Probably quiet today because I hurt my right arm and can’t type. Multitudes rejoice.
LATER: Cancel the flowers. Thanks for the nice words but this is no big deal. I’m just a klutz and a wuss.
Somehow, I got a rotator cuff problem. That’s pretty funny (well, for you but not for me until the drugs kick in) because that is an injury for jocks and real men. The most strenuous thing I do is blog about Dell. So now I’ll take steroids — there goes that Tour de France entry — and walk around with a sling. I think I’ll make up a reason. “Well, at least it was a birdie.” Or: “One homerun too many, I suppose.” Or: “I really should take a break from the hockey in the summer, don’t you think?”
What’s even wussier is that I got all clammy mangling my posture for the x-rays. I’ve never passed out but I was looking fairly ghostly, apparently, for the doctor ordered me to lie down and he held my feet up in the air to get blood flowing back to my oxygen-starved, chickenshit brain as he explained rotator cuffs. He decided I wasn’t manly enough to take the shot to the shoulder. So I got pills.
He asked what I did for a living. I said I’m to be a journalism professor. He said he thought I was an academic. Read: bookworm wuss.
Don’t worry, you won’t get a blow-by-blow of this the way you have with my heart follies. But just because it hurts to type….
In a nutshell: This is publicly supported journalism. The public will come to NewAssignment.net with story ideas and will collaborate on honing them there. Once assigned by NewAssignment’s editors, the public will contribute both money and reporting to the work that reporters are paid to do. The process is open and the public will have a strong voice and role in the journalism NewAssignment does. Editors will supervise the assignments and the reporting and will edit the stories, assuring that NewAssignment produces quality journalism and also that it is not overtaken by a pressure groups. There’s much more to this with many nuances and Jay examines them all in a lengthy (even for him) FAQ on his blog.
This is an answer — not the answer — to the frequently asked question in the shrinking news business these days: How will we support journalism and investigation? NewAssignment will not replace the work of professional news organizations. It will complement them, attacking the stories that are not being covered. It begins with an article a few articles faith. First: The public will support journalism and investigation. Second: The public will then want more of a voice and a role in that reporting. Third: Given the opportunity to have more of a voice and role, the public will contribute more support. It’s a virtuous circle, if it works.
Jay got funding from the MacArthur Foundation to explore this idea for a year. NewAssignment just received a grant from Craig Newmark’s personal foundation to fund the work on a pilot project. And NewAssigment is getting help from Daylife, the news startup I’ve been working on. That relationship: Daylife will gather, analyze, organize, and create a new, distributed platform for the world’s news. In a sense, then, NewAssignment is complementary: Daylife shows you what is being covered and New Assignment fills in a few of the gaps about what is not being covered. Daylife will provide some technical and distribution help, starting with a pilot project.
I’ve known about Jay’s vision for NewAssignment for more than a year now and I’ve thrown in my two cents. I think this is an important experiment in pro-am, publicly supported, open journalism. We must explore new business models to support coverage of news and this is one of them. I’m an enthusiastic supporter of NewAssignment and I look forward to working with Jay and you on it and learning a lot along the way.
This is your chance: You’ve said you wonder why some stories are not getting covered. Well, now you can gather together and get them covered. You’ve wanted more of a role in journalism. Now you can be involved from start to finish. You’ve known facts that would matter in news coverage if only you could be heard. Now, you can.
Publicly supported media — the BBC, NPR, and the CBC — are all going through efforts to reexamine and reorganize how they work and what they are. Here’s the BBC’s DG Mark Thompson shaking things up; here is an outline a process of change in National Public Radio (with interesting blogging by the consultant helping them through it); and here’s a discussion about the proper role of the Canadian Broadcasting Company in a new media world.
Of course, the upheaval overtaking for-profit media is not going to exempt other media just because they get money from taxes or contributions, though such sure and steady sources of income can blind the bosses or delay the inevitable. (I say that’s the same problem with the blind faith some in the newspaper industry are giving to private vs. public ownership; the business realities and inevitabilities are no different even if the money’s dumber.)
