Here are my notes for my talk to the TEDxNYed gathering this past weekend. I used the opportunity of a TED event to question the TED format, especially in relation to education, where — as in media — we must move past the one-way lecture to collaboration. I feared I’d get tomatoes — organic — thrown at me at the first line, but I got laugh and so everything we OK from there. The video won’t be up for a week or two so I’ll share my notes. It’s not word-for-word what I delivered, but it’s close….
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This is bullshit.
Why should you be sitting there listening to me? To paraphrase Dan Gillmor, you know more than I do. Will Richardson should be up here instead of me. And to paraphrase Jay Rosen, you should be the people formerly known as the audience.
But right now, you’re the audience and I’m lecturing.
That’s bullshit.
What does this remind of us of? The classroom, of course, and the entire structure of an educational system built for the industrial age, turning out students all the same, convincing them that there is one right answer — and that answer springs from the lecturn. If they veer from it they’re wrong; they fail.
What else does this remind us of? Media, old media: one-way, one-size-fits-all. The public doesn’t decide what’s news and what’s right. The journalist-as-speaker does.
But we must question this very form. We must enable students to question the form.
I, too, like lots of TED talks. But having said that….
During the latest meeting of Mothership TED, I tweeted that I didn’t think I had ever seen any TEDster tweet anything negative about a talk given there, so enthralled are they all for being there, I suppose. I asked whether they were given soma in their shwag bags.
But then, blessed irony, a disparaging tweet came from none other than TED’s curator, dean, editor, boss, Chris Anderson. Sarah Silverman had said something that caused such a kerfuffle Anderson apologized and then apologized for the apology, so flummoxed was he by someone coming into the ivory tower of TED to shake things up with words.
When I tweeted about this, trying to find out what Silverman had said, and daring to question the adoration TEDsters have for TED, one of its acolytes complained about my questioning the wonders of TED. She explained that TED gave her “validation.”
Validation.
Good God, that’s the last thing we should want. We should want questions, challenges, discussion, debate, collaboration, quests for understanding and solutions. Has the internet taught us any less?
But that is what education and media do: they validate.
They also repeat. In news, I have argued that we can no longer afford to repeat the commodified news the public already knows because we want to tell the story under our byline, exuding our ego; we must, instead, add unique value.
The same can be said of the academic lecture. Does it still make sense for countless teachers to rewrite the same essential lecture about, say, capillary action? Used to be, they had to. But not now, not since open curricula and YouTube. Just as journalists must become more curator than creator, so must educators.
A few years ago, I had this conversation with Bob Kerrey at the New School. He asked what he could do to compete with brilliant lectures now online at MIT. I said don’t complete, complement. I imagined a virtual Oxford based on a system of lecturers and tutors. Maybe the New School should curate the best lectures on capillary action from MIT and Stanford or a brilliant teacher who explains it well even if not from a big-school brand; that could be anyone in YouTube U. And then the New School adds value by tutoring: explaining, answering, probing, enabling.
The lecture does have its place to impart knowledge and get us to a shared starting point. But it’s not the be-all-and-end-all of education – or journalism. Now the shared lecture is a way to find efficiency in ending repetition, to make the best use of the precious teaching resource we have, to highlight and support the best. I’ll give the same advice to the academy that I give to news media: Do what you do best and link to the rest.
I still haven’t moved past the lecture and teacher as starting point. I also think we must make the students the starting point.
At a Carnegie event at the Paley Center a few weeks ago, I moderated a panel on teaching entrepreneurial journalism and it was only at the end of the session that I realized what I should have done: start with the room, not the stage. I asked the students in the room what they wished their schools were teaching them. It was a great list: practical yet visionary.
I tell media that they must become collaborative, because the public knows much, because people want to create, not just consume, because collaboration is a way to expand news, because it is a way to save expenses. I argue that news is a process, not a product. Indeed, I say that communities can now share information freely – the marginal cost of their news is zero. We in journalism should ask where we can add value. But note that that in this new ecosystem, the news doesn’t start with us. It starts with the community.
I’ve been telling companies that they need to move customers up the design chain. On a plane this week, I sat next to a manufacturer of briefcases last week and asked whether, say, TechCrunch could get road warriors to design the ultimate laptop bag for them, would he build it? Of course, he would.
