AR&D Reinventing Local Media

CBS’s long-running hit “Survivor” posted its worst fall premiere ratings ever last Thursday, barely beating a rerun of CSI for the top spot of the night. According to Wayne Friedman at MediaDailyNews, the show had a “4.9 rating among 18-49 viewers, almost a rating point and half less than the show did with a 6.3 a year ago; and nearly a full rating point off its 5.8 rating of this past spring’s premiere edition.”

This surprised me, not because of the numbers, but because I wasn’t aware that Survivor was debuting last week, and I think this, more than anything else, states the ultimately conundrum for those who live in the mass marketing world. For those who use the mass need the mass to promote their wares, and what happens when the mass breaks apart?

The networks are running spots for their shows on other channels and in other places, but those spots cost money — real or otherwise — and that eliminates the competitive advantage of owning your own television network. The only time I watch network television anymore is sports, and I flip to other sports programming during commercial breaks. Hence, I’m not exposed to their promos, and I don’t think I’m alone.

Folks, this is serious stuff, and it just can’t go on much longer. In Friedman’s report, he notes that with ratings plummeting, CPM ad rates are skyrocketing. Ad inventory is tight, because the nets have to run make-goods based on up-front obligations. It’s not a pretty scene.

Mass marketing needs mass, and when that disappears, there’s no amount of multi-platform distribution that will make up the difference. We are in a new world, and television is trapped in that awful spot of trying to reinvent itself while continuing to milk the mass market cow for as long as they can.

Good grief, is there a better symbol of tradition’s death grip on the past than Dan Rather? With his $70 million lawsuit against his former employer, Rather is not only making a fool of himself and his vaunted career, he’s actually accelerating the demise of that which he claims to defend — journalistic integrity and the institution of professional journalism.

Countless media observers (including Howard Kurtz, Jeff Jarvis, Jay Rosen, and Dan Gillmor) have shared their expertise and concluded that this suit attempts to reframe the entire sad saga of Rathergate in the way that Rather wishes to be remembered, the facts be damned. If you haven’t already done so, go read their analyses.

I want to take a few moments this morning to offer a slightly different take, that Rather’s suit is all about his reputation within a closed, institutional community that really no longer exists. Rather wants to be remembered as a soldier fighting the good fight, but with whom does he wish the record be set straight, if not the family in which he once held patriarch status? As such, his action ignores those who the institution has always ignored (to its detriment), the general public. Like a giant boil on the face of professional journalism, Rather isn’t content to let it heal, choosing instead to squeeze it all over the mirror that represents the public in the false hope that a little Windex will take care of the mess later on.

Meanwhile, the contemporary professional journalism community is fighting for its life with that same public, so it will not and cannot embrace Rather’s ambition. 2004 was a very long time ago in the evolution of the press. We’ve all turned the page, but time has stood still for poor Dan. As a result, he thinks his war is with CBS, but the rejection of his actions has gone far beyond. The institution that Rather thinks still exists is increasingly turning away from the well-worn road to the tar pits, and the louder he screams about the unfairness of his treatment, the more everybody recognizes the path that he’s chosen.

The irony, of course, is that Rather wants a jury drawn from the people formerly known as the audience to exonerate him with the group that pulled him from the throne. CBS, which is certainly representative of contemporary professional journalism, will settle this suit — not because anybody there actually believes they’d lose the case — but because they know what a trial would do to journalism’s already strained relationship with the public. Dan doesn’t care what kind of fool he makes of himself, but CBS — and all of professional journalism — does.

And so the unintended consequence of Dan Rather suing CBS to get his reputation “back” is that it focuses attention on the self-centered nature of a once-proud institution, one that lost its way in the lust for significance within a culture it was supposed to serve.

This is not the kind of attention the professional press needs right now.

The next reality show will be about paparazzi. They’re rapidly morphing into the newest “stars” of pop culture. Anybody want to wager?

…but does anybody else see the humor in NBC hiring a guy named Death to run their digital entertainment division?

I’m just sayin….

Is there a media company on the planet with less focus than NBCU? Their overarching strategy must be, “Throw everything we’ve got at the walls and see what sticks!” Meanwhile, the disruption continues unimpeded, because none of what they’re tossing around has a damned thing to do with it.

The latest from the people who brought you ClownCo (aka hulu.com) is to offer free, advertising-included downloads of their top programs that will, should you choose to accept, self-destruct after a week. You can’t fast-forward through the ads, and you need a special player for the videos.

