BuzzMachine

I continue to neglect you, blog family, because I am in the final (I hope) throes of editing the book and school just began. I spoke to the new class yesterday in the start of the interactive journalism class. Here are my notes:

I’m an ignoramus about sports so take that dose of salt first. But while watching Olympic soccer, it occurred me to that the sport never took off in America because we prefer results to process.

I twittered that and a discussion ensued:

Richard Sambrook said: I assume that soccer comment was heavy with irony in the light of US football timeouts etc v the fluidity of the beautiful game?

Me: Point taken. But every down is measurable progress. That’s how we run companies: deliverables, metrics, milestones, deadlines.

Mohamed Nanbhay: Admittedly I don’t know much about sport but would think that football was about a result while American football about progress.

Me: Well-said. But I keep focusing on the idea that soccer is a process. On my mind because papers struggle with process v. product.

Mohamed Nanbhay: That makes sense. Football is dynamic, players think of their feet. American football is about planning and execution?

Me: Right. And that’s more American, I think: the belief that things can be planned, then executed.

Ross: Soccer is samba. Football is line dancing.

Me: I like that. Fill in the blanks, everybody: Soccer is ____. Football is _____. Football is American because ____.

Thomas Knuewer: Nice idea. So: Soccer is free trade. Football is WTO. Football is American because it’s over regulated.

Me: By that rule, then chess is the sport of the regulated EU.

Shane Richmond: Soccer is Jackson Pollack, football is Piet Mondrian. I like this game! (But not the word ’soccer’)

CharlesThomas: I think soccer isn’t big in the US because we prefer discrete units, pitch/snap/24 sec shot clock.

CharlesThomas: Hockey is kind of an exception, but play stops often enough for it to be discrete.

Me: Hockey’s not American. It’s Canadian a heart. And Canada is of the empire. Rule holds.

niltiac: You mean soccer’s slow and boring and the best team doesn’t always win? My thoughts exactly. Rugby - now that’s a real sport.

Mohamed Nanabhay: Do you think the national sport reflects in the way business is done? Strangely, they don’t play test cricket over here.

Ross: Soccer is the world’s game. Football is American because we win in games we invent.

Benroone: Soccer doesn’t take off in the US because you can’t break for adverts every 5 minutes.

ciaranj: Soccer is interesting. Football is boring. Football is American because it’s built around advertising.

Me: Soccer is flow. Football is a PERT chart.

Me: Soccer is a Google beta. Football is a Microsoft release.

Steve Baker’s book, The Numerati, is about tracking and predicting people’s behavior based on their data, and so he and his publisher are taking a page from the book to try to target advertising for it.

Somewhat related: I recommend Cory Doctorow’s new short story, The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away, an allegory for the age of tracking our data.

For those who were interested in this post asking about sponsorship for my book, please see the discussion there and Rick Smolan’s answers to some of their questions and concerns.

This week’s Guardian column asks whether editors are a luxury we can afford. (There’s a separate version online here where comments can and I suspect will be made.)

I’m set to be on Howie Kurtz’ Reliable Sources at 10a EDT today to talk about the waste and hubris of sending 15,000 journalists to the political conventions and how we over-report politics and under-report government.

I was talking with a media exec who started a blog ad network — bless him — but who I thought was taking too high a share of the revenue: at least half. That’s a natural reflex, perfectly understandable: Get what you can. Other networks do that. But the problem for me is that by taking too much, he excluded me from the network — I’m sticking with BlogAds, which takes only 20 percent — and the problem for him, then, is that this slows the growth of his network and a smaller network is a less valuable network. He understands this will because he’s a smart media guy. He wants a large network.

I was actually just trying to channel the network wisdom of Yochai Benkler, author of The Wealth of Networks, and Tom Evslin, who had talked about how to grow networks at a Union Square roundtable about collaborative production more than a year ago. I wasn’t sure I was getting it right, so I went to Evslin’s blog and asked him for a reprise, which he has just provided, brilliantly. I’ll summarize:

The first counterintuitive lesson: Companies that build large networks on the web don’t charge users what the market would bear; they charge as little as they could bear. That is how they maximize growth and value for everyone in the network on top of the platforms they provide.

In his blog post, Evslin takes this a step farther, pointing out that if you run a network that depends on scale, such as an ad network, then the more pages you have to sell, the bigger and better advertisers you can attract and the more you can charge. So if you take a smaller commission for each ad in the network, more sites will join it with more pages, which can now be sold at a higher value.

It gets even more head-scratching: Evslin argues that if you are too profitable, then you will attract competitors who will undercut you and steal market share. “If you’re doing well but running at or close to breakeven,” he explained, “you’ve made it impossible for anybody to undercut you without running at a deficit, which is hard to get funding for.”

So, to sum up: Take the minimum value out of the network to make it grow to maximum size to enable its members to charge more for their value while keeping costs and margins low to block competitors.

That’s not how old networks operate. Cable companies wrap their wires around you and squeeze maximum fees out of you. Ditto phone companies, newspapers, and retailers. But they all face competition from next-generation networks.

craigslist is the Evslin poster child. It foregoes revenue for most listings in most markets—charging just for job ads and for real estate in a few markets—and that turned it into the critical-mass marketplace for most listings. “If Craig now attempted to maximize revenue by charging for a substantially higher percentage of ads, a door would be cracked open for competition,” Evslin writes. “There is no chance at current rates for a competitor to steal Craig’s listings (and readers) by charging less.”

