Advertising is content in Media 2.0. Here we have OfficeMax creating one of those creative holiday virals that people will use for the next month. It’s called “Elf Yourself,” a cute Flash application that allows you to put your face, the face of your dog, the face of your boss, or anybody’s face into the body of a dancing elf. Up to four are allowed, and they dance a stupid dance and wish holiday greetings.

Dumb, yes. Smart, hell yes. It’s a branding play that doesn’t require buying ad space next to somebody’s content, and that’s a small part of the problem for contemporary media. It’s participatory, interactive and fun, and it uses the energy of the users to pass the message.

It’s not the first, just one of the latest.

So I was wandering through espn.com this morning and thinking about a post on the NFL game tonight and how most of the country won’t see it. I thought of embedding an ESPN video in the post, which caused me to pause and think about how many companies are catching onto the whole unbundled media thing. But then, I got sidetracked by an eTicket piece on Bo Jackson, only to find that this lenghty, magazine-style piece contained — are you ready? — an embedded YouTube video. That’s right.

And then I thought, “We really have come a long way.”

For nearly ten years, Mike James has been a burr in the saddle of television owners and managers through his daily “NewsBlues” website. Mike took some time out of his schedule to answer ten questions for me recently. Here’s one:

Regardless of your persona, you’ve been leaning back and observing television for many years. What are your thoughts about what’s happened to the business?

Someone needs to clean the kitchen, discard the spoiled meat and rancid vegetables, scour the cupboard, expel the vermin, hose down the joint, and chug a big jolt of reality. TV news has lost its way. Forget the excuses. No one cares that your bosses are asking you to fill more time with fewer resources. The business is contaminated. The content is fetid and foul, shallow and pointless. Get a job selling time share. Drive a bus in Reno. Do anything but continue foisting polluted, noxious news feces on the superficial American public.

Love him or hate him, the guy is provocative, to say the least. Here’s the rest. Enjoy.

So Classmates.com is planning an IPO to raise $144 million. I’m enjoying some of the spin, such as references to the site as “pioneering.”

I refuse to go near classmates, because they pursue a business model that turns me off — the relentless pursuit of my wallet. The information about my class and, yes, classmates is useless, because it’s all behind the pay wall. So while I’m one of its “50 million members,” I’m probably not alone in my disdain for the site. When I first entered my profile information, the site wasn’t nearly so obnoxious. If this is “pioneering,” then hand me a bow and arrow.

The company is trying to take advantage of all the buzz about social networking, and perhaps a successful IPO will help them remove the walls. Until that happens, though, don’t count on me to buy any of its stock.

If you’re a basketball fan in Dallas, the name Mark Cuban personifies the party that is a Dallas Mavericks game. He bought the team in 2000 with wealth acquired during the dot-com days — specifically, a company called Broadcast.com. A self-made guy from blue collar roots and a textbook entrepreneur, he worked his way up through the gold rush days of technology to where he is now — one of the richest people on the planet. His latest business venture is HDNet, the high definition cable and satellite network.

Cuban maintains an active blog and is quick to share his opinions about anything relative to his business interests, and that includes trends in media. He’s relevant and always gives good “soundbites.” He provides a consistent focus on traditional media business models from an executive’s seat, which makes the blog a fascinating and provocative view, although some would say similar to that of the captain of the Titanic. Time after time, he paints the media business disruption as one driven by thieves, shadowy denizens of the darknet out to rob him and his peers of what rightfully belongs to them. It’s astonishing that a man of Cuban’s history would take such a view, but HDNet needs the existing hegemony in place in order to fulfill its value proposition. So by way of investment, Mark Cuban, a swashbuckling maverick who sliced a path through the status quo to a lofty seat in society, now finds himself a defender of the very things that were his targets “back in the day.”.

His latest is an open letter to Comcast — and anybody else who owns the pipes in which the Internet functions — calling for them to block peer-to-peer (P2P) activity. The blog post comes off as ignorant and disingenuous, for Cuban’s objection to P2P is presented as that of a consumer, not the owner of a business potentially disrupted by P2P.

