BuzzMachine

I just posted my suggestion to MyStarbucksIdea: Don’t run out of coffee. Please discuss there.

I’m not saying editing is bad. But as news becomes a process rather than a product, editing can affect that process. Note the lead story from the NY Times home page right now:

The edited, packaged story says that one person died in yet another crane collapse in New York today. But right below that, the lightning fast Sewell Chan has later, more up-to-date and correct information in his blog — two have died — which the Times wisely feeds directly onto the home page, contradicting their own edited story. In a breaking story, a blog in the hands of a good reporter beats a long line of editors.

This is one reason why Rupert Murdoch is complaining about 8.3 editors touching the average story in the Wall Street Journal. When I taped a segment for CBS News once, I counted 12 people who touched it before it was even edited for air. At Time Inc., the were famous for editing and re-editing every story until it was churned into butter. At The Times, there are three editors for every reporter. But when I consulted at About.com, it had about eight writers for every editor (that ratio has since changed). About.com, like blogs, is a publish-first, edit-later operation. On this blog, you could say that I have no editors — or you could say that I have 100,000 of you.

Clay Shirky in his wonderful book Here Comes Everybody calls this new process “publish first, filter later.”

The media landscape is transformed, because personal communication and publishing, previously separate functions, now shade into one another. One result is to break the older pattern of professional filtering of the good from the mediocre before publication; now such filtering is increasingly social, and happens after the fact.

So does editing.

Albert Wenger, the VC, takes that new biorhythm and applies it to not just journalism but financial information (talking about the company we both invested in, Covestor). This will be the nature of many business processes, including design and messaging. Process and structure change.

Editing of everything before publication has been seen as a necessity in journalism, but I think it will increasingly be seen as a luxury (and sometimes, ibid. Murdoch, a drag, an inefficiency). When I say this, traditional journalists are horrified. But that’s often because of their tradition and the necessities of production (e.g., fitting into a scarce space) — not to mention their jobs.

When I worked at the Chicago Tribune way back in the dawn of my career (pre-computers, children), we had to hammer on our (manual, kids) typewriters so the last of more than 10 carbons could be read. Why so many? That’s just what a new managing editor of the paper asked as he decreed that the 10-carbon books should be destroyed, replaced by five-carbon books. The office manager protested that it would be a waste. No, said the editor, I don’t want back sliding. Destroy them. So we typed on five-carbon books — for about two weeks. Then we backslid. We were told to put two five-carbon books together so everybody could get their copies again and so they could all weigh in on every story. This was editing as status.

Rather than assuming that everything must be edited, we will need to ask why something should be edited, what’s the goal and what’s the cost (to the product and its urgency and to the budget). As newspapers continue to cut back, what do they need more: reporting or editing? I say reporting. Editors will not and should not die, but they will become a scarcer species.

Well, damn, my beloved Silverjet is grounded. Great idea, great service, terrible timing, what with record oil prices, a credit drought, a recession, and a sucky dollar. There goes the last hope of an independent example of a service based on the quality of service in the air.

And flying today is pure misery, which is proving to be very bad for business:

Some air travelers prefer to stay home rather than suffer through flight delays and cancellations, a loss of about $9 billion in potential revenue for an industry desperate to offset the soaring cost of fuel, a new survey showed Thursday.

In a survey of 1,003 travelers by the Travel Industry Association, more than half said they were fed up with flight delays and blamed airlines for the deteriorating state of U.S. air travel. They also prefer to stay home, or take alternative transportation such as a bus, train or car.

“Many travelers believe their time is not respected and it is leading them to avoid a significant number of trips,” said Allan Rivlin, a partner at Peter D. Hart Research Associates, which helped sponsor the survey. “Inefficient security screening and flight cancellations and delays are air travelers’ top frustrations.”

The TIA estimates that more than a quarter of U.S. air travelers cancel about two trips a year to avoid dealing with security, delays and cancellations. That translates into a loss of about 41 million passenger tickets at an average roundtrip price of $700.

When lost revenue for hotels, restaurants and taxes are factored in, flight delays are costing the U.S. economy about $26.5 billion, the survey showed.

Bad service is bad business.