So we need to move students up the education chain. They don’t always know what they need to know, but why don’t we start by finding out? Instead of giving tests to find out what they’ve learned, we should test to find out what they don’t know. Their wrong answers aren’t failures, they are needs and opportunities.
But the problem is that we start at the end, at what we think students should learn, prescribing and preordaining the outcome: We have the list of right answers. We tell them our answers before they’ve asked the questions. We drill them and test them and tell them they’ve failed if they don’t regurgitate back our lectures as lessons learned. That is a system built for the industrial age, for the assembly line, stamping out everything the same: students as widgets, all the same.
But we are no longer in the industrial age. We are in the Google age. Hear Jonathan Rosenberg, Google’s head of product management, who advised students in a blog post. Google, he said, is looking for “non-routine problem-solving skills.” The routine way to solve the problem of misspelling is, of course, the dictionary. The non-routine way is to listen to all the mistake and corrections we make and feed that back to us in the miraculous, “Did you mean?”
“In the real world,” he said, “the tests are all open book, and your success is inexorably determined by the lessons you glean from the free market.”
One more from him: “It’s easy to educate for the routine, and hard to educate for the novel.” Google sprung from seeing the novel. Is our educational system preparing students to work for or create Googles? Googles don’t come from lectures.
So if not the lecture hall, what’s the model? I mentioned one: the distributed Oxford: lectures here, teaching there.
Once you’re distributed, then one has to ask, why have a university? Why have a school? Why have a newspaper? Why have a place or a thing? Perhaps, like a new news organization, the tasks shift from creating and controlling content and managing scarcity to curating people and content and enabling an abundance of students and teachers and of knowledge: a world whether anyone can teach and everyone will learn. We must stop selling scarce chairs in lecture halls and thinking that is our value.
We must stop our culture of standardized testing and standardized teaching. Fuck the SATs.* In the Google age, what is the point of teaching memorization?
We must stop looking at education as a product – in which we turn out every student giving the same answer – to a process, in which every student looks for new answers. Life is a beta.
Why shouldn’t every university – every school – copy Google’s 20% rule, encouraging and enabling creation and experimentation, every student expected to make a book or an opera or an algorithm or a company. Rather than showing our diplomas, shouldn’t we show our portfolios of work as a far better expression of our thinking and capability? The school becomes not a factory but an incubator.
There’s another model for an alternative to the lecture and it’s Dave Winer’s view of the unconference. At the first Bloggercon, Dave had me running a panel on politics and when I said something about “my panel,” he jumped down my throat, as only Dave can. “There is no panel,” he decreed. “The room is the panel.” Ding. It was in the moment that I learned to moderate events, including those in my classroom, by drawing out the conversation and knowledge of the wise crowd in the room.
So you might ask why I didn’t do that here today. I could blame the form; didn’t want to break the form. But we all know there’s another reason:
My first bit of advice to pissed-off Cablevision customers in New York — who’ve just lost WABC right before the Oscars — I do recommend that you switch to Verizon Fios. You won’t get it in time. It’s not perfect. But for me, it has been a helluva lot better than Cablevision: more channels, better service, better broadband, good phone service, impressive installation. Switch. It will feel good. It will feel just. I spent years sparring with Cablevision to get what I paid for and I’m glad to be rid of them.
This doesn’t mean I side with ABC in this fight. They — like Fox before them — are trying to get us to pay for free TV channels. This was a point I wanted to make at last week’s FCC workshop on the future of media: It’s no longer true that broadcast channels are free. Fewer than 13% of Americans get broadcast channels over the air; the rest of us have to pay for cable or satellite to get access and now these channels — which got our spectrum for free — are trying to charge us yet more.
Who’s fighting for us? Not the FCC.
But I think that as these fees are fought over and granted to broadcast channels and passed on to viewers — adding up to a likely $72 for New York’s half-a-dozen commercial channels — then I still think that there will be a consumer revolt and the FCC will have the cause it seems to have wanted to require a la carte pricing for cable.
Then both broadcasters and cable operators and their parent companies will get their just desserts. I will not pay for 90 percent of the channels I am forced to pay for now. That will reduce revenue to cable. It will mean that many channels will no longer be subsidized. It will kill marginal channels.
