David Weinberger boswells a chunky discussion of the future of news at Foocamp.
Adrian Holovaty from the WashingtonPost.com is interested in optimizing information collection. How do we get journalists to collect information in ways that machines can reuse it. Newspapers are a collection of information desperate for a framework, while Wikipedia is a framework desperate for information, he says. . . . Adrian says that the categorization onus should be on the reporter. All the info in it ought to be categorized so, if it’s a report on a mayor’s speech, we can see all the speeches by the mayor, all speeches about the same topic, etc.
Al Gore says the internet isn’t as powerful as TV. He says the goal is to drive content from the internet to TV. That’s what my West Virginia father would call bassackwards. YouTube serves 100 million videos a day. I dare say that Current on cable doesn’t have nearly its audience — it reaches 20 million homes but only a tiny fraction of those watch, as with any of so many cable channels, but it is because of his cable deals that he doesn’t put his “best” content online. Also, Current is not nearly so open to the creations and voices of the citizens as YouTube and the internet as a whole. LATER: I wasn’t being clear above. I think it is a fine and proper ambition to make TV more porous, as a BBC exec said, bringing the voices of the people onto the big screen. But big, old TV is by no means the only game in town and the real goal is to break down the barriers so people need not care where or when they watch (or create) something, so long as they do it.
There’s a giant pin stalking the land of Web 2.0 and the people are fleeing in fear of the prick.
But little do they know, what they’re really afraid of is not being a fucked company but instead a faked company, that is a company that is not grappling with the realities of business — value, customer base, efficiency, marketshare — because they are enveloped in some false and protective bubble of hype, VC money, or — in the case of the big, old companies — monopoly. The same fear is stalking not just the new kids but also the old guys.
Go take a read of Dead2.0, a good and skeptical blog that lacks the supreme snarkiness of other efforts and also does not try to paint the whole world in contrarian colors. Pessimism isn’t his (or her) unified theory of the universe. No, the blog merely tries to rationally find the irrational. And that makes it all the more ominous.
Dead2.0 is, of course, reminiscent of FuckedCompany.com. I hadn’t been there in ages, since the last Bubble 1.0 company faded into schwag nostalgia. But I see it’s still in business, though now it also reports on big, old f’d companies like Delphi, Delta, and Dell. (It is now officially bad feng shui to start a company name with the letters d-e-l).
Now see John Battelle, Paul Kedrosky, and Fred Wilson ruminating over whether there is a VC bubble. Kedrosky leaves the TechCrunch bash — as I did after a PaidContent bash — fretting that the equilibrium is off. Too many companies are getting funded — Battelle says there are 200 video search companies with bucks in banks — and not enough are failing, which means that business success — audience, revenue, growth — is not concentrating sufficiently to anoint winners (or, I’ll add, in the cases of, MySpace and YouTube it is perhaps concentrating too quickly). Wilson says fret not, for the bad companies will die. But because they are cheaper to start, it will take longer. And because they are cheaper to start, I’ll argue, more bad companies can get funding. And because the VCs have to fund more companies to invest all the money they’re handed, they as a group are now going to be less picky and more stretched and less able to watch over the companies in their portfolios — but, for a while yet, they’ll be less worried because each investment is less of a big deal. In this case, less could be more trouble. Small is the new big headache.
Now venture over to Steve Rubel’s Micropersuasion, where he got much deserved linkage for worrying that too many 2.0 media efforts are being supported by the ad spending of fellow (unprofitable but VC-backed) web 2.0 companies. That kind of rob-Peter-to-pay-Peter spending is, indeed, what inflated the last bubble and Steve wonders whether it is happening again. Valleywag assessed the risk to a few 2.0 media empires. This is why Scott Karp argues that we’d better start getting our act together and figure out how to provide the metrics that real advertisers with real money demand. Amen. This is also why I’ve been arguing — whistling in the wind of a leaking bubble, perhaps — that we need an open ad marketplace with both the metrics and the means to sell and accept real advertising.
But, again, this isn’t just about the new kids. Now see Kit Seelye’s comprehensive tearjerker about the late Knight Ridder in today’s Times. It’s hard for me to get up much sympathy for either the company or its bete noir, investor Bruce Sherman, who caused the company’s sale, or its purchasers — none of whom, I think, is really tackling the fundamental change that is called for today. Getaloada this: Seelye explains why Sherman invested in papers in the first place and it’s a case of the blind buying the blind:
Mr. Ridder said Mr. Sherman was optimistically buying newspaper stocks after the Internet bubble burst because he was driven by the belief that “the Internet is not going to be as big a factor for the industry, so we’ll go with newspapers.â€
After all this, Sherman’s investments are no better off and so he tells his investors: “In some regards, it would be easier for us to abandon the investment theme than to continue to argue the point.†Oh, nevermind.