So give credit to these publicly supported institutions for recognizing the necessity of change. And as we watch them, keep in mind that we may see the birth of more publicly supported media in this new world. Later this week, I’ll tell you about an exciting project a friend is working on to support journalism with the money and effort of the public. I think we’ll see many such efforts. As we grapple with new business models for news, I think that public support will not be a panacea (any more than private ownership) but will be one of many solutions to the puzzle of media in an open world. Now that we, the people, have more voice and control, I think we will be willing to take more responsibility to support media that matter.
National Public Radio faces both vexing challenges and great opportunities. NPR and its affiliated stations can now broadcast their good work to many more people, with NPR going international and stations going national. They can find new talent online (if it works for NBC…); when I spoke to the Public Broadcasting Program Directors’ confab last year, one visionary station exec said that she used to be able to try out new talent only at 11p on Sundays but now she can try them out on the web. This means they can discover and promote more talent and work with it in new ways — collaboratively, that is. And when you have a surplus of good stuff, the web means that you are not trapped in a 24-hour clock. They also don’t see their work die after it is broadcast; now I can listen to On the Media or Brian Lehrer anytime I want, which means I listen more often.
The greatest challenge, I think, is what to do with local affiliates. The large ones that make good programming, like WNYC, will be fine for all the reasons above. But the small ones that are really just channels for distribution out and contributions in are in trouble. I don’t know what the fate of a local affiliate — for commercial or public broadcast — will be when the internet is a better means of distribution. I’m tempted to give them the same advice I give newspapers: Go local. But some of these stations are tiny and don’t have the resources. It’s a hard problem.
Current, the paper about public broadcast in the U.S., reports on the changes coming to NPR. Amid the organizationspeak, I see these priorities:
* First, they want to work hard to strengthen local news. That is a smart solution — not the only one needed — to the local affiliate problem: Make them more valuable. As other radio news dies, fill the vacuum. They’re spending $600,000 on this.
* Next, they are working on the Newsroom of the Future. Well, who isn’t? The goal is the same: getting news online, involving online in planning, and better integrating local through international efforts. Bill Marimow, NPR’s VP for news, talks about that here. He says:
We still have a huge way to go, but there’s now a real collaboration between every nook and cranny of the digital division and of the news division. The goal in the long term is to make sure that everything we produce for broadcast has an online, podcast, cellular phone component to it.
Note that the BBC’s Thompson is combining broadcast and digital production. That’s the next step.
Asked whether NPR will end up competing with newspapers, Marimow said they’ll more likely be complementary, for NPR will have the foreign correspondents they don’t have. And, I’d argue, newspapers will have the local depth radio doesn’t have. They need to link to each other. As I said below, they don’t own networks; they’re in networks.
* They are working on a new digital distribution infrastructure. I’m not sure exactly what that means but it acknowledges that the internet will be the means of distribution for public radio. It already is.
* They want to create a ” ‘trusted space’ for listeners to visit and have a hand in creating.” Emphasis mine. I think that’s important and if they mean it, a powerful key to the future of public media.
They admit they’re not sure what it is. Their blueprint document says: “We have an opportunity to embrace, promote and encourage connections among the audience around shared civic goals based on our mission. To accomplish this, we will need to curate content and provide tools that enable individuals to engage in making the world a better place.” NPR exec Dana Davis Rehm confesses: “We don’t know all the characteristics of a trusted space. It’s more of an ideal we’re trying to achieve.”
I’d think of it this way: Dave Winer has complained that when he gives money to NPR, he loses any control over it, any voice in at least suggesting how it is used. I think that people willl not only want that voice and some measure of control but also will be willing to contribute their own creation to a “trusted space” network. If NPR can enable that to happen, it’s big.
And that is the real question at hand: What is the role of public media in an era of public control of media? How can the public be more involved in the network (and thus support it more)? And how can the network point to and support the good work of the public?
: Here, via PaidContent, is the NPR blueprint (PDF). And here is blogging consultant Robert Paterson on the process that led to this in NPR and here is his very good explanation of what NPR is, really, and the challenges it faces. Here is John Bracken of the MacArthur Foundation (a big supporter of NPR) talking about the needs of this network of the future. And here is a wiki for the Digital Distribution Consortium that is working on that new digital platform for NPR>
: Now see this story in the Toronto Star talking about the debate on what the CBC should become. Historically, part of the raison d’etre for the CBC was to give Canadians a voice when their voice was in danger of being drowned out by ours, down here. Content regulation in all Canadian media also addressed that. But now everyone’s voice can be heard. So what should Canada’s public media be? Michael Geist, a law professor specializing in the internet, writes (my emphases):
A plethora of proposals — including various recommendations that the CBC become a commercial-free zone, a pay-TV service, or that it leave sports programming to the private broadcasters — have emerged from the latest round of discussions. While most CBC debates tend to focus on the ideal broadcasting model, the future of the public broadcaster may actually lie in rethinking the meaning of “public”, rather than redefining the model of broadcaster. . . .
If the CBC can no longer claim to be a unique home to Canadian programming and perspectives, then perhaps its future lies in transforming itself from Canada’s public broadcaster to the broadcaster of the Canadian public, telling our stories and providing our news from the bottom up, rather than the top down. . . .
Indeed, public broadcasters in other countries are already reinventing themselves. The British Broadcasting Corp.’s Creative Archive allows users to download clips of BBC factual programming for non-commercial use, where they can be stored, manipulated and shared. Similarly, the BBC Backstage program provides data, resources, and support for users who want to build on BBC material.
The BBC also encourages civic journalism, inviting the public to contribute photos and first-person accounts of breaking stories. . . .
The Danish Broadcasting Corp., which already features hundreds of hours of archival material on its website, recently announced plans to provide content to the Wikipedia online project, thereby enabling users to build on its materials.
Later this month officials in the Netherlands intend to unveil plans to digitize 700,000 hours of feature films, documentaries, TV shows, and radio programs. This remarkable project will transfer an incredible array of historical materials to the public. . . .
[T]he CBC would do well to innovatively collaborate with Canadians to bring their creativity to a wider broadcast audience.
Yes, that’s a good definition: Public broadcasting is our broadcasting.
Mary Hodder, one of the most respected thinkers of the blog world, has launched her new company, Dabble. It’s a video search across many sites and a place where you can find the good stuff. In that sense, it is just what I was saying the world needs this morning: network 2.0.
I haven’t linked to One Web Day, whose mission is to create, maintain, advance, and promote a global day to celebrate online life on Sept. 22. There are lots of updates with new people and organizations signing on daily. And Sept. 22 is nearly upon us. So here’s the link.
Here is my Guardian column this week (and here’s a nonregistration version). Snippets:
Witness the toppling of the TV tower: this month in the US, primetime viewing of broadcast networks sunk to the lowest level in ratings history: 20.8 million on average. At the same time, the open video-sharing service YouTube revealed that it is delivering 100m shows a day. No wonder BBC director general Mark Thompson just announced a major restructuring, tearing down walls between broadcast and digital for a “360-degree, multiplatform” world. “Much of what we call new media,” he said, “is really present media.” Yes, thanks to the internet, we are watching the end of linear television.
But the internet does more than destroy. It forces the media to redefine themselves, to discover their essence. Broadcast networks thought their value was in controlling precious distribution and content. But in this post-scarcity media economy, the real job of a network is to find us the good stuff. Doing that no longer requires owning studios or transmitter towers. Today, a network is born with every link. When you recommend shows to friends, you’re a channel. When your blog links to good reading online, you’re a magazine. When you share your iTunes playlist, you’re a DJ. Today, everybody’s a network. . . .
Simply put, a good network today will find the right stuff for you: no longer one size fits all, but one size fits me; no longer a prisoner of a 24-hour schedule, but primetime as my time.
As Amazon helps you find the right book, so the new network will be built on experience, trust and relevance to help you find the shows you’ll like. And in a world with unlimited content, there is an unlimited demand for such networks that filter and recommend. . . .
So the old networks – including newspapers, which should start acting more like networks – must transform themselves from closed to open, centralised to distributed, one-way to two-way. They need to learn to find and recommend not just their own good stuff but good stuff from the world, from fellow creators (who need not be competitors). This is a new and valuable service. And they need to learn to support these new creators by sending them both audience and revenue in distributed promotional and advertising networks. Consultant and blogger John Hagel puts it this way: “Audience-relationship businesses take these proliferating content options as an opportunity, rather than a challenge. The more options there are, the more value that can be created by organising, packaging, presenting and adding to these options for specific audiences.” So the big guys need to see themselves not as the owners of a network but as members of networks. For networks are no longer about controlling but sharing. They are not about broadcasting but about finding and being found. They are no longer static. Networks are fluid.
ABC’s experiment with streaming shows online worked. Ad Age says tomorrow:
ABC’s streaming-video experiment earlier this year on ABC.com will become a real offering in October, according to Anne Sweeney, Disney Co. co-chair-media networks and president of Disney-ABC TV. The network said the experiment was a success for advertisers given that research showed users had 87% recall of the advertisers involved. (Average recall of advertising on TV is about 24%.) Each program that was streamed was supported by a single advertiser.
That’s an amazing ad story. Linear TV should kiss its ass goodbye.
Last week, after Pew’s survey of bloggers was released, someone you’d know plopped down in a chair in front of me and said: ‘So explain to me why most bloggers don’t consider themselves journalists.’
Easy, I said. I’ve long argued that we shouldn’t assume that bloggers want to be reporters. Sometimes some of them do. But mostly, blogs are just people talking. That’s my essential definition of the form: people in conversation. And when you see blogs through that light, you have to relate to them differently: Your customers, voters, neighbors, students, audience are talking and only a fool wouldn’t want to listen. But that doesn’t mean you can ignore the journalism in them.
I also said that what confuses the pros is that acts of journalism are mixed in with moments of life. One minute, I may report some news or comment on it, but the next moment, I’ll complain about Dell. To bloggers, this makes sense. Journalists have trouble figuring it out; they think that something journalistic must be purely journalistic.
The Pew survey supports that view, finding that 34 percent of bloggers consider their work journalism but 65 percent do not. Instead, most bloggers blog about life. Asked the reason they blog, 52 percent said that expressing yourself creatively was a major reason, 50 percent said documenting and sharing personal experiences, 37 percent said staying in touch with family and friends. Those top three reasons are about blogging as life. The next major reason hits journalism (34 percent want to share practical knowledge or skills) and the next one advocacy (29 percent want to motivate people to action); no. 8 on the list combines the two (27 percent want to influence how people think). Rounding out this top 10: entertaining people (28 percent), storing information (28 percent), meeting people (16 percent), and making money (7 percent). The blogs that get attention in the news are those about news — and news organizations — but that ignores the great silent majority of bloggers.
In short: Blogs are different keystrokes for different folks. There is no monolithic motive for blogging. And what that really means is that we are approaching the point where measuring what bloggers as bloggers do is pointless, like measuring why typists type or phoners phone or talkers talk. That, to me, is the most valuable insight from the Pew study.
I spent some time with Pew’s report this weekend trying to suss out the narrative the numbers tell about blogging. Some of the themes I saw:
* Blogs are just people talking. See above. Note that most just do this for themselves. That is, traffic and money are not motivators for most. Nearly half of the bloggers don’t even know their traffic. Only 8 percent have earned income from their blogs. That clearly separates them from media moguls.
* Blogs enable new voices to be heard. 54 percent of bloggers have never published before. As I said above, most do it first to be creative. That natural human desire has been constrained by scarce media in the past. No longer.
77 percenet of bloggeers have shared something they created — artwork, photos, videos, stories — vs. 26 percent of internet users. 44 percent of bloggers have taken content they found online and remixed it, versus 18 percent of internet users.
* Bloggers are informed. 95 percent of bloggers get news from the internet, vs. 73 percent for the internet population. 71 percent of bloggers get news from the internet on a typical day. Compare this with a recent Belden survey that says that only 27 percent of newspaper online users come to their sites daily.