And that will open the door for internet programming. More and more TVs will be directly connected to the internet. Program creators will be able to break free of the control of cable MSOs. We’ll be watching more programming on our mobile devices and pads and computers. Fragmentation? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
I would invest in low-cost production of, say, home and food programs that can reach sufficient critical mass online. I’d invest in niche programming — see: TWiT et al — that can reach a very low level of critical mass and sell highly targeted advertising. I would not invest in cable companies or big, old TV companies. They’re just trying to milk the cash cow before she keels over.
Here’s audio of an appearance on The Takeaway on public radio this morning about the American Cancer Society’s new prostate (PSA) screening guidelines, telling doctors to discuss the test and its implications first — the moral equivalent of the breast-cancer-screening shift of a few months ago. I disagree. As the n in a hundred whose cancer was caught by screening, I caution that the interest of the individual are not aligned with the interests of the aggregate — that is, it may not seem worth it to statisticians to save just one more life … unless that life is yours. For those coming in because of the show, my story is here.
Warren Buffett — owner of one newspaper and director of another — complains in his letter to shareholders (PDF) about his quote being mangled and misused by sound-bite journalism:
Last year we saw, in one instance, how sound-bite reporting can go wrong. Among the 12,830 words in the annual letter was this sentence: “We are certain, for example, that the economy will be in shambles throughout 2009 – and probably well beyond – but that conclusion does not tell us whether the market will rise or fall.” Many news organizations reported – indeed, blared – the first part of the sentence while making no mention whatsoever of its ending. I regard this as terrible journalism: Misinformed readers or viewers may well have thought that Charlie and I were forecasting bad things for the stock market, though we had not only in that sentence, but also elsewhere, made it clear we weren’t predicting the market at all. Any investors who were misled by the sensationalists paid a big price: The Dow closed the day of the letter at 7,063 and finished the year at 10,428.
Given a few experiences we’ve had like that, you can understand why I prefer that our communications with you remain as direct and unabridged as possible.
I am in Tampa waiting to fly back home to New Jersey and, thanks to the snowicane but rather than sitting in the usual information vacuum to which airlines subject us, I am watching as Continental shows us the status of the flights that were supposed to bring our jet in from LA to Cleveland to Newark to Tampa. I saw the flight to Cleveland canceled, then the one to Newark canceled, and I figured we were doomed when I saw the aircraft number for my flight erased. But then I saw us assigned a new jet, one that flew into Tampa from Houston last night.
That’s simply amazing. Continental is practicing operational transparency. It opened up information is already has to us, the customers, so we can be informed and empowered. This way, I’m not cursing the airline and its employees. I’m well aware that our flight might be canceled and that’s entirely out of Continental’s control, so I wouldn’t blame them. But every time this has happened in the past, I hated being in the dark; I hated being lied to by airlines; I simply want more information. And now an airline is giving it to me. Bravo for Continental.
What information does your company have that you can and should share with your customers?
The essence of Google’s value is that — though it’s opaque about its algorithms and ad splits — it turns around the information it gathers from us and feeds it back to us (that is, our aggregate links and clicks inform its search results for everyone). OpenTable lets us know when tables are open in restaurants so we can plan on our own. In What Would Google Do? I suggest that a Googley restaurant should share data on how many people order each dish on a menu so we can use that to choose what we want. A manufacturer should expose the provenance of the component parts that go into its products. A newspaper should footnote its work so we can know the provenance of its information and we can judge the sources. A store could reveal its inventory so we know there’s only one left (better hurry). I say we should expect doctors and hospitals to reveal data about the patients they treat. What else?
Friend Michael Rosenblum forwarded word that the Star-Ledger in New Jersey was just nominated for seven local Emmys for its video work. Bravo for my old friends there and for Rosenblum, who trained them .
I remember when my old colleague Jim Willse, then editor of the Ledger, told me he wanted to get the paper into video and I begged him not to do what other papers had done: turn out pale copies and unintentional parodies of local TV news, something that deserves no emulation. I introduced him to Rosenblum, who came in an politely toured the TV studio the paper had just built and then said, “This is bullshit.” Nobody wants to see fake TV, he said. The newsroom is the story; it’s where the action is. So he had them set up cameras in the newsroom and he trained staffers to make video stories with a small camera and a Mac. I’ve watched my own students learn the Rosenblum Method and come out empowered, like the Ledger’s old paper people. Yes, anyone can make TV.
If I had it to do over again, I’d do one thing differently: bring in ad people to train them so they would understand the power of making TV and would sell it to advertisers and make video for them: so they, too, would think video.
