I’ve just had the chance to listen to Obama’s race speech. It is, as always, eloquently written and delivered and I agree with what he says about America, race, unity, and our work to do. Who could not?
But I believe he is trying too hard to dodge making a decision about Jeremiah Wright and his divisive and racist speech. After having thrown Wright to the wolves in prior videos, he now backs up. He tries to explain Wright. He explains him more as a product of racism than a racist himself. He says he cannot leave Wright and his flock behind or we will not come together to solve our problems.
No. A church is a choice. I left a church because it was bigoted toward gays. I left one congregation and the entire Presbyterian Church with it. Oh, one could try to explain their bigotry, to give it context and history, to caution that they should not be tossed aside because of this belief. But that, in my mind, would be every bit as bad as staying in a church or a country club that refused to allow black people in. That would be every bit as bad as refusing to condemn the hate speech of a Pat Robertson or a Jerry Falwell. It would be as bad as trying to explain away the racism of George Wallace or Lester Maddox with context and history. I did not want to endorse or support this church myself and I certainly did not want to raise my children in their atmosphere of discrimination. A church is a choice and I chose to leave.
Obama chooses not to leave. He chooses to try to explain Wright away. He wants to make it into a lesson in racial history. He wants to stay with Wright and company while only disagreeing with what he says. He wants to have it both ways, every way.
This is not the decisive decision of a leader, I think.
I also believe that Obama missed the opportunity to recast the campaign, the nation, and even himself. As he so beautifully puts it, he has bits of every bit of America in him. He is not black. He is not white. He can be the melting pot we’ve dreamed of in this country — at least my generation did once — and have never and probably will never achieve. Indeed, we no longer want cultures to melt away. And that is good. But I’ve heard Vin Diesel and Soledad O’Brien — hey, I’ll take cultural spokesmen where I can find them — refusing to let people put them into racial pens and to insist that they are simply American.
Barack Obama is simply American. Yes, he’s right that we cannot work together to solve racial problems and all our other problems by glossing over race, acting as if the history and wounds are not there. We agree. But we also cannot move past mistrust by justifying words and actions that divide and demand condemnation and separation.
I liked my minister. But I told him that he was supporting an atmosphere of bigotry. I told his board that was why we were leaving their church. I refused to try to get along with that. It was a choice, a sad but clear and necessary decision. If we are going to change, we sometimes must break from the past, not explain it.
As the web turns live — with broadcasters streaming and with anyone carrying a mobile phone broadcasting — the next big challenge for search will be how we can find what’s going on while it’s going on. How can we search the live web?
I’ve written here before that witnesses sharing what they see via video from their mobile phones will change the essential architecture of news. No longer will CNN tell witnesses to send things to them that they then vet, package, and present to the world. When a Qik or Flixwagon user sees live news and broadcasts it on the web, it won’t be through CNN. CNN’s challenge will be to find it and its choice will be to link to it or embed it or not. That changes the role of a news organization in the ecology of news. It might even take them out of the flow of much of live news unless they can come up with systems to find and recommend what’s happening now.
Even when dealing with known, branded sources of live broadcast, there’s a challenge. I want to see whether anyone — TV or radio network or citizen armed with a Nokia — is going to broadcast Barack Obama’s speech about race from Philadelphia today. But I can’t find that.
Google is not prepared for the live web. Google values pages that grow links and clicks over time. It understands the permanent web. Of course, that is a protean thing, a growing brain. But it’s not live. Technorati likes to think that it gives us the live web but I’d say that instead it gives us the dynamic web, the latest static pages. It also doesn’t give us live.
How can you find and value live? Looking at links will make you too late. Traffic might tell you something — why are people swarming around this video stream? — but that, too, will be unreliable and probably too late. Brand won’t be a help because the witness will almost always see and share news before a reporter can get there.
Nobody would have had any reason to know that I was on the last PATH train into the World Trade Center on 9/11 but if I’d had the phone I had now, I would have been broadcasting the news from eye-level — not from rooftops three miles away — as it happened. How could you have known that?
There will need to be a new system where, Twitterlike, he who’s broadcasting live can alert the world about what he’s sending and others — audiences or armies of interns monitoring these feeds — help the good stuff bubble up and quickly.
If this doesn’t exist, the live web’s value will be as perishable as smoke. If it does exist, we’ll probably find what’s going on — what’s news — around the present news architecture. And then we’ll have to wonder how we vet and confirm that what we see is real.