As a consumer, I want my internet experience to be as fast as possible. The last thing I want slowing my internet service down are P2P freeloaders. Thats right, P2P content distributors are nothing more than freeloaders. The only person/organization that benefits from P2P usage are those that are trying to distribute content and want to distribute it on someone else’s bandwidth dime.

Cuban is fully taken to task for this view in the comments to the post. I’ll just say that it appears on the surface to be simple ignorance, because P2P bears no resemblance whatsoever to the way it’s described here.

But Mark Cuban is a very smart fellow, and his presumption to speak on behalf of consumers is well-considered. He may go off half-cocked from time-to-time, but this “letter” is actually a defense of his investment in HDNet. It’s the same reason he writes so passionately about the disruption to the music industry, the uploading of “pirated” TV clips and the general unbundling of video. He has a pretty big dog in the fight, and instead of simply delineating how the disintermediation of media impacts his business model, his strategy is to rant and rave about how “wrong” it all is in the first place. He’s a charismatic fellow, and all of this makes him a great witness in Congressional hearings, for as HDNet’s chairman, he’s a great friend to the copyright industry’s efforts in Washington.

All of which is to say that we need to pay attention to what Mark Cuban writes but also bear in mind that it’s one side of a very two-sided story. What I appreciate most about Cuban is his willingness to give us the business side. I just wish he’d be a little more transparent about it.

UPDATE: Mark clarifies things in the comments.

I’ve been following a fascinating discussion at TechCrunch over the holiday weekend, and it’s a worthwhile read for anybody who follows this stuff.

It began with a rare guest post (The Secret Strategies Behind Many “Viral” Videos) on the site Thanksgiving day by Dan Ackerman Greenberg, co-founder of the “viral marketing company, The Commotion Group.” It got my attention, because, well, who knew there were “viral marketing companies?” I mean, isn’t the whole idea of viral marketing that it’s, um, viral?

Well, it’s not. It’s “managed” by guys like this, and the post was a how-to list of their secret sauce. Fascinating. Provocative. And ethically questionable. Here’s an example on how to get a video to an important level on YouTube:

3. Core Strategy: Getting onto the “Most Viewed” page
Now that a video is ready to go, how the hell is it going to attract 100,000 viewers?

The core concept of video marketing on YouTube is to harness the power of the site’s traffic. Here’s the idea: something like 80 million videos are watched each day on YouTube, and a significant number of those views come from people clicking the “Videos” tab at the top. The goal is to get a video on that Videos page, which lists the Daily Most Viewed videos.

If we succeed, the video will no longer be a single needle in the haystack of 10,000 new videos per day. It will be one of the twenty videos on the Most Viewed page, which means that we can grab 1/20th of the clicks on that page! And the higher up on the page our video is, the more views we are going to get.

So how do we get the first 50,000 views we need to get our videos onto the Most Viewed list?

• Blogs: We reach out to individuals who run relevant blogs and actually pay them to post our embedded videos. Sounds a little bit like cheating/PayPerPost, but it’s effective and it’s not against any rules.
• Forums: We start new threads and embed our videos. Sometimes, this means kickstarting the conversations by setting up multiple accounts on each forum and posting back and forth between a few different users. Yes, it’s tedious and time-consuming, but if we get enough people working on it, it can have a tremendous effect.
• MySpace: Plenty of users allow you to embed YouTube videos right in the comments section of their MySpace pages. We take advantage of this.
• Facebook: Share, share, share. We’ve taken Dave McClure’s advice and built a sizeable presence on Facebook, so sharing a video with our entire friends list can have a real impact. Other ideas include creating an event that announces the video launch and inviting friends, writing a note and tagging friends, or posting the video on Facebook Video with a link back to the original YouTube video.
• Email lists: Send the video to an email list. Depending on the size of the list (and the recipients’ willingness to receive links to YouTube videos), this can be a very effective strategy.
• Friends: Make sure everyone we know watches the video and try to get them to email it out to their friends, or at least share it on Facebook.

Each video has a shelf life of 48 hours before it’s moved from the Daily Most Viewed list to the Weekly Most Viewed list, so it’s important that this happens quickly. As I mentioned before, when done right, this is a tremendously successful strategy.