Meredith, the magazine publisher, is taking on functions of ad agencies, as the Wall Street Journal describes in detail today. It’s a smart move by Meredith and it’s inevitable as we shift from selling scarcity to selling service to marketers. Meredith is taking on the functions of a creative agency. In a networked media ecosystem, I also think that media companies will take on the functions of the media-buying side.
See also this piece arguing that a company should invest not in marketing but in its relationships with customers.
Just two anecdotes in the ongoing shift that will hit the ad industry just the way it has hit media.
(Disclosure: Meredith brought me to Iowa to talk about WWGD? last year.)
Demand Media just announced the formation of an advisory board; Staci Kramer has the details at PaidContent. I was invited to join but decided to decline. I’ve been saying a lotabout Demand — sometimes disagreeing with the common and negative perception that it is a content farm, arguing that we should not miss the key insights and lessons in Demand’s model (first, finding new ways to listen to what readers and the market want and letting that be its assignments and second, cutting content creation into its constituent elements and creating a market for creation to find new efficiencies).
I advise and have various relationships with media companies, which I disclose on my about page so you can judge accordingly what I say about them and about their sectors. Demand is uniquely controversial right now and so I decided to decline its invitation to advise and also thought I should disclose that here once it made its announcement. I will, of course, continue to write about Demand et al, positively and negatively, and I will continue to give them advice in public (such as this post) but will receive no remuneration from Demand. So you should read no particular statement into my decision to decline; still, I thought you should know.
Italy is endangering the web. It convicted three Google executives for privacy violations for a video that was posted on YouTube Google Video that Google took down when it received a complaint. By holding Google liable for the actions of a user, the Italian court is in essence requiring Google and every other web site to review and vet everything anyone puts online. The practical implication of that, of course, is that no one will let anyone put anything online because the risk is too great. I wouldn’t let you post anything here. My ISP wouldn’t let me post anything on its servers. Google wouldn’t let me post anything on it’s services. And that kills the internet.
In America, we have a First Amendment for the web called Section 230, which every nation needs. Section 230 say, “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” It gives a provider safe haven to take down content that violates laws without finding the provider liable. The American Congress and courts knew — with impressive foresight — that such protection was necessary to protect discussion and free speech online. Of course, the interpretation of the law is an evolving beast, but the principle is vital.
It attacks the very principles of freedom on which the Internet is built. Common sense dictates that only the person who films and uploads a video to a hosting platform could take the steps necessary to protect the privacy and obtain the consent of the people they are filming. European Union law was drafted specifically to give hosting providers a safe harbor from liability so long as they remove illegal content once they are notified of its existence. The belief, rightly in our opinion, was that a notice and take down regime of this kind would help creativity flourish and support free speech while protecting personal privacy. If that principle is swept aside and sites like Blogger, YouTube and indeed every social network and any community bulletin board, are held responsible for vetting every single piece of content that is uploaded to them — every piece of text, every photo, every file, every video — then the Web as we know it will cease to exist, and many of the economic, social, political and technological benefits it brings could disappear.
In the global, interconnected web, we live in constant danger of the lowest common denominator, of one court, legislature, or regime opening up liability that affects risk and behavior everywhere — like the U.K’s libel tourism, which enables miscreants to sue publishers if only one person saw the publication in the U.K.
This is why we need a set of principles protecting our freedom of speech on the web: not a law, not a treaty, nothing from government — see John Perry Barlow’s declaration of independence for cyberspace. In the Google/China situation — in which Google acted as a quasi-state to protect rights (albeit belatedly) according to its principles — Rebecca MacKinnon argues for a constitution for cyberspace but I worry that it would become overloaded with clauses and conditions. In American historical terms, I say we already have a Declaration of Independence and I’d skip over the Constitution to get a Bill of RIghts that begins with its First Amendment: governments shall make no law no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble. Start there.
Here’s another in an occasional series of posts to that try to examine, explain, and illustrate the new structure of media. This one looks at how we discover content now.
Back in the day, a decade (to 50 decades) ago, we discovered media — news, information, or service — through brands: We went and bought the newspaper or magazine or turned on a channel on its schedule. That behavior and expectation was brought to the internet: Brands built sites and expected us to come to them.
Now there are other spheres of discovery — new spheres that are shifting in importance, effectiveness, and share. I believe they will overlap more and more to provide better — that is, more relevant, timely, and authoritative — means of discovery. These evolving spheres also change the relationships of creators and customers and the fundamental economics of media.