Live changes everything — again.
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Seconds after posting this, I see Dave Winer — who else? – at the start of such a structure of leading us to the live web. He Twittered: “I’m making an MP3 of Obama’s speech. I’ll publish it a few minutes after the speech is over, 15 minutes from now.”
The more you learn about him, the more Obama seems to be a conventionally opportunistic politician, impressively smart and disciplined, who has put together a good political career and a terrific presidential campaign. But there’s not much audacity of hope there. There’s the calculation of ambition, and the construction of artifice, mixed in with a dash of deceit — all covered over with the great conceit that this campaign, and this candidate, are different. . . .
With no particular dog in the Democratic fight, many conservatives have tended to think it would be good for the country if Obama were to win the Democratic nomination, freeing us from the dreary prospect of the return of the House of Clinton. Now I wonder. Might the country be better off with the cynicism of the Clintons than the conceit of Obama?
* * *
Peter Daou, Clinton’s online adviser, sent an email to a bunch of bloggers arguing that Obama’s playing the negative game, too:
I want to address a pervasive misconception, namely, that Senator Obama hasn’t run a negative campaign against Hillary. I think it’s time to put that misconception to rest.
The truth is that for months, the Obama campaign has been attacking Hillary, impugning her character and calling into question her lifetime of public service. And now the Chicago Tribune reports that Senator Obama is preparing a “full assault” on her “over ethics and transparency.” To those who contend that Senator Obama is the clear frontrunner, I ask, to what end this “full assault” on Hillary?
On CNN last Tuesday, Senator Obama said, “Well, look, Wolf, I think if you watch how we have conducted our campaign, we’ve been very measured in terms of how we talk about Senator Clinton. … I have been careful to say, that I think that Senator Clinton is a capable person and that should she win the nomination, obviously, I would support her. You know, I’m not sure that we have been getting that same approach from the Clinton campaign.”
The facts of this election stand in stark contrast to that statement. Senator Obama and his senior campaign officials have engaged in a systematic effort to question Hillary’s integrity, credibility, and character. They have portrayed her as someone who would put her personal gain ahead of the lives of our troops, someone who would say or do anything to win an election, someone who is dishonest, divisive and disingenuous. They have adopted shop-worn anti-Clinton talking points, dusted them off and unleashed a torrent of unfounded character attacks against her. Among other things, they have described Hillary - and her campaign - as: “Disingenuous” … “Too polarizing to win” …’Divisive’ … “Untruthful” … “Dishonest” … ‘Calculating’ … “Saying and doing whatever it takes to win” … “Attempting to deceive the American people” … “One of the most secretive politicians in America” … “Literally willing to do anything to win” … “Playing politics with war” [Each of those lines is a link in his email to the quote; I'm too lazy to copy them all over -ed]
To top it off, they have blanketed big states with false radio ads and negative mailers — ads and mailers that experts have debunked time and time again. They have distributed health care brochures using Republican framing. They have tried to draw a nexus between Hillary’s votes and the death of her friend Benazir Bhutto. And one of Senator Obama’s top advisers (who has since left the campaign) recently called Hillary “a monster.”
This “full assault” on Hillary comes from the very top of the Obama campaign, not surrogates and supporters.. . . .
This is a hard-fought campaign - as it should be. Like any candidate for elected office, Hillary has made clear why she thinks she would do a better job than her opponent. She has laid out comprehensive policy proposals, put forth her 35-year record of accomplishment, and spent countless days introducing herself to voters across the country. She has said that she is far better prepared to take on John McCain on national security. She has contended that she is the candidate with the experience to confront the GOP attack machine. She has argued that she is more electable. She has said that Senator Obama’s words are not matched by actions. And she has challenged him to live up to core Democratic values and goals such as universal health care. . . .
* * *
I look forward to hearing Obama’s speech today about race. I hope he will say that criticism is not racism. And questions are not all negative. I hope he will urge a return to substantive discussion of issues, not personality and victimhood.
It warms my cockles to see a local blog ad network start, especially from a company as big as CBS’ station group.
