BuzzMachine

I’m going to be on Pundit Review Radio in Boston and online tonight about 9:20p ET.

I’m eager for the transcript of this morning’s Face the Nation to come out, because as I was listening to a discussion of Bill Frist and stem cell this morning, I thought I heard Sen. Sam Brownback say that this would be the first case of using taxpayer money to intentionally end human life. Uh, Senator, what about capital punishment… and war?

UPDATE: Yes, he said it:

SCHIEFFER: So you’re going to let this go then? You’re going to be for this?

Sen. BROWNBACK: No, what I thi–no, I’m not going to be for this. This is a big step. This will be one of, I believe, the first time we’ve ever used taxpayer money to pay for the intentional destruction of human life and that’s what this does. But what I’m focused on is let’s get a package of votes together. Let’s do this one but then let’s also take up the issue of human cloning. Let’s also take up the issue of the creation of embryos, just human embryos, just for the purpose of researching. Let’s do all those together. Let’s vote on all of them. Let’s move the whole package and have this debate with the country.

Matt Galloway tries to do some analysis of the blog bitching about Dell after I started complaining about my lemon.

The interesting thing here is that once Jeff started attacking Dell – and others started talking about Jeff attacking Dell – the number of people that wrote post about Dell including at least one of Jeff’s negative words increased. Furthermore, these are generally not posts that are talking about Jarvis!

In other words, he says that it contributed to bad buzz about Dell. Of course, there could also be other coincidental factors (like Dell closing a customer forum). And I think that a blogger bringing up a complaint you already have gives you the peg to mention that complaint yourself.

Matt concludes:

So is Jeff Jarvis bell cow or bellwether? Either way, I think Dell would be better off doing more that just listening.

It’s cow week here at BuzzMachine.

The Observer thinks it has found big news in a report that the London bombers didn’t like the war in Iraq:

One of the men accused of taking part in the failed terror attacks in London on 21 July has claimed the bomb plot was directly inspired by Britain’s involvement in the Iraq war.

In a remarkable insight into the motives behind the alleged would-be bombers, Hussain Osman, arrested in Rome on Friday, has revealed how the suspects watched hours of TV footage showing grief-stricken Iraqi widows and children alongside images of civilians killed in the conflict. He is alleged to have told prosecutors that after watching the footage: ‘There was a feeling of hatred and a conviction that it was necessary to give a signal - to do something.’

“Remarkable insight?” How about obscene spin?

But quite convenient spin, it is, for those who would try to blame Britain for the attack on Britain.

Yet in this next paragraph, there’s an entirely different obscene spin:

But some of the Italian media reports told a conflicting story. Some reports quoted Osman as saying: ‘I hardly know anything. They only gave me a rucksack to carry on the tube in London. We wanted to stage an attack, but only as a show. Who gave me the explosive? I don’t know. I didn’t know him. I don’t remember. We didn’t want to kill, we just wanted to scare people.’

As if we should believe and give credence for a moment what these terrorists say.

: Meanwhile, on this side of the ocean, The Times tries to understand more of the terrorists:

Mr. Khan, Mr. Tanweer and Mr. Hussain were part of a larger clique of young British-raised South Asian men in Beeston, a neighborhood of Leeds, who turned their backs on what they came to see as a decadent, demoralizing Western culture. Instead, the group embraced an Islam whose practice was often far more fundamentalist than their fathers’, and always more political, focused passionately on Muslim suffering at Western hands.

In many ways, the transformation has had positive elements: the men live healthier and more constructive lives than many of their peers here, Asian or white, who have fallen prey to drugs, alcohol or petty crime. Why Mr. Khan, Mr. Tanweer and Mr. Hussain in particular crossed a line that no one had before, how they and Mr. Lindsay linked up, or whether their plot was homegrown or steered from outside, remain mysteries, at least to the public.

But the question asked since their identities were revealed after the bombings continues to resonate: what motivated men reared thousands of miles from the cradles of the Muslim world, without any direct experience of oppression themselves, to bomb fellow Britons, ushering in a new chapter of terrorism.

Many here see answers in the sense of injustice at events both at home and abroad that is far more widespread among Muslims than many Westerners recognize; in the rigid and deeply political form of Islam that increasing numbers of educated European Muslims are gravitating to; in the difficulty some children of Muslim immigrants in Europe have had in finding their place or direction.

Note all the PC language and thinking in that excerpt: Muslim suffering… The religion has positive elements…. They were the first to go bad and everyone else is good… They have trouble finding their place….

