AR&D Reinventing Local Media

When I first began writing about things new media, I made the choice to do so from the perspective of people instead of technology. This is because I firmly believe that people are driving technology, not the other way around. You can “understand” technology until the cows come home, but that won’t translate to new business until you closely examine what’s taking place with people.

Ironically, it is the tech company folks who understand this, not the media companies. That’s why they’ve been able to come up with concepts like eBay, Amazon, Google, and a whole host of others, while we’ve continued to play the mass marketing game of days gone by.

I’m back to thinking about this today as I prepare to speak to Phyllis Slocum’s class at the University of North Texas here in Denton. My talk is A Media Lesson for Today from 15th Century Europe. It contains a gem that is most fitting as we watch events of contemporary media history unfold.

“The Church” dominated culture at the time, and they did so through protected knowledge. The priests were the keepers of the Word of God — the source code of the culture — and they used their position to essentially govern. When movable type came along, Gutenberg printed the Bible. And when Wycliffe and others followed with common language translations, the ruling class (The Church) said, “The jewel of the elites is in the hands of the laity.”

The power of knowledge was in the hands of everyday people. Anybody could become a priest. Authority was challenged, and the whole world changed.

It’s interesting to note that one of the first reactions of the church was to propose licenses for those who could print the Bible. This sounds vaguely familiar today as the world of the professional press tries to deal with the exploding world of the Personal Media Revolution — pejoratively dubbed “User-Generated Content” by those of us who can’t handle the fact that the “jewel” is once again in the hands of the laity.

We’ve entered an era in human history when empowered people are changing everything. There’s money to be made in this new world, but the ticket for entry requires, among other things, a willingness to let go of the weighty baggage of the world that preceded it.

The jewel isn’t ours anymore, and, like the Bible and the church, maybe it never was. Our future business goals would be well-served by accepting this simple reality.

Oh, and by the way, the media is just the beginning.

(NOTE: I published an essay on this topic a couple of years ago.)

Here is the latest in the on-going series of essays, TV News in a Postmodern World. This one deals with something we all take for granted about the web — links and linking. These, I believe, are the real currency of the web and that one day, like cash, we’ll find a way to buy and sell goods and services using them. Who’ll calculate the value? “The Machine,” of which Kevin Kelly so brilliantly wrote in his 2005 Wired essay, “We Are The Web.”

Links play a key role in the web’s determination of the new metric “influence,” and this will grow in terms of validity and value as the years go by. Those of us in traditional media embrace the concept of inbound links, because we can easily see how they help “drive traffic” or distribute our content. We’re reluctant to play with outbound links, however, and this is to our detriment.

Links, the Currency of The Machine

Here is the latest in my ongoing series of essays, TV News in a Postmodern World.

This picture was taken last week during a visit to the National Press Club in Washington. I was there to meet some great people and make a presentation, but I got the chance to walk around, look at all the marvelous photographs and try and absorb the history of the place.

The Press Club represents the essence of all that professional journalists hold dear. Bathed in the lives and deaths of those who went before, it is a lasting testimony to an institution that finds itself facing significant internal and external pressures today.

On the way home, I began writing this essay, Voyeurism: Journalism’s 21st Century Crisis. As always, I make no claim to special insight or knowledge. This vision is simply my thoughts about where we’ve been, where we are, and where we might be headed. The way I look at it, it’s all there for anybody to see, but the price of a pair of glasses is a willingness to be honest with ourselves.

The people I was with in Washington agreed with me that this is perhaps the most exciting era in the history of communications, but that traditional media companies must “drive their car and fix it at the same time.” That is a significant challenge, and a how-to manual would certainly help. Unfortunately, we’ve got to make a lot of it up as we go along, and our ties to our assumptions, traditions and history might just be a net liability.

I’m in D.C. for a presentation in the morning, but I wanted to take a moment to write about my endless distaste for the phrases “user-generated” or “consumer-generated” content.

Who writes this stuff anyway? Could there be anything more disrespectful to the people formerly known as the audience than to reference them this way? Users? Consumers?

Here’s what bugs me. J.D. Lasica’s wonderful term, the Personal Media Revolution, describes a very real revolution in terms of media. His book, Darknet: Hollywood’s War Against the Digital Generation is one of those must-have books, if you want to understand what’s really going on. And what’s going on is that people — those formerly known as the audience — are taking matters into their own hands. The revolution is a real one, and it’s against, in part, the people who come up with terms like “user-generated” or “consumer-generated” content. They’re not users. They’re not consumers. They’re people!

