I’ve been saying for years that the soul of the disruption gutting the business model of traditional media and marketing is the people formerly known as the audience. None of this makes any sense without that basic assumption. As I tell groups in presentations, it’s all about people:

• Informed people — never has there been a time when so much information was at the end of our finger tips.
• Empowered people — if information is power, then guess what? These people are ripping power from institutions who were never designed to deal with a truly empowered citizenry.
• Enabled people — not only do people have more information and more power, but technology is also enabling them to do something about it.
• Connected people — connected in ways we never dreamed possible in years gone by, in the days of one-to-many media.
• Involved people — and potentially involved on a level that history has never seen. Technology is enabling this. It’s getting more powerful and easier to use all the time.
• Fleeing people — that’s right, and they’re running from the relentless bombardment of unwanted messages provided by mass marketing in all its iterations.

Now comes new evidence of this in the form of privacy groups banding together to create a “Do Not Target” list for people who’d rather not participate in the Holy Grail of web advertising — behavioral targeting. Here’s the lead sentence from PC World:

A coalition of nine privacy and consumer groups have proposed a U.S. do-not-track list that would allow consumers to opt out of advertising efforts that track their movements online.

…The do-not-track list, similar in some ways to a do-not-call telemarketing list maintained by the FTC, would allow consumers to take control of their personal information online, Cooper (Mark Cooper, research director for the Consumer Federation of America) said. While they would originally have to download the list and manually enter sites to block into security software, the privacy coalition expects that browser developers would create tools to automate that process, he said.

“This is a single step for consumers, and this is completely needed,” said Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum.

Such a list would not be good news for advertising companies. Dave Morgan of Tacoda told Advertising Age that such a list would actually defeat the idea of anonymity that the Web boasts.

“It runs into the core issue of, we don’t want to take the anonymity away. This isn’t a consumer-led revolution like do-not-call was. … This is an advocate looking for a cause issue,

That may well be the case, and this is just a proposal for now, but this business with Facebook wanting to use private profile data to target members when they’re not on Facebook puts a big weapon in the hands of these consumer groups.

Nothing will ever be enough for those being disrupted, and that’s becoming increasingly evident as we watch various companies respond to decay in their business model. What needs to happen is that the media and advertising worlds have to start paying attention to the people who are running away from them.

How about talking with the targets instead of trying to hit them?

Here is the latest in the ongoing series of essays, Local Media in a Postmodern World. This one is an intellectual exercise that may not be for everyone. Hang with it, though, because it’s all about challenging our assumptions, something I’ve benefited from greatly over the last decade or so. I’m also offering ten mass media assumptions that need to be challenged while we work in a time of tremendous change.

As we go about our lives, we do so with a tremendous number of assumptions in place, little things or big things that determine how we think and sometimes how we behave. We’ve all heard the old saw about assumptions making asses, but I’m talking about core assumptions, things we don’t consciously question, because we, well, assume them to be truth — perhaps even absolute.

Postmodernism forces the challenging of assumptions, and I view this as a great benefit to culture. The legalists and fundamentalists of every field will disagree, of course, and that’s a source of great — albeit not necessarily visible — drama today.

Postmodernism’s Most Important Gift

Chris Anderson, he of “Long Tail” fame, has published the email addresses of hundreds of PR people who’ve solicited him via email. He’s tired of wading through 300 emails a day that are nothing more than spam.

Lazy flacks send press releases to the Editor in Chief of Wired because they can’t be bothered to find out who on my staff, if anyone, might actually be interested in what they’re pitching.

By publishing the email addresses of PR types that he’s banned, Chris is actually offering them to spammers. “Turnabout is fair play,” he wrote. Amen.

This is what happens when you try to pull the Web back into the reach/frequency paradigm. It blows up in your face, because the people formerly known as the audience can — and do — fight back.

Well done, Chris.

There was a time when Steve Rubel was one of the most prolific bloggers around. Steve’s a stand-out (and straight-up) PR guy who works for Edelman, and I’ve always found him to be one of the most astute observers of contemporary media in a time of great change. Steve’s job got the best of him, and his blog posts have been few and far between, but he’s posted something today that I consider a “must read,” and one that bears further exploration.

The endless dot-com parties are back. So are the countless trade shows/conferences that regurgitate the same “new paradigms” the last 10 events did - with no end in sight. And yes, the ridiculous BS press releases are flying into my Gmail box. This is why I don’t speak at or attend very many Web 2.0 conferences anymore. I don’t have the heart for it. I would be stirring the big pot of Kool-Aid.

Let’s face it, we’re skunk drunk and it’s because of money. It’s almost like we all need to enter Betty Ford Clinic 2.0 together. This time, it’s not stock market money but private equity, M&A, VCs and to some degree the reckless abandonment of logic by some advertisers who are perpetuating what is sure to end badly when the economy turns. Hubris is back my friends.

Steve calls this a “somber time for the Web” and says it feels just like it did before the last web crash. He notes that start-ups are more into the exit strategy than the entrance strategy, unlike post-bubble sites like Flickr and del.icio.us.com who launched because they had something that genuinely added value to the web experience.