Please tell me how this washes with the strategy of selling the same programs for $3.99 at hulu.com? Moreover, what makes these people think that viewers will flock to the NBC.com website to view these programs on their computers. Call me a nut, but most people into time-shifting do so with their handy little DVRs, which allow them the fast-forwarding option.

How does NewsCorp — their Hulu partner — feel about this, I wonder.

A New York Times article on the new service includes a fair bit of skepticism, too.

Chris Crotty, an analyst for iSuppli, an independent firm that specializes in analysis of new electronic media, said of the NBC move, “I think it’s a stretch.” He argued that consumers have shown they are extremely happy with the iTunes service and that it would not be attractive to consumers to have to range far and wide over a number of services to find the programs they want to download.

“It’s not just a shift from a supermarket to a mom-and-pop story, it’s a shift to one store that only sells bread, another store that only sells dairy products. The consumers have decided they want to get their content from iTunes.”

Mr. Crotty said NBC had come across to consumers as “highly greedy” in its dispute with Apple. Apple reported that NBC was insisting it raise the price of some downloads on NBC shows to $4.99 from the $1.99 iTunes charges for all programs.

The Times story also quotes Jeff Gaspin, the president of the NBC Universal Television Group as saying, “piracy was and is our No. 1 priority.” Um. Shouldn’t your audience be priority number one? This falls in line with the quote of the week below about how it’s always bad business if you treat your customers as thieves going in.

But the real problem with this is that it forces people (again) to come to the NBC site in order to access the programs. This is what all legacy broadcast companies want, and every time one of these companies forces this issue, all of Silicon Valley smiles, because THEY KNOW that this is contrary to what’s driving online business success.

Prediction: Some valley start-up will create a portal for these types of downloads, because the networks and studios are too prideful to do it themselves (see my essay below).

Here’s the latest in my ongoing series of essays, TV News in a Postmodern World, Creating Spectrum Within Spectrum.

As media companies struggle with disruptive innovations eating away at the foundation of their business model, they’re throwing everything but the kitchen sink at trying to sustain the unsustainable. One solution would be to transfer the world or worlds in which they now compete to the Web as a whole, instead of trying to compete for attention in a world of unlimited reach and range.

I flew over Philadelphia on Tuesday, a city — like others — that has all of its sports arenas in the same location. Each shares the parking space, and freeway access can sustain the traffic required for such big crowds, all of which makes it very convenient for sports fans. There are many examples of this in “real” life, so why can’t we see that this might also be smart online?

Why? Because it would mean competitors cooperating to create the location.

Ain’t gonna happen? Never say never.

There’s plenty of buzz today in the trades and online about new distribution deals by NBC and ABC. NBCU has announced a new ad-supported download service that’s described in detail by Staci Kramer at PaidContent:

If all goes well, viewers will be able to sign in at will and download current episodes of NBC Studio-owned prime-time and late-night shows. It’s an example of increasingly ubiquitous professional video—and of a strategy being embraced by NBC and others that makes the network provider, distributor and retailer.

Meanwhile, ABC is delivering a shift in strategy to stream its shows via AOL. Here’s David Kaplan, again from PaidContent:

The shift reflects the stepped up syndication moves from rivals CBS…which created its online distribution network this past spring, and NBC Universal…which earlier countered its outside distribution deals by saying it would beta test its own desktop video download service called NBC Direct starting next month. Also in October, NBC and News Corp. will release the private beta for their online video jv Hulu.

So the turd in the punchbowl in all of this is what it means for the affiliate system of television distribution. It’s in a death spiral, folks. Put a fork in it.

And here’s the thing. Everybody in the business knows it, but we all seem to be paralyzed, frozen in space as we await the next knife in the back from “our” network.

This seems somehow trite at this point, but the only option that local television stations have is to be local. The sooner, the better.

Laugh? I thought I’d never start.

(Link — for anybody who cares)

When success knocks, it’s always accompanied by invisible Cretans wearing trench coats and smiles, imaginary beings that seduce us with promises of more, more, more. You see, success is never enough (what is?), and this is more often true than not with new media companies. What begins as a simple and well-received concept is morphed into the tired models of yesterday by the men in the coats. This scenario has overwhelmed my beloved TMZ.com, and it will soon fall victim to its own unwillingness to stay the course and serve its audience first.