They just announced a new widget ad network in 13 of their local markets (the owned & operated stations with newsrooms). In a week and a half, they’ve put together 80 blogs in the network, many more to come. They are all local blogs around various content interests: news, politics, sports, real estate, entertainment. This is pretty much just an ad network rather than a curated ad-and-content network like Glam. CBS intends to send the blogs some traffic, but unlike Glam, it’s not aggregating and curating their content. They’re looking for decent blogs that are local and are updated regularly, but they’re not yet turning this into a contest where the best quality wins (that day will come, I hope). When I spoke with them, they did add that they’re delighted with the quality of the local blogs they’ve seen.
You can see an example of the ad unit here and here: a constant feed of content (video stills in most cases, text in others) over an ad unit. So far, they’ve sold AT&T, Liberty Mutual, and the Honda dealer group in Dallas. They will sell in both local and national ads; it’s too soon to know what that mix will be, but they anticipate about an even split.
This is a model I like and one I’ve been pushing with companies I know: You could look at this as an ad with content attached or as content with an ad attached. So the blogger gets an ad, revenue, a some small dollop of content, and an association with a major media brand (which some still value). The station gets to push its advertiser as well as its content and brand and gets an association with those cool bloggers and its gets new inventory and audience. The advertiser has a better idea of the environment because there’s content next to the ad and because the station picks the blogs. What’s not to love?
The CBS unit also carries the local station’s branding plus a link to a pitch to join the network. Here are examples of the units.
I spoke with Jonathan Leess, president and general manager of the CBS station digital group, and Aaron Radin, senior vp for their ad sales and biz dev. They understand that this is not just about driving traffic to CBS domains but about reaching audience they may not now serve in other places. That’s the attitude.
I had to pull numbers out of them like baby teeth. They’re telling the bloggers to expect an effective CPM of about 50 cents but they quickly acknowledge that they’re subsidizing and backfilling the network, which is brand new. That is, they’re not yet selling the high-value ads and they’re not selling out, so they are putting in lower-value advertising in some cases and throwing in a subsidy on top. So that’s the net-net bloggers can expect today. But that’s not the value they’re selling to advertisers. That, they said, is more like a $10 CPM (though all life is negotiable). Compare that with $8-20 CPMs on CBS domain banner ads and $16-25 on video inventory. If they can sell a CPM approaching a double digit for local blogs and sell through enough inventory, that could be healthy. In the end, I ask, what will the value of a network impression be relative to a CBS domain impression? Again, it’s too early to say, but Radin guesses one third to one half.
They hope to add 20 million incremental (that is, new) ad impressions per month per market, though they’re quick to add that their goal isn’t just ad impressions but also new audience. Amen. And note that they’re pushing not just web pages but also those high-value video views. Leess and Radin said they serve 20-25 million streams a month, about half of that from the stations’ sites and half from syndication to Yahoo.
By the way, Buzzmachine is not local so it won’t qualify. Drat. When will somebody start that media wonks’ network?
The digital issue of AdAge leads off with a three-page gatefold ad for Google that is impressive for the number of things they can now tell advertisers to do, including:
* Air your radio spot at the perfect time - google.com/adwords/audioads
* Sponsor a must-read feed - feedburner.com
* Put your business on the map - google/com/localadd
* Strike up a conversation with your customers - google.com/adwordd/gadgetads
* See what’s hot right now - google.com/trends
* Make your newspaper ads ‘clickable’ - google.com/adwords/printads
* Keep visitors glued to your site - services.google.com/websiteoptimizer
* Shine at the drop of a dime - google.com/adwords
* Build your network - groups.google.com
* Find out how many viewers tuned in to (and out of) your TV spot - google.com/adwords/tvads
* Create your own local news channel - news.google.com
* Turn your custoemrs into stars - youtube.com/advertise
And on and on. Who needs the rest of the magazine when you have Google?
Google Ad Manager is one critical piece in creating the open network of networks where any site can take any ad and any marketer can advertise on any site. When that day arrives, we all become atoms that can attract to one molecule or another, no longer locked into one network. We start to see a truer marketplace for online advertising. We also get to see small sites gather together in large, ad hoc networks to compete with big sites — and this, I believe, will encourage and support the creation of more small sites. God’s work. Or now Google’s.
The creation of a standard ad call — which any site can use and into which any advertiser can place an ad, which in essence is what Google is doing — is the foundation of what I envisioned when I called for an open-source ad infrastructure.
There’s just one issue: It’s not open-source. And it’s Google’s.