We make these condescending terms, because we still think of us as an “us” and the audience as “them.” In the Media 2.0 world, we’re all the same, and that’s the key to unlocking creativity in building platforms of information service.

I realize that the modernist marketing world needs to create slots for everything, because logic works that way. But collaboration isn’t a one-way street, and not everybody’s dying to get their stuff to us ’cause we’re the mighty media. Nuh-uh. We’re in this new media thing together.

In the words of the immortal Gordon Borrell, “The deer now have guns.” We’re smart if we respect that and stupid if we don’t.

When I first started writing about culture years ago, it was already clear that technology was serving the masses in what was and is an on-going quest for power over their own lives. There’s a fascinating story about the auto industry in today’s Wall St. Journal that reminded me of this, and it’s a powerful lesson for media companies as well.

To back-up a bit, we’ve entered the postmodern era in Western culture. I use that term, but others call it post-industrial, post-colonial or post-Christian. Regardless of what you call it, it includes a shift away from institutional power to individual power, and technology is its principal weapon. The illustration most used here is of the contemporary doctor, whose authority has dramatically changed as a result of the explosion of information that’s at the fingertips of most patients. The doctor is still the doctor, but her authority has changed.

This change is occurring at every level of every institution that governed the modern (industrial) world, and it’s both a frightening and exciting time to be alive.

The more I explored these changes, the more they became evident, which is why my first postulate is that the disruptive influences attacking media are all about people, not technology.

Fast-forward to the Wall St. Journal article. The theme is that the CEO of AutoNation, the U.S.’s largest chain of auto dealers, is asserting his clout in “suggesting” that Detroit change the way it makes cars. The issue is excess inventory at dealerships — billions of dollars worth of cars that are hard to sell. And why? Because nobody wants them.

At one AutoNation Inc. location in Delray Beach, Fla., scores of “orphan” vehicles have been sitting on the lot for months. One hulking silver Dodge Ram pickup has languished unsold for 237 days, an eternity by automotive standards. The problem? Chrysler equipped the truck with a V6 engine instead of the V8 requested by most buyers of big trucks.

Parked nearby is a red Jeep Grand Cherokee with four-wheel drive, a feature popular in snowy climes but not sunny Florida. One Chrysler Sebring convertible is so loaded with options that its sticker price is $32,0000 — nearly as much as a BMW 3 Series.

“No customer would have asked for these vehicles that way, and they never should have been built that way,” says Mr. (AutoNation CEO Michael J.) Jackson. “This has to change.”

Sounds obvious, but it means completely re-doing the century-old, top-down manufacturing concept originated by Henry Ford, who pumped out millions of nearly identical Model-Ts. “You want a car,” the message was, “you take what we give you.”

The lesson for media is likewise obvious. The consumer is now in charge, folks, and we have no choice but to embrace a culture where customer choice is the mandate. Why is the late news in most markets dying? Because there’s little demand for it anymore. Why is the web growing as a source for news and information? Because it meets the wants and needs of people who are clearly in charge.

These profound cultural changes are like the proverbial frog in the cooking pot, and one day, institutional power will walk out the front door and not recognize anything. “What happened?” will be the hue and cry.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Interestingly, the Wall St. Journal article is behind its vaunted pay wall. Earth to Dow Jones…)

According to a new Pew report, 55% of online teens have created a personal profile online, and 55% have used social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook. This in no way resembles a bulletin, but there is one hugely important piece of information contained in this report: two-thirds of teens who have created a profile say that their profile is not visible to all internet users. In other words, you have to be invited into their network in order to view their profile, something that drives some parents and the Media 1.0 types absolutely bonkers.

It’s information like this, however, that puts the whole social networking phenomenon in perspective. One, it shows that teens are a lot smarter than we give them credit for being. Two, it punches a sizeable hole in the worrywarts’ self-serving (can you say NBC Dateline?) rants that these places are seething hives of treachery and evil. Three, this statistic — more than anything else — screams that teens want and respect privacy, and for that, we should all be grateful.

Steve Rubel gets it wrong when he suggests that this statistic shows teens aren’t “being social.” They’re being very social; they just don’t want outsiders shoving messages — or worse — in their faces (there’s a name for that, and it’s called e-mail). Parents may lament this, but if parents aren’t allowed in, it says volumes more about the parents than it does the teens.

Those of us who work in media must burn into our minds the message from the creator of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, “The Web is more a social creation than a technical one.” I’ve learned this not only by paying attention but also by experience, and instead of looking for the bogeyman all the time, we’d do well to study what’s really taking place behind the walls of the millions of these closed networks of teens. Far from the evil we suspect, life is the thing about social networks — young people supporting each other, sharing their lives with each other, and growing together.