The post infuriated TechCrunch readers, who left over 400 comments slamming what Greenberg does for a living. It apparently made him feel bad, so TechCrunch let him post another guest entry (Follow Up To The Viral Video Post: Dan Wants Another Word), in which he backtracked on much of what was stated in the original post. That, too, didn’t go over well with readers.

Trust me, it’s a good read. And the lesson is Umair’s “good beats evil” in the new world. We simply MUST accept that empowered consumers are in charge these days, and they’re using that power to escape the kind of manipulative crap that marketeurs have foisted upon them for decades. By pulling back the curtain on his own manipulative practices, Greenberg ran into the buzz saw that is angry consumers.

You may read this and come away thinking, “Gee, maybe we should be doing some of this stuff.” In fact, there are a lot of smart tactics listed, and perhaps that’s correct. If you choose this path, however, do so with extreme caution: caveat venditor, let the seller beware. Proceed at your own risk.

Okay. When was it decided that “not so much” would be the default phrase to describe any lesser opinion of anything? It seems like I first heard this about a year ago, and now it’s every friggin’ where. To be annoyingly precise, the phrase has to appear at the end of a sentence, or more commonly, at the end of an interrogative.

Do you like apples? Not so much.
I played the guitar every day once, but now? Not so much.
Cowboys, yes. Patriots, not so much.
What do you think of Mildred? Not so much.
Those carrots taste great, but the beans, not so much.
I like First Class but coach? Not so much.
That drink is great cold, but warm? Not so much.
I loved that book until the ending, then, not so much.
Yes or no; did you like the soup? Not so much.
She’s a great writer, but her opinions? Not so much.
I used to enjoy a big meal, but now? Not so much.
Waffles? Yes. Pancakes? Not so much.
Did you like dinner? Not so much.

I hear this everywhere now, and very often among sports announcers and analysts. For all I know, it’s a part of the playbook for those who wish to be considered cool. Nobody gave me one, however, which suggests something very unpleasant — that I’m not among the cool.

Most things, I can take or leave, but this?

Not so much.

I’ve sung the praises of London Business School grad and new media economist Umair Haque here before. The guy is on a serious roll lately, and I thought a few little snippets of his recent thinking might open eyes to the economics of the media disruption. Haque is simply an original thinker, and I’m finding his terms in many other places these days.

I won’t go into all of them, because it isn’t necessary. Just read this and ponder the genius of this remarkable contemporary mind.

• Trust is at the heart of value creation in the edgeconomy.

  Microsoft is playing massconomy games in an edgeconomy. Coercion doesn’t work; closure doesn’t work; and, most definitely of all, evil doesn’t work.

• Light beats heavy.
  Open beats closed.
  Free beats paid.
  Good beats evil.
• Here’s another key principle of the edgeconomy. One of the tremendously cool things cheap interaction does is free us from the costs and risk of yesterday’s industrial assets.
  Lightweight business models are possible because interaction is cheap - and in most markets, they utterly and totally dominate heavyweight business models.
• See, the thing is: there’s a difference between planning and strategy.
  Plans aren’t worth so much - especially in the edgeconomy.
  Strategies, on the other hand, are.
  Unfortunately, planning riddles the DNA of most incumbents like an error sequence gone out of control. And it blinds them to the larger point: plans without a coherent strategy are about as useful as a bike without wheels.
• Open beats closed, Look - this isn’t about subscriptions, really. It’s about tremendous economic pressures for atomization and unbundling - and the fact that context is king.
• And between Apple and Google’s full on onslaught of radical economic innovation, mobile operators - still stuck in a world of where lamer = better - stand no chance at all of survival.
• Second - real innovators, or the guys that wanna change the world, rather than take it over, remember - don’t often need or want massive valuations so early in the game, because it makes really changing things that much harder, by the weight of expectations.
• Note to Coke - forget about widgets. They’re irrelevant for you. Focus on the bigger picture: rethinking marketing. Because marketing is really the only reason you exist at all anymore. And if the returns to marketing continue to get vaporized - so will you.
• Like I keep telling you, markets, networks, and communities…
  Like I keep telling you, changing the world - for the better.
• Lots of you guys keep asking me for strategies and business models. I don’t have (unfortunately) time to talk to all of you.
  But I’ve already told you a big part of the answer for the last couple of years: markets, networks, and communities.
• So if you wanna think radically - here’s a (really) easy way. Take the dominant business model/strategy in your market space, and use a market, network, or community to invert it…like Wikipedia, Google, Myspace, Facebook, etc.
  This doesn’t mean do something superficial, like a social net for hairdryers. Rather, it means using markets, networks, and communities to shift resources and capabilities from core to edge.
• Connected consumers want firms to be citizens of their microcultures.
  It means means accepting, deep, in the very essence of your DNA, that the fundamental premise of orthodox marketing and branding - that we could fool consumers into thinking almost exactly the same goods were really, truly different by “positioning” them on a spectrum of imaginary psychological benefits - isn’t just utterly, totally, almost incomprehensibly ludicrous; it’s also deeply evil.
  Think about that for a second. It’s not just economically inefficient; it’s mind-blowingly absurd to think this shell game, this pseudo-strategy, this masquerade of value creation, could go on forever.

