A Broadcaster’s Christmas Carol

December 15th, 2011

We’re ten days out from Christmas, so it’s time, once again, to pull out my 2004 effort at modernizing the Charles Dickens’ classic. Please enjoy…

A Broadcaster’s Christmas Carol

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments » |

Driving traffic (that doesn’t want the ride)

November 14th, 2011

The new Pew study revealing that media companies use Twitter almost exclusively for spreading links to their own content comes as no surprise.

…mainstream news organizations primarily use Twitter to move information and push content to readers. For these organizations, Twitter functions as an RSS feed or headline service for news consumers, with links ideally driving traffic to the organization’s website.

Back when Twitter first came along, I predicted that media companies would immediately become big users, because they could easily see it’s one-to-many functionality. It’s what we know and what we practice. The strategy became:

1. Get a lot of followers
2. Feed them breaking news and weather
3. Feed them promotional content
4. Feed them stories, many stories
5. Put a link in everything

Twitter is a terrific notification system, so it’s hard to blame media companies for this practice, but it points to a serious weakness that media has today: its mission can’t help but come across as hypocritical. What appears to be one of disseminating information and being society’s watchdog is actually a commercial mission to make money. There’s nothing inherently evil about that, but think about it. If influencing public life is the goal, then readership is what matters, and there are many ways to efficiently deliver unbundled content via the Web. When forcing people to read our content within our infrastructure, then it’s clear that monetizing that content is more important than anything else.

Using Twitter this way is easy, but it’s also lazy and sells short a tool for newsgathering and news dissemination. When I talk to clients about Twitter, the stumbling block question is always “How many people do YOU follow?” The answer is simple — none or very few. This means that Twitter is to them, in fact, nothing more than a notification system.

However, some individual employees of news organizations use Twitter in a myriad of ways, including to participate in its unique discussions. These employees seem aware of the new reality that their personal brands are everything in the world that’s ahead, so they participate in social media. These smart people may include links to their work as well, but that isn’t necessarily the sole purpose of their accounts. It gets very tricky for some media companies when they try to control the personal accounts of employees, because they cling to the notification system paradigm and the ethical (and profitable) mechanism of an opinion-less stage.

Twitter is also very useful on mobile device, so the practice of only spreading links — that then lead to a fully-packed website and not an HTML5 landing page — is ultimately self-defeating. This is a different playing field with different rules, and we risk our own relevancy by insisting that it’s best used to drive traffic to our advertiser-fed websites.

And nobody ever asked to be driven to such a place in the first place.

Posted in Technology, Twitter, Unbundled Media, Uncategorized | 3 Comments » |

I want my cap gun for the Fourth

July 4th, 2011

The Fourth of July was my favorite holiday growing up, even moreso than Christmas. Summer in Michigan was pretty special, and the fact that my father was in World War II gave special meaning to all holidays involving the fight for liberty and freedom.

But what I enjoyed most about the holiday isn’t legal for kids in all places today. There are too many rules, because, well, accidents happen, and some parents recognize an easy lawsuit buck when it comes along. Some states still allow it, but those are rare. And then there’s local government ordinances that carve it up even more. Of course I’m talking about fireworks.

The most common for us was caps, little red tape with small bits of gunpowder in bubbles every few centimeters. The tape was made to load into cap guns and allow more realism with our imaginations. I loved caps and cap guns.

But on the Fourth, we’d get these little “bombs” into which you could load many caps. We’d toss them in the air and the weighted end would come down first, collapsing the trigger on impact with the street and making a very loud noise. God, those things were fun. Some stupid kid somewhere got a finger blown off or something and some lawyer made good money by suing the manufacturers with no regard for the idiocy of the kid who didn’t have proper guidance. This has been the course of our society and represents to me why we so badly need tort reform, but I digress.

We could also extend a roll of caps and put them on the ground and throw rocks at them. The endless fun of personal fireworks. Then there were the roman candles, the sparklers and the snakes. The day was one, big ball of fun, and we always had hot dogs and hamburgers, too. What kid growing up in the 50s could ask for anything more?