This is textbook postmodernism: people crafting their own “tribes” and turning to each other instead of trusting institutions. And if they do this as teens and young adults, those habits will become lifetime habits, and what does that say about our culture?

Volumes, methinks.

Rather than dismissing Joseph Rago’s rant The Blog Mob, “Written by fools to be read by imbeciles”, I think we ought to pay close attention to what he says. Rago is an assistant editorial features editor at The Wall Street Journal and a writer who likes to use big words (a sesquipedalian, eh?). When I first read of his commentary, I was incensed that such a man would resort to name-calling in ranting against bloggers, but I’ve come away with a very different opinion after reading his piece.

This is why we should always follow the links, but that’s another essay.

I don’t doubt there is condescension in his opinion piece, but his reference is mostly to political blogs, and I’m quite in agreement with him that many of these tend to noise.

The blogs are not as significant as their self-endeared curators would like to think. Journalism requires journalists, who are at least fitfully confronting the digital age. The bloggers, for their part, produce minimal reportage. Instead, they ride along with the MSM like remora fish on the bellies of sharks, picking at the scraps.

He’s right in that there exists in the blogosphere no serious criticism of the blogosphere, at least not that I’ve been able to discover. This in and of itself ought to give us pause. I think his broadbrush treatment of bloggers, however, is idiotic and self-serving and evidence of his own pronouncements for political blogs — that because this type of writing is predictable, it is “excruciatingly boring.”

I also don’t care for his belief that “journalism requires journalists,” for it suggests that only the educated elite qualify for such a title.

But there’s more, and this is why I think it’s so important to “hear” what Rago is saying:

Certainly the MSM, such as it is, collapsed itself. It was once utterly dominant yet made itself vulnerable by playing on its reputed accuracy and disinterest to pursue adversarial agendas. Still, as far from perfect as that system was, it was and is not wholly imperfect. The technology of ink on paper is highly advanced, and has over centuries accumulated a major institutional culture that screens editorially for originality, expertise and seriousness.

Of course, once a technosocial force like the blog is loosed on the world, it does not go away because some find it undesirable. So grieving over the lost establishment is pointless, and kind of sad. But democracy does not work well, so to speak, without checks and balances. And in acceding so easily to the imperatives of the Internet, we’ve allowed decay to pass for progress.

I concur that without checks and balances, we are certainly passing a form of decay off as progress, but any serious blogger knows that his or her audience provides a kind of check and balance that institutional journalism doesn’t know. Take a look, for instance, at the comment by Tom Tucker on my entry below about illegally sold DVDs in Amman. This is my editor, if you will, and I can understand why Rago would be concerned about this with political writers, because they may be more inclined to dismiss criticism that I am.

Like any of its modern equivalents, postmodern institutions will have to also find balance between opposing views, but this will be increasingly the role of an informed citizenry and not that of the few who work for the institutional press. By increasingly rejecting the mainstream media (through viewership and reader declines), this check and balance system is already underway.

I’ve been away from my “beat” for nearly two weeks, and there’s a lot of catching up to do.

According to numbers from Nielsen, only one of the top ten telecasts in 2006 was a scripted program. Here’s the list, thanks to Lost Remote:

Top 10 TV Programs - Single Telecasts - 2006
Rank Telecast Network Date Aired % of Homes in U.S. (Rating)
1 SUPER BOWL XL ABC 2/5/2006 41.6
2 SUPER BOWL POST GAME ABC 2/5/2006 29.0
3 ACADEMY AWARDS ABC 3/5/2006 23.1
4 ROSE BOWL ABC 1/4/2006 21.7
5 GREY’S ANATOMY ABC 2/5/2006 21.0
6 FOX NFC CHAMPIONSHIP FOX 1/22/2006 20.8
7 AMERICAN IDOL-WED FOX 5/24/2006 20.5
8 AMERICAN IDOL-TUES FOX 1/24/2006 19.6
9 AMERICAN IDOL-TUES FOX 1/17/2006 19.3
10 AMERICAN IDOL-TUES FOX 3/21/2006 19.2
Source: Nielsen Media Research

This is noteworthy for two reasons. One, it shows the difficulty of “creating” a blockbuster. Contemporary blockbusters are slipping away, as mass marketing struggles to maintain its grip on media. The Long Tail, with its niche economy, is making it harder — and more expensive — to generate real blockbusters.

(In the news business, Hurricane Katrina was a blockbuster.)