When Solomon built the first temple, he summoned all the people and prayed a prayer of repentance. Why, one wonders, would he use such an occasion — such a triumph — to ask people to repent?

Those more scholarly than I have attempted to answer that question, but I think it’s because we are most vulnerable at the moment of success. It’s when we choose to shine a light on US and all our greatness.

This is why it’s so important that we maintain a heart full of thanks, one of gratitude that will survive the roller coaster ride of life. For in the end, we have no power over anything — only in how we react. And I can tell you from experience, my friends, that a heart full of gratitude will survive where others will not.

And so we set aside one day to give thanks, to remind ourselves that we are not in charge. My wish for all of you is that you will carry that spirit for as long as Life gives you breath.

So Google has dissed the bloggers who participate in the horrible PayPerPost ad scheme by removing their page rank altogether. PayPerPost is the hideously deceptive practice of IZEA that pays bloggers to make posts about advertiser products without revealing they are, well, ads.

Some people are saying that what Google has done is censorship, but I don’t view it that way. Google historically has done nothing that I view as contrary to their “Do No Evil” mantra, and this PayPerPost crap is certainly evil. The more I watch this stuff, the more I conclude that — at least for me — I’d rather have Google policing things than anybody else, including any government anywhere.

UPDATE: Per Andy’s suggestion, here’s a link to PayPerPost founder Ted Murphy’s blog entry on the subject.

Media companies live and breathe — in large part — through the benevolence of the agencies that control vast resources of ad dollars for their clients. This relationship is a part of what’s being disrupted by Media 2.0, and it’s one of the most interesting elements of the overall disruption.

A little review first. This blog examines media disruption as the fruit of the cultural shift from modernism (I think and reason, therefore I understand) to postmodernism (I participate, therefore I understand). Changes in culture aren’t zero sum games, unless there’s a bayonet forcing the issue. In the West, it’s more like evolution; that which was remains, albeit with new adoptive characteristics.

So it comes as no surprise to read the following headline from a Research Brief from the Center for Media Research:

Measurement Seen As Hurdle to Ad Spend On Emerging Media

Well, duh! The hegemony that controls mass marketing is dependent upon complex measurement systems. Once established and agreed upon by all parties, success is defined in terms of who can outsmart, outspend, manipulate or otherwise manage the systems to their advantage. Take away the system, and the hegemony demands another.

But this is the modernist way. We establish laws and rules, which are then manipulated for us to get what we want. And by “we,” I’m talking about those who are in a position to do something about it. The rest of the culture can only sit by and be used. This is the essential flaw in a cultural system based solely on the rule of law. It may produce order, but that order can be manipulated by those in a position to do so.

