big emotional toll on me over the decades that followed.

My two brothers and I are not close. The Vietnam War broke up our band, and we all went our separate ways. It has been one of the biggest regrets of my life, because I really did and do love my brothers. That fact is inescapable when examining these pictures. We were really good, and to quote Marlon Brando, “I coulda been a contender.” Bluegrass is a music meant to be played, not just listened to. I haven’t had a banjo in many years, but this may inspire me to find something at a pawn shop. I’m playing an old Gibson Mastertone in the pictures. That instrument is worth a lot of money today.

This event in my life has reinforced everything I believe deeply about the enormity of this “second Gutenberg moment” in the history of Western Civilization. We may spit and snarl and fight it all the way, but this “Great Horizontal” is transforming everything about our culture. The more open we become, the harder it is for anybody to live a double life and to present bullshit as a cover story for one’s life. We have to rethink everything, and I envy those who are just entering adulthood, for life will be very different for them when they reach my age. The naysayers shout down change, usually because they have something to lose in terms of their position vis-a-vis everybody else.

I’m incredibly hopeful for tomorrow, because truth weighs far less than falsehood, and we’re all ridiculously overweight. That’s what my view of postmodernism is all about. These pictures have helped me in the ongoing journey to find my truth, and I am forever grateful.

Posted in Culture, LifeSlices, Networked World, Personal, Postmodernism, The Great Horizontal | No Comments » |

CJR story brought to you by the FCC

January 2nd, 2012

The Columbia Journalism Review has presented — as a news commentary — a piece indirectly written by the FCC that favors the commission’s position in a key legislative issue involving broadcasters. The piece hypocritically trashes broadcasters for the same kind of behavior it represents, and it does so using the popular buzz term “transparency.” This is a smokescreen for what’s really being conveyed.

First, a little background.

Long ago, our government decided that “the airwaves” belong to the public and, therefore, should be regulated by the public’s representatives in Washington. Licenses to “use” the public’s airwaves were granted and maintained by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and so was born an antagonistic relationship between the licensor and the licensees. Broadcasters have long held the upper hand in this antipathy. They are a powerful group with the ability to easily reach the public “back home,” where legislators raise money and votes. The National Association of Broadcasters was and is a powerful lobbying organization.

However, there’s been a recent shifting of that power, and things are a little different today. Armed with knowledge of a real demand for wireless broadband — which would use that same spectrum owned by the public — the FCC is turning up the heat on broadcasters. This will evolve to an all-out war that threatens the core value of all of broadcasting, and as the number of people receiving TV via those airwaves alone dwindles, the case of the whole industry weakens. We’re in a season when broadcasters can extract value two ways: through subscriber revenues from cable providers and via advertising based on reach, at least some of which is over-the-air. As a group, therefore, broadcasters must promote both, and that hands the FCC an industry with a split focus to regulate. The FCC, however, cares mostly about that spectrum.

We can argue that cord-cutting raises the value of that over-the-air signal — especially in high-definition — but the longer technicians are able to innovate and resolve compression and other hi-def delivery problems, the more viable TV over IP becomes, and so we must admit that broadcasting’s “cake and eat it too” has a limited window. Broadcasters are well aware of this “problem,” and are working on so-called solutions that limit broadcast signals over IP to those geographic regions determined by broadcast licenses, thereby maintaining the old status quo. The weakness of one solution supported by the NAB and big broadcast companies (Syncbak) is that it requires the broadcast signal to verify geographic position within the market. This will be a hard proposition to sell Congress or the FCC as pressure mounts for broadband spectrum.

It’s into this scenario that an advisor to the FCC Chairman was begun writing what I would call “attack pieces” published in the Columbia Journalism Review. What or who is being attacked? Broadcasting, specifically television. It would be untoward for me to suggest that this is a deliberate effort to cloud the picture of the FCC versus broadcasting, but it does strike me as odd that such vertically-slanted stories would be published in the high church of the Columbia Journalism Review.

