I’ve come to argue that newspapers should not be big brands but big collections of brands.
If I develop a relationship with a blog, I don’t go searching for it through the many layers of an adventure game that is newspaper-site navigation. I don’t treat a newspaper as a portal to my blog relationships. I don’t recommend a brand and address that has too many dots and too many slashes in it. I mostly find posts via links from trusted peers or through RSS subscriptions. Blogs spread not because they reside on huge sites but because they have relationships with people, because the are viral. And the way to be viral is to live at the same level as other linkers: blog to blog, brand to brand, person to person.
So I think that if newspapers are going to blog, they should have lots of blogs at lots of addresses, lots of people creating lots of brands. And this also means that they must be written in the human voice of the person, not the cold voice of the institution. And, while we’re at it, this means that they must join in and link to other conversations; that is they only way they will spread and grow, not because they live six clicks deep into a giant newspaper site. We are seeing the links and the voice. But the architecture remains a problem.
Choire Sicha at Gawker, a man who knows his blogs, highlights the problem at newspapers as he points to their ghettoization into blog sections, as if we come in thinking, ‘hmmh, I feel like some blogs today — a little sports, then some gossip and maybe some politics too,’ as if we are really at a Mongolian barbecue saying, ‘I have a hankering for some chicken and pork and sprouts and put that sweet sauce on it, please.’ It only highlights the broken nature of the newspaper navigation and the portal. Well, Choire would argue, I think, that it’s not broken: We still come to a newspaper and newspaper site wanting to get sports and business. But we don’t come wanting blogs. We either will or won’t build a direct relationship with those blogs and to do so we need to get to them directly.
Architecturally, this returns to the idea that news sites shouldn’t be sites at all but larger, looser networks and not just of stuff they make but also — who can afford to make it all — stuff others make. It also points to the problem of presuming that sites can and should still consider themselves destinations; this, I argued, is one of the lessons of the death of Timesselect.
Now having said all this, I am happy to see that newspaper bloggers are understanding the need for a new voice and a new relationship with others. Simon Dumenco at Ad Age pointed this out in a column that is now behind a pay wall (Hey, Ad Age, can’t you learn a lesson from the Times on this?). One of the best examples of the new newspaper blog voice is Saul Hansell at the Times’ Bits blog. He gets personal and opinionated and is certainly breezier than his print persona and he also makes artistic use of the link to bloggers’ conversations and competitors’ news.
I’m also happy to see that the Times doesn’t think it has to produce all this bloggy goodness itself; that’s why it made a deal with Freakonomics. But the mistake, I’ve argued, was bringing Freakonomics into the Times’ site and navigation. I think that instead, it should have made it part of a larger Times network of content and ads. I should add that Prezvid, my other blog, was brought into syndication deals with the Washington Post and now CBSNews.com. This slurping-up of the content occurred for another reason (media lawyers’ fear of the copyright questions raised by news video on YouTube). And may be the idea that Prezvid’s posts can exist in four or five places is just a preview of a more distributed architecture for blogs themselves.
Still, I think Choire has important advice for newspapers. The blogs may be getting more plentiful and they are getting better. But now they’re ready to move out of the house and find homes of their own.
Air travel may be the first industry based on a business model of kidnapping and imprisonment. It is the least open industry possible. You are trapped with the airline that controls your home airport or destination. And now, far worse, you are trapped in their planes for three to five hours. And why? Well, yes, we can blame weather and bad air-traffic control for some of this. But the essential reason is that that don’t want to let you loose and lose your fare. So they hold you captive. Amazingly, they are allowed it. And, of course, this yields just the amount of resentment and seething hatred it deserves. So no one thinks positively of the industry or the brands in it. It’s so bad that it’s making clearly inferior competitors — driving for hours, Amtrak, ferchrissakes, and maybe even soon the bus — look better. That’s bad. The entire industry and its relationship with its entire customer base is broken.
The attempted solutions so far are all nonsolutions: Attempts to regulate and limit our imprisonment — to still obviously unacceptable levels — have failed. Attempts to sue airlines into civility have not worked. Even the White House finally recognizes the problem but its solutions are aimed at reducing the flights that are already over subscribed; gee, that helps.
It’s time to turn the thinking around. If, for once, anyone in the industry or the government would think like a customer, the solution would be the reverse of imprisoning us in airplanes until they can take off:
Jets should not be boarded until they have a take-off — and landing — slot.