I especially liked the Fourth, because my birthday was just five days away.

They still make cap guns and sell caps, but they only have regional popularity. They’re available at Wal-Mart. Here’s a page full of them from toyarsenal.com. Sweet. Of course, it’s not very politically correct to link to such a place, but I’m waxing nostalic today, so cut me some slack.

I suppose Al-Qaeda could hit up Wal-Marts around the country and buy up their stock of caps to make a bomb, but really, I think even Wal-Mart employees would find that a little odd.

A Google search produces 323 million entries on the word “caps,” but in the 78 pages they gave me, I could find zero, zip, nada, no entries about the kind of caps I’m talking about. I found baseball caps, golf caps, a lot on the Washington Caps, hubcaps, market caps, Motrin 600 mg caps, graduation caps (and gowns), bottle caps, swim caps, lock caps, caps lock, salary caps, spending caps, a bunch of acronyms like the Chinese American Physicians Society or a Certified Aging-in-Place Specialist, ALL CAPS, lens caps, broadband caps, user caps, data caps, Geek Culture Caps and Beanies, the Polar Ice Cap, even Davy Crockett coonskin caps, but not one about caps or capguns. Not one. I even found an article about how baseball caps and flip-flops increase your risk for skin cancer by not covering your ears or the tops of your feet. This is what we’ve become.

On page 75 of the search, I did find The Complete Blackpowder Handbook, but it deals with ammunition caps, not real, um, caps.

This is, I suppose, one of those posts you can ignore, because I’m just an old guy in love with the way I grew up. Times have changed, you can argue, and probably be right. But I can’t help but think that some of this old stuff, this old way of playing, where risks were involved with imagination, produced a kind of fruit we don’t have today. You can’t fix stupid with laws and lawsuits, and you can’t teach responsibility without letting the students be responsible.

Never mind. I’m just ranting now, and I want to go enjoy some fireworks.

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments » |

Media 2.0 101: separation is the key to media survival

June 22nd, 2011

I’m occasionally told that I bash and complain too much and tend to write about what’s wrong instead of offering advice on what to do. So this week’s Media 2.0 101 is dedicated to simple (but hard) advice.

For media companies to thrive in the 21st Century, we must learn to embrace the word “separation.” We must separate the content we make from its infrastructure. We must produce a form of news-as-a-process and separate that from the finished products we produce. And we must separate our ability to make content from our revenue-growing potential.

INFRASTRUCTURE

If you’ve followed my work at all, you’re familiar with this 2004 quote from then FCC Chairman Michael Powell:

Application separation is the most important paradigm shift in the history of communications, and it will change things forever.”

He was speaking of the ability to separate any communications application from the infrastructure needed to deliver it, and this is the heart of the disruptive technology of the online digital world. Applying this paradigm to thinking about the future reveals realities that we might not otherwise consider, the most important being that the salvation of media is to embrace this rather than fight it.

Media companies make money through the infrastructure, not the content it presents, and that has to change. This is why pay walls don’t (and won’t) work, why banner advertising doesn’t work (nobody sees them), why otherwise intelligent executives would speak of digital dimes versus analog dollars. I love what John Paton of the “Digital First” Journal Register Company (JRC) says about that one: “Start stacking dimes!”

The idea that marketers can force people into anything is archaic, because that’s all done via infrastructure. It’s the eleven other cuts on the CD that allowed record companies to charge up to $20 for a single hit that buyers were actually seeking. It’s the infrastructure of a television station that has turned one-third of prime time into a marketing frenzy, while viewers buy their TiVos to escape the bombardment. It’s the ability to quickly consume unbundled content that birthed RSS, and its language, XML, was created to separate content from formatting, which allows us to “mix” content from different places, such as Flickr Maps. The point is that separation is where everything’s going, except perhaps us.