Some of the owners and employees try to blame all this on the public marketplace. But that’s crap. All the marketplace wants is rational business. And private owners can be rogues, too. See the Santa Barbara News Press, where the rich owner is now trying to get $500,000 out of the former editor for daring to stand up on principle. See also rich man Mark Cuban and how he’s trying to redefine journalism. No, those hoping to find knights on shining gold piles are just looking for a means to put off for a little longer — perhaps until their retirement — the inevitable pressure of the market.
They all keep trying to get sap out of dead trees. Well, not all. In response to the Economist’s cover on the (upcoming) death of (some) newspapers, Guardian Editor in Chief Alan Rusbridger said: “The supply chain of newspapers is utterly Victorian and very expensive.” The point is to get past the past.
The simple truth is that newspapers in the U.S. have been living in their own bubble — the bubble of a monopoly — for the last 50 years, since TV killed off their print competition. Now they have to deal with the marketplace and they simply don’t know how to do it. And 2.0 media companies have to learn to deal with the marketplace, too. That’s what this is all about: economics, pure and simple. The new companies face the same business necessities as the old ones:
1. Value: You have to provide value or, obviously, you’re worthless. And today in news and media, value is redefined. Value no longer includes delivering the commodity news everyone already told me. But value does now include listening to me and helping me create media alongside you. And value always equates to credibility.
2. Customers: In most media, you will still have two customer bases: the people and the advertisers. You have to serve a public large enough to serve to advertisers and you have to give advertisers a competitive return on investment and the means means to measure and prove that you did. Only now, you have more competitors — unless you chose to turn them into partners in a network — and some of those competitors are working for free.
3. Efficiency: There is no rule of journalism that says newsrooms and newspapers should operate as they always have. As I’ve said often, they must shed inefficiencies and resources put to commodities and ego and must find their true value. Return to No. 1.
There is no 1.0 or 2.0. There’s just a vast marketplace with endless opportunities and challenges and no end of new tools and realities. It’s not a new world. It’s the same world but it just keeps changing, faster now than ever. While you have money in the bank account — whether from VCs, or from ad budgets paid for by VCs, or from monopoly power, or from benevolent rich owners — you can avoid the pressure of the marketplace and run a business that would not stand on its own. That’s what bubbles are about — not irrational exuberance but irrational business.
So if we stop looking at this as if it were the border between two worlds but instead one world operating under change, then we would find the ways for old to work with new, big with small, professional with amateur. That may mean new companies acting as the laboratories and development arms for old ones. It may mean big media companies expanding by reaching out to the small. That may mean journalists working with their public to expand the reach of news. That is what our new, networked world demands.
: SEE ALSO: Rick Segal and Chip Griffin on bubblethink.
The Times goes on an odd attack against Forbes.com and its claims to be an audience leader.
The Times’ real complaint is against Comscore and other providers of the numbers Forbes.com — like every big web site — uses. These numbers are gathered from small samples — a la Nielsen TV ratings — and they are relative bullshit but they’re what advertisers go by. Their veracity is ever less reliable the more the media world spreads. When there were only three networks, a small sample was probably a fairly reliable indicator if not measurement of viewership. But with millions of sites, the odds that a small sample will go to them in the same proportion as the rest of the world falls to nada. (This, by the way, is why blogs are doomed in a Comscore/Nielsen world; there’s no way that they can be measured. And that, again, is why we have to do a better job with our own measurement.)
This argument over ratings numbers is less important online because advertisers need not care how big the site is, only how often the ads they pay for get served — something the web can measure and verify and TV can’t. I served on the horrible Audit Burea of Circulations committee that dealt with these issues years ago (“What is a pageview?”). As it turned out, advertisers didn’t care about audits of how big sites were. They needed audits of their own ads. So whether Forbes has X million users or half that, it doesn’t matter to the advertiser so long as his ads get served to the right number of people.
One more note: I think I found one odd reason why Forbes.com keeps growing. For unknown reasons. GoogleNews favors Forbes.com way over other sites. Look at this analysis of citations on GoogleNews — compiled for more than a year since GoogleNews had a neonazi site and wouldn’t reveal its own sourcdes — and note how high Forbes.com is. The Forbes.com guys didn’t even know this until I ran into them on a panel and told them.
On the day of the worst air crash in years, the Emmys begin tonight with Conan O’Brien crashing on an airplane and ending up on Lost. “What could possibly go wrong?” he asks. That. Otherwise a cute gag: dropping in on Office, House, South Park — where Tom Cruise is in the closet — and Dateline catching predators (proving that Dateline is nothing but entertainment). Bad timing, nonetheless.
: LATER: LostRemote says the GM of the NBC station in Lexington was horrified. They should have at least warned him.