Unimaginative business is also bad business. Rather than trying to make the business work charging us for every breath, maybe the airlines should be looking at alternatives: advertising or gambling on the plane and even this.

Meanwhile, I think I’ll be looking for alternative means of transporation.

Rupert Murdoch: “I think they are the greatest company in America.”

The monopolistic hold big real estate agents have had on information — on access to use multiple listings services — has been blown open at last thanks to the Justice Department’s antitrust settlement with the National Association of Realtors.

Kiss your 6 percent commission good-bye, Ms. Agent! Competition is on the way.

The only reason — only reason — that Realtors could hold onto their high commission for such little value and work is that they kept information away from the marketplace, making it inefficient. To quote Umair Haque (sorry, no link; I’m pulling this from my manuscript):

Competitive advantage is fundamentally about making markets work less efficiently. One catastrophically effective way to do that is to hide and obscure information – to gain bargaining power relative to the guy on the other side of the table. . . .

A world of cheap, abundant, always-on interaction, where value is shifting to the edges, demands a fresh understanding of what’s truly strategic and what’s not.

Here’s a quick example. Where orthodox strategy advises hiding information and making things less liquid, what does edge strategy advise? Exactly the opposite: release information bottlenecks and make things more liquid.

What Craig Newmark realized is that listings — for sale, for rent, for hire — are the property of the market. By making that efficient and extracting the minimum value from it, craigslist grew huge. When Craig spoke with our students at CUNY recently, telling them about some of his other activities, the students asked him why he wouldn’t maximize the value of craigslist, then sell it for billions, then use that fortune for his philanthropic investment. Craig said that he believes he is doing more good leaving the internet dividend he created in the economy. Buyer and seller, directly connected by craig or by Google, keep more money from transactions. The middlemen — agents and newspapers — suffer but more people benefit.

This new economy can now come to real estate sales as information become freer. Oh, it’s not fully freed yet. But I do believe that the combination of this settlement and what it does to empower discount players and the depressed real estate market will combine to finally shove dynamite up Realtors’ rears.

Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch. A 2008 survey by the British Journalism Review found that estate agents in the UK are the least-trusted profession, worse even than tabloid reporters; only 10 percent of Britons trust them.

Freakonomics demonstrated how real estate agents’ interests are not aligned with their clients. “A real-estate agent may see you not so much as an ally but as a mark,” wrote Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. They cited a study that found that real-estate agents keep their own homes on the market an average of 10 days longer than homes they represent and sell them at prices 3 percent higher. Levitt and Dubner explained that it’s more efficient for agents if they can get you to sell quickly, even though, from your perspective, that is clearly a less efficient marketplace because it doesn’t get you maximum and true value. “Here,” they wrote, “is the agent’s main weapon: the conversion of information into fear.” That is to say, the control of information leads to inefficient marketplaces. But in the long run, Zillow is becoming far smarter than the smartest agent because it knows more thanks to the aggregation of our data about sales. On the internet, more information equals more value.

The Times said:

Real estate agents earned $93 billion in commissions in 2006, with a median commission of about $11,600, Justice Department officials said. Internet brokers, offering pared-down services, provided average rebates of 1 percent on commissions that normally ran 5 or 6 percent, translating into thousands of dollars per sale. . . .

The National Association of Realtors, with more than 1.2 million members, said that the settlement was “a win-win” for both the real estate industry and consumers. It noted that the association admitted no wrongdoing and paid no fines or damages as part of the deal.

Laurie Janik, the [National Association of Realtors] general counsel, said in a telephone interview that the settlement would have no real impact on home buyers or sellers.

“I don’t think they’ll see anything different,” she said. “This lawsuit never had anything to do with commission rates, or discount brokerages.”

Bullshit. Competition is coming. Information will get freer. Rates will decline. Homes will be worth more. A more efficient marketplace is good for buyer and seller but not middleman. We’re finally headed in the right direction. The Times concludes:

Norman Hawker, a business professor at Western Michigan University who organized a symposium on the Justice Department litigation as a senior fellow for the American Antitrust Institute, predicted that the settlement would ultimately mean a drop in sales commissions of 25 percent to 50 percent as a result of increased competition.

“It’s pretty clear that there was an enormous amount of discrimination against brokers who were trying to use innovative business models,” including discounted fees and virtual offices on the Internet, he said. “There are lots of entrepreneurs who have been looking for a green light in the form of this order to begin offering discounted rates. It has the potential to be a big step forward for consumers.”

When I write posts decrying the wasteful sloth of real estate agent commissions, I invariably get a cadre of agents - more often, actually, their defensive husbands - saying I just don’t understand the value they bring. I say that if they have to explain their value, then it is empty. They do not deserve 6 percent commissions and soon they won’t get them. Heh.

Jeezus H. Cable, what took them so long? The Wall Street Journal reports that TVs may soon be able to get TV without those damned cable boxes that do so little for so much with such bother:

Sony Corp. and six of the biggest U.S. cable operators announced an agreement to create digital televisions capable of receiving cable service without a set-top box.

Sony signed a pact with Comcast Corp., Time Warner Cable Inc., Cox Communications, Charter Communications Inc., Cablevision Systems Corp. and Bright House Networks to develop technology that will allow consumers to eliminate set-top boxes, yet still receive basic as well as advanced cable services, such as pay-per-view movies.

The new technological standard should enable a new generation of TVs to include video-on-demand, digital video recording, interactive programming guides, and other services, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association said Tuesday. By eliminating the set-top box, cable companies can simplify installation and reduce costs, while consumers can worry about one less component in their home theater systems. . . .

Sony and the cable operators will adopt a Java-based application called tru2way as the nationwide interactive standard, which will allow for the manufacture of new “plug-and-play” interactive devices that can be used with TV sets.

The technology could also make it easier for consumers to receive the full range of cable-based services on other devices, such as laptops, MP3 players, and cellphones.

It’s not as if this took a single technological breakthrough. It simply took cable companies realizing that they make it too fucking difficult to get the service they offer and it’s getting far easier for us to watch TV via the internet (witness the incredible popularity of the BBC iPlayer in the UK). The cable box should have been dead at least a decade ago. The only thing that kept it alive was cable companies’ business model built around control and restriction. But you can no longer make a business on telling us what we can’t do.

Yes, we all get corrected by grammatical nannies when we use media as a singular when it refers to more than one medium: print, TV, radio, online….

But I think that media is becoming singular — that is, it often will be impossible to distinguish one medium from another. I’ve been mulling this for sometime as we figure out what media tracks mean in journalism school — which is really a question of how we prepare students for a job market that still separates media and their orthodoxies.

But at the same time, we are working with new forms of news narrative that blur or abandon the distinctions. I tell students that they no longer have to choose a medium for a career but must choose media every time they prepare to tell a story, deciding how best to tell it and how people want to get it. So we may use video not as part of a TV story but instead to illustrate a text story with a picture that moves and talks. Is that TV? Is it video? Is it text? Is it online? None of the above, I’d say, because it’s all of the above.

And keep in mind that the internet is not a medium but a place, says Doc Searls. Online is not a medium but a means. And news is more a process than a product. So efforts to graft old architectures and worldviews onto the new just won’t fit: a 2-D peg into a 3-D hole.

This came to mind again because I’m writing my Guardian column for next week about a tour of the reshuffled BBC News newsroom with its head, Peter Horrocks. This is what I’m writing (repeating an illustration from above):

Horrocks said that “the balance between monomedia and multimedia production will change,” but he believes there will still be specialists, different people with different skills and knowledge: TV folks know speed, radio people understand the needs of different audiences, and online people work in depth. Perhaps, but I wonder whether this will prove to be a legacy of the BBC’s products. As media mix – as, for example, video is used in new narratives not to make TV stories but to illustrate a text story with pictures that move and talk, and as we interact with stories using all media on the same devices – I wonder whether we’ll soon be able to define a clear difference between one medium and the next….

So when I watch/read/hear — and importantly, talk with — news on an iPhone, is that TV, an online newspaper, or an on-demand radio station? Is it a new medium? No, I think it’s a combination of media finally coming together, no longer bounded by the limitations of the means of production and distribution. So though you could argue that media is more plural than ever, I’d say it’s really reaching its natural state as a singular. Now the story is what matters, not the medium in which it is told. This is the triumph of substance over style.

: While I’m blathering on about this, let me quote the wonderful John Naughton of the Open University and the Observer, who wrote this for an essay for an Ofcom report:

‘Media’ is the plural of ‘medium’, a word with an interesting etymology. The conventional, everyday interpretation holds that a medium is a carrier of something. But in science, the word has another, more interesting, connotation. To a biologist, for example, a medium is a mixture of nutrients needed for cell growth. And that’s a very interesting interpretation for our purposes.

In biology, media are used to grow tissue cultures – living organisms. The most famous example, I guess, is the mould growing in Alexander Fleming’s Petri dishes which eventually led to the discovery of penicillin.

What I want to do is apply that perspective to human society: to treat it as an organism that depends on a media environment for the nutrients it needs to survive and develop. Any change in the environment – in the media that support social and cultural life – will have corresponding effects on the organism. Some things will wither; others may grow; new, mutant, organisms may appear. The key point of the analogy is simple: change the medium, and you change the organism.

This way of looking at our media environment is not new. I picked it up originally from the late Neil Postman, a passionate humanist who taught at New York University for more than 40 years and was an unremitting sceptic about the impact of technology on society.

I wish Google would just go ahead and buy Twitter and put us out of our misery. I want Google to get it, not AOL or Yahoo or Microsoft. We know that Google can fix its problems, as it fixed Blogger’s. I’m not one of those who is bitter about Twitter’s outages. It’s new. It’s wildly popular. It’s fundamentally changing. It’s worth waiting for. Blogger, many of you will remember, was like that, too. It was crashing and infuriating constantly. Ev Williams kept it alive by sheer dint of will. Nick Denton got me to get my employers at Conde Nast to invest in the company and help save it once; if I’ve done anything worthwhile on the internet, that was it. So now Ev and company are pulling out their rubber bands and string once more. And once more, they have created something world-changing. So you know that Google will want it. I wish that Google would just go ahead and buy it.

I was going to write a post after returning from my latest trip to London urging anyone who could afford to to fly Silverjet, the last remaining independent all-business airline (after the death of Eos and Maxjet) because I want this one to stay in business. Today, there was some bad news as Silverjet is having issues with getting cash out of its latest line of credit. They say they are still flying the usual schedule between New York-Newark, London-Luton, and Dubai. But clearly things are at risk. Damn. Damn. Damn.

I’m telling you: This is the way to fly. That was the conversation among passengers in the lounge going over and in the line for U.S. Customs coming back. It’s no nonsense: Arrive at the lounge, hand them your passport, sit down and have a drink, they bring you your boarding pass, you get on the jet, you have your own space, you can lie down and go to sleep, you arrive at an uncrowded airport in London — no Heathrow madness — and head easily into the city. The food is good, the service wonderful. Everything I hate about other airlines today, I love about Silverjet. (And I’m not getting a thing out of saying this; it’s a happy and frequent flier’s endorsement, pure and simple.)

BA is about to start its mostly business-class airline, OpenSkies, but it’s flying only from New York JFK to Paris CDG*, two nightmare airports, and it is maintaining three classes (business seats recline only 140 degrees). Drat. And Virgin is supposed to follow. But I’m afraid their prices will be high so they don’t cannibalize their regular services. Silverjet’s prices are reasonable considering the level of service.

I don’t fly Silverjet to get free wine. I fly so I can lie flat, take my Ambien, sleep through the night, arrive in London in the morning full of my dreaded vim, and get a day’s work in. It’s worth the money to me to save the lost day. And on the way back, I can plug in my laptop and get a good seven hours’ work done (with a little free wine).

If you have a chance and if it stays afloat, please fly Silverjet. You will thank me. And I will thank you.

: By the way, OpenSkies is trying to market itself virally with a blog, even, which I learned about in a comment here from someone who wondered whether they were following my advice. We’ll see.

* CORRECTION: OpenSkies will fly into Orly, not CDG. I’ve not flown into Orly but it has to be better than CDG. Also note that OpenSkies objects to my calling the highest of three classes on the plane first class; they call it business class. I’d say this is rather like fighting with Starbucks over small, medium, and large — a fight I obnoxiously continue to the death. But duly noted. (I’m sure they call it that so company accountants will not object to expense reports.)

The Washington Post just lost a passel of talent in its latest round of buyouts. Reducing headcount on newspapers is an economic necessity today. Everybody’s doing it.

Note there’s now a blog called Papercuts tracking journalistic job cuts. So far this year alone in the U.S. alone: 2,170.

But I’d suggest doing it in a few different ways as this continues to progress across the land:

First, offer all the talented people who are leaving a weblog. Tell them you’ll sell ads on the blog and share over 50 percent of the revenue with them. They will own the blog and if they choose to start a company around it, you’ll even invest. For those who continue to write online, the paper continues to get value from the assets and brands it helped build and the writers get promotion and revenue from the paper while readers still get to read their work. Why not?

Second, I’d be redefining every job in the newsroom and giving people still there the opportunity to retrain and apply for new jobs.

Microsoft’s effort to bribe/reward/cajole ecommerce search business away from Google with customer rebates is the product of dubious business economics. It’s a trap: a customer acquisition cost that becomes a habit hard to break. It’s just like premiums given by magazines to get you to subscribe. When I was at Time Inc. in the ’80s, Sports Illustrated had a big hit on its hands — or so they thought — with the Sneakerphone, free with your subscription. Time and other of the company’s magazines followed with clocks and other geegaws. In the end, though, they found that people weren’t subscribing to the magazines; they wanted the Sneakerphone and when it came time to renew, because they already had what they wanted, they canceled — and renewals are where magazines begin to see a return from their marketing to acquire subscribers. Advertisers eventually realized that they weren’t talking to readers; the magazines were the premium. The Sneakerphone turned out to be a very expensive problem. It took painful effort for Time Inc. to ween itself and its subscribers from the expectation of freebies with subscriptions.

Microsoft’s fees are a marketing cost, pure and simple. The company could pay to advertise it search or it can pay consumers to search. I’m glad to see money going into the pockets of consumers — the internet dividend strikes again. But I doubt that these economics are sustainable; this is just an effort to poke Google in the kidneys and I doubt that the giant will even notice. This is akin to Mark Cuban’s sillyass idea to pay/bribe/reward/cajole advertisers into leaving Google.

Michael Arrington has a well-done analysis of the Microsoft gambit. He concludes that it could increase Microsoft’s share of valuable commerce search:

A year ago Microsoft basically did a trial run of Live Search CashBack with Live Search Club, which lured searchers to Microsoft with offered of prizes to users for using Live Search. Microsoft went from 10.3% to 13.2% market share in a month, a nearly 30% rise. Live Search CashBack, which gives a much more straightforward payout to users, should see significantly better results.

But earlier in his post, I think he defeated that argument when he said, quite rightly:

This is a winner-take-most market: Having 9% of search doesn’t mean Microsoft has 9% of search marketing dollars. Far from it - publishers go to Google to partner on ads, which means advertisers must go there to get inventory, and a very healthy auction system pushes up prices. So not only does Microsoft (and Yahoo, and everyone else) have much fewer queries than Google, they are also generating much less revenue per query as well.

Right. So Microsoft pays heavily to raise it share but still doesn’t get critical mass. Then let’s say that Cuban gets on the board of Yahoo and convinces them to follow his plan and they lower their profit margin by paying advertisers, forcing Microsoft to do likewise. And what will they be left with? A warehouse filled with sneakerphones.

Is there a way to defeat the Google beast at search? Not this way. How about the Mahalo or Wikio method? I’m not sure about them either. They all have to try to change what is already a well-ingrained consumer habit and a critical mass of advertiser participation. Does this mean that search is Google’s forever? Well, I still don’t see anything to topple them — certainly not Microsoft’s plan. It has been tried before. Remember IWon.com? I barely did.

This American Life, my favorite US radio show after Howard Stern (a sentiment I seem to share inversely with TAL host Ira Glass) has a truly great episode made in partnership with NPR News explaining the debt crisis. It’s the clearest explanatory journalism I’ve seen or heard on the topic.