The longer we cling to our infrastructure as “the hope,” the farther from reality we get, the fewer are our options, and the greater the likelihood of our collapse. The more we embrace the unbundled universe, the more in sync we are with where things are heading, which will allow us to begin exploring revenue options (about which I’ve written many times). We really don’t have a choice in this.

NEWS-AS-A-PROCESS

One of the clearest trends for the news industry is a dramatic shift from finished products, which are tied to infrastructures, to the rapidly flowing stream of real time news and information. Twitter and other text services, RSS, social media status updates and text messaging have tipped the news business upside down. Curating all those streams has become the new challenge and doing so in real time.Traditional media companies are all participating in this, but all too often, we do so by insisting that finished news stories not only belong in the stream but should take precedence over everything else. This is simply false, and it badly misinterprets what’s taking place, because we want/need people to come to our infrastructures (see above). We must abandon that, but it’s not an either/or, all-or-nothing thing. It’s a simple matter of separation. We need two emphases during the day, which is the real prime time for real time news. We can easily create our own streams — and add to the bigger stream — by producing and distributing an unbundled form of news-as-a-process. At AR&D, we call this “Continuous News,” and the people formerly known as the audience LOVES it.

This doesn’t mean giving up our finished products, so the separation is as much in our minds as it is in practical application form. There’s no reason whatsoever we can’t produce both, and that’s what I think we “should” do as part of our all-encompassing Media 2.0 strategy. Paton would call this operating as “Digital First,” which has been badly misinterpreted by those who feel their finished product ox is being gored.

As we’re developing and honing our skills at news in real time, we’ll be forced into reinventing our finished products as well, and that will be refreshing. In a world where people already know the basics of what’s going on, finished “news” needs a new name and new concepts. The story and the article will still be important, but they must take on a different mission and function. What is that? We’re working on it, but so should everybody else. Why? Because we’ll never bring people back doing the thing that’s chasing them away.

If you’ll forgive the comparison, lipstick on a pig is still a pig.

REVENUE OPPORTUNITIES

This is both the biggest problem and the biggest opportunity for media companies, and it’s what I write about most. Making money in the new world BEGINS with separating ourselves from the notion that the only way we can do so is by attaching ads to or interrupting the content we make. It is through this mistaken assumption that our real competitors today are the Googles and Groupons of the world.The television stations and newspapers of the world cannot allow themselves to see past the limits of their “industries,” which is the textbook “Innovator’s Dilemma.” It’s why there is so much time, energy and resources devoted to being the best TV station we can be online or the best newspaper we can be online. It’s why we can only go so far in embracing the disruption of Jay Rosen’s “Great Horizontal.” Our responses completely and utterly and totally miss the point. When we copy what one of our offline competitors does, we dig ourselves deeper in the hole of irrelevance, because none of it matters. None of it!

That’s because the advertising industry — of which we are essential parts — is itself in disruption by the same forces that are disrupting media content. In the end, it’s not about content; it’s entirely about advertising, and we missed “search” and missed “deals” and will miss anything else that comes along, because we’re convinced we’re really in the content “business.”

What “should” we do? Wake up! Innovate. Invest. Local commerce still needs enabling, which is the raison d’être of advertising anyway. This is where the venture capital money is going. It’s a problem that needs solving, and that’s what VCs do with their money. Us? We try to be better TV stations or newspapers. Do you see the problem?

To get on this wavelength, this “vibe,” we need to separate our money-making drive from the creation of content. Oh, we can and should continue to make money that way, but it just cannot sustain us forever. It. Is. Impossible.

This sounds foolish and “out there” to most media managers, but it is precisely where we need to be to maintain relevance in any form or fashion tomorrow.

So let’s review. Today’s “what to do” instead of “bash and complain” is simple (but hard): separate! Separate content from infrastructure. Separate news-as-a-process from finished-product-news. Separate both from revenue plays. If you need the practical steps for each or want to know how to apply each of these to your business, I’m more than happy to talk to you and your team about it.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments » |

Sports indicative of bigger problems in the press

May 9th, 2011

This may seem a bit off-topic, but it’s not really.