TMZ wants so badly to break the mold, and in many ways it has. I’ve often commented how they’ve led the pack in coverage of their beat, and their work with the O. J. Simpson story has been great. They’ve written the book on how a time-sensitive news website should be executed. TMZ has become THE go-to media company for celebrity news and gossip, and they’ve become a powerful force in Hollywood. But along the way, power corrupts. It always does, and TMZ has lost my unqualified endorsement in recent days. And it’s just so bloody obvious what’s happening, too.

There are noticeably fewer entries on the pages now. Why? Because they’re playing the tired old game of forcing people to click, so they can serve more ad impressions. Media 2.0, meet Media 1.0. How sad.

They’ve introduced the awful “Click here, it’s not over yet” link, which also is a gimmick to drive page views. TMZ never used to do this. Everything was always right there and in your face.

The simple little polls that used to reveal immediately upon participation (and which I used to adore) now pop up a window (like ESPN Sports Nation) that doesn’t play well with Firefox. Why are they doing this? To create a sponsorship opportunity. Pandering to advertising is the fast lane to irrelevancy in the new media world. Mark my words.

They’ve launched a TV show, and we should all salute them for that. But the TMZ.com that built it is gone, sold out to the men in the trench coats. They’re on a new level now — or so they think — and they’ve changed the rules that got them there. It’s an odd form of suicide, but one that’s familiar to those of us who’ve followed this stuff for awhile.

The door is open for someone else now.

Too bad.

From Mozilla Europe CEO Tristan Nitot via Techcrunch:

“I don’t think DRM has a future. Treating your customers like thieves is bad business practice. Today the customer is not ‘king’, they are considered thief first….It is stupid to think that the key to a DRM system won’t leak. So if it becomes more painful for a legitimate customer to use a product than it is for the pirates then that’s a problem.”

I love the pure simplicity of the concept expressed here. It’s the 30,000-foot view of all the noise about copyright, and it expresses the hopeless foolishness of all the legal maneuvering we’re reading about these days.

As J.D. Lasica so beautifully pointed out in his book Darknet, Hollywood’s War Against the Digital Age, one of the driving influences behind the personal media revolution is the quality of the stuff we’re getting from the incumbent media players these days. Once people begin entertaining themselves, the next logical step is for them to begin entertaining others. Hence, a whole new media industry is being birthed right before our eyes (although we may not have eyes to see it).

There are two things in the news that I want to point to that validate this shift.

One, the AP and AOL teamed up for a poll that shows 62% of Americans say that TV programs are getting worse, compared to 22% who say they’re getting better (they must have included asylums in the survey). These people are more likely referring to network television, which seems more interested in that which is inexpensive to produce and that which will appeal to a younger audience. While I don’t disagree with these findings, I do think that you can find good shows these days but that they’re coming from other places. I rarely watch network fare anymore. Cable and the Web do just fine for me.

But the point is that people have this sense that there’s a lot of crap (I’ve been using that word a lot lately) out there, and crap has a way of driving people away from the smell. This is not smart in a world where attraction is the new promotional model.

Two — and this one is even more fun — George Simpson wrote a fascinating piece for MediaPost this week about how the porn “industry” (he puts that in quotes) is having problems dealing with prosumer or “amateur” producers. It makes sense that the “industry” most disrupted initially by J.D.’s personal media revolution would be porn, which has been amateurish all along. Read George’s piece. It’s funny as hell (as usual):

DVD sales and rentals have dropped by 15% to 25% in the last year, and one porn industry executive estimates that no more than 15% or 20% of the porn in the wild is “legitimate.” While legitimate porn may seem like an oxymoron, I think he means that most P2P distribution of porn is ripped off from his “industry.”

…The “industry” thinks perhaps it will fight the onslaught of homemade amateur porn videos by promoting the “quality” of its professional videos.

Porn is a $50 billion “industry,” and an increasing share of that is going to people who are now able to make their own porn and publish it online. Who needs the “industry” to do that?

You may be nodding your head saying, “Well, yeah, Terry. Anybody can produce crap.” I watched a wonderful documentary the other night on one of the independent film channels about how independent producers “push the envelope” as regards sex. In this context, “push the envelope” is a euphemism for “show more skin.”

A part of the documentary was about the newest thing — are you ready for this? — “unsimulated sex!” What a nice way of saying porn. So these producers, led by the French, of course, are now getting “real” actors to have sex in front of the camera to “push the envelope.”