And then there is the most misused word of all: injustice.

The injustice of terrorism is against the victims.

: I am not saying that we should not report what these slime say — especially if it leads us to bin Laden et al. Neither am I saying that we should not investigate their lives, just as we investigate the lives of murderers and criminals.

But enough of this effort to portray them as angry young men with motives that could possibly make sense or for a moment justify their actions. They are murderers. They are terrorists. They have no cause.

I said cash cows kill courage and innovation in media. John Robb says it’s true for defense, as well:

Everything Jeff Jarvis says here applies to the US DoD. The systems that bring in the big bucks are nearly useless in our current security environment yet they suck up the majority of funding. Unfortunately, those big budget programs are also the source of power in the Pentagon.

In what other industries and segments of society is it true that the cash cow kills change?

I’m going to quote three leads from three pieces that were just written about the trouble with the news today. The litany of troubles is no longer the subject of debate. It is conventional wisdom.

First, see the remarkable essay by Judge Richard Posner (who knew that he blogs?) in Sunday’s New York Times book review, setting forth the state of the fourth estate:

The conventional news media are embattled. Attacked by both left and right in book after book, rocked by scandals, challenged by upstart bloggers, they have become a focus of controversy and concern. Their audience is in decline, their credibility with the public in shreds. In a recent poll conducted by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, 65 percent of the respondents thought that most news organizations, if they discover they’ve made a mistake, try to ignore it or cover it up, and 79 percent opined that a media company would hesitate to carry negative stories about a corporation from which it received substantial advertising revenues….

Now here is Barb Palser’s piece in AJR on journalism’s backseat drivers (that’s us):

These are beleaguered times for news organizations. As if their problems with rampant ethical lapses and declining readership and viewership aren’t enough, their competence and motives are being challenged by outsiders with the gall to call them out before a global audience.

Journalists are in the hot seat, their feet held to the flames by citizen bloggers who believe mainstream media are no more trustworthy than the politicians and corporations they cover, that journalists themselves have become too lazy, too cloistered, too self-righteous to be the watchdogs they once were. Or even to recognize what’s news.

And now see Rory O’Connor’s piece, published in a few places on the web:

By any measure American journalism is in a state of crisis. Media scams and scandals abound, embroiling journalists and their news outlets — from Jayson Blair and The New York Times to Dan Rather and CBS News — in controversy. Plagiarism, errors and outright hoaxes proliferate, along with corrections, extensive “Editor’s Notes” and eventual apologies. Partisan political operatives masquerade as credible news agents, disseminating fake news produced by phony journalists. Columnists and commentators accept government and corporate money to shill ideas without disclosing it to their audiences. Government-produced propaganda is presented as objective reportage.

No wonder journalists rank near the bottom of every poll measuring the trustworthiness of American institutions.

And yet still, I hear journalists say there is no problem with journalism… and how dare anyone say there is.

: Here are a few samples of what Posner says about bloggers; read the whole thing. He understands the real interaction between citizens’ and professional journalism:

The latest, and perhaps gravest, challenge to the journalistic establishment is the blog. Journalists accuse bloggers of having lowered standards. But their real concern is less high-minded - it is the threat that bloggers, who are mostly amateurs, pose to professional journalists and their principal employers, the conventional news media….

Having no staff, the blogger is not expected to be accurate. [I'd certainly argue with that -jeff] Having no advertisers (though this is changing), he has no reason to pull his punches. And not needing a large circulation to cover costs, he can target a segment of the reading public much narrower than a newspaper or a television news channel could aim for. He may even be able to pry that segment away from the conventional media. Blogs pick off the mainstream media’s customers one by one, as it were.

And bloggers thus can specialize in particular topics to an extent that few journalists employed by media companies can, since the more that journalists specialized, the more of them the company would have to hire in order to be able to cover all bases. A newspaper will not hire a journalist for his knowledge of old typewriters, but plenty of people in the blogosphere have that esoteric knowledge, and it was they who brought down Dan Rather. Similarly, not being commercially constrained, a blogger can stick with and dig into a story longer and deeper than the conventional media dare to, lest their readers become bored….

What really sticks in the craw of conventional journalists is that although individual blogs have no warrant of accuracy, the blogosphere as a whole has a better error-correction machinery than the conventional media do. The rapidity with which vast masses of information are pooled and sifted leaves the conventional media in the dust….