I completely support everything Steve says in this post, and I want to point to two specific items on which to comment.

Meanwhile, the sleeping giant many of us mocked - the big media - got with the program.

This is bigger than you might think, because despite mistakes along the way, the “old money” behind traditional media has awakened to the reality that is the Web, and they don’t invest the way Silicon Valley venture capitalists invest. Traditional media makes investments designed to produce a return, and while I’ve chided them (and will continue to do so) for not extending the runway on some projects, the truth is they are definitely in the game.

What this has done is to make valley start-up investments even more risky, because they don’t have the wide open playing field of the first bubble. Barry Diller can say that most media company executives don’t get it and probably be right, but I believe the ship has begun to turn. Start-up Web 2.0 applications are making pitches to be acquired by these companies, only to be met with a very real, “We can do that for ourselves.”

I have become less interested in every new shiny object and more engrossed in the social changes it, slowly, effects.

Exactly. This is the safe ground, the place where we all need to be focusing. When hype is everywhere you look, it’s always smart to go back to basics. This is why I base my observations on culture and culture change, because the impact of all this hype is a form of vertigo.

Sites like Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch are extremely valuable in helping me sort through the new glitz and glitter, but over the past year, even reading TechCrunch has become a significant burden due to the relentless bombardment of this new start-up and that one.

Steve’s right, folks. The economy is weak and 2009 is coming. When this bubble deflates, it may be even more unpleasant than the first.

(Side note: When I write of “Media 2.0,” I’m speaking much more of a business shift than one of technology, the playground of new competency development.)

My old colleague and friend Jim Cummins has died, and I am sad. Jim and I were part of an amazing team at WTMJ-TV in the early and mid 70s and had stayed in touch. Like my other friend who died this year, Pete Wilson, Jim was a big early influence.

I use a story about Jim whenever I speak with budding journalists. When he came to WTMJ-TV from Grand Rapids, he was that station’s top reporter. I ran the desk, and Jim didn’t like that he had to wait in the wings while all the tenured reporters at the station got all the good assignments. Hey, that’s life.

One day, he came to me and asked, “What time do you get to work?”

“7 o’clock,” I replied.

“Tell you what,” he said, “if I have a story idea for you at 7 a.m., would you consider giving me a shooter instead of waiting until you’ve set up the day?”

What AE would disagree with that?

His first piece was on a local toy company that had stopped making a certain toy, because the manufacturer couldn’t get the petroleum necessary to make the thing. The year was 1973. The first line in the piece was this: “The Birdie Ball has gone the way of the energy crisis.” It was an outstanding piece, and it wasn’t but a few weeks until Jim was our top dog reporter. Nobody was surprised when he went to NBC Nightly News.

He loved the resources of the network. I remember a call from him while covering a tornado in rural Missouri. He arrived on a chartered plane at the local landing strip known as the airport, only to discover they had no car rental place. The guy who ran the joint had an old beater, though, so Jim (er, NBC) bought it.

I loved Jim Cummins. He was an amazing storyteller, a great husband and father, and my dear old friend.

Farewell, Jim.

New York Times writer Brad Stone rightly set the stage with his summary of hulu.com’s private beta launch today:

Since March, when the broadcasters announced their joint effort to bring free, ad-supported television shows to the Web, critics have pounced, predicting the venture would be doomed by diverging agendas, technical challenges and an all-powerful enemy: YouTube.

Skeptical bloggers even slapped Hulu with a derisive moniker: “Clown Co.”

Now the defense is ready to present its case.

As any viewer of “Law and Order” will tell you, the defense is often not about guilt or innocence, but about the presentation of reasonable doubt. That’s what hulu has done with its highly-controlled press presentations on this, the launch of its private beta.

The NYT header says it best: “Hulu Readies Its Online TV, Dodging the Insults.” Over at TechCrunch, one of the site’s biggest pre-launch critics, the headline is just the way hulu wants it: “Hulu Launches Private Beta, Makes Very Good First Impressions.”

Since I’ve been one of those critics — not of the presentation but of the strategy — I’ll admit that I’m naturally going to be skeptical of what I’m reading. Launching in private beta means you invite some people in to kick the tires. I’ve found nothing yet today from any such person, which means all of this positive coverage is coming from the information and screen grabs that hulu is feeding them. That said, everything looks very nice on the surface. The videos look well-organized. The player is portable, and they’re touting the ability of users to clip programs and embed those clips elsewhere. These are textbook unbundled media tactics, and they should help spread the monetized videos across the Web.

(You can view hulu vids via AOL Video. If this is the best they can do, it’s not saying much.)

There are two problems immediately. One, the videos don’t play anywhere except in the U.S. This is the result of trying to provide an application that lives by all the industry’s rules. Rights, you know. Secondly, the television shows that are offered stay online only five weeks. So think about this for a minute. Why would anybody embed a hulu clip if it couldn’t be seen in other countries and would disappear after five weeks?