One guy was asked, “What’s the difference between this and porn?”

“Lighting,” he responded in all seriousness.

We may all chuckle at this, but there’s a lesson here for anybody in the entertainment business these days with everyday people making videos of their own “unsimulated sex” and selling them on the Web.

As George notes in his piece, it’s one thing to put a camera on the nightstand and videotape yourself boinking your significant other (or not), but it’s quite another “to produce 42 minutes worth of drama that will hold an audience week after monetizable week until you have amassed enough content to move into syndication, where the real money is.” This is certainly true, but only for now.

Those who underestimate the prosumer movement do so at their own peril.

I’ve been saying for years that the institutions of modernism will not go quietly into the postmodern future, and this certainly includes the world of communications. I wrote long ago that we needed to watch the courts, because lawyers are the maintainers of the status quo. That is their reason for being, to keep the money in our culture where it “belongs.” Whether it’s lawyers in political office, lawyers in the private sector, or lawyers in the public sector, the mission is the same: create and uphold laws that validate the behaviors of the haves in the keeping what they’ve got.

This is, of course, problematic when the playing field is leveled by technology and when people formerly left out of the power paradigm are suddenly let in. It was this way with the California gold rush, and it’s this way today.

So we watch the courts, because that’s where the battle is really fought. Unelected governors of the culture dressed in black robes keep a lid on everything, because, well, that’s the way things are done. Where they can find no law to support mission, they often just make one up. Case law, I believe it’s called, but I digress once again.

We watch the courts, and there’s a lot to consider this week.

• Verizon doesn’t like the half-assed job that the FCC did with setting “arbitrary and capricious” rules for the 700 MHz auction, so they’ve gone to court. Verizon likes closed spectrum, because it gives them a competitive advantage. The FCC bought a part of the argument of that bad old disruptor Google, and decided to make a part of the spectrum open, meaning any device will have to be able to connect to it. Verizon may have legitimate business concerns, but going to court means they want a judge or judges to do for them what they can’t do for themselves.
• CNET news surveyed some lawyers and discovered that they’re all waiting for somebody to go to court to stop people from blocking ads online. That’s right. The “issue” is “just now ripening,” according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). The article does point out that the courts have historically come down on the side of consumers with this issue, but the new twist here is somebody other than the consumer (Firefox) is blocking ads. Of course, Firefox is open source and built by “the people.”
• Prince, or the artist known as Prince, or whatever he calls himself these days is suing YouTube, eBay and others over what he views as copyright violations. In so doing, he joins Viacom and others in asking the guys in the black robes to help them against this great evil. Don’t misunderstand; I’m a writer, so copyright means a lot to me. But this copyright business has become the symbol for resistance against an enormous consumer backlash over price gouging and dictatorial control by an industry interested far more in profit than music. According to a Reuters article in the New York Times, Prince is thought to be the first individual artist to go this route. Lawsuits by the music industry have become common.

  Prince has apparently hired British company Web Sheriff to help him ferret out offenders.
  

  “In the last couple of weeks we have directly removed approximately 2,000 Prince videos from YouTube,” said Web Sheriff managing director John Giacobbi.

  “The problem is that one can reduce it to zero and then the next day there will be 100 or 500 or whatever. This carries on ad nauseam at Prince’s expense,” he told Reuters.

  The phrase “at Prince’s expense” is most interesting, because this is really more about a principle than real dollars lost. And what is the principle? That the courts “should” help the status quo get back to the position it used to enjoy.

These are far more complex matters than I’ve articulated here, and I suppose it would be easy for a smart lawyer to explain why I’m full of it. But if this “personal media revolution” has taught me anything, it’s that the people formerly known as the audience — the viewers, the listeners, the users, the fans — aren’t going back into the box from which they’ve escaped. I wouldn’t bet against them in any of this.

I don’t get political very much, because I’d rather avoid the accompanying mud baths. However, this one is too much for me to keep quiet about, and I sure hope we get somebody in office next year who chooses to dismantle some of the stupidity that’s been put in place in the name of anti-terrorism in this country.

An absolutely frightening thing has been happening in our prisons, according to an article in the New York Times. By federal mandate in the wake of 9/11, “chaplains have been quietly carrying out a systematic purge of religious books and materials that were once available to prisoners in chapel libraries.”

