BuzzMachine

Three former titans of news wrote pieces in the last week that are revealing, I think, of their view of the new media landscape: They whined about the passing of what they thought was their captive mass audience. But they don’t understand that the audience was never mass and never captive, and given a chance at choice, we took it. That is the natural order of media. They blame network executives and even the government for the decline of what they define as quality, important news. But the truth is that the public is going elsewhere to get news and these demititans’ definition of news did not always serve that public.

: Ted Koppel wrote his inaugural guest column in the New York Times (sorry, it’s behind the Select wall) mewling about broadcast companies killing the mass audience by targeting demographics:

What is, ultimately, most confusing about the behavior of the big three networks is why they ever allowed themselves to be drawn onto a battlefield that so favors their cable competitors. At almost any time, the audience of a single network news program on just one broadcast network is greater than the combined audiences of CNN, Fox and MSNBC.

Reaching across the entire spectrum of American television viewers is precisely the broadcast networks’ greatest strength. By focusing only on key demographics, by choosing to ignore their total viewership, they have surrendered their greatest advantage.

Poor fellow still thinks that the networks are in charge of our media lives. The truth is, Ted, that many of us prefer The Daily Show and the Colbert Report. Some prefer not to have to wait up for the news. The advertisers prefer targeted audiences. And the large audiences of broadcast are doomed to shrink. The networks aren’t your enemy, Ted. You have seen the enemy and it is us.

: Aaron Brown writes a speech and the Palm Beach Daily News quotes him:

“Truth no longer matters in the context of politics and, sadly, in the context of cable news,” said Aaron Brown….

“Television is the most perfect democracy,” Brown said. “You sit there with your remote control and vote.” The remotes click to another channel when serious news airs, but when the media covers the scandals surrounding Laci Peterson, the Runaway Bride or Michael Jackson, “there are no clicks then,” the journalist said.

With the departure from the screen of the “titans” — Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings and Dan Rather — who “resisted the temptations of their bosses to go for the ratings grab, it will be years before an anchorman or anchorwoman will have the clout to fight these battles,” he said.

I think poor Aaron is kicking himself for not fighting against Lacivision but also kicking himself for the shrinking audience that lost him his job. Can’t win for losing.

: The most amazing of these three pieces, to me, is Columbia Journalism School Dean Nicholas Lemann’s piece on Edward R. Murrow in The New Yorker in which he argues in favor of government regulation of TV news. I find it shocking that any journalist would invite government interference in speech but especially in the news. Even he seems to realize it’s shocking, but he does it anyway:

The structure that encouraged Murrow, uncomfortable as it may be to admit, was federal regulation of broadcasting. CBS, in Murrow’s heyday, felt that its prosperity, even its survival, depended on demonstrating to Washington its deep commitment to public affairs. The price of not doing so could be regulation, breakup, the loss of a part of the spectrum, or license revocation. Those dire possibilities would cause a corporation to err on the side of too much “See It Now” and “CBS Reports.” In parts of the speech which aren’t in the movie, Murrow made it clear that the main pressure on broadcasting to do what he considered the right thing came from the F.C.C. The idea that, in taking on McCarthy, Murrow was “standing up to government” greatly oversimplifies the issue. He was able to stand up to a Senate committee chairman because a federal regulatory agency had pushed CBS and other broadcasters to organize themselves so that Murrow’s doing so was possible.

It isn’t possible anymore—not because timid people have risen to power in journalism but because the government, in steady increments over the past generation, has deregulated broadcasting. The Fairness Doctrine no longer exists. Regulation, license revocation, or reallocation of the spectrum are no longer meaningful possibilities. The advent of cable television brought a new round of debates over government-mandated public-affairs programming, with the result that private companies were granted valuable monopoly franchises in local markets; in return, they were required only to provide channels for public affairs, not to create programming. That’s why cable is home to super-low-cost varieties of broadcast news, such as C-SPAN, local public-access channels, and national cable-news shout-fests, rather than to reincarnations of the elaborately reported Murrow shows from the fifties. The rise of public broadcasting has freed the networks to be even more commercial….