The idea of a portal for “legal” videos is a good one, but 1.) all content creators must play in the same space, and 2.) the reach must parallel that of the Web itself. Hulu may work these things out eventually, but right now, those are big concerns.

Moreover, hulu further erodes the already damaged network-affiliate arrangement by making first-run show videos available after midnight, Hawaii time (nice).

In the Times article, NBCU head Jeff Zucker goes out of his way to position hulu as an entity separate from NBCU, and this will either be its greatest strength or its biggest weakness:

“At a minimum it’s another way for us to offer our content to users and get paid for it,” Mr. Zucker said. “If the site itself does well, that will be gravy on top of it.”

This distancing himself from hulu is interesting, because it was Zucker who made the original announcements and led the original cheerleading. So now hulu is just another company that’s distributing content created by NBCU, which means if it crashes and burns, it was THEIR fault. Nice.

But this isn’t what we get from NewsCorp president Peter Churnin, who takes credit for the idea in the Times article and is a bit defensive about the criticism. “I think there’s a snarky desire to say this is big dumb media and this is a big dumb joint venture,” he said, adding that he thought of the idea as a way to distribute Fox programming. So is it a joint venture or a stand-alone company?

I guess it’s both, but the question is important in judging its viability from here. If it’s a stand alone business, will it be able to sustain itself without more investment money when the costs go up? That’s a fairly significant issue. If it’s a joint venture, then NBC and NewsCorp will foot the bills, and then it becomes just bad strategy and a drain on resources.

There is one distribution partner in this that really intrigues me, and that is MySpace. If hulu is to succeed, it would help to be THE application that exposes this content to people who don’t already watch it, and that basically is the definition of MySpace’s core demos.

Stay tuned.

As a student of life, culture and media, little surprises me anymore and especially when it involves humankind’s propensity to greed. Much of the reaction to the Microsoft/Facebook announcement yesterday is making my caution flags ripple unfurled in the wind, because it has “greed” written all over it.

An Advertising Age article points to a meeting on November 6th between Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg and a select group of advertising executives to “unveil a new way of advertising online.”

Facebook is keeping mum about exactly what it is unveiling at the Nov. 6 event, but ad-industry executives familiar with the company’s plans said the social network is looking to better use the data its users voluntarily offer up on their profiles. Of course, that much seems like a no-brainer (although it’s actually not easy to implement). But less obviously, a couple of industry executives familiar with the company’s plans suggest Facebook could use some of what it knows about people — and their relationships with others on the site, what is known as the “social graph” — to target them off Facebook (emphasis mine) as well.

If that niggles your privacy concerns, it should. Hell, I’m a Facebook member, and I can guarantee you I don’t want the information I’ve given them — or that they’ve gathered — to be used to serve me ads elsewhere. And I can guarantee you that I’m not alone.

Look, I support behavioral targeting. I think that’s fair game. But to use information I voluntarily gave Facebook to help the targeting process is unethical, to say the least. But again, nothing surprises me when it comes to greed, and Facebook needs to be a bit little lot greedy to support a $15 billion valuation.

Nobody understands this stuff like Dave Morgan of Tacoda. Dave has — in many ways — written the book on behavioral targeting, and he told me via email this morning that like all things new, it’ll take time. He also sounded a cautionary note:

It all depends on whether they give the consumer more value with the ads that they deliver them, and on the core principles of notice, transparency and choice. They have to be very careful about being perceived as creepy. What makes them different than more classic behavioral targeting is the large amount of very personal information that people share with them on Facebook, many times with an expectation — which may be incorrect — that only their friends can see it.

Notice, transparency and choice. For Facebook to live by those principles, its privacy policy is going to need a little overhauling, and the question is will its members fully understand what’s taking place?

Web strategist Jeremiah Owyang doesn’t necessarily think so, because Microsoft — whose “Passport” concept met with significant early backlash from privacy advocates like the Electronic Freedom Foundation — will now have access to personal data through a side door. Here’s what’s at stake, according to Jeremiah:

1) Facebook knows who you are: your name, your gender, where you live, your martial and political status, sexual preference, age, where you work, the list goes on. The funny thing is, you’ve voluntarily given that information up.

2) The Graph: They also know who you connect to, who you talk to, and what you say to them (you don’t own those private message ya know).

3) Gestures: Sure, up to one third of all profile information is bogus, but what about those unsaid gestures: What people do is more important than what they say. What apps you use, how frequent, what and who you click on.

This thing about Facebook is either going to be a new level in the world of targeted media, or it’s going to blow up in Facebook’s, well, face.

I have no problem with Facebook targeting me within its application. By being a member, I’ve given them that option. It’s not inexpensive software to maintain, and the membership is free, so I think it’s a fair trade. But there’s a word for taking the information I’ve given them for that purpose, and using it in any way to validate a ridiculous corporate valuation. It’s called evil.

I’ve written to Facebook to ask what will happen to/with my information, if I cancel my membership. I’ll let you know what they say.