In effect, the blogosphere is a collective enterprise - not 12 million separate enterprises, but one enterprise with 12 million reporters, feature writers and editorialists, yet with almost no costs. It’s as if The Associated Press or Reuters had millions of reporters, many of them experts, all working with no salary for free newspapers that carried no advertising.

How can the conventional news media hope to compete? Especially when the competition is not entirely fair. The bloggers are parasitical on the conventional media. They copy the news and opinion generated by the conventional media, often at considerable expense, without picking up any of the tab….

Some critics worry that ”unfiltered” media like blogs exacerbate social tensions by handing a powerful electronic platform to extremists at no charge….

But probably there is little harm and some good in unfiltered media. They enable unorthodox views to get a hearing. They get 12 million people to write rather than just stare passively at a screen. In an age of specialization and professionalism, they give amateurs a platform….

And most people are sensible enough to distrust communications in an unfiltered medium. They know that anyone can create a blog at essentially zero cost, that most bloggers are uncredentialed amateurs, that bloggers don’t employ fact checkers and don’t have editors and that a blogger can hide behind a pseudonym. They know, in short, that until a blogger’s assertions are validated (as when the mainstream media acknowledge an error discovered by a blogger), there is no reason to repose confidence in what he says. The mainstream media, by contrast, assure their public that they make strenuous efforts to prevent errors from creeping into their articles and broadcasts. They ask the public to trust them, and that is why their serious errors are scandals.

My amazing son just made BuzzMachine a tag machine. Via a nifty WordPress plug-in he adapted, instead of my old, inflexible categories, I now have fluid tags that appear at the top of every post. These include the old categories — now converted to tags — as well as any new words as they occur to me.

Now if I want to get fancy….

: I wonder whether I should do anything to make these tags work for Technorati et al (see the post below).

: It would be neat to see whether anyone linked to a post here in Del.icio.us or some of its competitors so I could import those tags here (under the assumption that your tags are better — more descriptive, more accurate, more useful — than mine).

By the way, I was inspired to do this by what Nick Denton did to his blogs. For commercial sites, there are added benefits to this structure of navigation:

: I’ll be you increase page views per visit because readers can find more on a topic that interests them.

: When readers do go to that tag page, it’s tremendously targeted and better for advertisers.

: The tags themselves should be useful for automated ad targeting via Kanoodle, Google Adsense, et al.

: The tags should be useful in informing search (if you search for a word that happens to be a tag, you would want posts using that tag to have priority).

Tags are not the cure to acne. The current infatuation with them is a bit faddish. But don’t let that distract you from their value.

: UPDATE: Dave Sifry says the tags are being picked up by Technorati as is. Bravo! And in relation to the open tagging discussion below, note that the tags don’t address Technorati; they are open.

: UPDATE UPDATE: Kevin Marks corrects me in the comments and says they are not open. I frankly don’t understand. I need a whiteboard….

A new use and value of podcasts: Brushing up on your foreign language. I just subscribed to Schlaflos in München, a podcast by Annik Rubens, a pseudonym for a German journalist with a charming — no, sexy — voice. I know that for Americans, the notion of sexy German is oxymoronic, but at the end, when she says the German ciao — “Tchuss!” — you just want to kvell. It’s a helluva lot better than listening to language tapes, all bleached of personality and charm, not to mention relevance and currency. Her ‘casts are brief and fun and I almost understand some of them.

After I wrote a post about wanting an open tagging structure for aggregating distributed content around topics, tags, and audiences (e.g., restaurant reviews from any of us tagged “mexican” and “hoboken” and “for:about.com”), Stowe Boyd responded and Kevin Marks responded to that. I was quickly lost but I am delighted that smarter folks than I are debating the best ways to accomplish this. All this links are here.

Are Britain’s police smarter than ours or are the terrorists who attacked London dumber than the ones who attacked New York?

Whichever, it is wonderful that British authorities have captured the terrorists. Let us hope they lead back to the murderers’ creators.

: Commenters point out it’s all those video cameras that helped. Yes. In New York, they’re talking about getting rid of subway conductors on some lines (which always struck me as a waste anyway). Various opponents complained that would hurt security (though most of the conductors I see would be easy to outrun). Mayor Bloomberg’s answer: Video cameras.

Yes, let’s cam New York.

I’ve been thinking about TV Guide and why its drastic overhaul didn’t/couldn’t happen when it should have, 10 years ago — and why similar drastic strategic changes are not happening at other publishing companies today.

It’s because they are cash cows.