Start with brands. They decide what we want or should want and they succeed or fail based on that judgment. (They also succeeded because they controlled distribution and access.) They create the content and bear the risk. They depend on critical mass and economies of scale. One-way, one-size-fits-all, fleeting — these are the characteristics of branded media. Brands are disrupted by the spheres that follow, which disaggregate and disintermediate them, challenge their authority, compete on much lower cost bases (thanks to automation and collaboration), and provide better targeting and relevance (thanks to new means of gathering and analyzing data).
Next came search. Fundamental to search’s impact is that it shifted media from supply side to demand side: We, the people formerly known as the audience, initiate the sequence of a media transaction. In branded media, creators, editors, and producers decided what they’d give us and then we bought or didn’t. In search, we begin with our needs and curiosities. That theme of a reversed sequence carries through to other spheres. Search also provided the means to intuit intent and improve relevance, which is what feeds its higher value. Once a large universe of content became available to us all, value shifted from creator to curator. Content wasn’t scarce; organization was. The definition of scale was also upended: small could now succeed — highly specialized media can find its highly targeted public — but big became bigger than ever (see: Google). Search also commodified brands; it didn’t matter so much where we found an answer so long as we could search for it.
Algorithms — Google News or Daylife (where I’m a partner) — also meet the organizational challenge of abundant content and they tackle the challenge of timeliness. For search to infer content’s relevance, it must gather data from our use — that was Google’s key insight — but that won’t work for news, whose value is perishable. So algorithmic aggregators use other signals — source, content analysis, timing, location, association — to cluster and present coverage in a nest of relevance. These algorithms enable content to coalesce into stories and topics that search will find because it gains depth and attracts links and clicks. Algorithmic aggregators exposed a key conflict in old v. new media worldviews: The old-media view is that aggregators extract value from content by displaying it; the new-media view is that they add value by creating audiences and causing links — this is the essence of the misunderstanding of the link economy.
Thanks to new tools — Twitter, Facebook, Buzz — human linksare exploding as a means of discovery, which gives lie to the old-media complaints of Rupert Murdoch et al that aggregators are stealing their content. When your own readers recommend and link to your content, is that stealing? Do you want to turn those people away and call them worthless? Facebook, according to Hitwise, is the fourth largest referrer of audience to media. Bit.ly alone causes two billion clicks a month, double Google News’ impact. Soon Buzz will be causing many links (teaching Google what’s hot and relevant, which is a key reason to start the service). And, of course, bloggers have shown the way as curators. Thanks to our newer, easier tools that enable links, humans are becoming a huge force in content discovery, reducing search’s and algorithms’ share and dominance.
Now we need to better understand the quality of those links and linkers. Clay Shirky cravesalgorithmic authority. Azeem Azhar is one of many entrepreneurs trying to systematize the annointing of more authoritative tweeters (read: linkers) at Viewsflow. On the latest This Week in Google, Google’s Matt Cutts talked about efforts to find more signals of quality so it can send us not to the crops of lowest-cost content farms but instead to original work. (The good news is that quality will out.) In the link economy, sending traffic to original work becomes an ethical imperative as links are the means to support that work. But it’s an old-media mistake — a leftover of the brand era — to think that authority can or should be one-for-all or that it’s the creator who establishes authority. Authority will vary by context and need as well as opinion (one man’s New York Times is another’s Fox News). Branded media was one-size-fits-all as was search and algorithmic aggregation. Now discovery will become personalized based on context (who you are, where you are, what you’re doing, what you’ve done, what you like…) as well as timing, taste, and quality.
That personalization will disarm the dark art of search-engine optimization — because it will be hard to game everyone’s search results and will already disrupt even the farms and make critical mass harder to reach (and not soon enough for some tastes). But I remind people not to miss a key insight that underpins the most prominent factory farm, Demand Media: predictive creation. That is, Demand listens to us — via search queries — and to the market — via ad demand — and enables the public to assign its writers (assuring its success, reducing its risk). Return to the point above about the reversed sequence of the media transaction: now creation does not start with the creator but with the consumer (pardon my use of the term; it fits in this context). Isn’t that the way it should be (and not just in content but for most any product or service)?