(Thanks to Doc for the link to Jeremiah)

Bill Maher (I hate myself for writing about him) to hecklers during Friday night’s program:

This isn’t the Iowa Caucus. It’s not a debate. The debate’s between us (pointing to his panel). You’re in the audience. Audience comes from the Latin “to listen.”

I’m posting this only because it so beautifully describes what’s happening in media generally. We’re losing the stage, and we don’t like it.

Please don’t misconstrue this to be an endorsement of hecklers. God forbid! The goal of hecklers, however, is to hijack the stage — even if for only a moment — and this friction (or the perception of it) is responsible for the defensive posturing of traditional media as they’re confronted with the personal media revolution.

The online world is all atwitter with word that Microsoft won in a bid for a piece of Facebook. They beat Google on the bid, put at around $250 million for less than a 2 percent stake in the social networking site.

Rather than slithering away in defeat, I think Google is quietly smiling here. Microsoft’s purchase of such a small stake for so much money is big for Redmond, because it means Microsoft keeps their advertising deal in place with Facebook.

I’m on the record as not being a big fan of Facebook. It’s cold and impersonal, and it’s a closed network of profiles. It acts as if it was built by business people to make money, not by geeks to make users happy. Then there’s all the hype the place has gotten.

There’s also something not quite right about Facebook’s value proposition to advertisers — targeting based on private profile data. Besides, paying $250 million for less than 2 percent puts the value of Facebook at $15 billion. Sorry, I don’t buy that.

Eric Schonfeld at TechCrunch adds more:

While Google would have been a closer fit in terms of it overall philosophy (more open than not), it may have just been too expensive to buy out Microsoft from its current deal to supply ads for Facebook in the U.S. Given its deep ties with Microsoft, sticking with them was always the path of least resistance. And one could argue that Google has never felt comfortable targeting ads based on private user profile data, which seems to be the great promise of Facebook, ad-wise. Microsoft doesn’t share those qualms.

Viveck Varma Kevin Johnson of Microsoft told a press conference audience late this afternoon that the market justifies the huge valuation for Facebook. The following are notes from TechCrunch.

Online advertising is $40b/year, will grow to $80b per year. Equity stake in facebook is a strong statement of confidence in MS’ ad platform and in facebook. If you look at FB growth and think that they will get to 200 million users in future, combine that with monetization opportunity along with modest rev/user/year, the valuation is supported.

If this sounds vaguely familiar, it should. It’s called “bubblespeak,” the kind of self-deceptive hype that preceded the explosion of the first internet bubble. A lot of people think that Web 2.0 is pushing a second bubble, and if that’s the case, Facebook may well turn out to be the AOL of this one.

Texasism: “Dumber than a bucket of hair!”

NBC Universal continues to make absolutely boneheaded moves in its effort to insist that scarcity will work online. Hulu.com apparently launches in private beta next week (”private beta,” for the uneducated, is short for “help us fix mistakes before we let everybody see how incredibly stupid we are” and not to be confused with the public beta launch strategy made popular by Google, who doesn’t really give a crap about being perfect before letting people play with the goodies), and to properly tee it up as a web “destination,” NBC pulled its YouTube channel. After all, if you want the teeming masses to march willy-nilly into your trap, you can’t support alternatives, or so the thinking goes.

Seth Freilich at Pajiba (one of my favorite sites) nails it:

While they may not have seen any direct revenue from the YouTube channel, what about the tons of free advertising they got? I mean, I’ve used NBC clips in various round-ups on countless occasions, essentially giving “The Office” or “Scrubs” or “30 Rock” free prime advertising real estate. I posit that something like the “Dick in a Box” or “Chronic(what?)cles of Narnia” phenomena wouldn’t have happened on some proprietary NBC site, and much like its decision to separate from iTunes, I think NBC is being incredibly short-sighted.

Not satisfied with the marketing given to them by people like Seth (and they are legion), NBCU wants more “found money” for its “content.”

The gamble NBC is making is significant. Will people, who are quite happy with their YouTube, thank you very much, go elsewhere to view clips — with ads — that they can record and share with their friends for free?

CBS continues to impress, meanwhile, by striking deal after deal with any site or system that wants to serve their content to an audience that CBS cannot get on its own. This is the right strategy in a distributed media world, and one that both NBCU and Viacom would do well to emulate.

…now broadcasters will have to cough up airtime in what will likely be a better revenue year (2008) to “educate” viewers about the end of analog TV. Shelly Palmer poses the doomsday scenario that we’ve been trumpetng here for the last couple of years:

If you like disaster scenarios, I have one for you. 2009 is not an election year and it is not an Olympic year. The end of analog TV is scheduled to occur in the middle of February Sweeps (the first television ratings book of the year). With millions of antenna-only households gone missing, what will the May Sweeps look like? No political cash, no Olympic cash and, due to missing antenna-only viewers, a measurable ratings decline in households that over-index to the four major networks. Ahhh — your tax dollars at work.

Shelly’s right, and this is the thought that causes local television company executives to lose sleep at night. Everybody’s running to the Web for salvation, but the question is will broadcasters have the courage to spend money while they have it to prepare for the time when they don’t?