Karen, Tory and I went to the Mavericks-Lakers game on Mother’s Day, and a great time was had by all. It was historic on many levels, and I especially enjoyed watching the Mavericks systematically dismantle the former champs. We’re not big Kobe fans in my house, so the victory was doubly enjoyable.

But at least Kobe gave credit where credit was due. The same cannot be said for the national sports press. Take a look at the bottom of the picture below. This is ESPN’s analysis Monday morning. Read the story headlines; they’re ALL about the Lakers.

• Transition can be tough
• Phil deserved better
• Loss begs questions
• Classless acts

It has been this way since the series began. Nearly every story from a national sportswriter came from a Lakers’ perspective. Only viewers knew that Dallas won the series, in a sweep no less. To the sports writers, Los Angeles lost it. There’s a huge difference.

I even listened to ESPN “NBA analyst” Ric Bucher on Mike & Mike this morning dismiss the Mavericks as a favorite to win now, saying that their victory was all about beating the Lakers and not a reflection of how good they really are.

Folks, whether you’re a basketball fan or not, this is simply unacceptable poppycock from people who obviously don’t even know the sport. The national basketball press has been mesmerized by the Los Angeles Lakers. According to the narrative, they’re the best that ever was and the expectation is that the only team on the planet that can legitimately beat the Lakers is — wait for it — the Los Angeles Lakers.

Hearing the babbling from all of these folks and reading it online, I know one thing for certain: not one of these people has ever taken the time to get to know the Dallas Mavericks. None of us fans were in the least bit surprised that the Mavs beat the Lakers, although the sweep wasn’t “expected.” After they stole the first game in L. A., we started thinking about it, though, and when we took the second game, we actually started talking about it.

Our team is a VERY gifted and deep team with a toughness not really known by these guys (and gals). And the most impressive thing — which got very little, if any, discussion — is that two of our stars didn’t even play. Caron Butler is our number two guy, and he’s been injured since January. Rodrigue Beaubois has been out with an injured foot. At full strength, we are a juggernaut, and that FACT was set aside by how the Lakers beat themselves.

Sports journalism is just like any other form of pack journalism. Everybody agrees on the narrative and presses on from there. There are no doubt some interesting stories out of the Lakers from this series, but they are not the only ones. It’s not so much anger-inducing as it is pathetic, and it’s THE essential problem with all of the contemporary press.

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments » |

Get your bloody hands off our spectrum!

April 29th, 2011

Dear President Obama,

I wanted to take a moment this morning to give you a bit of advice in your open attempts to steal take spectrum from broadcasting and give it to the Telcos for your broadband plan.

We had a bunch of tornados in the South this week, including some enormous ones in Alabama. Brian Stelter of the New York Times has done an excellent job of covering the local on-air coverage of the storms, so you can see the role that broadcasters played in protecting lives. Many, many reports have come in that reveal lives saved by people watching television meteorologists or listening to the radio. In one particularly vivid account, a group of young people were on their way to Milo’s in Tuscaloosa (THE local hangout – best Sweet Tea in the country) when television broadcasts alerted them to the danger. They stayed home. Milo’s was destroyed.

Here’s a paragraph that Brian wrote:

After the storm, hundreds of viewers wrote on Mr. Spann’s (James Spann, WBMA-TV) Facebook page, where he has 55,000 connections, to thank him for the hours of nonstop live coverage. One woman wrote, “I have no doubt that you saved too many lives to count.”

So you see, Mr. President, you’ve got a problem on your hands. You want that spectrum, but you’re not about to be the leader who led to broadcasting’s downfall, are you? Sure, Twitter was filled with accounts, too, but that’s a very long way from what a simple broadcast signal can do in such an emergency. And let me get this straight, you want us to trust the Telcos in an emergency? Anybody who has AT&T as a cell provider knows the foolishness of that thought.

