I’m at the Online News Association hearing Tina Brown talk about her Daily Beast. She told me last night it will capture the daily zeitgeist with editors–more than 20 of them–rather than algorithms.
She throws over her past in print. She says it is good to work online in a medium that is “vibrant with life instead of constantly obsessed with fears of its own extinction.”
“Old war stories about the glories of media in the past,” is no longer exciting. “Yes, it was great but hey, it’s over. The tipping point has happened.”
She confesses being new to the web world. She’d never heard the word “wireframe” and says that tech geniuses are in another hemisphere. She recalls having scoops to hold onto in print but that day is over. She is happy not to be boxed in in presentation. She discovers the new world. She’s a convert.
She discovers “citizen journalism” as well but she cites big media efforts to get contributions rather than citizens’ enterprises. It’s a paragraph taken from some speech in 2004.
Now she gets to her pitch. Wind up: “People seeking to be informed are becoming increasingly overwhelmed.” Cue the stats about how many blogs and YouTube videos there are. She said that at the Democratic convention, everybody was filming everybody else: “a hall of mirrors.” Now she quotes Nick Davis bemoaning “churnalism.” Methinks she’ll cure.
She says we fear we’re going to miss that special moment of news. She says there’s so much we can’t believe: splogs, flogs, and misinformation. “That’s the part that scares me the most.”
Tina to the rescue. “What can we do to cut thorugh all this static, fake stuff, and noise…. There’s nothing wrong with algorithms. They’re fantastic…. It is the time for editors to reassert themselves ot curate in a more rigorous way.
Forward to the past. She praises other aggregators — Real Clear Politics, HuffPo, Arts & Letters Daily — “but there is still room, I think, for more metaaggregation with a distinctive voice just as there was always room for another magazine with a distinctive point of view.”
She says they started development eight weeks ago and hope to be up in the early fall. The launch will be evolutionary, she says, with new features up every 4-6 weeks.
She offers a site for “the news junkie who wants a speedy scan of the zeitgeist.”
She says her job as an editor was the write clever billings and headlines to get readers to read stories they wouldn’t otherwise read. The first duty of the journalist whether in print or online or no TV is to attract interest, she says. The next is to bring skepticism.
One underestimates Brown at one’s peril. From the sound of it, it’s magazine-think to the web, editing the world. For the proof, I’ll await the pudding.
In questions, she says she wants people who will forego the wisdom of the crowd to have their own take.
She says “there has to be pushback” against big-media companies hiring young people without experience and making writers put out too much. “It will indeed destroy their brands.”
It’s all very magazinethink.
“I think this period where anybody thought that anybody could write a posting for a venerable brand is a terrible mistake…. There hasn’t been enough pushback from the creative world…. The great con of the 20th and 21st century is the way that talent has been exploited by this technology boom….”
A journalism student asks for advice. She’s a print student but she’ll take a job in print, online, anything. “Well, you’re an easy lay, aren’t you,” says Tina, who advises not to go to a big company like Time Inc, where “you’ll be making big-media slugs coffee all day long.”
One person from the audience tries to hear more about her business plan. Tina won’t talk about it. Another tries to get her to talk about her video strategy. She won’t talk about it, saying she doesn’t want to give Forbes any ideas I get up and ask her to give us some idea of what the Daily Beast will be and she cuts me off and she she won’t talk about it. “I don’t want to give a press conference about The Daily Beast.”
As I sit down, the friend next to me says, “She’s a tough lay.”
[...] September, 2008 in Uncategorized http://www.buzzmachine.com/2008/09/12/the-beast/ Subscribe in a reader StatusKathryn is wondering if there is an ONA back channel? [...]
It was a good talk. It felt a bit like she had stepped of plane and wanted to tell us about this new country she’d discovered called ‘the Internet’. Strange one for the 10 year anniversary of the *Online News* Association conference!
Hello Jeff,
Welcome back to the world of blogging. It is interesting to hear Tina Brown’s thoughts, but yet they are not new and not any more likely to pan out today as previously.
Particularly there is always the notion (promoted usually by old-school editorial types) that what the web needs is a good set of editors. As an editorial type myself originally, I can see the benefits, but having been on the business side long enough I have never seen the economics.
When I was at News Corp’s iGuide in 1995 it was an editorially-driven web service headed up by some of Murdoch’s top talent such as Anthea Disney. Murdoch canned it when he realized he couldn’t justify footing the bill.
When I joined Excite in 1996 the company also had a strong editorial sensibility headed up by the legendary Jim Bellows — and the original concept was to complement Excite’s search results with strong editorial website reviews. Excite canned it when the economics didn’t add up.
These are just two examples of early efforts to “edit” the web. Many more have come and gone, all victim to the economics. It is far cheaper to let computers crunch websites than people. Advertising revenues pay for CPU cycles more easily than for editors.
About.com started to get it right when they paid contributors based on a share of ad revenues generated rather than on a salary. But they also made it clear that About.com provided contributors with a supplement to their income, and not a primary income.