This is the same dynamic at work in our courts, where “the system” has created its own laws through the process of judicial activism found in “case law.” Case law is the process by which one court’s ruling is used in other court rulings to modify laws created by the law makers of the culture, our legislators. The problem, of course, is that case law is viewed as THE law, so judges don’t judge at all; they merely interpret. When justice is the only permitted outcome, mercy goes out the door. This whole justice/mercy thing is why we need judges in the first place, but that’s not what we have today.

And so it is with media and advertising. We all sit back and say, “Show me the rules,” parenthetically adding, “so I can plan how to manipulate them to get what I want.” Here’s the key part of the above-referenced article:

The gap in the knowledge base of most advertisers with regard to new/emerging media, says the report, exists not only because of the wide variety of options, but also because of the constantly changing dynamic nature of the space. Given the amount of change, metrics do not generate the same level of confidence as in traditional media.

70% of the larger advertisers, those spending $50MM and up on media, were more comfortable with current vehicles. These respondents reported satisfaction with the measurement of traditional media, while their level of satisfaction was 60% for measuring new/emerging media.

So Madison Avenue won’t be comfortable playing with the Web until there is a locked-down mechanism in place for continuing the same old system they’ve always had. While I can understand and sympathize with them, there’s a big problem with that thinking.

Its name is Google, that clever group of folks who don’t pay a lick of attention to Madison Avenue and have chosen, instead, to push forward along other lines. That’s not to say that Google wouldn’t take their money, but the truth is they don’t need it. This is because the company shakes hands with the Web in a way that works in the best interests of everybody, not just the ad agencies in New York who controlled all the cash in the old world. As the Web grows, so does Google. The company has their measurement metrics, but they’re based on the Web as the platform, and this doesn’t mesh with the way Madison Avenue does business, for the hegemony requires platforms who play by its rules.

So the old value proposition is in decay, and the best it can do is fold its arms, stomp its foot and demand that this thing called the Web give it what it wants. It won’t. It doesn’t have to. And Madison Avenue is, well, screwed.

Pee BEFORE you get on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

I’ve been on-the-road and apologize for ignoring my duties here. I’ll post later today.

In our latest newsletter, I posted the story of Terri Bennett, former chief meteorologist at WCNC-TV in Charlotte. Her contract wasn’t renewed (PR speak for “she was fired”) this summer, so Terri has launched a local weather site that competes with her former employer. She rightly feels that “Terri Bennett” is a brand in the Charlotte market, so why not exploit the brand to make a living? The site is primitive, but her plans are not.

And this is happening elsewhere with a frequency that ought to alarm the companies letting these people go. In Minneapolis, MinnPost.com launched this week. It’s a news start-up in the twin cities that’s built and maintained by Joel Kramer, the former publisher of the Star Tribune and former reporters from the newspaper downsizing blood bath earlier this year.

“Between the two papers, I think they’ve cut at least 120 or 130 news jobs in the past year,” Kramer told Minnesota Public Radio. “And I think no matter how hard they try to do the best they can, that’s a big reduction and it shows up all over the place in news, in business, in arts.”

So now these former employees are competing with their former employer as freelancers for a start-up. Do you see a pattern developing here?

There are other examples, and they all represent what Glenn Reynolds called in his book, An Army of Davids “the triumph of personal technology of mass technology.” Despite this new reality, mainstream media companies continue to lay people off instead of exploiting the tools and energy of the personal media revolution to better serve their communities.

In fact, some are finding that it’s beginning to actually eat into their business instead of just being the annoyance that perhaps it was at one time. In Missoula, Montana, a group of students from the University of Montana have created a news website serving the Crow Indian Reservation CrowNews.net. This has not gone over well with Wes Eben, the publisher of the Big Horn County News in nearby Hardin, who says that the Crow Reservation is “not an underserved market.” That means, of course, that his paper does business there and doesn’t appreciate the competition.

So Eben’s paper may have to downsize, because business will go down, and that will put people on the street who could work on the student project.

I hope you’re taking notes, because we’re living in a remarkable time in the history of communications.

Here is the latest in the on-going series of essays, Local Media in a Postmodern World.

This piece examines a new working definition of news in the current marketplace and how media companies can (and should) adopt it as a central component of their Web content strategy. I believe we will see much of the traditional world shift to this model over the next 18 months, because it makes so much sense for the world of the Web. News-as-a-finished-product is the model for everything from the morning paper to the 6 o’clock news, and it is the model that’s broken by the disintermediation and unbundling of news and information. So what is evolving to take its place?

You don’t have to like their content to appreciate the work that TMZ.com is doing to evolve the new model, and this essay contains portions of an interview with Bob Mohler, Executive in Charge, New Media, Telepictures Productions and one of the creators of TMZ.com. I also reach inside the mind of the inimitable Doc Searls for his wisdom on the topic, and I think you’ll find it memorable.

The new model offers new value propositions for both users and advertisers, which is a big reason why I believe it will be successful.

News is a Process, Not a Finished Product

I’ve just returned from a few days on the road, that romantic dread of business travelers. You can learn a lot about life while jet-hopping and car-renting here and there. For professional observers, this can be as funny or ironic as it is enlightening, and surely Murphy was traveling when he wrote his “law.”

I always try to book the exit row aisle seat on the DEF side of the plane. This is because the middle seat is often open, so the aisle seat is the next best thing to First Class. On my trip home last night, I was in the B seat on the AB side of the exit row, and the guy in the A seat had shoulders as wide as a football field. I mean, the man probably played tackle on the football team in college.

I’m no little fellow myself, so I spent the entire 3 hour ride tilted to starboard. I had no choice, and of course, I started making up new rules for air travel that would prevent this kind of thing from happening. I mean, it’s one thing to have the side of a large woman’s butt pressing beneath the arm rail and intruding into my own butt space, but this was worse. I could not sit up straight in the seat. He then opened his computer, plugged in earphones, made selections from iTunes, and began writing reports. This worsened the situation, because now his right elbow overwhelmed the arm rail and further pushed me to the right.

“Guys like this ought to have to buy TWO tickets,” I thought. Yeah, right.

Earlier, I met a couple returning home to Dallas from a week in Scotland. They were lamenting the state of the dollar, which caused everything to be at least twice the price it is in the states. “We were bleeding money,” the man said. “Hemorrhaging would be a better term,” she replied. That got me thinking about how a weak dollar must benefit businesses that sell overseas. Who does a weak dollar benefit? Big American business interests.

See what happens to me at the airport?

I rented a car this trip. I usually take cabs, but this time I had to drive between cities, so the car was the only option. 2008 Chevy Blazer. Nice car, but I didn’t like the way it handled on the highway.

I don’t rent cars usually, because it’s just another thing that requires my attention, and when you’ve spent hour upon hour with clients (which I dearly love, BTW), sometimes the old brain just needs to relax.

I’ve got two words for driving in strange places these days: Google Maps. I mapped out each leg of the trip and printed the instructions and little images provided by Google (about ten different legs), and each was perfect. I used to look forward to the latest “Atlas,” but that has become as archaic as, well, certain forms of traditional media.

Finally, there’s landing at the DFW airport after a long trip. The flight was late, which meant I’d get home late. Everybody was going to be late, and of course, the pilot knew this, so we got the customary “We’ll get you there just as fast as we safely can.” On approach, he said, “We’ll be on the ground shortly and estimate being at the gate at 9:10.” It was 9 o’clock. We landed a few minutes later and got to the gate at 9:25.

Only in Dallas will air traffic control take a jet that’s an hour late and put them on the runway that’s farthest from their assigned gate. As anybody who uses our airport knows, It can be a very long ride from the runway to the gate.

But who’s keeping track of time?

There are two headlines back-to-back in Romenesko’s RSS feed today that speak volumes:

Plain Dealer didn’t bow to political pressure in blog dust-up
Denver Post skewers governor in rare front-page editorial

In the former, the ombud for the Cleveland Plain Dealer speaks about his paper’s decision to shutter its political group blog and fire a liberal blogger. His crime was supporting a candidate and writing about the same candidate on the blog. The paper’s policy is carved from the canons of journalistic ethics:

“You can’t contribute to a political candidate and then write about his or her campaign, either as an employee or as a paid free-lancer for The Plain Dealer, on paper or online.”

But Jeff Jarvis asks why they hired the bloggers and created the blog in the first place, if it was not to hear the opinions of involved citizens.

The logic of all this is baffling. The paper knew it was hiring opinionated people. But it didn’t want involved people. That is a “difficulty.”

What we’re really seeing is the view of journalism from inside the cloister of the newspaper: Once you take a dollar from the paper, once you take its communion, you are transformed: You take a vow of political celibacy. You have no opinions and if you do, you hold them to yourself, like impure thoughts. You don’t participate in your community but stand apart from it. And you don’t mingle with those outside the walls who speak the vulgate, blog. So the priests of the paper said that the bloggers were sinners. And they were excommunicated.

The second headline from the Romenesko feed tells the story of a Denver Post editorial that refers to Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter as “Jimmy Hoffa,” “a toady for labor bosses” and “a bag man for unions.”

These two stories are different sides of the same coin, and they both make a case for the return of argument to journalism. They point out the silliness of the line between personal, paid support and corporate editorial support. Purists will argue that the person who wrote the Post editorial didn’t or hasn’t supported an opponent of the governor, but I would argue that this is semantics because support is support, whether its in the form of cash contributions or otherwise. Others will argue that the Post editorial was well thought out and agreed upon by the editorial board of the paper — that elite group of educated and informed people who guide the decisions of the paper. No name-calling; just thoughtful prose. Not.

But what’s really sad about these two instances is how they are viewed by people watching from the outside — the people formerly known as the audience. Those people are arming themselves with personal media technology and speaking for themselves in ways that are not part of the canons. The Cleveland paper was right to try and display some of that in its group blog, but it was wrong to put it under its banner (and its canons). You can’t have it both ways, and the worst thing we can do is try and drag that which is new into the model that’s being disrupted. When will we learn that?

Just like everything else, the canons of journalistic ethics — and how we apply them to our work — need to be reviewed. Otherwise, we’ll be clinging to them — with looks of deep pride — all the way to the ocean floor.

“Amy” in Ball’s State’s “Notes from the Digital Future” blog (published by MediaPost) writes of something that will fuel both the conspiracy crowd and fundamentalist Christians — the movement to a cashless society. She notes that Apple is no longer accepting cash for sales of iPhones (to better track sales) and notes that “where the risk of product alteration and hacking is high, many companies selling cutting edge and technologically advanced products may follow suit and decide to stop accepting cash payments.”

“Unlike cash sales,” she notes, “debit and credit card sales provide a quick and easy way to track buyers.” But it is her tying this to another trend that makes her observation intriguing:

A shift towards a plastic currency can also be seen in the new line of Visa commercials telling consumers that ‘life takes faster money, life takes Visa.’ The commercials depict a crowded and bustling but smooth sailing store or event, which grows disorderly when a customer decides to write a check or pay for a product with cash. In this sense, Visa is telling consumers that the quick and easy way to pay for products is by using a Visa check card. Consumers choosing to pay with check or cash will be ridiculed for slowing purchasing pace and not conforming to the use of plastic currency.

This “ridicule” is a powerful peer pressure argument to get with the program, and I agree with Amy that we’re definitely headed in a cashless direction.

Conspiracy theorists will find resolve for their beliefs that big business and government are aligning to foist Big Brother on the world, while Biblical literalists will see this as the mark of the beast from Revelations 13:

And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:

And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.

Cue the sinister music and the evil sound effects. The movie is just around the corner.

Seriously, though, there are enormous privacy, legal and other issues that our culture will have to wrestle to the ground in order for a cashless society to actually materialize, and maybe this is the time to be asking the tough questions. Clearly, Visa and Apple have their reasons, but who speaks for everybody else?

Thanks, Amy. Keep up the good work.

James Katz, director of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at Rutgers University via the New York Times:

“If anything characterizes the 21st century, it’s our inability to restrain ourselves for the benefit of other people.”

Amen!

Of all the paradigms being disrupted these days, none is more interesting than that of books and book publishing. We all know about how the actual publishing process is evolving, but what you may not realize is that the path from aspiring author to published author is also being disrupted.