Now it’s true that some of the live pictures of the twisters came via Internet connections — and those were helpful in getting people to pay attention — but it took the work of a central organization to put everything together and make sense for everybody else. This is not going to be replaced quickly, and you flirt with disaster every time you hint through actions that broadcasting should be treated as second class.

So think twice before you move in where you don’t really belong. Think of the consequences for the mere suggestion that we could live without this.

Thanks for listening,

Terry

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments » |

How I beat the New York Times’ paywall

April 26th, 2011

A big part of my study time is following links from my RSS reader. You can say what you want about Twitter, but I still find RSS to be the best way to keep track of what people are writing in my beat. A lot of those links go to the New York Times.

The Times, however, has introduced its paywall, and part of the deal is you get access to 20 articles for free per month. After that, you’re blocked and need to pay up. The exceptions are links from social media giants Twitter and Facebook. The reason is simple: the Times wants no part of losing audience for advertisers, which is what has happened with other paywall experiments.

But I’ve thought the same exception should apply to RSS, and I’ve complained about it via Twitter.

Today, I ran into my first blocked story, so I simply tweeted the URL of the article:

That link allowed me past the paywall.

This is silly, but it shows how easily the Times wall can be breached. Frankly, it makes sense that the paper’s paywall should allow inbound links from anywhere, but that’s probably impractical. Why have a paywall then, right?

Right.

Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments » |

The Internet is about humanity

April 25th, 2011

I’m so glad that Kevin Kelly is back to blogging regularly via The Technium. Today’s entry is worth a comment. Kevin writes of what it means for kids to be growing up in the digital age and concludes:

“…the internet is not about computers or devices; it is something mythic, something much larger; it is about humanity.”

This is so true, but there’s one group that doesn’t seem to understand — media companies. To us, the Internet is all about technology, the technology to better enable us to do our job. It’s so much bigger than that, people. It’s a beat unto itself, and one that’s damned compelling, too.

Do you have anybody assigned to this beat? I’ll bet not.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments » |

An anniversary: what I’ve learned about loss

April 25th, 2011

Five years ago today, my world was changed forever when I awoke to find my precious wife Allie dead on the bathroom floor. Mine wasn’t the only world altered, because Alicia had a big family and was well-known in North Alabama and South Central Tennessee as a TV news reporter for WAAY-TV in Huntsville. That’s where we first met in the 90s.

We’d only been together for two and a half years and had been married for just 18 months when she passed. She was just 41 years old. She died of an accidental drug overdose, primarily dextromethorphan, the ingredient in most over-the-counter cough medicines. I wasn’t aware that a small percentage of the caucasian population can’t metabolize dex properly, and that it can build up in your system and reach toxic levels. The autopsy revealed she had twice the lethal level of dex in her bloodstream. She went to the toilet, fell asleep, lapsed into a coma, and died peacefully.

Those who remember will recall the outpouring of love that followed that day via a blog entry where I let people know what was going on. Over 250 comments followed, from my close friends to those I barely knew. Alicia was a public figure, and everybody loved her. The Web held me up during those hours. You held me up during those hours.

Those close to me know it broke my heart, but I had some excellent counseling, mature friends and a strong sense that she would want me to move on. At her aunt’s home the following day, I was outside crying and begging God for answers and asking for a sign that everything was going to be okay. She was my rock in troubled times, and I felt so alone. I went into the dining room by myself and sat in a recliner, when a young niece that I’d never even spoken to before came into the room, climbed up in my lap and whispered in my ear, “It’s going to be okay.”

A month later, Jerry Gumbert came to see me in Nashville, bought my company, and moved me to Dallas to become a part of AR&D. Allie would’ve approved, but I was sad that she never got to witness the fruit of our sacrifice together. There were many times when we were together that we didn’t know where our next income was coming from, but I kept writing. She believed in me — in the vision I had — and that made us strong together.

I had a tombstone custom made that included the words we spoke together before closing our eyes at night, “He gives to His beloved sleep.”