Steve Waldman is the writer/advisor, and his latest (This News Story Is Brought to You By…) is about how some television stations “allow sponsors to dictate content” within or close to newscasts. Mr. Waldman was the lead author of the FCC’s Information Needs of Communities study, which challenged broadcasters and helped lay the groundwork for the above arguments about the best use of spectrum.

One of Mr. Waldman’s major concerns in the CJR article is the use by certain television stations of video news releases disguised as news stories or other methods that those with a position employ to escape the wall of separation between news and advertising via the public’s airwaves. In making this charge in the Columbia Journalism Review, however, Mr. Waldman is guilty of the exact crime of which he accuses broadcasters, namely the presentation of a government position paper as news or commentary. I find it astonishing that the CJR would permit this, and yet, there it is.

That said, Mr. Waldman’s point is well-taken and broadcasters most certainly should be following the law and clearly labeling such as sponsored. But so should the Columbia Journalism Review, for this piece was surely presented — however indirectly — by the FCC.

Posted in Broadcasting, Ethics, Journalism, Legal | No Comments » |

The blogosphere, circa 2012 (Hint: it ain’t dead or dying)

December 30th, 2011

One could argue, I suppose, that blogging has always been a cry for attention, but then you’d have to admit the same for all forms of media. As Dave Winer so brilliantly points out, “the readers are the product, and the customers are the advertisers,” so who can blame content creators for wanting attention? It’s one thing to have an idea and to put that on paper, but it’s like the proverbial tree falling in the forest unless somebody else reads it. However, when money is exchanged for content creation, everything changes, because the paradigm moves from just being read to the number of people reading. This is called mass marketing. Media has always thought it was the content business, but Dave rightly discerns, attention for advertisers is the real business.

Much has been written over the last few years about blogging and blogging’s future since the dawn of social media. The latest is Jeremiah Owyang’s “End of an Era: The Golden Age of Tech Blogging is Over.” I won’t attempt to deconstruct this view, because others with greater credentials than mine have already done so. I do wish to comment about what’s happened to blogging, however, because 2012 will be my 10th year with The Pomo Blog.

There are many definitions of blogging, but mine most closely resembles, again, Dave Winer’s. He’s writing here about how some tech blogs, most notably TechCrunch, moved from being “blogs” to being media companies writing about technology, like CNET.

It’s understandable because they earn their salaries based on how much they please advertisers. It’s like the hamster-farms they write about — the readers are the product, and the customers are the advertisers. Bloggers, as I use the term, are the product without bothering with the advertisers. It’s people and their ideas, for better or worse, and nothing more than that.

This is The Pomo Blog. You won’t see any advertising here, because this blog isn’t about attention; it’s about ideas and the challenging of assumptions. It’s a teaching vehicle, and the student is me. That’s all it is, and this brings me to the social media disruption.

Technology spawned the personal media revolution — the “Great Horizontal” to which Jay Rosen refers — which has given voice to the formerly voiceless. Telling the world what you think only requires time. Everything else is free. If you follow closely (from a distance) all that’s taken place with this in the past ten years, however, you’ll find thousands of people who’ve interpreted this as a way to “make their mark” and pursue dreams that aren’t so horizontal as much as they are hierarchical.

I always used to argue that bloggers were not really competing with traditional media companies until I began seeing the various A-list, B-list, C-list rankings. It was clear that some people were in it for the rankings, and in that sense — and just as Dave asserts — they were trying to generate a mass following. But regular blogging takes time, so when social media came along, these people fled the blogosphere to find the audience — the “Klout” — they were seeking elsewhere, because, well, it was more efficient and a whole lot easier to grow a reputation using connected social media.

Personal branding burst onto the scene, and we started seeing stories, posts, tweets about how to advance our personal brands. I wrote a tongue-in-cheek post “How to ‘be somebody’ on Twitter” that was based entirely on practices I had observed from those whose primary purpose on Twitter (and especially when tied together with Facebook) appeared to be growing an audience. There’s, of course, nothing wrong with that, but it has separated the wheat from the chaff in terms of blogging and the blogosphere.