The established institution — like so many others in our culture — is being disrupted from the bottom up and old pathways are overgrown with new foliage. The obvious new path is self-publishing, and another is that more bloggers and geeks are writing books these days. They know how to write, because their efforts are being read by people every day, and they have the reputation with potential book buyers to get the attention of publishers.

But one old path that’s closing isn’t really evident — that from newspaper journalist to author, which is the grand dream of many budding journalists, although they might not say so. It’s not polite to state up front that you’re in it for you.

Writers need to write, and newspapers have traditionally provided a tremendous vehicle for that. It’s not just the sensational stuff, like “All The President’s Men;” it includes thousands of books all along the importance spectrum.

One such man is David Simon, who was a reporter for the Baltimore Sun for 13 years before a series he wrote on the Baltimore City Homicide Division, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, was turned into a best-selling novel, and then into an NBC series. His second series and subsequent book, The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood, became an HBO mini-series, and Simon was on his way. He’s now Executive Producer of the HBO series The Wire, and his life as a writer is fully established.

But he began as a reporter in Baltimore.

In an interview with the fan site Fancast, Simon observed the overgrown path, but his comments strike me as remarkably shallow for a man of his position:

The newsroom where I used to work (the Baltimore Sun) had 460 people. Now it has 300. And there are people out there who just don’t care. They’ll make more money putting out a mediocre paper than they would putting out a better paper. They know this. It’s their equation. They’re quite content with mediocrity.

And within that culture we have people that are saying, ‘oh no, we’re going to do more with less,’ which is one of the great lies of the 21st century. What it means is we’re going to less with less. And that’s the nature of what journalism is becoming.

So here we have a “famous” guy, who became famous by taking a year to write a newspaper series that brought the paper recognition and awards and rocketed Simon into the future, now using the pulpit given to him to throw bricks at the tough business decisions being made today. I find that pretty disingenuous.

Why don’t we do a cost/benefit analysis on Simon’s original series?

You see these sort of ‘we gotcha’ stories, bite sized morsels of outrage, half-assed scandals. No one is tackling big problems. That kind of ambition is gone. When I went into journalism school, which is over 20 years ago now, high end journalism seemed like it was growing by leaps and bounds in its ability to assess the most delicate and ornate contradictions in society.

You look at some of the coverage (of) Watergate and some of the examinations of political infrastructure that followed on the part of high end papers. It was very impressive and there was every reason to believe that it was (going to) become more so, that newspapers were going to become more serious and instead the opposite happened.

Look, we all wish we had the time and resources to build a career as a successful executive producer while being paid by a local newspaper, and while Simon rails against the contemporary press and actually brings his outrage into the HBO series, we all need to back off the blame game and take a look in the mirror. What real, lasting cultural change did Simon bring to Baltimore’s streets? What role did this style of making-a-name-for-yourself journalism play in the distancing of newspapers from their readers?

It’s easy to cast stones, but as the old saying goes, it’s not very smart to do that from glass houses. What we’re reaping today is partially the fault of public companies more interested in the next quarter’s profits than the role of the press in our culture, but they didn’t invent the Internet or the disruptions that are originating with the people formerly known as the audience. I believe the worship of the fame of Woodward and Bernstein is directly responsible for much of what Simon finds wrong with the news these days.

And the next David Simon may come from YouTube. Would it really be all that bad? We’ll see.

Tom Curley, CEO of the Associated Press, told a fundraising dinner for the Knight-Bagehot Fellowship in New York last night that news editors need to “stop pining for the old world and intensify the leading to the new one.”

Curley said news organizations were partly to blame for the troubles they are experiencing in adapting to the new realities of the news business being wrought by the explosion of Internet use.

“The first thing that has to go is the attitude,” Curley said. “Our institutional arrogance has done more to harm us than any portal.”

Meanwhile, NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams is hosting Saturday Night Live, which has a chorus of “harrumphs” echoing through the halls of Big-J office towers everywhere.

Brian Williams will be great on SNL. It’ll do a world of good for Brian and, I think, the Big J world altogether. Curley’s right. The attitude is the problem.