That leaves us, the passengers, free to walk around in the terminal — and, yes, free to seek competitive means of transport (other airlines, cars, trains) or to go home. In no sane world should we be held in captivity and prevented from that free choice. We would have the services of airports at hand — which, in the long run, would improve because there’d be business to be made there; demand for beers yields supply of beers (the mixed-nut marketplace shifts from the jet to the terminal). The airlines would compete to make us comfortable to keep us at their gates. The jets would not be sitting on runways burning incredible amounts of fuel and producing incredible amounts of carbon for hours on end. Onboard crews would not be stressed dealing with righteously angry customers. People might actually decide to fly more often. Oh, yes, this shifts some of the logistical burden of air travel from taxi and air traffic control to the terminals — fine. It also shifts the pain in this relationship from the powerless customer to the people who are in a position to fix the situation. If the airlines want to imprison us, they still have the tool of the nonrefundable ticket, though the market will in the long-run dictate whether we choose to pay for this discount with the risk of captivity.
It’s hard to imagine an industry — other than prisons themselves — that is less open to openness. It’s much easier to imagine how media, retail, consumer products, and entertainment can spawn Cluetrain companies. But if you simply turn around and ask how customers would run these companies, you will get an answer like mine, not like the industry’s or the government’s. The problem is that, deregulation aside, it’s not a competitive marketplace. It’s worse today than telecom. So it’s not as if one company can break away from the pack and think like its customers; it’s not in control of its relationship with us, end-to-end. How do we get from here to there?
The only thing that is new is our empowerment as customers on the internet. We can coalesce and gang up on the airlines. There is also market pressure. The horrid shoddiness of the mainstream airlines is just what has opened up the market for Eos, Silverjet, et al to offer independent, quality competition and take away the big airlines’ most profitable customers, who are all turning their backs and saying nya-nya-nya to their former wardens as they leave the prison gates. But, of course, that marketplace is limited. It’s a much bigger mess than that. And it won’t be cured until the industry starts thinking like its customers, which will only happen when the customers shout so loudly, now that we can, that the industry can’t help but hear.
In the end, the ability of companies to make a business by telling customers what they cannot do is over. It’s only a question of when and how it is replaced.
: I should add that when I flew to Austin this week to see Dell, my Continental flights were ontime both ways — though I saw a chart yesterday (can’t find it now) showing Continental as the current leader in passenger imprisonment. I was lucky to get a first-class upgrade both ways, which improves one’s outlook.
In this video from last night’s debate, Barack Obama makes politics a bit too cause-and-effect, in my book.
Sound bite: “One of the things the next president has to do is to stop fanning people’s fears. If we spend all our time feeding the American people fear and conflict and division then they become fearful and conflicted and divided. If we feed them hope and we feed them reason and tolerance then they will become tolerant and reasonable and hopeful.”
Isn’t that essentially insulting? We are politicians’ empty vessels. We are molded by their rhetoric?
The Presidency isn’t a PBS self-improvement show. It’s an executive job.
Sounds like Obama has been hanging out with Oprah too much.
Next he’ll get elected by giving us all free cars.
Well, look at this: I did read and am now linking to a NY Times op-ed column, because I agree with it and have been saying this for sometime, only not as well. David Brooks today debunks the power of netroots and endorses of the power of the center and Hillary Clinton’s dominance of it. That’s why Bill Clinton still holds a special spot in the admiration of many — because we respect the center. He writes:
The fact is, many Democratic politicians privately detest the netroots’ self-righteousness and bullying. They also know their party has a historic opportunity to pick up disaffected Republicans and moderates, so long as they don’t blow it by drifting into cuckoo land. They also know that a Democratic president is going to face challenges from Iran and elsewhere that are going to require hard-line, hawkish responses.
Finally, these Democrats understand their victory formula is not brain surgery. You have to be moderate on social issues, activist but not statist on domestic issues and hawkish on foreign policy. This time they’re not going to self-destructively deviate from that.
Both liberals and Republicans have an interest in exaggerating the netroots’ influence, but in reality that influence is surprisingly marginal, even among candidates for whom you’d think it would be strong.
My fear is that commentators equate the internet with netroots and will try to marginalize the large, large tree above those small roots.
I think that Henry Copeland may have just coined a term in his nice welcome-back post about me: “post-media journalism.” Hmmmm. I like it. It beats social-media for what follows in news is more than media and more than social. We don’t know where it will end up, except that it comes after media. I also like the term because it blows up the definitions (and brains) used by the incumbents. They define themselves by their medium. But the media doesn’t matter now. The conversation does. The connections do. And the map of them is where news goes next. I think.
It was thanks to Yelp on my Treo that I had a good burrito in Austin last night. Now if only it worked with GPS to find me the nearest burrito (having no idea of my damned zip code). Still, this is what mobile and local and the internet are supposed to be doing. Why’d it take so long? Why isn’t it there yet?
Blog silence because I spent a packed day at Dell, briefly interviewing Michael Dell, visiting the factory, and talking with lots of execs. I’m going to write my magazine piece first and then blog about it (I know, I know, that’s the reverse of what should happen but, hey, the tree-killers are paying the way). There’ll be a lot that won’t fit in the magazine piece and I’ll share it all once I get my notes organized.