TV Guide brought in a helluva lot of cash; it was No. 1 in ad pages, and each page was golden. When I was there, I developed a new magazine, the Parents’ Guide to Children’s Entertainment, because I believed the company had to expand its guide franchise and diversify and because I thought it was a helluva good idea and was needed (it was). We sold 400,000 copies in only two weeks on the newsstand with no promotion but the project was killed. Why? It wasn’t worth the time of TV Guide ad reps to sell $8k pages when they could be selling $80k pages in the main mag. Now the answer to that, of course, would have been to invest in the new products with new staff. But when you work on a cash cow, executives don’t want to spend time raising calves; things need to be big to compete for attention and pay for the big infrastructure. And new = risk. So new things don’t start.

And the answer to the creeping shrinking of the main mag would have been to make radical changes in the product: gutsy changes like the ones TV Guide just made to not only update the product but also cut costs. Some argued in favor of making those changes when I was there, me among them. But inertia and fear and politics and cash won. Strategy didn’t.

Having a cash cow distracts companies from the future. It makes them complacent: ‘Look at all the money (still) rolling in.’ It makes them think that if they just tweak this and that — if they can still get away with raising their rates even as their audience and value are shrinking — they will continue to keep milking cash from that old cow. It makes them overly cautious: ‘Nobody hurt Bessie!’

And politically, the guys in charge of the cow don’t want anybody inside the company competing with them: no new products, no new power centers, no one else to set strategy, no one else to use resources. They win because, of course, they’re the ones bringing in the cash. Nevermind that they’re the ones stopping the company from building for the future. They’ll tell you that’s not their job. They’re there to protect the cow.

Jay Rosen argued in his post about laying newspapers down to die that it is also about draining the value of a company as it declines. In some cases, that’s true. But in some, there isn’t such a sinister or cynical motive; it’s more about blindness, wilfull blindness.

As in the case of TV Guide, change will finally come, but only when it is inevitable, and perhaps when it is too late.

: And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a picture of what life is like in many other big media companies today. That is what is happening on shrinking newspapers, and in shrinking broadcast and even cable networks, and in many a shrinking magazines.

The cash cowherds run the farm, change is resisted, strategic bravery is rarely seen. Why? They still make a lot of money. Yes, but they aren’t growing, not in real terms.

And, worse, the world has changed in this decade in profound ways. There is an entirely new medium competing for attention and dollars. This new medium has devalued what you thought was your core asset — your stranglehold on distribution, your size — and made them into burdens rather than advantages. Your customers, once just a mass, can now talk back and complain. And, most important, in a world where small is the new big, a million small competitors are now enabled to chomp away at your audience, your franchise, your brand, your business, your cash.

Other media companies should look at TV Guide’s saga as instructive and predictive: What happened to the magazine that once sold more copies every year than any other magazine can happen to you.

TV Guide is the cow in the coal mine.

I hope Rick Segal won’t mind my quoting this in entirety but it’s too wonderful a postscript to my Dell saga (which isn’t quite over but will be momentarily, a coda to follow):

I work in an office tower with standard food courts all filled with people like me; complaining about prices but too lazy to make our lunch at home.

I happened to be sitting across from a couple of bank tellers from TD Canada Trust, the bank in our building. These two ladies I’d seen before so I knew where they worked.

Lady one: I was going to buy a new Dell but did you hear about Jeff Jarvis and the absolute hell he is going through with them.

Lady two: Yeah, I know the IT guy told me that the cobler blog was recommending we stay away from Dell.

Okay, after you are done laughing at this; laughing at Scoble’s name being mangled, laughing at two random bank tellers talking about some one line blog entry about some guy pissed off about his Dell experience; after you are done: Pay Attention.

I’ll accept that an IT guy would be reading scoble’s blog. I’ll even accept the IT guy offering an opinion which, randomly, I overheard.

The pay attention part: Lots of people (Dell?) are making the assumption that “average people” or “the masses” don’t really see/read blogs so, we take a little heat and move on.

Big mistake.

That interchange probably cost Dell at least two sales and lord only knows how many over time. And those lost sales are coming from a feedback system that didn’t matter a few years ago.

This “blogging stuff” is moving mainstream seriously fast. You and your management team had better be watching what’s going on because Jeff Jarvis and Aunt Mildred both have blogs and both can call BS on whatever BS you are serving up.

[Side note: I don't think Scoble ever said don't buy Dell as the Redmond OEM Mafia would have him killed. ;-)]

That lunch is on me, Rick.