I’m not suggesting anything untoward or disingenuous about this. It simply is what it is.

What I am trying to suggest is that this wing of the blogosphere has indeed vanished or transformed into plain old fashioned media designed to accrue an audience, and as long as this continues to be its goal, I’m not sure it’s all that sustainable, because their product — the audience — isn’t as necessary as it once was. That’s because the people who used to want that product — the advertisers — are now using the same technology to route around inefficient middlemen and go directly to the customers they seek. Further carving up the same old pie nets only smaller pieces and more confusion for the people who have the money in the first place. Any business model today based on traditional advertising has a rude awakening ahead.

I’ll never disrespect or discourage anyone for crying for attention, but if the end game is an audience for advertising, you might want to rethink your future.

(Disclosure: The Pomo Blog wouldn’t be here had it not been for the direct assistance of Dave Winer in getting me started.)

Posted in Advertising, Blogging, Culture, Disruptions | No Comments » |

NYT & union on collision course

December 28th, 2011

I feel pretty sad about the “profound dismay” expressed by former and current New York Times‘ employees due to a decision by management to freeze the pension plan for foreign bureau employees and other “recent developments.” The union sent a petition letter (384 signatures as of this writing) to publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. expressing their concern.

We have worked long and hard for this company and have given up pay to keep it solvent. Some of us have risked our lives for it. You have eloquently recognized and paid moving tribute to our work and devotion. The deep disconnect between those words and the demands of your negotiators have given rise to a sense of betrayal.

A Huffington Post article on the matter by Michael Calderone notes that it could have been worse.

Bill O’Meara, president of the New York Newspaper Guild, said some staffers had considered even “more dramatic” actions.

“There were people who wanted to storm Arthur Sulzberger’s office,” O’Meara told The Huffington Post. “There were people who wanted to stage a walkout.”

The problem here is that this is 1960′s style labor posturing that really feels ancient in today’s media world. I don’t like it anymore than anybody else, but crying for yesterday does nothing to solve today’s problems. Managers of public companies have fiduciary responsibilities to their owners, the shareholders, and people don’t buy or hold stocks in companies that can’t produce growth. It’s not about how much money one makes, nor is it directly about margins; it’s about growth, and there are only two ways to do that. You can increase revenue, which isn’t happening anymore, or you can cut expenses, and that’s what’s happening here.

There’s very little growth in any sector of our economy right now, but this is more than just an economic problem. This is a problem of core business decay, and it will not get any better unless there’s a total reinvention undertaken. The truth and the laws of economics apply to everyone, even a vaunted institution like the New York Times.

What can be done? Take a look at the marvelous work of Lewis DVorkin at Forbes. Here’s a company that has blown out the original concept of making media and replaced it with a much leaner, more nimble and flexible system. The problem, of course, is that there’s no room whatsoever for organized labor’s perspective, which is now simply dead weight around the necks of the people who are trying to save the institution.

But beyond that – and to every individual in media today – the safe harbor that once was “the collective” is no more. It is literally every man and woman for themselves. If your organizations won’t or aren’t able to assist you in reinventing you, then you must do it yourself. I get the letter to the boss, but the arguments are sadly and unfortunately irrelevant. You must take care of you, because nobody will do it for you.

Posted in Newspapers, personal media, Reinventing Local Media | 1 Comment » |

Dean Starkman and the FONers

December 26th, 2011

Back when Dean Starkman first struck out at those who present a view of the future of news (FON) other than his, I wrote a scathing retort but never published it. Others were saying the same things, and besides, I went after him for lazy intellectualism, which is always hard to prove. So I stayed home and let the FONers speak for themselves.

But wait! I’m a FONer myself, and now Mr. Starkman has struck out again, this time choosing to “interact” with one of his chief targets, Clay Shirky. Shirky had responded to his rant, so Mr. Starkman chose to engage Shirky and clarify his disregard for the FON crowd. After conceding four points that Shirky made, Mr. Starkman boiled his concern down to one simple thought – the story.