The One Laptop Per Child project has just done what I was hoping they’d do: opened up to us buying two laptops at a time – one for ourselves and one for a child someone who needs one. I’ll order when the program starts on Nov. 12.
My Guardian column this week looks at the implications of the death of TimesSelect (nonregistration version here). The bigger issue that keeps hitting me is that this indicates not just the death of pay content — and, good news, we hope, the strength of advertising — but I also think it tells us something about the strength of destinations . . . and perhaps brands. Snippet:
I think the loser could be the power of the media destination or portal - the notion that consumers should come to us and pay us for scarce information that we control. The death of TimesSelect is an affirmation of the new media reality that says the public will seek out our brands less and less and will detour around the front doors we design for them. Instead, they will arrive because of their own need (via search) or peers’ recommendations (via links). So we in media must open ourselves to the public in every way possible. Tearing down walls - pay, registration, archive, or just obtuse navigation - is only the start of it. I believe this also means finding more ways for our audiences to distribute us: we’ll widgetise. And I believe that we must think like Google and see ourselves as platforms on which others build that larger conversation.
At the Online Publishers Association confab in London last spring, Times Company strategic guru Martin Nisenholtz and I got into a theatrical tiff over my contention that we in media should all be asking WWGD (What would Google do) and getting ourselves distributed widely. Martin held that some brands are worth coming to. Is that still the case? Will it be for long? For how many? Clearly, this has big implications for media’s distribution and branding strategies. In a widgetized architecture, they need to figure out how to get their brands and value to stand out in search and links; they need to figure out how to maintain and prove the value of those brands, for Google commodifies everything. They are already beginning to redesign their products around this, opening up to search and links and rewriting pages for SEO and making friendly with linking bloggers. They also need to get their public to distribute them.
The death of TimesSelect is about more than just the death of paid content. It is a fulcrum point in the evolution of media architecture.
I’ve been meaning to mention the elephant in the room: that naked butt to the right, the happy ass. Some of you like it. It led Scott Heiferman to click on it and find “transcendent navigation.” Stowe Boyd sees a connection between an ad for toilet seats and reading newspapers. But this appropriately self-described curmudgeon was offended, so much so that he couldn’t bare bear to link to me and chose to steal a post of mine. That’s fine.
I’m proud of the ad, not because I’m a customer for $1,000 toilet seats (not made for the Navy) but because it represents my return to Blogads, where you should feel free to buy an ad and replace that ass. Hint, hint.
This means I’ve left Federated Media. I have nothing but respect for John Battelle and FM, but it was not meant to be. I earned less there than I had earned at BlogAds and I think I know why. Battelle’s original vision was to sell high-value federations built around blog authors and topics. Of course, I liked the idea, it appealed to both my ego and greed. But it turns out that selling a federation of media wonks is hard. It’s possible, I think, if you find just the right advertisers who want to reach my dear fellow media wonks (read: you). But that would take a lot of effort, it would be an expensive sale as a result. Federated had more immediate success selling big advertisers like Best Buy, but I can’t compete with all its placements when it comes to traffic. Federated also went down a road they called conversational marketing, where I didn’t want to go. So I decided to shift. I wish FM the best of luck; I’m rooting for them to make blogs profitable, which will mean more blogs get made. God’s work.
I’m relieved that blog advertising pioneer Henry Copeland at Blogads would take me back. And that butt is my first ad, the fruit of Blogads’ sales. My second was for a serial killer (a Showtime show). And I’m happy to have both of them. If I make a lot of money on those ads, maybe I can afford one of those toilet seats, which are pretty amazing (but don’t take that as an endorsement . . . this isn’t Pay Per Post).
Oh, I’m feeling so old right now watching a TimeLife commercial for a (shockingly overpriced) collection of FlowerPower songs from the ’60s with your infomercial host: Peter Fonda. Ouch. It’s not just that he has fallen to this fate but that my demographic has. Born to be wild, my ass.
I’m headed to Round Rock, TX, on Monday to interview Michael Dell and other folks at the company — bringing my blogging saga full circle — for a magazine piece. I obviously have my own list of questions but as is my habit, I’ll ask you whether there’s anything you think I should ask them. (I’ll also be videotaping much of it and hope to share that with you if I don’t mess it up.)
* Here’s my Dear Mr. Dell post.
* Here’s Dell blogger extraordinaire Lionel Menchaca’s one-year-anniversary post on Direct2Dell.
* Here’s the action Dell has taken as a result of customer’s requests at IdeaStorm.
* My original posts (from the old blog design) here. Later posts (post-redesign) here. It all started June 21, 2005.
* Drinks with Dell.
* The funniest Dell post.
* White paper on the saga here. Followup study on Dell’s progress here. Another followup: Dell’s stock and customer satisfaction up.
* By the way, I note that Dell Hell is now much farther down Google searches on the company. That, alone, is a huge benefit of getting into the conversation.