* Bloggers are engaged. 64 percent go online several times a day from home, vs. 27 percent for the internet.
* But bloggers are not obsessive. 44 percent of bloggers see it as “something I do, but not something I spend a lot of time on.” 13 percent update daily. 40 percent call it a hobby. Only 13 percent describe their blogs as big parts of their lives.
* Bloggers are diverse. Bloggers are less likely than internet users to be white, contrary to the popular and often stated assumption. 60 percent are white (vs. 74 percent for the internet), 11 are African-American (vs. 9 percent), 19 percent are English-speaking Hispanic (vs. 6 percent). More demos: Bloggers are evenly divided between men and women and most live in the ‘burbs. Oh, yes, and they’re not all old farts like me; blogs skew young.
* Blogs are not an echo chamber. 45 percent of bloggers say they’d rather get news “from sources that do not have a particular point of view,” equivalent to the internet population. 24 percent prefer political news “from sources that challenge their viewpoint” — more than the 18 percent who “choose to use sources that share their political viewpoint.”
The survey doesn’t delve into attitudes about mainstream media except consider this: 55 percent of bloggers say they are inspired to post something by media. “Bloggers frequently inspired by the news media tend to identify politically as Democrats or independents. Republicans are also inspired to blog by the news, but less often than the other two groups.”
The Pew study also continues to show that blog authorship and readership are growing. It finds that 8 percent of internet users (12 million American adults) blog and 39 per (57 million Americans) read blogs, an increase of 39 percent since February 2004.
: At the same time, MSN just released a study of bloggers in Britain. Shane Richmond of The Telegraph points out that the numbers are suspiciously high next to another study by Universal McCann, where the numbers seemed low. So take your pick. The Guardian’s summary of the MSN study:
One in four British internet users keeps a blog and more than half of that number share their online musings with the public, according to a report released today. The research suggests that, with 27 million internet users across the UK, the country now holds nearly 7 million bloggers – equivalent to nearly one in nine of the population.
Google keeps getting bigger and bigger and that makes competitors get ever more skittish about competing. But I think this is the perfect time to nip at Google’s heels and come away with a mouthful of flesh. For Google will get too big. Just as newspapers got so big and so protective of their classified monopolies that they could not adjust their business strategies to deal with new, smaller competitors interested in taking any marketshare away from them, so Google will be big and lumbering. Here are Fred Wilson’s questions about Google’s stock and dependence on search ads (he bought Yahoo stock instead; see my post below on why I decided not to). I think Google will keep growing and that is precisely why I think there are a number of great opportunities to compete today:
* Specialized search: Like Google, the internet has gotten too big. A one-size-fits-all search is becoming as satisfying as one-size-fits-all media. What the internet needs now is topicality: searches within health, business, sports, my town, video, books, and so on. The links among sites and analysis of content within them can help to put a topical layer on what’s there. No, I don’t want to reproduce the Dewey Decimal system and no, I’m not pulling for the semantic web. But being able to at least give preference to content in certain topics when I express my need — search health content, please — makes the search results and advertising attached to them far more relevant. And there are fringe benefits: My actions in those search results help confirm the categorization of content — if I searched for health and was satisfied and clicked on that link that must mean it is about health. This also helps categorize my interests and helps a service make advertising more relevant to me, thus more effective, thus more profitable.
* Ad networks: Google’s AdSense and AdWords grab important marketing dollars, including those from advertisers too small to afford the big, old ad vehicles; from businesses that could never reach this level of targeting before; from big businesses that are eager to buy online but can’t find any easier and more efficient way to do it. But these programs are still built on the coincidence of a word on the page — on shallow content connections — and not on the essence of the internet: relationships. No, I’m not going to suggest that MySpace and other efforts and social networks will take this over. The internet itself is a social network but Google, like a geek, is blind to the human interaction around it. So what are the opportunities?
First, I’ll flog the open-source ad network for citizens’ media, built on trust and authority that is measurable thanks to the social interactions among the creators of content online. This shouldn’t be a new destination; it should, as Google does, find the ways to take advantage of the content and connections that already exist online and put together networks — masses of niches — that turn relevance into efficiency.