The chaplains were directed by the Bureau of Prisons to clear the shelves of any books, tapes, CDs and videos that are not on a list of approved resources. In some prisons, the chaplains have recently dismantled libraries that had thousands of texts collected over decades, bought by the prisons, or donated by churches and religious groups.

…prison chaplains, and groups that minister to prisoners, say that an administration that put stock in religion-based approaches to social problems has effectively blocked prisoners’ access to religious and spiritual materials — all in the name of preventing terrorism.

…A chaplain who has worked more than 15 years in the prison system, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is a bureau employee, said: “At some of the penitentiaries, guys have been studying and reading for 20 years, and now they are told that this material doesn’t meet some kind of criteria. It doesn’t make sense to them. They’re asking, ‘Why are our tapes being taken, why our books being taken?’”

Of the lists, he said, “Many of the chaplains I’ve spoken to say these are not the things they would have picked.”

Inmates are furious and lawsuits are pending.

The issue, of course, is this “approved list” and who is on the group of “experts” that the government tapped to create the list. According to the article, the effort has decimated libraries of some prisons.

Folks, this is not only a violation of the Constitution; it’s just plain wrong. But it’s the kind of totalitarian activism that I’ve come to expect from Washington in the past six years. Impotent to actually do anything constructive, we’re wasting our time and resources on foolishness like this. It’s like running over a wasp with a steamroller just to make sure it’s dead. It doesn’t matter how many other bugs get crushed in the process.

This is not what our country is all about. We’re actually destroying the very freedom that we’re trying to sell to other cultures. How dumb is that?

I’ve been extremely lax in making blog entries lately, and the only thing I can say is that I’m absolutely swamped with stuff I get paid to do. I know. I know. Lame.

And it’s been such a great few days for material, too.

Here we find that NBCU — the guys who just can’t seem to get it right, IMO — is “quietly organizing a new council of ad agency research, strategy and media buying executives that will develop and field primary research that helps move the media marketplace forward.” I’m not sure what moving the media marketplace forward means, but the idea of this council is another example of the public masturbation that is old media responding to new.

To use my (by this time tired) analogy, this is like the whale oil industry summoning the best minds it has to come up with a plan to move whale oil forward when the whole world is moving to electricity.

The story linked above refers to this as the latest in a series of what it calls “third-party funded” research initiatives, but the third parties are all within the paradigm that’s being disrupted.

And, once again, the folks at Google close their office doors and smile.

Meanwhile, there’s this, ta-da, bulletin from the Project for Excellence in Journalism that’s best articulated in a headline reference from Romenesko: “The news looks different when non-journos select the stories.” Who knew?

Actually, this is a pretty interesting read, although nothing here will come as a surprise to regular readers here.

If a new crop of user-news sites—and measures of user activity on mainstream news sites—are any indication, the news agenda will be more diverse, more transitory, and often draw on a very different and perhaps controversial list of sources…The question of whether citizens define the news differently than professionals is becoming increasingly relevant.

Indeed, it is, and it’s ripping the foundation out from under the media elite.

Here’s a great line from a San Francisco Chronicle article on the subject:

“The traditional news outlet wants to put a lot of gravitas on their front page. They want the readers to eat their spinach,” said Kourosh Karimkhany, general manager of Wired Digital, which owns Reddit. Technology allows users to create their own news “agenda” from multiple online sources, rendering a traditional front page increasingly “irrelevant,” he said.

This is something the folks in traditional media simply cannot bring themselves to accept about the path of new media. To accept would be to reject the model that’s sustained the industry for the last century, but to do otherwise is the path to the tarpits. Not an easy choice.

Meanwhile, Jack Feuer writes a heartfelt piece reflecting back on 9/11 that contains a graph that bears response:

We are inundated with media choices that seduce us with entertainment, ply us with information, supply use with endless ways to push-pull, opt-in, interact and network. We call it a revolution. But it’s not. The options are just choices. The channels are just toys. It doesn’t matter if we’re five, 15 or 75. When we are threatened, when the world goes mad, when we are desperate to connect, we don’t log on to MySpace. We turn on the television.

This is certainly true, but there are a couple of caveats. One, we can “watch” live coverage of events on our computers today in ways that we couldn’t six years ago. Two, blockbuster news events aren’t everyday fare, and attempts to elevate “regular” news to blockbuster status are what’s wrong with the whole 24/7 news channel concept. These events cost money instead of making it, because advertising is the first thing to go. The problem for television isn’t real breaking news. It’s what happens when the break is over.