Secondly, the nine shows that weren’t scripted all offered a sense of participating in history, one of the hallmarks of successful live television. Back in 1986, when he was Executive Producer of The Today Show, Steve Friedman told Electronic Media that the show had changed to a “more active, less reactive” program with a “shift in emphasis from a review of the day before to what’s happening now.”

“People are brought in as spectators to history,” he says, explaining, in part, why the show is doing more and more live material.

This “spectators to history” meme revealed a brilliant understanding of not only media but people, and it is a key factor in understanding what’s happening in our world from a postmodern perspective. Witnesses to history, after all, have a hard time buying anybody’s version that contradicts their own witness. Witnesses are participants, and that is something scripted shows are increasingly unable to provide.

So the unintended consequence of Friedman’s “shift” is that it has fueled the cultural shift that I call postmodernism. We are a participatory culture, and our institutions — media included — must alter their course to accommodate it.

Here is the latest in the on-going series of essays that I call “TV News in a Postmodern World.” This is my annual look ahead, and what I see is “2007: The Battle for Local Supremacy.”

You’ll be reading lots of prophecies for the coming year, because that’s what observers do as the holidays approach. There are so many trends upon us that to do the subject justice would require a book, but it would likely be out-of-date in a month. Consequently, I’ve narrowed it down to three big trends that I see and for which we should be prepared — an increasingly intense battle for local ad dollars between local media companies and outside internet pure play companies, the web becoming more video-centric, and the rush by stations to self-reliance and away from third-party web providers.

Of these, the first is clearly the most significant, and I think it has to be accompanied by an awakening by local media companies that the online local community IS a real community. The internet isn’t just a tool used by community people to draw information from, for example, the broadcast world. It’s a community unto itself, and this is one of the secrets to doing business there. The pure-plays know this, and more local media companies are going to need to have this revelation for us to really be competitive.

Doug Rushkoff writes of a fascinating incident that’s sure to spark debate as we continue to evolve to a truly informed citizenry. Here’s the story: A bicycling blogger had an incident with an SUV in New York. The blogger was upset that the guy almost ran him over, so he stopped his bike in front of the guy and demanded an audience with the fellow. He got off his bike, the guy ran it over, the blogger got his license plate, and his commenters eventually outed the guy and even posted an e-mail exchange. Turns out he’s the CEO of a software company.

Go read the original story and especially the comments. It’s pretty amazing stuff.

Rushkoff calls it “Street Justice” and points out that using the internet to “catch” a perp has ramifications that go beyond the deed.

While the mob’s action may not always prove benevolent, the power of a group of committed and angry people - working without top-down leadership - shouldn’t be underestimated, particularly in an age when so much information is available so quickly. This is a markedly different use of media than, say, the exploitation of radio in Rwanda to instigate mobs to round up targets and cut them to pieces. For in the case of broadcast media, it was more a matter of provocation and instigation than here on the Internet, where it looks a lot more like empowering a group of formerly voiceless or powerless individuals to take the collective action they had wanted to, all along.

Still, given the anonymity of the net, a case like this could as easily be fabricated as actual - making the crowd an easy tool for the abuse of an innocent. I’d have to believe that when mistakes like that are inevitably made, however, the crowd will use even greater effort to punish whoever abused their good will, and - if possible - repair the damage done.

A lot of people apparently think this incident is a dangerous use of technology, but I agree with Rushkoff. I agree, because I have faith in people that our institutions lack. Remember, modernism teaches that only rationality and the rule of law can overcome (ignorant) mob rule. These people are hardly ignorant, however, and that’s what’s new in our culture and what poses such remarkable promise for tomorrow.

Meanwhile, watch your step. Empowered people are watching.

Here is the latest in the ongoing series of essays, TV News in a Postmodern World. This essay examines what I believe is a right brain renaissance in our culture — a shift away from counting numbers and making rules to creative thinking and creative expression. When people speak of culture wars, this conflict is very much at the center.

This is an important understanding as we move into the Media 2.0 space, for much of what “works” here doesn’t make a lot of sense. Or perhaps it’s better to say that it makes sense only after it has been up and running for awhile, when we can see what it’s all about. But by then, it’s often too late for us. Google is the classic example. Their purchase of YouTube doesn’t compute with those who think in a purely left brain fashion, but to those who see beyond the numbers, it’s a perfect marriage. Google itself didn’t make a lot of sense as a media company just a few years ago. This is what I mean when I say that looking for left brain understanding in a right brain renaissance will bring us to the table too late.

And there has never been a time when we need creative thinking in local television, yet most creative concepts are shot down, because they can’t stand the test of left brain goal-setting and planning. This is a serious challenge for all management levels in broadcasting.

Right Brain Renaissance