Variety carries an interesting story today about how the networks are reducing their obligations to original programming by giving up on either dayparts or whole days. This is serious business for local TV stations, who need prime time lead-in numbers to sustain late news viability (and in which to promote other offerings, much less sell local advertising).

Desperate to contain costs, networks have found that one way to reduce their overhead is simply to vacate hours previously earmarked for original fare. As a consequence, Saturday has essentially disappeared from the week, as ABC, CBS and NBC use the night either for prime time sports or as Rerun Theater.

…Based on the networks’ body language, Friday could be the next parcel of real estate in jeopardy of foreclosure. CBS research guru David Poltrack has pointed to the high volume of DVR playback occurring that night, and depressed ratings could lead to more reruns there, as ABC did most of last season with encore plays of “Grey’s Anatomy.”

…Networks have been even more aggressive in finding ways to reduce their investment in other dayparts by stretching “Today” to occupy a fourth hour or brokering their entire Saturday-morning lineups to outside suppliers,,,

This is both sad and fascinating to watch, and I find my own viewing has almost entirely shifted to cable channels for original programming. HBO and Showtime lead the way, but for advertiser-supported drama, there’s nothing like USA, TNT (We Know Drama) or FX. Then, there’s a whole list of other interesting and entertaining things to watch on scores of other cable channels.

The networks suffer from big overheads and investor expectations, and I’m afraid they’re going to drag local stations down with them. Perhaps we’ll get to the day when local stations can cherry pick programs from multiple cable nets and create their own line-ups, paying appropriate fees or sharing advertising with them.

It would certainly be better than following the nets to the tar pits.

The company that wrote the book on the “walled garden” variety of web experience, AOL, laid off another 1,200 employees this week, a bloodbath by anybody’s standards. And for those media companies out there that continue to cling to the assumption that YOU provide the ultimate platform, heed well what AOL CEO Randy Falco told The New York Times:

“Publishing is no longer just about the portal,” Mr. Falco explained in a conversation earlier this month. “We are going to be in as many different places as possible.”

This vision is in sharp contrast to the strategy laid out yesterday by Jerry Yang, the chief executive of Yahoo. He wants Yahoo to focus mainly on services that make it the start page for people’s online experiences.

The Web is the platform, folks, not Yahoo! or anybody else.

In the culture of rules that is modernism, logic demands a governor. That governor can be internal or external; it all depends on the society being served. In totalitarian regimes, the bayonet is an effective governor. In a democracy, however, the governor must be internal, for where the rule of law ends, promises and oaths are all that stand between civilized behavior and the base elements of human nature.

19th-century French political historian Alexis de Tocqueville noted that its churches was what made America strong. This is because religion provided the internal governor that the American experiment in democracy required. We swear to tell the truth with our hand on the Bible, because we believe that telling a lie will bring punishment beyond that which the courts can administer. At least that’s the assumption behind the oath.

But now that religion is publicly vilified in the U.S., what do we have as a governor?

I’m brought to this thought this morning after witnessing something in a football game last night that I simply couldn’t believe. The game was between Louisville and UConn. Late in the third quarter, UConn’s Larry Taylor signaled for a fair catch on a Louisville punt. I saw him wave his hand in the air. The Louisville players racing down the field saw him wave his hand in the air and stopped their pursuit. Even the UConn players nearby relaxed and slowed down, because they knew the play was over.

But no. Taylor scooted up the left side of the field and scored a 74-yard touchdown. UConn won the game by four points. That punt return made the difference.

No referee blew a whistle, so apparently the men in the striped shirts didn’t see him wave his hand. Players are taught that the play isn’t over until a whistle blows, so Taylor just did what he was taught. This morning, the spin is that a fair catch technically requires more than one wave.

“That wasn’t no fair catch, that was a fair play out there,” Taylor told the Associated Press. “The referee didn’t call anything, he said it was a fair play. I felt I didn’t fair catch it anyway.” He even went so far as to suggest he planned the fake fair catch by not “really” raising his hand over his head. And we all just turn away.

Taylor is full of crap, and everybody in that stadium and around the country knows it. It is, however, the fruit of that missing internal governor. Honor and respect for the truth were nowhere to be found in that stadium last night. The referees represent absolute authority, and when they make a mistake, so what? It’s such a sad commentary on our whole culture.

What the University of Connecticut did Friday night was get away with cheating.

UConn coach Randy Edsall, if he had even an ounce of integrity, would forfeit the game, but he won’t. All that matters is that they are undefeated in their conference, but that’s only on paper, for the real losers in the game were the UConn players, who will now go forward in life understanding that in America today, it’s all about what you can get away with.

Every fan of the University of Connecticut, every alumni group, every supporter and the parents of all those players should feel an enormous sense of shame this morning. But wait; that would require a conscience, the core of an internal governor.