Meanwhile, Bob Garfield (of NPR fame) shares his chilling account of dealing with Comcast as a consumer. This is really a good read.

Finally, somebody has finally sued AT&T(Cingular) for the ridiculous claim that they have fewer dropped calls than anybody else.

Back to the grind. Aloha.

One day many years ago, in a roomful of mirrors all pointed at my navel, I began sending probes down various thought streams deep into the world of postmodernism. It’s a fun thing to do, although it often produces a bad headache, because this stuff rarely “makes sense.”

This particular day, I was toying with the idea of pomos trusting each other more than institutional expertise, which they would view as self-serving. If you run this out to the extreme, you can find some pretty idiotic concepts, but occasionally, you’ll run across one that has merit. This day, my mind was wrapping itself around an elaborate and searchable database of the medical experiences of everyday people. What worked? What didn’t work? What was it like? What would you do differently? This, I felt, would be a very valuable service, although two institutional groups wouldn’t like it: doctors and lawyers.

Imagine my surprise when my boss handed me the latest issue of Business 2.0 (how can they shut down this great magazine?) and I found a little blurb about a company called PatientsLikeMe. The company’s tag line is: “Patients helping patients live better every day.”

The site began in 2004 dedicated primarily to Lou Gehrig’s disease, ALS, but has grown to include MS, HIV/AIDS and many other ailments. Could this be the database I envisioned years ago?

At first, institutional medicine will embrace it. It’s a great place for research, and who knows what like-suffering patients can come up with? Then, it will become a genuine disruptor, and the American Medical Association will attempt to co-opt the site or otherwise bring it under its control. If the site’s owners resist, it will bring about the inevitable “practicing medicine without a license” accusation. PatientsLikeMe carries a robust disclaimer about this, but that won’t stop those who view the site’s content as a threat to their authority.

This Site Does Not Provide Medical Advice
ALL OF THE MATERIAL PROVIDE ON THE SITE, SUCH AS TEXT, TREATMENTS, DOSAGES, OUTCOMES, CHARTS, PATIENT PROFILES, GRAPHICS, PHOTOGRAPHS, IMAGES, ADVICE, MESSAGES, FORUM POSTINGS, AND ANY OTHER MATERIAL PROVIDE(D) ON THE SITE ARE FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY AND ARE NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR PROFESSIONAL MEDICAL ADVICE OR TREATMENT. ALWAYS SEEK THE ADVICE OF YOUR PHYSICIAN OR OTHER QUALIFIED HEALTH PROVIDER WITH ANY QUESTIONS YOU MAY HAVE REGARDING YOUR HEALTH. NEVER DISREGARD PROFESSIONAL MEDICAL ADVICE OR DELAY IN SEEKING IT BECAUSE OF SOMETHING YOU HAVE READ ON THIS SITE.

We live in such a nice, neat modernist world, where everything is organized to serve those in authority, who also control the paths leading to them. From the postmodernist’s perspective (and there’s a little of it in each of us), however, the hierarchy exists first to serve itself, and we pay the price. I’ve written before about a dear friend of mine who runs a drug and alcohol abuse facility in the South and finds the rules of the hierarchy to be increasingly anti-patient. He had to fire a man who had worked for him for 15 years and was the best family counselor he’d ever known. The guy had a gift for putting families back together, but what he didn’t have was a Master’s Degree in counseling, which was what the insurance companies required. Rather than lose his business, my friend was forced to terminate the guy and hire somebody “qualified” in the eyes of the institution.

PatientsLikeMe is positioned to overcome issues like this and further change the nature of authority in our increasingly postmodern world. Doctors will still be doctors, but the nature of their authority will be a far cry from absolute.

Steve Jobs in an interview with USA Today on whether he fears the new iPod Touch will cannibalize iPhone sales:

“If anybody is going to cannibalize us, I want it to be us. I don’t want it to be a competitor.”

This ought to be the ongoing mantra of every local media company in America. It’s a textbook disruptive innovation response. When IBM, for example, got into the PC business, it helped cannibalize its mainframe business, which was already being attacked from without.

(hat tip to PaidContent)

It seems that David Weinberger and I share the same sense of humor about spam, namely that it’s such a part of online life — and you can’t completely stop it — so the best thing you can do is be entertained by it. And since most of it is written by Borat wannabees, it does produce a certain, albeit unintended, comedic punch.