Google’s benefits are clear: By offering free ad-serving to sites, it has an opening to be on many more sites, and when they don’t have ads of their own to serve, Google can serve AdSense and make some more money. Google also gathers incredible data about ad performance and pricing and about the sites themselves. One big problem with its program is that it doesn’t share that data with the publishers and let them use it to more efficiently serve its ads. It also doesn’t share it with advertisers and let them take advantage of a more transparent marketplace.
No, Google’s holding onto that information itself and, once again, becoming smarter than all of us. And I say that’s our own damned fault for not building our truly open ad marketplace. It’s not too late, but it soon will be.
The closest thing we have to an infrastructure for such an open marketplace is OpenX (nee Openads, nee phpAds), a free and open-source ad platform now serving ads on 30,000 sites. What’s needed — and I told CEO James Bilefeld this when I met him sometime ago — is that all those separate sites should be tied together into an open network so advertisers can pick and choose where to place their ads. The other thing it needs is standard metrics so advertisers can decide where to buy.
Now Google promises to build that cross-internet ad network with Ad Manager. And Google has the metrics — only, again, it’s not sharing. It lets sites target ads on the most basic of criteria: geography, bandwidth, browser, browser language, operating system, and domain. Whoop-dee-do. Each site can use its own information to target. But it’s the cross-site information that is exponentially richer and it’s Google that sits in the catbird seat where that is visible.
We should be able to target on so much richer information: the cross-site behavior of users (that’s the basis of Tacoda, just bought by AOL); their influence (that’s part of the sauce cooking up at 33 Across, where — full disclosure — I am an adviser and investor); their place in the timing of a conversation (meme starters, meme spreaders); their own characteristics (what do the demographics of authors tell us apart from the demographics of audience?); their authority (too bad Technorati never found a way to exploit that for bloggers’ benefit); and so on. This is about moving beyond eyeballs to brains.
But I wonder whether entrepreneurs will be able to start building some of this structure atop Google’s Ad Manager: analytics companies finding the ultimate network of soccer moms; ad agencies or media companies putting together ad hoc networks. This will create greater efficiency and thus greater value. And it will tie together a distributed community of interest into a critical mass advertisers will pay attention to: the mass of niches. And that, again, will support the creation of a new wealth of content and communication; that’s what I want to see.
On a less momentous scale, the Google move also reduces the cost of serving ads to zero and that will have benefit for sites of any size. When I worked on sites that were DoubleClick clients (which will still charge for serving as it becomes part of Google… for now) it was too expensive to serve even our own promotional ads because we had to pay DoubleClick to do it. Now sites can use their ad inventory in new and more creative ways. That, too, is a benefit of Ad Manager.
Altogether, Google is simply doing what Google does: creating a platform. That benefits all its users and it benefits Google by putting it at the center of the market. But the more closed that market is, the more it benefits Google over the users. And the more Google becomes the sole standard, the more it can successfully make it closed. So if we’re going to create an open ad marketplace, now’s the time. If it’s not already too late.
The real reason I went to SXSW was to accompany my son and webmaster, Jake, as his aide and chauffeur. I was along for the ride. When Henry Copeland invited me to join his panel, I hesitated and then he pulled an unfair move: He told me that I should bring Jake and if I didn’t, I would be a really bad dad. Henry was right. So off to SXSW we went. Watching Jake in his element was, of course, the highlight of the weekend. People knew him from his Facebook programming. And he got to meet and hear some of his idols, the rock stars of the creation generation: Kevin Rose, Matt Mullenweg, Mark Zuckerberg, Ev Williams, Gary Vaynerchuk, Andrew Baron, Jim Louderback, and more folks from Twitter, Pownce, Digg, Revision3. And Robert Scoble, too. And they were all wonderfully gracious to us. He had fun. I was proud.
One of the highlights was Sarah Meyers’ interview with Jake for Pop17, in which she got another of her many scoops, this one about the sale of his Facebook app:
And here are father and son, resplendent in convention badges (thanks to Tony Pierce):
We ate out with my teammates from Daylife and with Lionel Menchaca from Dell; we had the good sense not to get into the line for the Google party; we saw a few premiere movies; we got t-shirts and schwag. A perfect weekend, I’d say.
(CommentIsFree asked me to write this post about AOL acquiring Bebo.)
Poor Bebo. I feel for the residents of their hip and convivial apartment block. It has just been bought by a slumlord.
AOL — which is paying $850m for the social networking site, the other Facebook — is where innovations go to die. Remember Netscape? Bought for $4.2b and now dead. AOL bought a mess of advertising platforms — Advertising.com, Quigo, Tacoda — and can’t make them to get along; the New York Times reports on continuing warfare that has resulted in AOL firing the business talent it just acquired. Back in 1998, AOL bought the pioneering instant-messaging platform ICQ and though AOL’s IM went on to become huge and though ICQ lives still, it was never the leader again. And then there’s what AOL did to Time Warner and its stock (which I bitterly regret holding onto from my days working at the magazine publisher).
In its purchase of Bebo, AOL — like Yahoo, Time Warner, Microsoft, and no end of media companies — is trying to buy the strategy it doesn’t have. And that’s a strategy that rarely works.
The terrible irony is that if anyone should have understood community and how to support, nurture, and profit from it, AOL should have. The problem is that AOL never understood its real value. At various times, it thought it was an internet service provider and then a portal and then an ad network. But all along, AOL’s greatest asset was the community of people under its nose: millions of enthusiasts in countless niches meeting and enjoying each others’ company in forums and chat and personal pages, the platform for community that AOL created.
AOL should have been Bebo before there ever was a Bebo. It should have been the Google of people. It should have been Facebook. Instead, having killed the golden goose of its own community — one it created as the social pioneer of online — it is going to the market to buy a tin gosling.
So what will become of Bebo? I shudder to think. These acquisitions rarely work well. We can look not just to AOL but also to Yahoo, which bought the wonderful photo service Flickr and bookmarking service Del.icio.us. Both live on but without the rush of innovation that made them so valuable and Yahoo has saddled each with its own klunky membership structure.
If history is any guide — and in AOL’s case, it certainly is — I fear that Bebo’s talented, visionary founders will leave in frustration or firings; AOL will bury the service inside its outmoded portal; and AOL will treat the people inside not as people but as ad inventory.
Oops, I forgot to subject you to my Guardian column this week about SNL, Obama’s honeymoon, and the election. If that’s not enough of me, here’s the transcript of my appearance on the same subject on Howie Kurtz’ Reliable Sources.
And for good measure, I give you Will Bunch of the Philly Daily News and James Poniewozik of Time, all of us agreeing that it’s time for journalists to fess up and tell us whom they’ve voted for.
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In a time of blogs with their ethic of transparency, how long can journalists continue to hide their opinions? I’m a believer in the British newspaper model, in which print journalists join a tribe, Guardian left or Telegraph right, and then invite the public to judge them not on their hidden agendas, but on the quality of their journalism. British broadcast and all US news organisations, by contrast, expect us to believe journalists are devoid of opinions: half-human hacks, roboreporters.
That fiction is falling apart in the US presidential campaign, where news media have failed to cover one of the essential stories of the event: media’s own love affair with Barack Obama.
The story has begun to attract attention, with comedy show Saturday Night Live twice skewering the press’s roughing up of Hillary Clinton and fawning over Obama. In one skit, the show’s faux Clinton complains: “Maybe it’s just me, but once again it seems as if a) I’m getting the tougher questions and b) with me, the overall tone is more hostile.”
The real Clinton picked up the punchline at the next debate and said: “If anybody saw Saturday Night Live, maybe we should ask Barack if he’s comfortable and needs another pillow.” Some believe this played a role in her victories last week.
In the other skit, a reporter gushes to “Obama”: “I just really, really, really, really want you to be the next president.” And the Fauxbama responds that journalists are “tired of being told, ‘You journalists have to stay neutral, you can’t take sides in a political campaign’. And they’re saying, ‘Yes, we can. Yes, we can take sides. Yes, we can.’”
So why don’t they? The question of journalistic objectivity is the stuff of endless journalism-school seminars. But what’s different this year is that the journalists’ opinions are related to the quality of coverage of the campaign.
I’ve seen reporters complain Clinton doesn’t give them access or is aloof; I’ve seen journalists quoted (anonymously) saying that they don’t much like her. Of course, that shouldn’t affect their coverage - since when do we see crime reporters whine that murderers are mean to them? - but it does. Obama is on an endless press honeymoon. He breathes rhetorical cumulus clouds - “Change we can believe in”, “Yes, we can”, “We are one” - without reporters challenging him or his supporters to define what they mean. I’ll wager that if a pollster asked 1,000 Obama fans what “change” means, there’d be 100 different answers.
There’s another new factor in the objectivity debate: weblogs. Reporters are now writing them. And they’re learning that if a weblog is successful, it is a conversation held at a human level. That conversation demands frank interaction and openness. As one online executive puts it: blogs are a cocktail party. I’ll add that if you talk to friends at a party and refuse to give your opinion while demanding theirs, someone will soon throw a drink at you, as I have been wanting to do to many a TV pundit lately.
I’ve heard TV news executives say that to have on-air personalities writing blogs might present a conflict because, after all, TV people are impartial. But they already live with that conflict by presenting TV journalists as personalities and then cutting off that part of the personality that enables opinion. If these people want to join the discussion on the net and reap its benefits, they have to give something of themselves.
The more journalists tell us about their sources, influences and perspectives, the better we can judge what they say. So I should tell you I voted for Clinton. You probably could have guessed that. But now you don’t have to.
What a difference a day makes. I’ve gone from SXSW to the McGraw-Hill Media Summit in New York. It certainly is a different crowd: jeans to suits and better haircuts and far more people trying to pitch. By the coffee table, I hear a guy saying, “We build communities for large brands.” That is something you would never hear at SXSW because the people there know that’s an impossibility.
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Good PowerPointese line from Disney’s Bob Iger: He has shifted from protecting the brand to projecting the brand.
Another: He says Disney isn’t embracing the internet so much as embracing consumers and to be relevant to and reach them, they need to use the technology.
He says they will generate $1 billion in digital revenue in the company up from $750 million the year before (not including online sales to the parks). He says they’ve sold 4 million movies on iTunes and 40-50 million TV episodes, which pales into comparison to streams. Both are incremental — that is, new and additional — to their existing business. He says the DVD business won’t go away but there will be a shift to online delivery.
He cautions that social media isn’t just about Gens X and Y. It’s about kids now. He believes that the broaddband enabled computer will be come a primary entertainment medium for kids. “It’s just as important to them as television.”
Asked what’s the trick for an old-media company to get it, Iger responds, “Hire new people.” He says you need people who look at technology as a friend not a foe, not talking about challenges and fragmentation. (The kind of people at SXSW.)
Google is no threat, he says. Disney is a popular search term. He knows that Google sends him people and rather than seeing Google’s ad sales on top of that as a problem, he wants his company to find ways to make the experience of coming from Google better.
He talks about Disney as an American brand worldwide. He says he respects the need for local creation of content and so in local markets they set up creative centers, not just distribution centers. (I wish he were around in 1991 when my bosses at Time Warner killed — muzzled — my column at Entertainment Weekly because I dared to say that local content support could be a good thing. “How can you say that?” demanded one of the company’s editors. I stopped writing my column then, in protest, and soon quit the magazine. This was only one of my problems.)
* * *
Next, a panel with big, old media companies: Julia Wallace of hte Atlanta Journal Constitution, Jon Klein of CNN, Kinsey Wilson of USA Today, David Westin of ABC.
“The paper I read most often is the Pocono Record,” says Raines, ex-editor of the New York Times. He says that local is the value of local newspapers. And that quote will float around his old shop in a few minutes.
Asked about the Times, Raines says they need to decide whether to go head-to-head nationally with Murdoch and the Journal. I thought it was the other way around. Isn’t the national report the high ground? Raines says no. He points to the Washington Post’s contraction strategy, pulling back into inside the Beltway. He says that the Times may need to come up with a contraction as opposed to an expansion strategy. “Common sense tells you that when your stock was at $54 in the mid 90s and it’s now at, what, $18 and the son of an Alabama construction millionaire has bought 20 percent of your company… your stock price cannot sit there.”
What should the New York Times do? Lightning round. Klein: “Stop writing about themselves.” Wallace: “Become that voice for the intellectuals of America on any platform.” Wilson: Long pause. Then he agrees with Howell — contraction. Westin: “It sounds right … that they’re in a middle ground that is not sustainable right now, neither fish nor fowl.”He says he doesn’t know whether the contraction is about local or a set of subjects of readers. Raines: “I think Julia’s idea of going for that elite, intellectual audience is a sound one.”
Klein answers moderator Jon Fine’s question about what job they’d fill first if they had a budget to start a new news product: “I’d hire data miners.” Right. Hunters. Gatherers. Searchers. Vetters. Curators. Right. “If you do it the right way, you’ve got the audience telling you an awful lot.” And that helps.
Fine gives a question that came in response to his blog post on the panel: Is there a supply-side problem? Is there too much news? Will there be a consolidation. Well, I’d say, there’s not too much news. But choice hurts one-size-fits-all products. There’s a supply-side problem for them, but it’s not that there is too much. There’s just too much for the old control point.
Wallace says the demand for news is higher than ever. I agree. And, as I’ve said before (but can’t link to it because there’s no wi-fi in this auditorium… grrrr) we are in the post-scarcity economy. Those who made their business by controlling that scarcity are the ones in trouble. And that is these guys if they don’t change their essential models, which they’re trying to figure out.
Westin says that they will not win on covering, say, the bridge collapse because that news is a commodity. But the Rep. Foley story is where they will win because that was reporting. There, he argues, there is an undersupply. Wilson says that is the discussion happening in newsrooms across the country: minimizing commodity effort and maximizing unique reporting value.
Fine asks them how they’d organize their newsrooms if they were doing it from scratch today. Klein says they’d have a lot fewer people. He tells about taking a feed via Skype (because Jeff Toobin went to law school of Eliot Spitzer and was on an island with no satellite uplinks); today, he says, he’d buy a lot fewer trucks and buy more laptops. (Or soon mojo phones, I’d say.)
Asked what is its high ground, its unique value, Wilson gives a characteristically smart answer: He says that USA Today is perceived as a down-the-middle voice, something it has cultivated since the start and something that is more valuable in a time when news organizations are perceived as having agendas. But then he acknowledges that it is difficult to bring that to online when the web wants voice and perspective.
I ask Klein what they’ll do when people out here are broadcasting live from their phones via Qik.com and Flixwagon.com etc. He says that iReport.com will be “a home for unvetted material.” He says they haven’t dealt with live material but they’re getting there. He wouldn”t put the CNN brand on it until it is vetted.
The New York Times op-ed page has now crossed the line I was hoping would not be crossed in a piece by Orlando Patterson that makes criticizing Barack Obama or questioning his qualifications — both the essence of campaign debate — tantamount to racism. We have crossed into a land where political discussion is politically incorrect. He says:
I have spent my life studying the pictures and symbols of racism and slavery, and when I saw the Clinton ad’s central image — innocent sleeping children and a mother in the middle of the night at risk of mortal danger — it brought to my mind scenes from the past. I couldn’t help but think of D. W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation,†the racist movie epic that helped revive the Ku Klux Klan, with its portrayal of black men lurking in the bushes around white society. The danger implicit in the phone ad — as I see it — is that the person answering the phone might be a black man, someone who could not be trusted to protect us from this threat.
Oh, for God’s sakes, the images could also remind me of Peter Pan and children being protected from the youthful scamp by the shaggy dog.
Oh, and what would solve this problem in Patterson’s view? Not casting a blonde child. Being blonde is a problem.
He concludes:
It is possible that what I saw in the ad is different from what Mrs. Clinton and her operatives saw and intended. But as I watched it again and again I could not help but think of the sorry pass to which we may have come — that someone could be trading on the darkened memories of a twisted past that Mr. Obama has struggled to transcend.
Yes, and as I read this sorry piece again and again and saw its clear intention of painting Hillary Clinton as a racist, I could not help but think that it is a sad day when a Harvard professor and the New York Times sink to playing the race card in this election, turning political debate into victimization.
In this, the age of offense, let me say, I’m offended.
OK, that’s likely a lie. But I just got back to New York and belatedly watched the Aust360 video of Sarah Lacy after The Event. Once again, she’s emblematic of bigger problems in our craft: She refuses to hear the feedback she got. Worse, she doesn’t seek it out. This is one of those moment when I see a mirror — a mirror of my own past — and realize how blogging has changed me. Like her, back in the day, I hated getting letters from readers (probably because many were scrawled in crayon, covering sheets of paper with writing at 0, 90, 180, and 270 degrees, and spotted with drool). But with blogs, I had to learn to deal with feedback, criticism, and correction and then I learned the benefit of seeking it out. We hear none of that from Lacy, only the belief that she knows her job and we don’t:
: LATER: Note that unlike his BW colleague, Jon Fine is asking his audience for advice and questions before his panel.