This remarkable statement was made yesterday by Jeff Huber, Google’s vice president of engineering, at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco. Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch provides the quote:

A lot that you have heard here is about platforms and who is going to win. That is Paleolithic thinking. The Web has already won. The web is the Platform. So let’s go build the programmable Web.

The beauty of this statement is in its simplicity, and it harmoniously resonates as the ultimate truth, the fundamental core of all that is disrupting media these days.

This is because we’re too busy building our own “platforms” to see that it’s just not enough. It will never be enough, because the Web IS the platform.

It’s also important to note that this philosophy describes the major difference between Google and Yahoo!, the latter choosing to develop their own platform and work within it, while the former views the entire Web as their platform. Who do you think is going to be the most successful? And I hate to beat a dead horse, but this is the issue that media companies face with the Yahoo! consortium.

For long-term viability, it’s vital that local media companies view their “platform” as the Local Web and not just a monolithic portal (or even just a series of sites) that they call their own.

How truly hollow and arrogant ring the words of those entrepreneurs business concerns who are working so hard to bring command and control back to media. None of these people understand — or wish to understand — that the horse has left the barn; it’s all about empowered consumers today, and unless that is the starting point for new business development, anything else sounds just ridiculous.

New media economist Umair Haque writes today about a new application from Blackarrow designed to stop people from fast-forwarding commercials via PVRs.

Who’s missing from the pseudo value chain at the bottom of the screen?

You guessed it - consumers.

I guess I could wax lyrical about the economics of connected consumption, why the shift of control to the edges is inexorable, etc…

But honestly…lolz. How can you think strategically about any kind of business (let alone advertising) in 2007 without factoring consumers into the value chain?

The answer’s simply - you can’t.

Meanwhile, Dan Gillmor is in Toronto (where I wish I was) at the Online News Association annual gathering. He’s on a panel described thusly: Learn how to harness the passion and creativity of your community to become a local sensation and a meaningful online gathering place.

He rightly grasps the arrogance of the wording here and replied:

With respect to the writer of that description, what hokum.

The word “harness” is singularly inappropriate in this context. It reflects traditional media’s belief that the audience — the community — wants or needs to be treated like a herd of horses.

We don’t need taming. We need places where we can have vital conversations about our communities.

Are you beginning to see what I mean? I’ve been around media for 37 years, and it’s always been this way (us thinking we had such “harnessing” power), but it seemed innocent years ago. Today, however, we’re seeing it for what it is — the willful manipulation of others for our own benefit. And guess what? The manipulatees don’t like it and probably never did.

I came across a pending workshop on “landing page optimization,” something I certainly think is important. But then I got to thinking about how this is just another attempt by marketeurs to hang onto their sense of importance in a world that’s been turned upside down. The assumption behind the concept is that a smart cookie can manipulate people into doing what he or she wants them to do. I know that’s harsh, but it’s true.

If we can’t manage how people relate to us, then what good are we?

Gord Hotchkiss also noted this in today’s MediaPost SearchInsider:

Last week, I explored the disconnect between how advertisers define Nirvana; the ability to control consumer and persuade them at will by inundating them with advertising; and what consumers dream about: authentic and reliable information on needed products and services. There…(is)…the nuisance cost to the consumer of wading through an earlobe-deep sea of irrelevant and uninvited advertising: zapped TV commercials, blaring billboards, glaring signage, email spam, ubiquitous interstitials and pop-ups, preloads…or one of the zillions of other ways advertisers choose to scream at you.

Notchkiss goes on to talk about the idea of advertisers as “infomediaries,” a term originated in the 1999 book, “Net Worth.”

What we have here is nothing less than a war, between advertisers and consumers. Actually, I think it’s been underway for decades — described in the battle plan books of mass marketing gurus. The problem is that consumers have already won, and our unwillingness to see that is leading us down paths that are increasingly visible as self-serving.

In this war, we have to surrender to win.

The Daily Northwestern is reporting that the Medill School of Journalism is thinking about changing its name to, according to Dean John Lavine, “better represent the school and what it offers.”

Okay, that’s fair. But consider this sentence:

Lavine did not comment on specific names being discussed, but said that in informal conversations he’s had with students and others, adding “Integrated Marketing Communications” to the name was a popular idea.

If this is the school’s attempt to articulate the next generation of journalism, it’s badly missing the reality that’s underway. They may be teaching integrated marketing, but that’s not the real world into which journalism is growing.

The idea of changing the name isn’t going over well with students the paper interviewed:

Emma Haak, a Medill sophomore, said she wanted the administration to “carefully consider” the possible effects of changing the name, and that the process seems like a “waste of time.”

“I understand that Medill is trying to get the multimedia approach,” she said, “but I think (changing the name) is a bit of an overreaction.”

Chardae Davis, a Medill junior, said the possible change really bothers her, and that the school was too old to change its name.

“It’s a brand in a way,” she said. “Medill has a reputation and the name stands for something.”

While she understands that journalism is evolving and so the curriculum is changing, Davis said that doesn’t mean the name should be altered.

“We came to Medill for Medill,” she said. “Not for the Medill School of Journalism and insert rest of name here.”

Schools everywhere are wrestling with the dynamics of the digital disruption, and I fully expect name-changing to become rather common. That Medill — which occupies the highest of seats on the Big-J pedestal — would be considering a name change is a sign of the confusion the exists within the mainstream. Most of the name changes I’ve seen have been to drop the word “mass” from communications, because, well, it’s not so much about masses anymore.

Regardless of what’s being taught as “journalism,” it’s still journalism, and a name change for Medill is unnecessary.

I’m suffering from the system overload that I’m sure other media observers get when the sheer volume of things to write about overwhelms the ability to spit out the kind of commentary it all deserves. Between phone calls, I spent the entire day yesterday reading and thinking, and it didn’t seem all that productive. Hence, the diagnosis of system overload.

And when this happens, it usually means (for me) a time of stepping back, a season to follow the dots and see where they lead. I’ve got a lot of uncomfortable feelings that need clarification.

Is Steve Rubel, a blogger I’ve followed since he first began, correct in predicting a crash in the pay-per-click world? My gut says he’s wrong, but, I mean, this is Steve Rubel! He gives five reasons why he feels this way, but Steve runs in the world of big-money marketers, one with an inherent bias towards the status quo. Besides, I don’t think they’re the people buying these kinds of ads from Google, and there’s no survey of them (that I know of) to see whether they think the things work or not.

I mean, this is Google, folks. The “recession” Steve predicts would be a recession for Google, which I view as the wishful thoughts of Madison Avenue (Oh please, God, let them collapse and prove we’re right).

Then there’s Scripps splitting itself into two pieces (seems to be a trend), and the two pieces are telling. One consists of its popular cable entities and all web properties. The other is its newspapers and television stations. I guess the hope is that the latter won’t be a drag on the former, but what does this say about those older properties (and the people who work there)?

Perhaps my malaise is due, in part, to participation in a heady online discussion (via Poynter’s Online News list) about the future of advertiser-supported media. It all began with Roy Peter Clark’s article, Your Duty to Read the Paper. There’s a ton of cynicism out there and even more anachronistic clinging to old models and methods. There’s also debate about whether there’s enough online ad money to support the traditional newsgathering process.

This issue of ad money is a theme repeated by Beth Comstock, president of Integrated Media at NBC Universal. She told Reuters:

I’m getting to the point where I feel like every answer to every business development pitch is ‘We’re going to be advertiser supported.’ … There are not going to be enough advertising dollars in the marketplace. No matter how clever we are, no matter what the format is.

You see, these kinds of things don’t make any sense to me, because I don’t view anything about the Web and web advertising as static. Therefore, I think it can be very misleading to try and understand shifts and trends in such a manner. Everybody has a point-of-view, and it depends on where you’re standing.

The view from Madison Avenue is very different than the view from Silicon Valley, and mine is sort of in-between, although I certainly tilt to the west. Ms. Comstock looks at the ad numbers and rightly states that there isn’t enough enough to support millions of “ad-supported” business models. This flows from a belief that “ad-supported” has only one definition: I make content and advertisers pay enough in ads to support the creation of that content plus a little (a lot of) profit for me. In this sense, she’s absolutely correct, and what does that say about all of the ad-supported models that are springing up at the local level?

Steve Safran and I beat our heads against the wall trying to convince people that the time to act is NOW. Do you need any more evidence that this to understand that the advertiser pie can only be split so many ways before it all collapses, because no viable platforms exist anymore?

And what do you do as a local media company in attacking the matter of advertising? Do you target money that’s in the Madison Avenue pipeline that’s looking for places to be spent? Do you target money that’s being spent locally, albeit not on your properties? Or do you begin with assumptions about tomorrow and point your ship in that direction?

So you see, there’s a lot of confusion out there, and I think that’s to be expected at a time like this. For me, though, I must stay with the firm belief that advertising is what’s really being disrupted and that — like everything else in the personal media revolution — it’s coming from the bottom, not the top. Companies that enable this will thrive.

One such company is called AdReady. It provides user-friendly software for the making and serving animated display ads by small businesses, and Nick Gonzalez at TechCrunch is right when he writes about the future:

With Google’s purchase of DoubleClick and Yahoo’s SmartAds initiative, the focus is being drawn back on display advertising. A tool like AdReady helps even the little guys get in to the growing market. That is, unless Google does something like this too.

This is the kind of initiative that I’m convinced local media companies need to be providing to seed a growing local online advertising opportunity.

And finally, there’s this disquieting little piece of information, also from TechCrunch. China — yes, China — has developed peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing that’s 50 times faster than BitTorrent in this country. Duncan Riley cites a Thomas Crampton interview with Ogilvy China’s Kaiser Kuo, during which Kuo claims to have watched a DVD-quality download of “24″ with 2.2% downloaded after only 3 minutes via China’s Blin.cn. Riley, who’s from Australia, then writes of the future ramifications, and I find this both ironic and chilling.

