The YouTube debates could fundamentally change the dynamics of politics in America, giving a voice to the people, letting us be heard by the powerful and the public, enabling us to coalesce around our interests and needs, and even teaching reporters who are supposed to ask questions in our stead how they should really do it.
The debates could also demonstrate that democracy is in good hands, that we care, we are smart, we are informed. Too often, that’s not the PR we, the people, get. We’re masses who don’t know and don’t give a damn. But that’s not the people you see in the vast majority of YouTube’s 2,000-plus debate questions.
Finally, the debates could begin to change the relationship between candidates and voters. Campaigns always have been and still are all about control, about handing down a message, about the appearance of listening. The wise candidates should go into those 2,000 questions and start answering the toughest ones, whether or not they’re asked on CNN; that will earn our respect. (John Edwards plans to answer more questions after the CNN debate Monday night.)
All this could happen. Or CNN could pick the dutiful, dull, obvious, sophomoric questions and make us look like a nation of dolts. I hope that won’t be the case; I don’t think it will. Yet CNN did give itself too much control and responsibility when it decided to single-handedly choose all our questions. They should have enabled us to select at least some of the questions and to rate, categorize, organize, and comment on them. At the very least, CNN should have asked us what we think about their choices. Not allowing that still indicates a lack of trust in us, the electorate. CNN shouldn’t be controlling this. They should be organizing it.
But Anderson Cooper, who’ll moderate the debate for CNN, told our sister blog at the Washington Post, Channel 08:
>These are smart questions, and people are clearly living these topics. It’s not just theoretical question, or an academic discussion. These are people that are very passionate about this topic. I want to make sure that this debate honors them, and honors the time they took to make these questions.
My fondest hope is that viewers — and candidates and journalists — leave the debate impressed with at least a few of the questions. I hope they see that handing over control to us — or I should say, back to us — makes for a better discussion and, in the end, a better democracy. I hope they see that we do care, we are smart. I hope they learn to involve us in their process more often. I hope we all feel better about the election and the country as a result. That is putting a lot of pressure on two hours of TV, YouTube videos, and politicians. But the YouTube debates are a crack in the wall of control of elections, politics, and media. Bring your chisels.
Variety sums up the sorry state of the TV critic – and makes me damned glad I’m not one anymore. Gail Shister, who lost both her column and then her TV at the Philadelphia Inquirer, went so far as to hyperbolate: “If there’s one beat that’s sacrosanct, it should be TV.” Forget City Hall. It’s Regis updates we need!
TV as we knew it is exploding and so should the critics who cover it. There is no way — no way — that one critic can perform a one-size-fits-all service anymore. TV critics, like other critics, should become moderators and catalysts of discussion and criticism in the audience. They should be discoverers of hidden gems in the vast and overwhelming world of online video. Like TV itself, they must change or die. And many are just dying. The best example of a next-generation TV critic I know of remains Virgina Heffernan, who has used both her blog and her page to cover internet video with creativity and determination.
The Guardian is going to stream The Wire (here) because they like it.
Remember that the Guardian also put itself on the podcast map with more entertainment: Ricky Gervais’ record-setting podcast. Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, once joked that if he had gone to the Scotts Trust, which owns the paper, a dozen years ago when he sought he job saying that he had a vision for the future organization that involved making comedy radio shows listened to on computers and gadget, he never would have gotten the job. But Gervais was a watershed moment in the multimediaing (sorry) of the paper.
Note also that a week ago, the Mail on Sunday had a gigantic bump in sales when it distributed Prince’s new CD.
I’m sure out there somewhere there’s a grizzled journalist who’s growling about getting news too close to entertainment. Whoever he is, he should get over it. It’s media. These bit of entertainment are just more ways to chronicle life. And they’re clearly good for business, which is good for the journalism.
It’s time for the New York Times to produce the Seinfeld of the age. If they had a sense of humor.
I spent the last week in Munich at Burda — thus the blog silence — talking with my friends at Focus Online and at Burda magazines, ending yesterday spending a day with five smart Voluntäre — professional trainees on a two-year program of work and education at the company. Their task was to brainstorm a project that reinvents the future, coming up with an idea in a day that they’d build in two months. I was there to facilitate and not screw it up. And because I was there, they had to brainstorm in English, which struck me as an added degree of difficulty (I began every spiel at Burda apologizing, auf Deutsch, for speaking such frightful German that I had to speak English; it made little difference considering how wonderfully all these people speak English — an embarassment for me).