I’m writing about the network model in the book and this will also be a key topic of discussion in our event at CUNY on new business models for news; that’s why I’m talking about it.

Forbes.com reports that the number of journalists covering the conventions this fall will remain at the same level as 2004 and 2000: 15,000 of them. What a waste. The outcome of the conventions is known. There will be no news. Why are these news organizations sending so many staffers there?

Ego.

That’s it, pure ad simple: Our man in Denver. Instead of your woman. It’s for bylines, bylines the public couldn’t care less about. The coverage will be no different outlet to outlet. We can watch it all ourselves on C-SPAN.

The conventions aren’t news. Anymore they are only staged events to get media coverage. And it works. But it’s not for the public good that they’re covered.

Don’t try to feed me that line about how they’ll be covering their local delegations. Their local delegations never make news — not since 1968 anyway — and their actions couldn’t be more predictable, less newsworthy. If you want to cover the locals, cover them at home — before the event. But you still won’t get any news from them.

As news organizations dwindle, this is an irresponsible use of resources and it only shows how the industry’s leaders are tied to doing things the way they always did them. That’s what will be the death of journalism.

Those reporters would be far better used in their local markets doing real reporting there. Don’t go to the convention and ask the same old question and get the same old answer about health care; instead, go ask patients and doctors in your market what is happening. Don’t go getting locker room sound bites from local pols at the convention; spend the time at home to analyze their expense accounts and donor reports. You want to know what issues matter in November? Ask the voters in your backyard.

Should bloggers be going to the conventions? I’m not sure why. It was a big deal when they were given official status; we were all so proud. But I think we just became another cog in the media machine. I don’t know about you, but I don’t remember reading much of moment in the convention blogs four years ago. That’s because nothing happened.

If I were a newspaper editor, I would proudly make the point that I’m not sending anyone to the conventions. I’ll use the power of the internet to find and summarize the best coverage there is. I’ll do what I do best and just link to the rest.

Sendign 15,000 journalists to the conventions remains a shameful waste.

A few fascinating tidbits from Jim Cramer’s interview with Google’s Eric Schmidt today:

* Google accounts for 0.7 percent of GDP, according to Goldman Sachs.
* Cramer says the ad market is $600 billion and asks whether Google could get 10 percent of that. Schmid says, “Well, we could,” and then corrects him: It’s a trillion-dollar market globally.
* Schmidt says Google will make more on mobile than on desktops because mobile is more targeted and Google targets.
* GMail outage? “Taht was a screw up. We fixed that. We’re not perfect.”
* What would Google make by adding sponsorship to its home page? “Some number of billions od dollars.” Why not do it? “People wouldn’t like it. We prioritize the end-user over the advertiser… We’re not going to sell it.”
* Google is 52 percent international revenue; Schmidt thinks it will go to 65-35.
* About getting too big: “How do we behave? Not the way Microsoft did. I would never do that.
* “I never worry about Microsoft.”

I have three weeks to edit and revise my manuscript and get ready for the start of school and go on vacation with the family and do a consulting project and help a few of the companies I’m advising and eat and sleep. So the blog will suffer. I apologize. The blog is the last thing I should abuse given what it has given me. But you are my friends and you will understand. Right? Thanks.

I sent the last of my first draft of the book to my editor last night. I believe the saying is, woot. I’m headed in this morning to go over it with him for my first revision. We’re on a fast track (for book publishing): It will be out in January.

What the hell are they thinking in Philadelphia? Inquirer ME Mike Leary just sent a memo saying they are going to hold all but breaking news for the paper and even restrict bloggers from using their blogs to work on stories in progress.

Let me make this very clear to Inquirer ownership and management:

You are killing the paper. You might as well just burn the place down. You’re setting a match to it. This is insane. Even the slowest, most curmudgeonly, most backward in your dying, suffering industry would not be this stupid anymore. They know that the internet is the present and the future and the paper is the past. Protecting the past is no strategy for the future. It is suicide. It is murder. You should be ashamed of yourselves.

And my message to staff, the few of them left:

Get the hell out now! Get away from these fools or you’ll get it on you. Let’s hold a new Norg meeting right now and organize a competitor to the ailing Inquirer. It won’t take much to kill it now. Let’s put it out of its misery.

And my question to readers:

Do you care?

: LATER: What a rotten time for Norgman Will Bunch to be on vacation and offline.

: An online producer elsewhere asked me for stats on the cannibalization of print by online. I responded:

That’s not the point. The point is that we need to make the leap over to the next medium and business model and an extra 10 or 100 saved copies now is NOT going to save the business as it was. It’s short-sighted and foolish. So forget that calculation and ask, instead, how to invent the next product and drive audience and advertisers there and reshape the staff — completely — around that. It will be a smaller scale business — no longer a monopoly — but likely more profitable in the longrun if it also relies on collaboration.

: Here’s Steve Outing’s reaction.

: As I write this, the top story on the Inquirer’s Philly.com: Paris Hilton. Oh, yeah, that’s local. But I guess they have to fill the page with something because they don’t have those stories from what’s left of the newsroom staff.