The blog networks arguably are only successful when they pay their editors very modestly, and we’ve seen some of them switch to a more performance-based form of compensation for editors, reflecting economic realities. Shiny Media recently fell apart here in the UK for similar reasons – ad revenues do not justify expensive editorial.
Arguably the notable blog network successes — such as Weblogs, Inc. — were successful more as exits via trade sale than as sustainable business models.
For this reason I am also skeptical of models such as Mahalo — not that it is not a great idea (reminiscent of the early Excite editorial model again) but that the economics are not likely to be any better this time around unless Calacanis pays his people plantation wages.
And this is the lesson for aspiring journalists too — if all you plan to be is a journalist, be prepared for hard work down on the digital plantation. Journalists and editors are at the bottom of the digital media food chain.
Better to prepare to be an entrepreneur — use digital tools to start and build your own business on the web based around your talent. Look at Rafat Ali and Om Malik as two prototypes. I hope that’s what you’re teaching them down at CUNY!
Best wishes,
Evan Rudowski
Now that’s old-school! The making the coffee thing. But she’s right. I had to leave network/unionized broadcast news to learn how to hit “Play” on a freakin’ tapedeck, fer chrissake. And I’d been there 5 years! A NABET clown had to be trotted in to mess with the electronics. Many moons later, I just roll my own. No, it’s not union-pretty stuff, but works great on YouTube, where of course, no one gives a shit what your video looks like. And like rolling one’s own doobies, videos get better with practice too.
And no offense, New Media Jim, ’cause I know you’ll read my comments here. You’re one of the “good” NABES. The few. The proud. The PERSONALLY-connected.
Tina Brown? Didn’t she used to be someone on the Big Screen? Or is she still big and the screen just get small?
She doesn’t sound to have a lot new to say.
But does she know just how *tough* it is?
[...] Jarvis posted this morning about Tina Brown’s speech and plans to launch an online site called The Beast, which plans to [...]
Javis sez: “One underestimates Brown at one’s peril.”
She hasn’t had a successful venture in over a decade. Couple with this the fact that Barry “IAC is sucking wind” Diller is backing her, and this is a big waste of money. I’m not underestimating her — I’m estimating that she’ll be a failure like she has been in her N post-New York ventures. There are only a few magazine editors who “get” the Internet — Adam Moss and former Brown deputy Maer Roshan are the only ones I can think of, and Tina isn’t among them. I guess we’ll see in the coming months if Bonnie Fuller can make the leap.
Thanks for noting Brown’s take on “citizen journalism”–given a recent conversation I had w/ Mike Tippett and Jan Schaffer, (and what I see daily at Placeblogger.com) the whole notion of “citizen journalism” is morphing. Nice that she has a general concept, I guess. But it would be great to bring her a little more up to speed. Makes me a bit sad I couldn’t be at ONA this year.
Sorry – the choice is surely not between algorithms or editors. The choice is between algorithms or user editors – and user editors win every time. Has Tina not heard of Digg, Reddit and Stumbleupon?
[...] Tina Brown’s still-in-development news aggegator Web site, Daily Beast. Here’s what Jeff Jarvis of Buzz Machine writes about Brown and the Beast: Now she gets to her pitch. Wind up: “People seeking to be [...]
I guess the days of Drudge and the Super Duper Algorythms he uses are numbered now! Boy, will she teach him with this new concept she has and on how to write interesting headlines by layers of editors! Anyway, judging from your excerpted speech, Tina Brown will fail simply because she’s still thinking top down. She still thinks what she wants MUST be what we want. That she’s smarter and knows better than her readers. The Queen of the interweb is coming!
[...] the somewhat uninspiring keynote address by magazine guru Tina Brown, I went to the Las Vegas Sun session to hear the wunderkinds of the new Rob Curley empire in the [...]
[...] her to the online journalism conference in the first place. She actually cut off Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine [...]
Kudos, Jeff. Thanks for sharing. The combo of Tina and Barry could prove to be the right one. Tina does have a solid grasp of attention getting editorial, works well with talent and plays well with the mad wo/men of the city. Barry has gone through a considerable amount of learning with his various digital ventures. I’d give tb/tdb 6 to 5 odds for success.
Nice report. Brown seemed out of place here to me. Here’s my take on the speech: http://cwweb.wordpress.com/2008/09/13/tina-brown-has-some-secrets/
[...] The beast – Buzzmachine [...]
[...] Dort wird versucht, Meta-Suche (Google, Yahoo etc.) mit redaktionell und durch NutzerInnen erstellten Infos und Einordnungen zu verknüpfen. Noch ist alles ziemlich mau, aber die Einträge zu Suchbegriffen wie Obama zeigen auf, dass da durchaus Potenzial drinsteckt. Nur ist zwar fraglich, wie lange das Projekt durchhält. Gründer Jason Calacanis ist ein sehr erfahrene Web-Unternehmer, aber dass da Geld drin steckt, ist einfach nicht sicher. [...]
[...] please don’t pull a Jeff Jarvis and ask about Brown’s business plan. Here is a little secret: there isn’t [...]
can tina brown ever open her mouth without using the word “zeitgeist?” how…90s.
Hmm sounds a lot like this is already being done, and done quite well over at Newser! http://www.newser.com