There’s another dimension I didn’t include in my silly little diagram: being distributed instead of merely discoverable (serving the fabled young woman who said, “if the news is that important, it will find me“). We can no longer expect our consumers/readers/users to come to us and wait for us; we must anticipate their needs by listening to their signals and go to them.
That reversal of the distribution pipe will force content creators to break out of the silos I’ve described above and mix the best of all these methods. Brand can still matter; it will be a signal of authority (or the lack of it) once content is discovered. Search will still matter but it will be sensitive to many signals and demands, from each of us and from the market. Algorithms will also use these signals to target and add relevance to content, helping us to prioritize our hyperpersonal news streams. We will discover more and more content through people we trust. We will wish that someone would create content to answer a question or cover an event and if content creators are listening and if enough of us want it, they will seize the opportunity (this is how the Demand model can come to news). They will even anticipate our needs — that’s why the airline gives me the weather in Florida on my boarding pass when I fly there.
Note in that example that media doesn’t come just from media anymore. Retailers, airlines, government, doctors, teachers, communities — any and all of us — will all be media, understanding the needs of a public and using all these tools to answer them without having to go through the old media brands to create content or reach an audience. That’s the lesson of blogs. And that may be the most profound change of all: the complete and utter disaggregation and disintermediation of media, turning everything about it upside-down: content starts with the consumer instead of the creator; authority is established by the public instead of the brand; the audience is the distributor.
So imagine a content ecosystem where users — who already do most of the information sharing themselves — decide where and how value can be added, explicitly or through our usage data. Imagine that these creations come to us through recommendations from peers we trust, prioritized by formulae (human-aided algorithms and algorithmically aided humans), or through search. Imagine that the creation isn’t a static piece of content but instead that nest of relevance with updates powered by collaboration and links. News and media start to look very different.
What does this mean for the economics of media? We don’t know yet; that’s why we must create new models and enterprises to figure it out. I tell my students that the marginal cost of the sharing of information and the creation of content is now zero; the internet makes it possible for that to happen on its own. So there is no value in doing what others have already done (even the value of one more page about fixing a toilet — no matter how clever its SEO — is diminishing); commodification is death. They should take advantage of the great efficiency the internet enables through platforms, specialization, and collaboration. They should then ask where they add unique value as journalists — finding or even anticipating needs and answering them by reporting, correcting, explaining, curating, organizing, training. That will be true for anyone in media.
And how is money made? We don’t know that yet, either, of course. At Friday’s PaidContent event on [cough] paid content, Forrester’s James McQuivey argued that we’ve never paid for content. He said we do pay for access, but I think it’s hard to make money in access long-term because somebody can provide it cheaper, faster, better. Can we still deliver audiences to advertisers? I hope so, but Bob Garfield warns that as merchants and manufacturers build their own direct relationships with customers — as they become media — there’ll be less to spend on media. I think the value is in the relationships, which is the question I asked of the well-media-trained New York Times executives at Friday’s event: In how many ways can you find value in a deep relationship with your public (selling goods and services, acting as a platform, selling education, selling events….); the implication of my question is that putting up a toll booth turns away those relationships and can reduce that value. But then, that’s just my theory. Everything is.
The one thing I know with some confidence is that we have to build to a new reality and this is a simple way to begin to express some of that change.
Paid Content is holding a conference on paid content. I’m there. Sigh. No surprise that I think this is too much focus on one model and meme.
At the start, James McQuivey of Forrester says: “People don’t pay for content and they never have… They have always paid for access to content. In the past, access happened to be gated by analog constraints.” We correlated the form – the gate – with the content. He argues that we are paying more for access but didn’t pay for content. “Media have always been a subsidized business.” He argues that subsidy is shifting from advertising to “a device and access service subsidy.” He says that he who controls access commands the highest share of revenue. He emphasizes that content rights holders win only if they hold a monopoly on that content; if competitors can do likewise (read: news) it doesn’t work. He says that device makers are a new player in getting access revenue. He also says that overall, revenue will go down because advertisers’ money will be split among many media (read: the end of scarcity). He says that competition among content creators will be fierce.
Next up is a panel on big-media joint venture. In Twitter, someone asked what a JV is. I said it’s a bunch of cats tied by the tail. As this is in the NYTimes building, I’m reminded of the newspapers’ disastrous JV, the New Century Network. I’m less interested in big-media JVs than in small-media JVs (aka networks, a la Glam).