But all of this misses the point; the talk here is all about process and structure. I’m talking about great stories. As I said in the piece, I care about institutions only to the extent that they can produce them.

…I do kind of believe that newspapers must find ways to blah blah and whatever, but in fact I care far less about that than that they produce agenda-setting stories.

And this leads me to what seems to be a gaping hole in FON theory, and that is this: It doesn’t have any great stories, and, worryingly, it doesn’t seem to have any way to produce them.

There are many ways to go in response to this thinking, but let me state just three.

1. The problem with news in the future has nothing to do with content; it’s in how we get paid for making whatever content is required. News institutions aren’t really in the content business, they’re in the advertising business, so the argument about stories is irrelevant to the problem facing organizations that shoulder a free press responsibility.
2. “The story” is a product of production processes and schedules. Many of us have written about this extensively, myself included (News is Not a Story). I think I know what Mr. Starkman means by “the story” in the above, and it’s more about the process than the product. He’s speaking of delving into some heretofore untold or hidden narrative and bringing it into the light of day through good old legwork and other journalistic practices. Clinging to this, however, as a justification to strike out at the FONers is problematic, because the very process that Mr. Starkman holds dear is being disrupted by the next factor.
3. Communications is now horizontal and in real time. This completely destroys the top-down framework within which Mr. Starkman’s story paradigm works. He proposes that the world needs educated and experienced professionals to generate and follow-up on their leads, knowledge and suspicions, and to do it in such a way that follows the ethical and legal requirements of the profession. The results are then turned over to another even more educated and experienced group for vetting and final preparation before being dispatched to a large audience for maximum effect, thereby engaging with the issues of society. It’s neat. It’s ordered. It served us well for centuries. But the world itself has changed, and in a horizontal, real time communications paradigm, no feed is special.

Mr. Starkman is asking for a replacement for that concept within the new, and there isn’t any so far. I’m not sure there ever will be, due to factor number one. Moreover, I don’t think this is the only or even the preferred way for journalism to function by default, because it produces inertia and inefficiencies along with the occasional, “agenda-setting” story.

And if we’re really going to be honest, we must ask ourselves, too, if the hiding of the various facts that make up “the story” before it’s deemed ready to publish is really always necessary in a horizontal world. If the newsgathering process is made public, we can all participate, including those who can advance “the story” separate from the person or organization who first started the snowball on its downhill adventure. I realize this may not be applicable to every situation, and that there may be times when keeping quiet is necessary. In those cases, however, I believe the new culture will figure out ways to do it without breaking the bank.

Then there’s this: Mr. Starkman’s piece in the Columbia Journalism Review — a highfaluting industry institution — is broken into two pages, presumably to play the old media game of page views. You won’t find anything similar among the FONers or their responses to Mr. Starkman. Not Mr. Shirky, not Jeff Jarvis, not Jay Rosen, not Mathew Ingram, not the host of others who fit the definition. This is itself a clue about tomorrow, for those who consume digital media are not unaware that the companies who practice such irritating tactics are merely raising the cost they have to pay for interaction. This won’t be tolerated forever. Scrolling is much more user-friendly than clicking.

The FONers know this. Mr. Starkman and those of his ilk either do not or don’t care.

Posted in Culture, Journalism, Networked World, The Great Horizontal | No Comments » |

The power of the personal brand (in a social world)

December 22nd, 2011

In a recent Nieman Journalism Lab article on the possibility of newspapers making money by selling ads on Twitter, Justin Ellis notes the successful efforts pioneered by celebrities and athletes. The fact is that the reach of certain celebrities far exceeds that of traditional media companies, so why shouldn’t advertisers pay them instead of media companies to get their word out? Besides, there’s that whole illusion of endorsement thing.

Mr. Ellis says much in a tongue-in-cheek reference to a certain reality show “star.”

Not to mention non-news outlets like, um, Kim Kardashian, for whom pay-per-tweet is a long-standing phenomenon.