News that makes money is alive and well; the incentive to present news that doesn’t, like all of Murrow’s great work, is gone. It is difficult for journalists to grapple with the idea that outside pressure—from government officials!—could have been responsible for the creation of the superior and memor-able journalism whose passing we all mourn. But look what has happened since it went away.

But, of course, if you’re trying to please Washington you’re in danger of displeasing Washington.

But nevermind. What Lemann, Koppel, and Brown want is some way to get us to eat their veggies. Koppel says it: “Now, television news should not become a sort of intellectual broccoli to be jammed down our viewers’ unwilling throats. We are obliged to make our offerings as palatable as possible….” Brown said it: “Brown said he tried to give viewers a balanced diet of light and serious news with NewsNight. ‘But I always knew when I got to the Brussels sprouts, I was on thin ice,’ he said.” Lemann clearly wants news he thinks is good — which, incredibly, he defines as news that doesn’t make money — to be part of a government-approved food pyramid.

These guys, and oh, so many of their former colleagues, just cannot get out of the notion that they should be lecturing us about what they think we should know, and they think the only way they can do that is if we are forced to watch them thanks to mass media.

Gentlemen: It’s our country. It’s our media now. It’s our time and attention. Sorry if we, the people, disappoint you. But does it occur to you that you disappointed us? Mind you, I’m not criticizing the work of these men. Koppel is a wonderful newsman. Brown could put me to sleep with his doe eyes but he, also, is a good newsman and a nice guy. Lemann certainly earned his journalistic stripes. It’s not their work that’s the issue. It is their attitude toward the public they so badly want to serve. The market is not a bad thing. The market is us.

And it is their definition of success that is the problem. Thanks to the old days of mass media — when we were, indeed, captive, to the products of a few big companies in what was the real age of media consolidation — they still define success as getting one message to the largest possible audience. I think we must redefine that. I see a new measure of success in hearing more voices and more debate, for example. I see an overall explosion of interest in news — but news of many definitions — and I call that a measure of success as well.

I watch my son, Jake, who has nothing short of an addiction to news at Digg.com and I call that a great success. OK, so it’s not a newspaper. Yes, it’s about tech. But it is news. At our session on the new tools of news at CUNY this weekend, Jake gave the professors a tour of Digg and explained why he liked it and trusted it. That was the most controversial moment of the weekend. It brought out a great discussion about new means of defining news and trust. (And Jake held is own most admirably.) I hope the former employers of these gentlemen are having just that kind of discussion and that they leave the tears in beers to these former titans.

There’s more media than ever and that’s good. There’s more news than ever with more ways to gather it and more ways to distribute than ever. And, I argue, there is more interest in news, and that’s great. Redefine news, reacquaint yourself with the audience, and recalibrate success.

: LATER: See this quote from Dave Barry, who used to write for newspapers.

We can no longer compel people to pay attention. We used to be able to say, there’s this really important story in Poland. You should read this. Now people say, I just look up what I’m interested in on the Internet.

It’s a good interview with Barry: “Newspapers,” he said right off the bat, “are dead.” Ready the rest here.

Looking at Scoble’s proper complaints about the cost of big venues for conferences, I wondered this morning about alternates. There aren’t any for the huge conferences with big display floors; they’re screwed. But for small and medium conferences, why not churches? Yes, the pulpit-and-pew arrangement isn’t ideal for conversation but there are plenty of breakout rooms (put the haughtier executives in the ones with the smaller chairs) and most churches need to make use of their space the other six days of the week when God worked and so do we.

The Wisconsin State Journal now allows readers to vote a story a day onto the front page. That’s a nice start, good symbolism. The real win will be when papers get their publics to vote on what stories they’re not covering that they should be.