Take, for example, the subject lines of spam that I grabbed in just the last 12 hours:

Your insatiable chick will be full of pleasure! (What insatiable chick?)
Don’t kick yourself, read up on these guys (Kicking myself is a skill I’ve not acquired)
Yes, I can help you (No, you can’t)
The problems with health are in the past (The problems?)
Protect your manliness! (Insurance scam, eh?)
Jessica Alba goes bra-less (And you’re gonna show it to me for free!)
Would you like to chat? (No)
Did you get it? (Don’t want it)
A chance to become healthy for cheap (The problems with health are in the past)
Do you want mega big penis? (What would I do with it?)
This will make any lady all yours! (I’ve been hearing that since the 6th grade)
Don’t be the “little guy” in the club (Actually, 5′11″ is pretty average)
Research has revealed that your penis has the ability to grow beyond its current size when fully erect. (And this is a bulletin?)
$4000 cash in 30 days? Screw that! I did it in 2 weeks! (Screw that? Screw you!)
Olny this 5 days special price on pharma for you dear customer (Borat, stop writing me)

As NBCU flops around like a gasping fish on a dock, Steve Jobs is in front of reporters showing the fancy new iPods that could’ve played all those programs the struggling network decided to pull in a spat over control of pricing.

And here’s a great quote from the conclusions of Accenture’s new Global Content Study 2007 (referenced below). Bear in mind that this is the number one recommendation under “Increase Reach:”

Proactively ensure content is available where users look for it, or to put it more bluntly — don’t be prissy about where people consume your content.

Yeah, NBCU. Stop being so prissy.

If you haven’t seen this, get ready to smile. It was made for Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions.

I lifted the code for the embed via a view/source from the site that created this wonderful clip, so please go there to post your comments. God, I love the Internet.

(Hat tip to John. Thanks)

I’ve been going over Accenture’s new Global Content Study 2007, and there’s some pretty good stuff here. I recommend you download the thing and have your own lookie-loo.

Accenture interviewed more than 100 leaders and decision-makers in the media and entertainment sectors…to gauge their views of where the greatest opportunities and challenges will come over the next five years. The study, called Beyond the Hype: How New Content and Technology are Redefining the Future of Media, provides, among others, these major findings:

• 62% of executives look to “new platforms as being the most important key to growth…
• 53% of executives surveyed indicated that “short form content” offered the largest opportunity for “new content”…
• Asked what they believed was a top threat to the business, over half of the executives (57%) identified “consumer-based competition” or “user-generated” content…
• Critically important is the need for digital readiness and a future technology road map…

I’m especially impressed that these “leaders” view “consumer-based competition” as a threat, because that’s exactly what they need to be considering. Accenture is a big name in the business consulting world, and it’s interesting to see them picking up on things that we’ve been talking about here for years.

Still, this report also reveals some problems on the road to the future. These are found in quotes from various participants. While most of the quotes used are spot-on, a couple left me gasping.

“We will look to the user side and learn from the YouTubes and the MySpaces who are training consumers in media usage. We will look at their experience and leverage it.” Executive, Reed Publishing

This kind of thinking always amuses me. “Leverage” is business-speak for borrowing (taking) a little to make a lot. It’s condescending, to say the least, and I would argue that the “training” of consumers that’s taking place on these sites can’t be leveraged in any way that supports a mass marketing paradigm. Here’s another gem:

“One of the things I think amateur user-generated content is most likely to do is to generate new respect for the outstanding creative professionals in our industry, who can tell a truly great story.” Henry Schleiff, CEO, Hallmark Channel

Here, Henry is telling us that great content will glow amidst all the crap that is user-generated content, and I have mixed feelings about that. Good storytelling always rises to the top, but that presumes certain subjective standards in what is or isn’t good. I mean, I didn’t like what we used to call the “MTV style” of video, where the camera moves around a lot. That’s pretty much a standard these days, so who’s to say that one set of standards is “better” than another?

Yes, we are going through tremendous change, and I agree with Accenture’s conclusion that the changes confronting us today are “akin to the changes witnessed with the invention of Gutenberg’s printing press in 1450 or Marconi’s transatlantic broadcast in 1902.” The media powers in those days had similar reactions, and while we’re all out here trying to project where things are going, the truth is nobody really knows.

But isn’t that what makes it exciting?