…without the artificial market restrictions imposed on P2P networks in the United States by the RIAA and the MPAA, Chinese companies have been free to innovate and are now producing superior web technology in P2P sharing, and a whole range of related industries. If you think it’s bad that China dominates the market for consumer goods, imagine that today companies in China have already created the next wave of P2P innovation and are thriving, perhaps ironically in a Communist country, with more freedoms than their American counterparts. It’s not unreasonable to consider that next year and into the future that much of what we do online may end up being based on Chinese designed technology and programming, and not good ol’ fashioned American know-how.

I guess that’s what’s really pulled me into the deep end of the pool today. Only in America, it seems, is free enterprise really not free. It’s a game played by the haves, and that’s what’s under attack by the triumph of personal media over mass media.

I think we’re headed for great change in this country, the thought of which generally makes me go quiet.

I’ve already ranted about this guy on the same subject (here and here), so this will be brief.

On this week’s “show,” Maher again went after southerners, repeating every known stereotype in a “humorous” bit about Alabama outlawing sex shops. Using various props, he repeated such classist stereotypes as rural southerners screwing their relatives, wearing overalls and love affair with the KKK. Then, he threw in the humorous suggestions that we masturbate with corn cobs, use grease for lubrication and turn jumper cables into nipple clamps.

You may think this is funny, and I’m willing to grant a comedian license. But Maher is a social commentator — a liberal to boot — and his relentless put downs of southern people from his intellectual pedestal is hypocrisy gone to seed.

Let me repeat myself. Why are rural southerners fair game when blacks, Polish people, Italians, Jews, gays, and women are not? Bigotry, however it’s disguised, is still bigotry.

A discussion on Poynter’s ONLINE-NEWS email list this week raised the question of why Jon Stewart is the only one regularly showing inconsistencies in certain political claims. He’s apparently doing this quite well, because it caught the attention of many of the Big-J types on the list.

Steve Outing asked:

Why is that technique restricted to the Daily Show? Is there some reason that it’s out of bounds for, say, the NY Times or CBS News to basically do the same thing the next time Cheney or Hillary says something that contradicts an earlier statement? Why not point that out and document it?”

Good question, to which Bob Wyman responded:

Since pointing out a contradiction involves interpretation and opinion, many papers would insist that such a thing could only be done by a columnist or on the editorial page — somewhere off the front page. But, there isn’t enough room on the editorial page for all the contradictions…

In any case, it probably wouldn’t be either very funny or even very interesting if a newspaper pointed out the contradictions — because of the way newspaper stories are written… When you try to represent “all sides of the story,” you simply can’t write with the same clarity, focus and impact as they do on the Daily Show or in an “unfair and unbalanced” context like Fox News.

Bob’s comments reflect what I see as the essential problem for journalists in the age of Jon Stewart, and that is that the rules and traditions of “professional” journalism don’t support the profession anymore. In fact, they so tie the hands of writers as to drive people away, and as I’ve said before, The Daily Show doesn’t do opinion as much as it does argument, and that’s what this country needs badly from its journalists.

The discussions on the Poynter list often deal with how to save newspapers, the keepers of the rules and traditions. But efforts to save the print media industry beg the question, “What is it about the print industry that needs to be saved?” The answer from traditional journalists usually falls along the lines expressed in this email group: that if the industry fails, so fails the model of journalism that goes with it, which then begs the question, “What is the model of journalism to which this refers?”

The failure of one isn’t necessarily the failure of the other, but you’ve got to honestly ask yourself if contemporary professional journalism is really all that valuable to our culture. I’m not convinced that it is, and the evidence is everywhere, for the failure of the press is reflected in the political and social ills about which it reports. Whether you believe it or not, there are two Americas, and we journalists have played a major role in the elevation of the elite at the expense of those who have nothing. Shining a light on problems doesn’t fix problems, and this is journalism’s failure.

When journalists share the same cultural status as those who gain at the expense of others, then what do we expect?

In his brilliant essay about the lost art of political argument, Chris Lasch wrote that Walter Lippmann’s (the father of professional journalism) vision was that an educated elite was necessary to rule the uneducated masses and that the press should be a part of it. Lasch also wrote that you could track the decline in involvement in the political process in the U.S. with the rise of the professional press.

So again, what is it about contemporary professional journalism that the culture will miss?

Moreover, Lasch wrote that Lippmann’s “objectivity” was really a ruse to create a sterile environment within which to sell advertising. Is this really the business of the fourth estate?

So what is it about contemporary professional journalism that the culture will miss?

What we need is a revival of journalism, not nostalgia, and I think the Web is the doorway to an awakening of the senses of justice and mercy that burn inside each of us and form the core passion around which we live and breathe. Such a revival would also stir a willingness to bring argument back to reporting. “Just the facts?” Bullshit. The First Amendment wasn’t necessary to protect facts.

Frankly, we need to stop sucking the tit of mother media and grow a spine! Our audiences are fleeing us, and it isn’t just because technology makes it convenient. If we want to be relevant tomorrow and beyond, we simply must reinvent what it means to be a professional journalist.