Kottke checks in on Dave Winer’s long bet with Martin Nisenholtz that blogs will overcome The Times in Googlejuice for news. It’s trending Dave’s way. In the Times’ corner: the SEO expertise of About.com. [Full disclosure: I'm consulting there and so I see it firsthand.] In Dave’s corner: A treasure trove of newspaper content without permalinks that disappears behind pay walls where no one can find it and give it links. If newspapers got permalink-smart and opened it up to links (and AdSense, by the way), they’d stand a fighting chance, because the key means of distribution online is, after all, search, and the key means of marketing is your own audience. If they don’t, Dave’ll be a winnuh.

The British National Union of Journalists has just issued a boggling code of conduct covering the use of material from “witness contributors,” aka citizen journalists, aka us. The ostensible goal is to verify and protect and all that. But it seems obvious that the real goal is to protect NUJ jobs and to try to maintain a separation between the “professionals” and the rest. They want to make it as difficult as possible to use reporting from the people.

It’s braindead. And what’s best is that they don’t even put it up as a web page. So I did here for your edification and discussion.

Emily Bell, editor of Guardian Unlimited, does a fine job filleting the code.

The code, designed for organisations such as ours, who sometimes seek contributions from the public, starts reasonably enough - with a clause that suggests that we do not publish false and malicious material and where we do we seek to rectify it immediately. After that, the suggestions skitter downhill fast in terms of practicality.

It suggests that if using “witness contributions”, media organisations should validate their accuracy before publication, and that they should use material from NUJ members in preference to witness contributors wherever possible, and it includes a clause that effectively rules out the syndication of any material submitted by one of these witness contributors….

The intention, for instance, at the heart of the NUJ’s proposed code is to protect a differentiation between the professional journalist and the amateur. What it actually does is to potentially tie the hands of those who employ journalists to the benefit of those who do not. Wholesale adoption of the code would lead to: no blogs with free comments on them run by established media organisations; no picture streams or video footage from viewers and readers on news channels and websites; and no ability for mainstream news media to experiment with “wikis” or community-built sites.

But, Emily says, everybody else in the world will be doing all those things as newspapers, to paraphrase the gansterism, lie with the dead trees.

: Neil McIntosh, also of the Guardian, also has a proper fit.

I wondered whether I was the only one who was amazed and even offended by the subhed under today’s lead story in the New York Times reporting the bomb attack on ABC’s Bob Woodruff and a cameraman. It read:

Now I get the point that the next headline makes: “Field Reports Were a Ratings Strategy.” There is a business angle. Woodruff, they’re saying, was put in harm’s way by Nielsen. Though one could also say they were put in harm’s way by journalism, by the need to report. And the subhed might have just as easily read, “BIG BLOW TO FAMILIES.”

My Media Guardian column today is a distillation of what I’ve been saying about the means and needs of interactivity. The beginning and end (who needs a middle?):

Interactivity isn’t easy. I must confess that when I wrote for large publications, I said that I loved my audience … but that didn’t mean I wanted to actually meet or talk with them. The people who reached out to me as often as not did so with crayons and crackpot conspiracies, and that helped set my view of interactivity. I think the same is true for much of mass media. The old forms of interactivity helped make us into - or rather, gave us an excuse to be - isolated snobs. The internet changed all that. Online, for the first time in my career, I developed eye-to-eye relationships with readers. And I learned to respect the knowledge, intelligence, goodwill and good taste of those I saw as a mass. I embraced interactivity with obnoxious fervour and would not stop repeating, “News is a conversation … ” …

Rather than restricting interactivity, I would find ways to expand it. The [Washington] Post already is a pioneer in linking to outside blogs that write about its stories. Such linking, I believe, can yield more productive conversation, since these people are writing their opinions on their own websites, under their own names, and not just lobbing anonymous snark grenades into comments. But papers should also stop thinking that the world revolves around them and what they write. Instead, they should listen to hear what the public is talking about that the paper is not writing about. And papers should make readers into collaborators - not just sending in photos from news events but suggesting and reporting on stories. Interactivity isn’t just a gimmick. It is a key to a new journalism.

Alternate link here.