We talked through all the possible media — blogs, video, wikis, and so on — and targets and topics and they came out with two great ideas. Actually, they had a half-dozen, but my job was to get them to focus on one and we outlined the content and audience, marketing and revenue strategies, and relationships to the existing brands. As I looked at the list, I saw that they’d concentrated on changing the voice, the distribution, and the relationship with the public. I won’t give away their ideas until they’re launched.
Every media company should have such a program and such a day. I’ve been told that the secret to MTV’s success is that it is reallly run by its interns. Having interns and giving them the respect to both train them and listen to them is vital today for the obvious reason: They understand the future better than the rest of us.
Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian (where, full disclosure, I write and consult), testifies before a Lord’s committee on the future of news and says that digital requires an “act of faith” and that he is not optimistic about the future of local newspapers, and he says it as eloquently as usual:
“For at least ten years we are going to have to have an act of faith and pump money into digital markets without significant return… and we will do it with the expectation that things will change,” he told the committee.
He speculated that the newspaper industry could have an ‘Ipod moment’ where a devise is developed with the potential to consign printed newspapers to the history books.
Regardless of this, he added, the situation for local papers was more worrying than for national papers. . . .
“Because societies need news, web-based models will spring up, and are springing up in most countries including America, that are much more local and originate from citizens.
“They are really interesting things which may be more reflective of the communities than the local papers… I don’t think the printed local newspaper has an optimistic future.”
Read this post by Saul Hansell about Yahoo on the NY Times’ new tech blog. It is opinionated, filled with opinion, and that’s what makes it so good. I doubt that this would appear in the paper but I certainly don’t know why. Hansell rips into Yahoo and its new/old CEO, Jerry Yang, for his buzzwordy performance in his first earnings call.
If any Yahoo users — and there are half a billion of them — listened to Jerry Yang’s debut earnings conference call as chief executive, they would have heard not a single reason to get excited about going back to Yahoo.com. . . .
“So many people want Yahoo to win,†he said. “I’m committed to making that happen.†. . .
The top buzzword today at Yahoo was “ecosystem.†Mr. Yang and Ms. Decker said they wanted to make Yahoo a “marketplace†where advertisers sell their products, publishers distribute their content and developers run their programs.
Why would an advertiser, publisher or developer choose Yahoo rather than, say, Google, Facebook or even Microsoft?
Mr. Yang’s answer had more buzzwords: “Insight,†“openness,†and “partnership.â€
: LATER: Hansell responds in the comments:
Thanks for noticing what we’re doing over at Bits, Jeff.
I think that blogs in fact do give us lots of great tools to do our traditional job better: We can be quick, say as much or as little as we need to, and of course connect to the broader conversation through outbound links and comments.
But I don’t think that blogs are as much of a revolution in the way that opinion and analysis is expressed as you and others may say. My watchword, as the editor ofBbits, is to work in the same voice long used by columnists in news pages, such as Floyd Norris, David Leonhardt, Joe Nocera and David Carr (not that I am putting my blogging on a par with any of them).
I can do that because in my new role I am no longer the beat reporter covering any companies. So I can step back and be a second voice on some technology topics.
Bits is a bit of a combination because it also includes posts from the rest of the reporters, who sometimes need to use a slightly different tone. The blog is less formal than the paper, and allows for first person writing. But for a beat reporter, it is a way to marshal curiosity and conversation. And again these forms of writing –news analysis pieces and reporters notebook collections–have long existed in our pages and others.
I won’t say that’s false humility. I’d say it’s politics. I do think Saul is changing the voice of the paper, one peep at a time.
Openness and partnership are taken for granted in Silicon Valley these days. No one says they want to be an island, even if they do. Insight is a code word for one of Yahoo’s differentiations: its data about its users and willingness to use it in order to target ads. Microsoft is also building targeting capability, but has fewer and less engaged users. Google is building up a vast repository of data, but it has been conflicted about what to do with it.
But Mr. Yang didn’t even try to explain — in words of any number of syllables — why users would want to visit his ecosystem: Is it warm, beautiful, exciting, relaxing?
Until Mr. Yang is able to say what Yahoo stands for and why people should use its services, he is going to reviewing and reorganizing and buzzwording as the company he founded continues to wither.
I would go farther — but then, I’m just a blogger; I’m dripping with opinion. I think that Yang needs a strategy to take Yahoo into the distributed web and away from the old-media model or he will fail. It’s not about convincing people to come to Yahoo. It’s about finding the ways to take Yahoo to the people. In other words, the question isn’t whether I Yahoo. The question is whether Yahoo Jarvises.