Kardashian may be a “non-news outlet,” but she is so only in the sense of a traditional view of “news.” Prior to social media, celebrities required the filter of news organizations in order to be promoted, but much of that is now in their own hands. Are they “media companies?” Of course they are. And just as Wal-Mart has a bigger advertising platform than the New York Times and the Washington Post combined, Hollywood and our athletic fields are cranking out new platforms regularly. It’s into this environment that the efforts of newspapers to play copycat look just a little weak in comparison.

In the last few weeks, The Hartford Courant and The (New Orleans) Times-Picayune have experimented with using Twitter as a new advertising channel. At the Courant, they’ve started offering twice-daily deals to local businesses — think Groupon by tweet — to their followers. The Times-Picayune, more controversially, used Twitter to advertise itself — or at least its website, as the online division of its parent company, Advance Publications, paid New Orleans Saints players to tweet about the newspaper’s relaunched Saints site on Nola.com.

Mr. Ellis notes that the hashtag #spon, which appears at the end of some tweets is a “semi-legible indicator of a sponsored tweet.”

“A Twitter search for #spon is an enlightening look,” he adds, “into what sorts of companies are paying people to tweet: at the moment, Verizon, Clorox, Pepperidge Farm, and Q-Tips.”

I like what Advance Publications did in employing NFL celebrities to promote its website, but the use of a mass media Twitter news stream is problematic. It’s is a part of what I dubbed “unbundled advertising” in a 2005 essay about how to make money in the unbundled universe of the Web. It was written prior to Twitter.

If unbundled media is where we’re headed, then unbundled advertising must necessarily follow. This is a scary concept, however, for there is no command and control mechanism or manipulable infrastructure in the unbundled world. The upside, though, is that it costs very little to participate. All that’s necessary is the release what I call “ad pieces” into the seeming chaos of the Internet, where other businesses will take those pieces and reassemble them when summoned by customers who are trading their scarcity for information they actually want.

So while I fully support the concept here, we need to go back to the comparison with Kim Kardashian to understand why media companies using this particular application — in their own streams — is suspect strategically. The problem is that Kim Kardashian is a real person; The Hartford Courant is not. Ms. Kardashian’s brand is personal and as transparent as a reality star can be. Followers and fans connect with her on a visceral level. They experience emotions in their vicarious relationship with her. When Ms. Kardashian tweets for a sponsor, there’s an inference that she wouldn’t try to “fool” her fans. The endorsement also benefits her directly, and fans understand, accept and appreciate that. The few seconds it takes to “see” the endorsement isn’t wasted; it supports a real person with whom fans are connected.

Moreover, the purpose of following a celebrity on Twitter is different than the purpose of following a news organization’s stream. For Ms. Kardashian, it’s about the connection. With The Hartford Courant, it’s about the news feed. To the former, therefore, a sponsored tweet is about the person, but to the latter, it’s about noise, an interference. A sponsored tweet in the midst of a stream of news is an interruption. It’s, well, advertising.

Nevertheless, it’s good strategic thinking, because it gets us into the world of unbundling, where aggregation is the real value proposition. We’d do much better, however, if we would take up the challenge of developing the personal brands of our news people and helping them create the relational types of connections with fans enjoyed by others with celebrity. This would directly conflict with the core value proposition of mass media — the maintenance of a sterile stage from which to place advertisements — so it’s not likely a concept that media companies will enthusiastically embrace. Moreover, media companies think of employees as “theirs,” so the idea of trumpeting a brand that might one day quit and go elsewhere seems counterintuitive. This is, however, precisely the kind of thinking we need to employ, for today’s media is increasingly unbundled and social, and people follow people, not institutions.

But Mr. Ellis nails the real problem. “Newspapers,” he wrote, “are trying to insert themselves as a middleman in a medium that doesn’t require one.” He’s right. With the possible exception of aggregators, there’s just no market for middlemen online. Advertising is the new content king, because they can place that content directly in front of people in the same way we can. The people formerly known as the advertisers are now competing with us for the same eyeballs.

It’s a battle we’ll lose, because they have the money.

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