ABC anchor Bob Woodruff and a cameraman were seriously injured in a bomb attack while they were taping in a military vehicle in Iraq.

Here is TVNewser’s coverage; keep scrolling.

: We’ll never know but one wonders whether they were attacked because they were reporters taping at that moment.

Too many conferences suck. They’re too expensive. They are filled with boring panels. They are all about speeches and not about conversation and argument and learning and meeting. They don’t capture the expertise of the crowd. They enrich the organizers at the cost of both the “talent” and the “audience” (a distinction that is usually random, meaningless, and essentially insulting). They are filled with commercial pitches. The large-scale conferences are too obvious; the high-end conferences are too often too safe. There are exceptions and conferences I do like attending because of the people they attract or because they are provocative. But often, the problem is that the interests of those who make conferences work — the people who fill it — are not aligned with the interests of the money behind conferences — the organizers and sponsors.

The conference business is ripe for revolution. If newspapers, TV, magazines, books, reference works, telecommunications, entertainment, retail, real estate, recruiting, and countless other industries are exploding thanks to the internet and the direct connections it enables, then so should conferences. Why shouldn’t we organize our own better conferences on our own terms?

Take, for example, this week’s SIIA conference in New York. I already bitched that these bozos wanted to charge me $500 to attend their full conference after speaking on their panel. The speakers are the content for these unevents, and to have the chutzpah to try to charge the content providers appalled me. I tried to drop out of the panel, but the guy who organized it — unpaid and paying to attend the event himself, the poor shmuck — would have been left holding the empty chair. So I’m doing it. But I’ll do it growling and fomenting revolt.

Look at the basic economics of this conference:
* 400 are attending at $1,100 to $1,700 each, which adds up to $440k to $680k. So let’s average that out at $560k.
* The 14 sponsor slots bring in $20k-$5k each for the privilege of handing out junk mail sans postage. That adds up to $140k (though one $15k slot is still open).
* The total: $700k. (And that doesn’t include membership fees to the organization that range from $850 to $125k per year.)
* So let’s give them $100k for the venue and coffee.
* That leaves $600k for content.
* There are 50 speakers. That means $12k per speaker. Hell, $5k would be nice. $1k would be something. $500 payment instead of a $500 fee would at least be polite.
But, no, the attendees and speakers are foolish enough to enrich the organizers to the tune of $700K, gross because they are a captive audience.

It is time to explode the conference and convene the unconference.

Dave Winer wrote recently complaining about creeping commercialism in conferences. He’s right. And he explains how he has dealt with this. But commercialism is only one issue. And Winer himself holds the keys to solving more problems than just that.

At the first Bloggercon in October 2003, which Dave organized, I was assigned a session on politics. Beforehand, I said something to Dave about “the panel” and Dave jumped down my throat, saying with a forcefulness that cannot be ignored: There is no panel, he decreed. The room is the panel. Well, he was right. Better yet, he was visionary. So I took that direction to heart, which is usually the wise thing to do with Dave’s advice. If you don’t, you’ll miss blogs, RSS, OPML, and podcasts.

And so I decided to become Phil Donahue (I used to say that I became Oprah, but considering my recent rant about her, I’ll change media metaphors). I saw it as my job to draw out the wisdom of the room, for that room was filled with wise bloggers who had widely varied experience. Luckily, I knew enough of them that I could hear a point and then go to someone else for a counterpoint. And the goal of all that was not argument or lecture but instead, a cooperative effort to try to get to a point. That was the form for the next Bloggercon and other such conferences to follow. The convesation was the content, the hallway was the room. They were open events whose aim was to share, not annoint; to listen, not lecture.

Why shouldn’t any professional community be able to gather to share best practices and toughest issues and meet to see what ensues? What holds us back? Conference organizing is a pain. So what would it take to solve that? Here’s an idea: conference concierges who hold no vested interest in the industry but merely manage the venue and the organizational details. What if we could gang together to find a critical mass of people who want to meet — all welcome — and we use online tools to agree on agendas — or not — and when we hit critical mass, we pool resources to hire a concierge to rent the room and bring in the lunch for us? What would that cost? A hulluva lot less than $1,700 for two days of blather and another chintzy bag, that’s for damned sure. The group could decide to have sponsors cover that cost, though see Dave’s cautions about that.