But that’s not the point of this post. I find it fascinating that Hansell, a respected reporter who, I believe, helped invent this blog, took on a new voice. Now in one sense, that could be said to misinterpret blogs; just because a blog, doesn’t mean it has to be snarky (as I have to tell my students). But on the other hand, I will say that having a blog opened up a reporter to a new voice that got to the point directly and quickly and didn’t make me read between lines or guess what he thinks. I like hearing what Hansell thinks and I’m glad I now can.
Congrats to Laurel Touby for selling MediaBistro to Jupitermedia for a reported $23 million. She built one of the original social-content companies and made it a success thanks to her strong, clear vision.
Steve Rubel declares dead the idea that blog links as a measure of authority. Steve likes declaring things dead; he’s kind of the grim reaper of measurements. He declared the pageview dead and now it is. This time, Steve’s point is that people do so much more than blog and so he wants to measure across those activities.
His colleague David Brain then takes up the challenge and tries to come up with a new measurement taking into account weighted activity and popularity on blogs, Twitter and company, Facebook, Del.icio.us and company, and more.
I’m all for coming up with new things to measure and new ways to measure them – things that start to capture the real value of the social-content sphere.
But I think that Steve gives an example that shows how tough it is to measure influence by the numbers. He points to Dwight Silverman of the Houston Chronicle watching a conversation on Facebook between Steve and Robert Scoble and quoting that in print, thus multiplying their influence even if the source came in a closed and ultimately, for each participant, small medium. And here’s the problem:
It’s not how many people you interact with. It’s who you interact with.
In this case, old media still has higher influence value; Rubel and Scoble influence more because they influence Silverman and Silverman watches them because they’re Rubel and Scoble. Just counting each as a person, a linker, an influencer misses the multiplying factor of standing influence and also, importantly, the qualitative impact of who’s saying what about what.
Of course, one-size-fits-all measurement is in the end meaningless. If you’re trying to influence knitters, Scobel and Rubel are not in the least influential; you want the most influential knitter, whether they click their needles in blogs or Twitter or Facebook or on video or now Pownce or whatever.
And I think there are different kinds of influence: those who start memes and those who recognize memes just as they hit critical mass and those who spread memes (not to mention those who declare them dead).
So this is more difficult to measure than merely adding up links or traffic but ultimately much richer. It has to become qualitative: ‘This person in this area had this impact on this meme (or story or discussion or idea).’
How is that done? I haven’t the faintest. I think it involves visualizing the links among people and overlaying what happens to the ideas they write about. I think we need to measure the impact people have on memes to measure the impact they have on each other. And we need to have some sense of speed and weight. It’s 3-D and, worse, needs to measure speed and time. Good luck.
: LATER: And just as I published that, I read a post by Steve Peterson of the Bivings Report about just this: trying to measure influence in a given topic about a given subject. His example is Dell Hell:
However, not all voices are equal in their importance to a company. Concerning this fact, one of issues I’ve grappled with is how to weigh general influence and influence within a specific topic.
For instance, using Dell as an example, most of the A-list bloggers very rarely discuss the company and its products directly. Granted, top blogs like Engadget and Techcrunch should interest Dell since they focus on technology, but what about other blogs like Boing Boing and The Huffington Post?
I use Dell as an example since the company has had to deal with a top blog that doesn’t focus on its arena. Remember Dell Hell?
Although Jeff Jarvis and his BuzzMachine blog are prominent, they focus on media, not technology. Thus, they typically shouldn’t worry Dell, but when Jarvis blogged about his “Dell Hell,†the rules changed. In fact, sometimes when bloggers (especially an A-lister) complain about a company and its products, word can spread fast. Sometimes even the mainstream media picks up on such rants.
Measurement is tough in situations like Dell Hell. Does Dell need to devote resources to scrupulously follow BuzzMachine? No, since Jarvis mainly blogs about media and not computer hardware and software. However, Jarvis was worth Dell’s attention for a while.
This also says that spheres of influence are far from fixed. With the cumulative speed of links, one can spread or influence and idea to new people and people can coalesce around that idea (more than that person).
How can a company determine which bloggers who don’t focus on the company and its field require their attention? Then, when should they start and stop monitoring such blogs?
The news for newspapers keeps getting worse. The Wall Street Journal:
The downturn in the newspaper industry is getting worse. . . .
“Right now, you’ve got a perfect storm,” says Edward Atorino, an analyst with financial broker Benchmark Co. He predicts total ad revenue will fall 4.3% this year. The decline will be one of the steepest in history.