: Also on Lost Remote, Steve Safran wonders whether the FCC will go after the Emmys for being “ass over tit.”
When I used to call bloggers et al “citizen journalists,” many professional journalists objected: “We’re citizens, too.” Absolutely, you are, and that raises questions about your responsibility as citizens. Consider these three illustrations involving The New York Times:
Sunday’s Times carries a most eloquent essay by Michael Wines on covering the world’s poorest and sometimes intervening to help them.
How to respond to it is a moral dilemma that lurks in the background of many interviews. Reputable journalists are indoctrinated with the notion that they are observers — that their job is to tell a story, not to influence it. So what to do when an anguished girl tells a compelling story about her young brother, lying emaciated on a reed mat, dying for lack of money to by anti-AIDS drugs? Is it moral to take the story and leave when a comparatively small gift of money would keep him alive? If morality compels a gift, what about the dying mother in the hut next door who missed out on an interview by pure chance? Or the three huts down the dirt path where, a nurse says, residents are dying for lack of drugs? Why are they less deserving?
In reputable journalism, paying for information is a cardinal sin, the notion being that a source who will talk only for money is likely to say anything to earn his payment. So what to do when a penniless father asks why he should open his life free to an outsider when he needs money for food? How to react to the headmistress who says that white people come to her school only to satisfy their own needs, and refuses to talk without a contribution toward new classrooms? Is that so different from interviewing a Washington political consultant over a restaurant lunch on my expense account?
If it is, which is more ethical?
The same question was raised during Katrina, as journalists saw people in need and had to help. I think it is insane to argue that as journalists, they should not act. As citizens of the world, as neighbors, as compassionate people, the canons of their profession should not stop them. At the same time, though, as Wines points out, you can’t help everyone — and sometimes your reporting will bring help.
Now hear Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald on On the Media this week talking about turning child porn sites he finds in the course of his reporting over to the authorities. Last year, in a much-discussed case, Eichenwald, convinced one of his youthful subjects to testify against the pornographers. Now, in a new series, he reveals, with admirable transparency, that he turned in sites because it is the law:
Covering this story raised legal issues. United States law makes it a crime to purchase, download or view child pornography, unless the images are promptly reported to authorities and no images are copied or retained. The Times complied with the law, disclosing what it found to appropriate authorities.
Last year, Jack Shafer argued against what Eichenwald did:
What extraordinary intervention! The analogies aren’t perfect, but imagine a Times reporter encountering an 18-year-old who had been thrust into the illicit drug business at 13 as a consequence of his neglectful family and unscrupulous dealers? Would he help the young man leave the drug trade and find him a lawyer at a Washington firm who is “a former federal prosecutor,” as Eichenwald did Berry? Not likely. Would a Times reporter extend similar assistance to an 18-year-old female prostitute? An 18-year-old fence? A seller of illegal guns? No way.
But why the hell not? Shafer argues that this puts the next reporter in a risky position: Will sources trust him or see him an an agent of the law? I think the reporter who does not follow Eichenwald’s lead is in a riskier position: of allowing and thus even abetting crimes to be committed. And what does that tell the public about our role in our communities? What kind of citizens are we then?
Now to the third, inevitable illustration. I wish that On the Media had asked Eichenwald about Judy Miller and related cases, for the parallels are clear. She knew a crime had been committed and she went to jail not to reveal the criminal. Now, of course, the counterargument is, once again, that sources — especially if those sources are the ones performing the criminal act — will not trust reporters and reveal information that should be revealed if they believe those reporters will not protect them and will hand them over to the authorities. But what if the crime is even clearer than revealing classified information? What if it is child molestation or murder?
Where is the line? Especially in a time when any citizen can perform an act of journalism, can there be a line between being a citizen and a journalist?
: LATER: Jeremy Wagstaff disagrees and says journalists aren’t built to be citizens.
London — already the home of free papers in the morning — is now getting free sheets in the afternoon Peter Cole sums up the situation. I’m betting it will be tried again in New York.
The Independent ponders the value of media studies v. journalism studies and reports that over there, they saw a 25.9 percent increase in secondary students taking certification exams in media, film, or TV this year over last and a 250 percent increase in the number taking media studies at A level in the last decade. Change is enticing.
Jay Rosen has an update on NewAssignment.net as well as on other networked journalism projects. And he has assignments for us. (And I, too, want to thank my son for contributing the work to get up the placeholder site.)
“We were forced to convert to Islam at gunpoint,” Centanni told FOX News. “Don’t get me wrong here. I have the highest respect for Islam, and I learned a lot of good things about it, but it was something we felt we had to do because they had the guns, and we didn’t know what the hell was going on.”
I’d say that given the circumstances, he could have been excused if he’d left off the PC postlude.