And once we’re together, we can gather in new ways that emphasize conversation over lectures, meeting over merely sitting. We can use online to organize birds-of-a-feather sessions and to address common problems. We can pool information and resources on wikis. We can have sessions that are about nothing but exploring what we don’t know.

Dave has another vision for a commercial hypercamp.

Whatever. The conference structure and industry is ready to be exploded.

If you get a chance, listen to this panel from the just-ended Burda Digital Lifestyle Day (which, sadly, I couldn’t attend, having too much work to do at home) to hear Marissa Meyer, the head of user interface and much more at Google. She made quite the splash on her recent cover of Business 2.0 — smart, beautiful, powerful, rich… enough to make her the geek goddess of all times — and so it’s interesting to finally hear her (and her endearing, humanizing little honk, a small badge of geekiness). It’s revealing, I think, of Google and its plans. She talks about things that come after blogs, about Google’s ambition to answer your question about how to cook a recipe with a video reply, about the devices that will take over home entertainment (she wished the home-entertainment Mac Mini had been one of Jobs’ announcements and said she and friends — not necessarily Google friends, note — thought about making it themselves). She also told about an employee who begged for help with SEO because she didn’t want the first thing to appear on a search for her name be her victory in a math award; with that, she’d never get dates (Meyer said they were having her post a lot on the Google blog since it has Googlejuice). She may be the most powerful woman in technology and because she’s so rarely heard, it’s revealing just to get this chance.

: Here’s what Meyer said about blogs:

I think there is a huge appetite for people to be able to publish easily to the web. I think there is a question in my mind as to whether or not blogs as they exist today are in fact that medium. I think they come today with a lot of conventions: You need to publish every day, you can’t retract or revise things, you have to publish another post. There’s a lot of religion around blogs that makes it not a great tool for, say, someone like my mother, who’d love to publish things on the web… I think there is a huge opportunity for blogs to broaden their perspective in the way they view some of their conventions and make themselves a lot more palatable for the public at large.

I just spent two days teaching the light tools of new media for the future faculty of CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism with Will Richardson (whose book is coming out soon), Saul Spicer of CUNY TV, and my son, Jake. It was exhausting, challenging, and fun. The faculty was eager, curious, and tolerant of my learning about teaching while teaching.

Here’s an outline of what we covered. We didn’t concentrate on the tools that allow news sites to add bells and whistles — the usual definition of new media — but, instead, on the tools that allow anyone to report, edit, add to, challenge, and organize news across media. The most important message I wanted to leave with the group — the headline of the PowerPoint overview at the start — was that these tools really are as simple as they look; that’s why so many are using them. The question is how we take advantage of this to expand and improve journalism and journalism education. What was best about all this was the discussion of the new opportunities made possible by these new tools — and no small debate about the dangers, which is where I always find journalists, in the classroom or the newsroom, approaching this phenomenon. A year ago, those fearing danger drowned out those seeing opportunity; today, everywhere, that tide has turned.

I think this sort of session would work well in newsrooms to bring out creative ideas for using these tools to find new ways to gather and share news: Get the bloggers to show everyone how to blog, the podcasters podcasting. Turn the newsroom into a classroom.

: Here’s Will Richardson’s take on the day. I’ll know I’ll have succeeded in corrupting our world when I can also point to 20 faculty blogs with their takes.

Hossein Derakhshan, now blogging from Israel, wrote an op-ed for The Times blaming the Bush Administration for bringing in radical Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by supporting a boycott of the election: “But the real problem here is that boycotting semi-democratic elections ultimately will not make such a system more democratic.”

: ALSO: Lisa Goldman blogs about Hoder’s visit in Tel Aviv, with links to other blogs writing about it.