So now it has been five years, and much has changed. The pain has slowly evolved into warm memories. I’ll always miss her, because she was my best friend, one of a kind, but I don’t have that deep emptiness that dominated my life in the months immediately following her death. I’ve learned about grieving, and I’m a lot more sensitive when a friend experiences a loss, any loss. I learned that families can turn on each other in the pain of grieving, and I had to bear the awful accusations that I failed to “protect” her and therefore was somehow responsible for her death.

Dragonflies were a special symbol for us, and occasionally, I’ll find myself talking to a hovering dragonfly as if it was her. I think that’s okay.

One thing I’ve learned about loss is that the turning of life’s pages doesn’t have to mean shutting down the love you had for the one who has gone. That’s a biggie, for without trying to enforce an abrupt end to loving, life has a way of smoothing out the edges and evolving things over time. That’s my most important advice to anyone who has experienced a great loss. Don’t stop loving. It’s unnatural.

I’ve learned to laugh again and let go, and for that I’m very grateful. A counselor told me that most people can turn the page but few really let go. I’ve fallen in love again and remarried, and I’m very, very happy with Karen. We are very much in love, and my world is complete with her. I miss every moment I’m away from her, and I think Allie is just fine with that, too. My counselor also told me that our loved ones want the best for us, and that should be reflected in our behavior after they’re gone. Allie would be upset if I’d shriveled up and pined for her the rest of my days. That’s such a romantic notion, but life is for the living,

I’ve learned other things, too. Like how precious and short life is and that to live in the here and now is where Life exists. I still have my moments, but for the most part, I’m pretty mellow and happy. Life gives us that, if we’ll but receive it. I don’t take any moment for granted, because it could be your last altogether or the last with the love of your life. I’m so grateful that Allie and I had the kind of relationship where we wouldn’t allow anger before we went to sleep. The last thing she said to me in this life was, “I love you.” I’m lucky. Almost no one gets that.

And so I’m thinking about her and going through old memories, those I store in a box in the closet and in that special room in my heart. And I believe that wherever she is, she knows it.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment » |

eBook sales signal (more) change

April 16th, 2011

Karen and I drove past the local Blockbuster store this week and noted the “going out of business” sign. We talked for awhile about renting tapes in the heyday of renting tapes, about the cleverness of timing your visit to intercept the new releases as they were being returned, and the sheer marvel of all of those choices in one place. Then came DVDs, kiosks, cable VOD and Netflix. Empowered consumers continue to press about price, convenience and sharing. Change is the new normal.

And it’s not that we need reminders of that, but this week’s news (here and here) that eBook sales have, for the first time, surpassed paper book sales is both stunning and foreboding (for any traditional form of media). According to The Association of American Publishers (AAP), February e-book sales tripled from a year ago to $90.3 million, making it the most popular format for books in the US. A lot of people got readers for Christmas and are signalling approval by continuing to buy. It’s cheaper and more convenient.

After completely disrupting music and video, technology has another one on its consumer-driven gun belt. The AAP is spinning this news to make it seem positive, but eBooks are making life miserable for the old way of doing things and all the jobs that make up the industry. Where it goes is anybody’s guess, but you can bet it won’t be a painless transition. For example, eBooks undercut the basic value proposition of book stores. Nobody can carry EVERY book, but the Web can. I can recall recently going to Barnes & Noble looking for a specific title. They didn’t have it but offered to order it for me. Why would I want to do that? If it’s a gift, I can order it myself (and get it quicker). If it’s for me, the Kindle version will be there in minutes and cost less. The future of the book store seems a little like the Blockbuster down the street. Don’t think so? Be careful.

Order is not one of my favorite words, because it’s almost always there to benefit the one defining the term. Chaos isn’t pejorative when it levels the playing field for everybody, which is why it’s feared mostly by those who benefit from order. Today’s chaos, however, is tomorrow’s order, although the adjustment period of such massive cultural shifts is always longer than the status quo wants. It’s just long enough to change things forever.

The news about eBooks should not be lightly dismissed. It’s permanent and a continuing reminder that we’re in the most remarkable era in communications history.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment » |