The Guardian just announced that it is releasing all its content through an API as well as making available many different data sets through a data store, all of which can be mashed up into others’ sites and applications. They join other organizations – the BBC, National Public Radio, and The New York Times – in releasing APIs; notes that it’s the creme of news that sees the wisdom in APIs. The Guardian’s offers more than headlines: articles, video, galleries, everything. It also adds one more important element to its offering: a business model, creating an ad network for users of the API.
Upendra Shardanand, my partner at and the founder of Daylife, has been saying for a few years that APIs are the future of distribution. The Guardian says its API will put its content “into the fabric of the internet.”
The moment that led to the title of my book – when I told publishers to ask what Google would do – came when I was trying to convince a roomful of them to think distributed, to stop believing that their brands were magnets sufficient to attract their entire audience, to go to where the people are, like Google.
The reflex of publishers – the few who agreed – was to think of distribution in terms of widgets (the trend that never was). They also produced RSS feeds, though limited. Note that a few weeks ago, the Guardian also shifted to full-text feeds (I asked about the business impact of this and they told me that there seemed to be none as traffic continues to rise).
Now APIs take distribution to its logical – if unknown and sometimes frightening – limit. Now I could build an application around the news of at least these four outlets – and, with Daylife, headlines from and analysis from thousands more. In the case of a Guardian story, you may read it via my application and not go to the Guardian’s site. Isn’t that insanity? Isn’t that what publishers are complaining about with aggregators? Actually, no, aggregators display only headlines and give links; this is worse if you’re trying to protect your content and traffic to your site. But that’s the old, centralized mediamind way to think. In the new, distributed world, you want to be where the people are. The frightening part has been that once you release your content as data, you lose control of the display, branding, data collection, and revenue. That’s why the Guardian is trying to add its advertising business model – because it wants to release everything; it wants its content to be used all around the web. This is the new distribution.
News organizations already lost control of packaging, whether they all knew it or not, when most of us most days come to content not through carefully designed home pages but through search and links and now Facebook. The media brand is less a destination and a magnet to draw people there than a label once you’ve found the content, wherever and however you found it. So the more places you can find it, the better.
: Disclosures: I should have added that I write and consult for the Guardian and, again, I’m a a partner at Daylife.
Start here: At CUNY, our students report on New York and much of their work ends up in publications and on sites around the city through our NYCity News Service, which is edited and managed by Jere Hester, former city editor of the NY Daily News.
We’ve been talking about how our students could possibly help serve and supplement local news outlets more as they shrink. Friend Jay Rosen at NYU and I have also been talking about this and we were further inspired by the organization of a new content-sharing consortium among a handful of New-York-area newspapers. How could journalism students feed into that – or into similar consortia that are forming all around the country? How could we use the good efforts of students to make sure that more news gets covered and that their coverage gets more reach? Jay and Jack Lail bounced the idea back and forth on Twitter this weekend.
Carry this notion to its logical extension and we see the start of a marketplace of news and assignments. In the print consortia, it only makes sense that one paper will ask another: ‘Are you covering this? If you do, I won’t so I can cover something else that we can share.’ That leads inevitably to a market of assignments and once that exists, there’s no reason others can’t join in: journalism students, freelancers, photographers, bloggers, too. Worried about quality? Well maybe there will be a process of reverse-bidding: three people sign up for the same assignment and it goes to the one with the best clips. If nobody signs up, maybe the price of the assignment goes up. It’s a market and I’m hoping to tempt Jay to use his students in his new Studio program to think it through.
What we’ve just built is a new ecosystem of news that tries to make sure that more news gets covered. It’s collaborative and complementary, as I believe news will be – will have to be – in the future. Yes, one could also say it’s anticompetitive but that’s the last problem for news organizations today (and, again, this is the one idea on news’ future that I share with David Carr).
From a news organization’s perspective, once a consortium/marketplace/ecosystem is opened, up, it requires different skills to manage: finding and knowing talent and helping make it better – organizing, curating, educating. From the community’s perspective, we should hope that all the important stories don’t end up with just one reporter and one perspective (I think editorial ego will take care of that) but instead that more news gets covered. From a journalism-school perspective, there are questions – namely, how should these assignments and opportunities fit into a curriculum to make sure that students leave with the broad range of skills and not just clips papers need.
Let’s also ask about journalism schools’ wider role as education becomes more important in new-media and community-practiced journalism: The pros need training in new media and new skills (while they still have jobs or as they reinvent themselves on their own) and the community often wants training in the essentials of new media tools and journalistic skills. The South Coast paper has trained more than 600 members of the community in an ambitious eight-week course and it is recruiting more. The Oakland Press is also holding classes. Papers and a university in Minnesota got a state grant to retrain professional journalists. Now add this: Trinity Mirror in the U.K. is hiring high-school kids to work on hyperlocal blogs. See also Robert Niles arguing that in their drive for professionalism, local news organizations (especially TV, I’d say) became disconnected from their communities and should be hiring from those communities.
The role of journalism education and journalism students in their communities will change as journalism changes. There’s a new ecosystem emerging and our roles in it will change as well.
We already knew that newspapers’ classified business was as good as gone, but even so I found these stats from the Wall Street Journal this morning devastating:
Last March, Baylor Health Care System, a large Dallas-based nonprofit, began purchasing keywords on Google, Yahoo and employment-related search engines SimplyHired.com and Indeed.com. The search-engine ads generated more applicants, at less cost, than the other recruiting methods, says Eileen Bouthillet, director of human resources communications.
In the first six months of the program, Ms. Bouthillet says, the search-engine ads delivered 5,250 applicants, at an average cost of $4. By contrast, Baylor paid an average of $30 for each of the 3,125 applicants who came via job boards, and $750 each for the 215 applicants who replied to a newspaper or magazine ad.
As a result, Ms. Bouthillet says Baylor has reduced spending on job boards and print ads. . . .
UPS says it received more than 150,000 applications from [its holiday hiring] campaign, at an average cost 75% to 80% cheaper than print ads. “We’re cutting newsprint wherever we can and trying to move more to online media,” says Matthew Lavery, corporate work-force planning manager. “Google is outperforming other online media.”
If this is true of job advertising, it will be true of other categories – including papers’ last hope: retail – especially local ones as mobile makes Google even better at targeting. Google has the mechanism to serve small, local advertisers who were never served by papers; papers don’t. I think this probably means that the best opportunity local outlets have is to help local advertisers with their SEO – to place ads on Google for them. (See Fred Wilson’s tweet on this model at CUNY’s New Business Models for News Summit.)
Print has always been inefficient. Now advertisers are learning just how inefficient as online becomes more efficient. This is another reason to develop the strategy to drop print now.
In the comments below, former TV online exec Rodney Overton also responds to David Carr’s medley of old songs about old newspaper business models in a new world. He warns that newspapers can’t still believe that they own local news because TV web sites “are closing in FAST.”
I’ll confirm that. I’ve seen TV guys flying over newspaper markets like buzzards getting a whiff of carrion. They smell death. They smell opportunity.
Now I know some will argue, as well they should, that TV news is crap and only getting crappier. True: fires, shots fired, flacks’ events, and weather teases. But remember that with their cutbacks, newspapers themselves are only getting crappier; there’s a convergence in quality coming at a low level. But while papers see their market and share shrinking, TV people see the chance to grab new ad revenue and new audience online and they still have a megaphone that can promote and build a new product. Will they be any good at it? There’s no telling. But Overton’s point is that newspapers cannot act as if they’re in monopolies and as soon as they circle their wagons, that’s when the attack will begin. Beware TV execs on horseback.
And if TV guys mess it up, there’s plenty of opportunity for other, newer, more nimble and efficient players to come compete.
Gannett and Wisconsin high-school sports bodies are in a fight over streaming games. As more and more people can broadcast even from their mobile phones, I think there’s an important principle at work here and it should be: Tax-supported content is taxpayers’ content. That means that anyone should be able to broadcast public events paid for by the public. This also should include government meetings (which are usually covered by local open-meetings laws). Otherwise, we are going to find governments, bureaucrats, and private bodies trying to stop us from sharing what we see because of commercial interests (or using those interests as a means of control). The problem with my doctrine is that companies that invest in broadcasting events will say they will not be motivated to do so when they don’t hold exclusive rights. It gets very complicated – and expensive – at a university level, I know. But as a matter of principle, I am uncomfortable with government selling control to information we paid for, from research to maps to field hockey.
David Carr sounds like an oldies station as he replays the same old record about charging for content (hey, Carr, would you please walk down the hall and do some reporting in your own damned building – I’ll give you the phone number for the right person – and find out why your own friggin’ paper made its own good economic decisions to stop charging?!?); and kissing off the aggregators (hey, David, can you imagine what would happen to your P&L if The Times Company told Google to take a flying leap and not to aggregate and link to your paper and the only bright spot in your parent’s P&L, About.com?); and getting rid of ad networks (great timing; this is the moment when the paper should kiss off revenue); and get rid of newspaper regulation. At least on that last point, we agree. Except that newspapers are so far gone they could collude and conspire and consolidate and fornicate to their hearts’ desire and it won’t help them. It’s too late.
NY Times asks, in regards to MediaNews’ “individuated” (horrible word choice) newspaper printouts, “Could customized newspapers bring readeres back?” We have customized newspapers. We’ve had them for more than a decade. On the friggin’ internet! This is like Detroit trying to invent the mechanical donkey.
It’s not a great depression, neither is it a great recession we’re going through now. At the Brite conference this week, Umair Haque called it a great “compression,” as an economy built on perceived value reconciles with actual value. This morning, The New York Times finally realized that what we’re experiencing is more than a financial crisis: “Job Losses Hint at Vast Remaking of Economy.” Well, yes, if hints were sledgehammers.
I try to argue in my book that what we’re living through is instead a great restructuring of the economy and society, starting with a fundamental change in our relationships – how we are linked and intertwined and how we act, nothing less than that.
The Times sees this play out in the loss of jobs that won’t return in their industries. That’s merely the symptom.
In key industries — manufacturing, financial services and retail — layoffs have accelerated so quickly in recent months as to suggest that many companies are abandoning whole areas of business.
“These jobs aren’t coming back,” said John E. Silvia, chief economist at Wachovia in Charlotte, N.C. “A lot of production either isn’t going to happen at all, or it’s going to happen somewhere other than the United States. There are going to be fewer stores, fewer factories, fewer financial services operations. Firms are making strategic decisions that they don’t want to be in their businesses.”
Yes, entire swaths and even sectors of the economy will disappear or will change so much they might as well disappear:
* America may well not be in the auto industry soon. “American car sales have dropped to an annual pace of nine million, from some 17 million in 2007. Even if sales increase considerably, that is likely to leave a lot of unneeded auto factories,” said The Times.
* Financial services will have to be completely remade (by government). “Much the same can be said for financial services, which gave up 44,000 jobs in February.” The Times said. “During the housing boom, banks hired tens of thousands of well-compensated traders, analysts and marketers to sell mortgage-backed securities and other investments. That industry is unlikely to return to its former shape.” Who knew that The Times was such a master of understatement?
* Newspapers will vanish. Magazines are in worse shape than I would have guessed and many will go. Books‘ channels of manufacturing, distribution, and sales will go through upheaval.
* Broadcast media will become meaningless, replaced by digital delivery.
* Advertising will be next to feel the earthquake avalanche, after media.
* Large-scale retail will shrink and consolidate and then be transformed by a search-and-buy economy. The Times: “The economy lost 39,500 retail jobs in February, and has eliminated more than 500,000 in the last year.”
* The blockbuster economy in entertainment will become harder to support as more attention and money shifts to the tail.
* Business travel – including the convention and conference business – will take a huge hit in the financial crisis and much of it won’t come back, replaced by more efficient communications.
* We can only hope that dirty and political energy industries will shrivel.
* Residential and commercial real estate will have to restructure around a new capital structure. Homes will get cheaper but so much of homeowners’ equity has been wiped out in real estate and stock investments that I’ll bet apartments will be what’s built when building returns. Commercial real estate had its own bubble and it will be hit with a double whammy as tenants shrink and disappear. Construction will, of course, decline.
* Health care was the one sector in this month’s employment report that showed growth. But we know that medicine, pharma, and insurance will undergo a forced restructuring.
* Computers are getting so small and cheap and open that that industry is under growing pressure. As every other device we have becomes smart and connected, I wonder whether the computer itself will begin to disappear.
* Universities are facing competition from each other and commercial newcomers online and have suffered huge blows to their endowments; they will have to change. We should be so lucky that elementary and secondary education will also face such pressure.
* Finally, consumer products of all sorts will have to change in the face of empowered customers and, in some cases, with competition from small competitors given the benefits of scale on platforms (see: eBay, Etsy, Amazon, et al). They will also face price pressure thanks to online comparison shopping and new retail structures.
* Government will grow but thanks to the empowered populace, it, too, will face fundamnetal change.
* * *
There are opportunities here, of course. There always is in change if you’re willing to see and seek it.
* This is the time when startups start. I agree with Reid Hoffman that founding new companies is our way out of this mess. Given the profound nature of the restructuring, starting new businesses – not fixing old, doomed ones – is the only sensible path. “Consider a few start-ups from the past century.” he wrote: “Microsoft, MTV, CNN, FedEx, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Burger King. Each opened during a period of economic downturn. Today, these brands employ hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. We need to prepare for the next Burger King. By empowering individuals and small businesses, an innovation stimulus can help germinate stable industry players for the long term.” Fred Wilson would disagree with Reid, I think, about government helping to fund startups, but I think we can all agree that creating the right environment for investment could not be more critical.
* Creating platforms to serve small and independent businesses and networks to bring them the advantages of scale are key opportunities in the restructured economy. That is the real lesson of Google in WWGD?. There are three ways to succeed here: Create a platform; create a network; build on top of somebody else’s platform or network. This, I believe, is how large companies will be replaced.
* There are many opportunities to provide services to new, independent players – startups and newly self-employed individuals. At yesterday’s Hacking Education, Scott Heiferman and I tweeted back and forth about the opportunities to build a network of spaces for independent work (the inverse of Starbucks: good with space and services, OK with coffee). Add payroll, insurance, hosting, and all sorts of services.
* Education is a growth opportunity but not in its current institutions. As industries are killed and turned upside-down, present and former employees will need to be retrained in technology, in the skills of starting and running a business, in entirely new skills. In Hacking Education, some participants were building such platforms. I see huge disruption here.
* Of course, there are opportunities to remake the fallen industries. At Davos, in a session I ran, business guys reinvented the bank under radical transparency. In my book, I started to rethink the auto industry in the image of the computer industry: disaggregating the car so we can reaggregate it from many new suppliers. Many are working on new scenarios for news. I see huge opportunities in rethinking and remaking advertising from the ground up. Every one of the collapsing industries listed above will be replaced – in a different image, at a different scale – and that presents opportunities.
* * *
But all that still doesn’t reveal the extent to which our society is changing. At Brite, Haque addressed some of this as he talked about a “metacrisis” in our “zombieconomy” in which we have understated cost and overstated value. He talked about reconceiving thin vs. thick value creation; about Google as an example because it creates principles more than strategy; and about the new principles of a new economy, built around stewardship, trusteeship, guardianship, leadership, partnership.
I said from the audience that his prescription sounded like a moral imperative. Another member of the audience said it sounded like dialectical materialism (I had earlier joked in my talk at Brite that I vaguely sounded Marxist talking about how all the change I outlined in media came from no longer being bound by the means of production and distribution). Haque responded that though both our contentions might be true, he was declaring an economic imperative. He previewed that view sometime ago when he wrote what I came to call Haque’s Law: “As interaction explodes, the costs of evil are starting to outweigh the benefits.”
Now back to the start: We are linked in new ways. Because of that, it’s hard to build a business model anymore out of screwing people – since when you do, we the screwed can rise up and be heard and fight back and make evil too expensive. Our interconnectedness is also what made the complex derivatives – the toxic assets – that triggered the financial crisis possible – but that is all the more reason why we will demand transparency, our best antidote to evil. That will change how business is run in fundamental ways.
And so there is our Great Restructuring, Great Rethink, Great Reboot, call it what you will: The change in our society and how it is structured are both causing and necessitating change in the economy and its industries. The crisis is bigger than it appears in the rear-view mirror. It’s more than jobs lost and companies folding. It’s a new economy built on a new society that we are only just beginning to recognize if not understand. That is WWGD? – and its sequel.
: LATER: In typical eloquence, Yochai Benkler expresses the restructuring in his response to Paul Starr’s lament about newspapers and the future of democracy:
Like other information goods, the production model of news is shifting from an industrial model–be it the monopoly city paper, IBM in its monopoly heyday, or Microsoft, or Britannica–to a networked model that integrates a wider range of practices into the production system: market and nonmarket, large scale and small, for profit and nonprofit, organized and individual.
This will be the case, I argue in WWGD? and now here, not just for digital and information enterprises but for others. Education was built, it was pointed out often at Hacking Education, for an industrial age, to turn out factory workers. It was also built in an industrial model: every student off the assembly line the same. The future of education will be a magnificent mish-mash of – to quote Benkler – market and nonmarket, large scale and small, profit and nonprofit, organized and individual. Computers and their software are made this way. Cars may be. Banking, I think, will be a similar mix (nonprofit? yes, credit unions). The bottom line is the shift from an institutional economy to a network economy.
: LATER: This post seems to have caused Bruce Sterling a bad trip. Sorry about that.
: “The new normal will be a lot different from the old normal.”
I’m lucky to be at a great Union Square Ventures session on hacking education today. I believe education will be restructured radically and that will be accelerated out of the so-called financial crisis. You can follow tweets at #hackedu; Union Square will put up the entire transcript later.
In honor of hacking education, I’ll put up all of the Google U chapter in What Would Google Do? (the rest after the jump):
* * *
Who needs a university when we have Google? All the world’s digital knowledge is available at a search. We can connect those who want to know with those who know. We can link students to the best teachers for them (who may be fellow students). We can find experts on any topic. Textbooks need no longer be petrified on pages but can link to information and discussion; they can be the products of collaboration, updated and corrected, answering questions and giving quizzes, even singing and dancing. There’s no reason my children should be limited to the courses at one school; even now, they can get coursework online from no less than MIT and Stanford. And there’s no reason that I, long out of college, shouldn’t take those courses, too.
You may suspect that because I’m a professor, I’ll now come out of this litany of opportunities with a rhetorical flip and demonstrate why we must preserve universities as they are. But I won’t. Of course, I value the academy and its tradition and don’t wish to destroy it. But just as every other institution examined in this book is facing fundamental challenges to its essence and existence in the Google age, so is education. Indeed, education is one of the institutions most deserving of disruption—and with the greatest opportunities to come of it.
Call me a utopian but I imagine a new educational ecology where students may take courses from anywhere and instructors may select any students, where courses are collaborative and public, where creativity is nurtured as Google nurtures it, where making mistakes well is valued over sameness and safety, where education continues long past age 21, where tests and degrees matter less than one’s own portfolio of work, where the gift economy may turn anyone with knowledge into teachers, where the skills of research and reasoning and skepticism are valued over the skills of memorization and calculation, and where universities teach an abundance of knowledge to those who want it rather than manage a scarcity of seats in a class.
Who’s to say that college is the only or even the best place to learn? Will Richardson, who teaches fellow educators how to use the internet in the classroom, wrote an open letter to his children, Tess and Tucker, on his blog, Webblog-ed.com: “I want you to know that you don’t have to go to college if you don’t want to, and that there are other avenues to achieving that future that may be more instructive, more meaningful, and more relevant than getting a degree.” He said education may take them to classrooms and lead to certification but it also may involve learning through games, communities, and networks built around their interests. “Instead of the piece of paper on the wall that says you are an expert,” he told his children, “you will have an array of products and experiences, reflections and conversations that show your expertise, show what you know, make it transparent. It will be comprised of a body of work and a network of learners that you will continually turn to over time, that will evolve as you evolve, and will capture your most important learning.”
If that is what education looks like, what does a university look like? I asked that question on my blog and entrepreneur and technologist Bob Wyman (who works for Google) responded by abstracting the university and identifying its key roles: teaching, testing, and research. I’ll add a fourth and unofficial role: socialization. Let’s examine them in reverse order.
Below, we have a link to the new blog of an excited former newspaperman.
Here we have a column in the Los Angeles Times saying it’s time to kill the Los Angeles Times — as a newspaper. David Sarno interacts with readers and says:
David New of Manhattan Beach was on the same page. “The question you and everyone else at the L.A. Times should be asking its print subscribers is: How can we save our paper?”
Well, it may sound radical, but my answer is this: We can’t save the paper, and we shouldn’t even try. Let me explain…
…by way of a distinction: Newspapers like The Times, which was founded in 1881, have distributed the news in paper form since they began. Until recently, there was no reason to use separate terms for the industry and its physical product — the word “newspaper” sufficed for both. But as we’re seeing now, that word is no longer enough: One “newspaper” is an institution whose mission is to gather, distill and present a world of information to its readers.
The other is just a piece of paper.
And as much as we cherish the newspaper that arrives on our doorstep every morning, as a medium for delivering news, it loses to the Web in too many ways. At the top of the list is, of course, currency. What you read on front pages is, quite literally, yesterday’s news — while what you see on home-pages is what is happening in the real-time present.
Nothing wildly new there, except where it appeared: in the newspaper. Yeah.
Greg Hernandez, Hollywood writer for the LA Daily News, gets laid off and in seven days he’s competing with his former employer online – using the brand equity said employer helped him build – in his own tinseltown blog, Greg in Hollywood. He tells the story of his launch here. Didn’t hurt that his friend Danny Sullivan is a leading expert in search engines – which apparently brings in enough value to afford him a guest house where Greg could stay while they built the site. He writes:
I was riding bikes with my friends along the boardwalk of the Balboa Peninsula last week and tried to remember the last time I felt so excited about the future. Then I realized exactly when: it was nearly 25 years earlier, the week I moved into the dorms at San Diego State University. Everything and anything seemed possible then and now it does again.
Except then, I had a lot more hair.
And he’s off and running. We’ll check back in in a few months to see how he’s doing with stamina and revenue. But it’s exciting to see a journalist excited about a new future.
Note well, other formerly employed journalists, that you don’t need friends in high places in the internet to build your own blog. You can go to WordPress or Typepad or Blogger and start writing and Google or GoDaddy to take your domain. My only advice is to specialize: take on a beat that isn’t being overcovered, do a lot of linking, rise up in Googlejuice, and make the turf your own.
I had a great time today talking about What Would Google Do with KCRW’s Rob Long on his show, The Politics of Culture (he also makes a great show/podcast about Hollywood: Martini Shot):
I can’t say the same for every radio interview I’ve been lucky enough to do for the book. Some are great (see hear also On the Media and KGO’s Ronn Owens and a few others). But some remind me of why Howard Stern makes fun of radio. I’ve had my share of IN-ter-VIEWS when THE hosts EM-pha-SIZE SYLlables in WAYS that No NORmal HUman DOES. But my favorite stupid radio trick so far: Three hosts asked me to tell the folks what Google is. Do they think their own listeners are that disconnected, that stupid? Apparently so. One droned on to me about how “people over 50″ just have a tough time with this internet thing and computers and all that. I responded that I’m 54 and I managed to figure it out.