Google is also trying to take its hegemony and efficiency in the auction marketplace for online ads and bring it to other media — radio, TV, print. But it is just beginning. So other players could come in and manage this. Even in network TV, there is a movement among advertisers — started by a former ad exec at Chrysler now at Wal-Mart, Julie Roehm — away from the network-controlled upfront and toward an auction marketplace. eBay, where are you?
If newspapers could get off their asses, they should have figured out long since how to provide rich directories of local advertisers in their markets. Problem is, they were trying too hart to protect their legacy businesses (read: monopolies). Now that the truth is dawning on them, maybe it’s not too late to wake up and offer local advertisers better, surer audiences, more efficiency, and better deals. Maybe.
* Social connections: I think there is a big opportunity to map social connections that already exist online. MySpace is really Rupert’s space. The internet is our space. It is, once again, already a social network. So look at it that way and make connections among the people here. Make it a way to find people. Make it a way to measure the quality of relationships: authority (as in Technorati), trust, leadership.
* Multimedia serving: YouTube is beating the hell out of Google. Of course, YouTube is earning next-to-no money. Google has tried to be a repository and server for our stuff but so far, it has failed. And because Google has tried to serve this stuff itself, it has not tried as hard as it could have — or would have, not long ago — to search this stuff wherever it sits online. So there are two opportunities here: Serve media easily with ads and revenue attached for the creators. And build a search that involves content, context, and social interaction (a la Flickr) to find the good stuff. That will be the real network of the future (this is the real topic of my Guardian column Monday).
* Identity services: Microsoft didn’t succeed at creating the universal wallet with Passport — because, I think, it was Microsoft trying to do that. Now Google is offering its wallet. eBay has its. Amazon has its. We still need a universal wallet. We also want to have some means of accepted identity for other reasons (authorship, trust, social relations).
Google is not invincible. Its specialized searches are lame. The Froogle shopping search is marginally useful. Google Finance didn’t bowl over the world. Calendar was a bit of a fizzle. The book search isn’t great — though that’s by no means Google’s fault but instead that of publishers that want to hide their books from public view.
Don’t get me wrong. Google is an incredible company. Google search changed the world. Google innovated in all these areas and showed the way. But that’s not to say that they cannot and should not be challenged. Or else it will just keep getting bigger and bigger.
The problem with portals is that they aren’t portals at all. The windows are nailed shut. They’re traps. They want to lure you in and then not let you leave. I said this in my Monday Guardian column (which I’ll put up then):
When Yahoo was young, cofounder Jerry Yang told me that his site’s job was to get you in and out as quickly as possible. That certainly changed. Now Yahoo licenses and creates content and services to keep you in front of its ads as long as possible; it is known for collecting and not sharing traffic. I say that Yahoo is the last old-media company – still trying to get viewers to come to it – but it is successful because it is unencumbered by presses, towers, talent contracts, and other media legacies.
The bald truth is that the deal, which we announced in November, garnered way more attention than we expected, but less traffic. A few new readers probably discovered Gawker, or one of the other four sites that we syndicated to Yahoo. I doubt many of them stayed. Yahoo has a mass audience; Gawker appeals to a peculiarly coastal, geeky and freaky demographic. And these people are more likely to come to our sites through word of mouth, or blog links, or search engine results, or Digg, not because of a traditional content syndication deal.
I go on to say in the Guardian column:
Contrast this with Google, which does still try to get you in and out quickly. It makes a fortune by putting targeted ads on many of the sites it sends you to. Thus its potential is unlimited, for the more content there is, the more Google has to organize, the more we need Google to find what we want, the more its ads can appear everywhere, and the more it earns. Yet Google still satisfies both traditional roles of the old networks in the content industry: It takes in money by aggregating audiences for advertisers, while it also pays out money to support content creators. Google is network 2.0.
So, there aren’t any fast-acting, silver-bullet solutions for newspapers. Just, slow, painful evolution to a “right-sized” organization and business model. Like industries have done in the face of technology-driven change for a countless years.