No surprises here anymore. But the real bad news is that we don’t yet see bold strategies for shifting fully into the leaner, meaner, faster, funner future. Jon Fine tried to push the San Francisco Chronicle into just stopping its presses and I agree that’s the way to think. I’ve said for sometime that papers just imagine not being papers anymore — and fast.
Kenny riffed off something I said earlier about journalism being a service as opposed to a product and found cause for optimism:
While the distinction may seem semantic, I think the industry’s mistaken impression of itself underlies its fear and loathing of readers’ migration online.
As a product, newspapers are doomed — and their demise is coming a lot faster than many of us realize. But as a service, journalism and the journalism business have unprecedented opportunity. The sooner journalists start thinking of their business as a service, the better equipped they’ll be for the changes ahead.
I’m two days late putting this up thanks to tortured internet access in my Munich hotel. The limits of technology: a revolution is stopped by a log in the road. Anyway, here’s my Guardian column about the impact of live TV news from witnesses, a polished-up version of the discussion here:
The wait for Apple’s iPhone turned out to be the great non-story: hordes slept outside Apple’s stores across America to get a phone that turned out not to be in short supply. As soon as the lines emptied, one could just walk in and buy one.
Yet I say we will mark this non-story as the moment when television news changed forever. For in those lines were people with small cameras hooked to laptops, which used mobile phones to transmit video to the internet, live. They are lifestreamers, who have been simulcasting their lives 24 hours a day. Why? Because it’s there. They’d already been blogging, Twittering, Facebooking, Flickring, podcasting and YouTubing their lives. Live video was merely their next frontier.
Yet because they were there, we saw this news covered live, in video, sent to the internet and to the public by the people in the story and not by reporters. The news came directly from witnesses to the world. Two months ago, after mobile-phone video of the Virginia Tech mass shooting went online via CNN’s website – more than an hour after the event – I speculated in this space that someday, we’d see that same video from a news event being fed live, directly to us on the internet. Well, that didn’t take long.
This changes the relationship of witnesses to news and news organisations. When witnesses can feed their views live to the internet, news producers will not have the means or time to edit, package, vet and intermediate. All that news groups can do is choose to link or not link to witnesses’ news, as it happens. This means that we in the audience may not see the news on the BBC’s or CNN’s sites or shows; we may see it on the witnesses’ blogs via embeddable players from services such as uStream.tv and Justin.tv, which enable lifestreaming.
This presents an infrastructural challenge for news groups and consumers: how will we know where to find this news? For a time, we may go to portals for live TV, but they are overcrowded with content – and anyway, portals don’t work any more. Instead, I imagine that news organisations will devote people to combing live video to see what’s happening out in the world. Or collaborative news collectors, such as Digg.com, will find and pass the word about news now. The real value will then be alerting all the rest of us to something going on now so we can watch on the internet … or perhaps on our iPhones.
And soon, those very phones will be a means of gathering and sharing news. Lifestreamers have had to carry their apparatus in backpacks, which sounds onerous until you consider all the equipment and expertise still hauled around by the networks. One of the lifestreamers covering the Apple lines at the gigantic Mall of America, Justine Ezarik of iJustine.tv, has glamorous looks destined for broadband. She wouldn’t let a backpack spoil her image. Instead, she perched her tiny camera jauntily on a fashionable cap and hooked that into a tiny laptop in her purse. Yes, news gathering is now purse-sized.
The fact that this coverage from the scene is live also means it can be interactive: the audience may interact with the reporter, asking questions, sharing information, suggesting they go shoot this instead of that.
Now add in global positioning technology and the ability to email or SMS people who happen to be near a news event and it becomes possible to assign witnesses to open their video phones: everyone at Glasgow airport with a camera could have received an SMS suggesting that they start shooting and sharing what they saw moments after the flaming car rammed the terminal. They also could be warned to stay away from the danger. Live.
Problems? Of course, there are. Yes, someone could fake a broadcast. So producers may choose not to link or may issue caveats. It is incumbent on journalists and educators to instil an ever-greater scepticism as a keystone of media literacy in the era of ubiquitous news. And, yes, through each lens, we’ll see just one angle of the story; it is necessarily incomplete. But we can also get more people to show more perspectives on that story than was ever possible with coverage from the networks.
In a comment on my blog, New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen said this is a case of “media evolving toward a more and more complete imitation of lifeâ€. Or perhaps the two begin to merge: life becomes news.
That was the headline on the lead story on the TV news here tonight. It means Germany sweats, but more colorful sounding. It’s damned hot here. I feel like a one-man global warming jinx. I was in New York for unusual heat, then Florida (when they say it’s a scorcher, it’s a scorcher) and now in Bavaria. Jarvis schwitzt.
