I was on an Amtrak train from New York to Washington today that got stopped cold by a torrential water-main break in Baltimore. Reflexively, I went to Twitter to see what others were saying (which would be more than Amtrak was telling us then). In short order, I heard from Andrew Baisley, who was on the same train, one car behind. I needed a way to get from Baltimore to Washington and Andrew offered a seat in a car with him and his colleagues from The Feed Room. I had a fast and free ride and good converstaion. We even did business. I was heading to the Web Manager University for government webmasters and promised to plug something they’re doing. I also told them about the amazing work Bild is doing with video in Germany. A disaster turned into a great experience thanks to Twitter.
Now ain’t that amazing?
I’ve been trying to push for sometime the idea that Twitter and internet connectivity will bring us societies on airplanes. So it happened on a train.
Condé Nast folds Portfolio even as it starts Wired in print in the U.K. So which are we to take as the harbinger for the future of magazines?
I hate to be calling doom for yet another medium, but I fear that Portfolio is the better indicator. We’ll see magazines fold and it’s going to be a lot riskier to start new ones to replace them — riskier because, just as on TV and in movies and music, it’s harder to create a blockbuster and consumer magazines depend on the blockbuster economy. Magazines don’t make money until they hit magic numbers of circulation (which comes only after renewals reduce marketing costs) and advertising (which is sold at heavy premiums and that market is bound to suffer both in a recession and against unlimited competition from online). In the U.S. market, subscriptions are so heavily discounted ($1 per issue for a product that can cost $5 or more to print and distribute) and marketing costs are so high (subscriber acquisition can hit $20 or $30) that the risk is only greater.
Entertainment Weekly, my baby, went through an astounding $200 million before becoming profitable. No one is going to invest that kind of money again. If anybody would, it was Condé. Oh, well, so much for that.
A few years ago, I was asked to speak on a panel at a magazine industry meeting. A few days before the event, the organizer called me and said, “Uh, Jeff, are you going to say that magazines are doomed? And if you are, could you not come?” So in a rare moment of preparing for a panel, I actually thought about what I thought and I concluded that magazines weren’t doomed. They have the unique value of slickness and focus that their publishers always brag about. And, I reasoned, magazines already were communities and so they should be perfectly positioned for the community-based internet. Magazines are collections of people who are interested in the same stuff. The challenge for an editor is to figure out ways to enable them to share with each other, to become a platform for that community.
Afraid I was wrong. Or at least, it’s hard to name a magazine that has done a good job becoming that community platform. The problem, as I said of newspapers in relation to GeoCities and MySpace the other day, is that magazines can’t stop thinking of themselves as content. They’re not communities.
If I proposed EW today, I’ve said here before, I wouldn’t make it a magazine, not for a second. It would be a community of criticism about all forms and tastes in entertainment, growing far, far bigger than its razor-thin page-count these days. But those communities already exist online; they’ve organized themselves. They don’t need EW. I hear that EW is suffering as a result. And it’s probably too late to rescue itself. It would pain me if EW followed Portfolio. But it wouldn’t shock me.
Can other magazines save themselves? I still think it’s possible. But then, I said that magazines weren’t doomed.
Mind you, I’m not saying that magazines are going to start dropping like flies and newspapers. When the economy comes back, many will still be able to sell their targeted, engaged audiences to advertisers for a premium … at least for awhile. Some may even manage to pull off a metamorphosis into community platforms and a few high-value titles — see: The Economist — can even grow. But when the weak ones die, there’ll be none to replace them.
And there are so many ready to die. Who needs newsmagazines? Business magazines are suffering the tragic irony of being at the same time more necessary and less supportable because of the financial crisis. Men’s magazines have been folding. Entertainment magazines are dicey. Trade magazines are dropping. And the list goes on and on.
So what about Wired? I don’t know, knowing what you know now about the state of the economy and magazines, would you have decided a year ago or so to start a new one?
The death of Portfolio doesn’t yet presage the doom of magazines. It marks the doom of magazine launches.
: Speaking of Wired.co.uk: Can anyone explain how this story is wired?
In today’s NY Times, Mark Taylor of Columbia calls for the end of the university as we know. As I do in What Would Google Do?, he uses the new structure of our post-industrial age to rethink the structure and work of a university.
He argues for the end of departments — that is the end of taxonomy. He argues for collaboration — that is, specialization (do what you do best and link to the rest). He argues for the end of the centuries-old form of the dissertation — that is, taking advantage of the new forms of creation and information sharing we have at hand. And he argues for the end of tenure — that is, building around merit and value rather than protection.
At the same time, see this post from Mike Hamlyn of Staffordshire University trying to apply some of the precepts of WWGD? to his university.
Here is my entire chapter on remaking the university from WWGD?, in which I argue that we need to separate the functions a university now performs — teaching, certification, research, socialization — and use the power of the link to put together networks of learning, teaching, and knowledge sharing that cut across departmental and institutional — not to mention economic — boundaries.
Good on Burl Osborn, former publisher of the Dallas Morning News and chairman of the Associated Press, for acknowledging newspapers’ missed chance: “”Now the consumers have taken charge — they decide what news is. Monopoly power vanished. The existence of a competitive marketplace is permanent. And we should have known and we should have anticipated that.”
It’s fate that GeoCities dies at the same moment that MySpace reshuffles and reboots its management in the face of no growth (which, on the internet, is the same as shrinkage). What they have in common, of course, is that they are platforms for creating content.
But content is not king. What is? Well, the junta in charge of growth online is Google, which is about search; Facebook, which is about social; and now Twitter, which is about live and social.
There’s a lesson here for newspapers because they’re about content. And they’re not as open as GeoCities and MySpace, which are (or were) at least platforms for others to create content. Newspapers create and control their own content and then allow others to comment on it (but enough about you….). Every effort newspapers have made to bring their content online and to update it with new ways to make it – audio, video, Flash, or the next flavor – still leave them in the exact same spot. That’s why they seem to be spinning their wheels. They still define themselves as content.
Newspapers must define their value differently – not as paper, for God’s sake, and not even as content but as a platform. But a platform for what? Content? No, there go GeoCities and MySpace. I think they should follow the advice of Mark Zuckerberg, member of the ruling junta, that their job is to bring communities elegant organization. In a sense, they always have done that; they helped communities organize their knowledge so they could organize themselves; that’s the essence of an informed democracy.
But now there are so many more ways to organize ourselves and we naturally use those tools to do it. As Clay Shirky teaches us, we don’t need organizations to organize. We need tools and maybe support. That’s what Google, Facebook, and Twitter provide. Should newspapers create such tools? No. They’re not good at it. But they should use the tools that exist to help communities organize themselves. They need to figure out how they add value to that.
Or else the will go the way of GeoCities and MySpace.
Every day, with everything they do, the key question for journalists and news organizations in these tight – that is, more efficient – times must be: Are you adding value? And if you’re not, why are you doing whatever you’re doing?
Sitting in a hotel room, cruising by CNN the other day, I caught a behind-the-scenes segment that wanted to show us just how cool it is to be a reporter dashing from story to story. It did the opposite for me. I was disturbed at the waste.
The correspondent – I won’t pick on him; it was just his turn to play show monkey – stood in front of the new Mets’ stadium to tell us that there’s controversy about naming it after a sponsor. It was just a stand-up. There was no evidence of reporting as he was standing alone in a parking lot. The knowledge was a commodity. Anybody could have read it. But they wanted to scene and invested a correspondent and crew to get it. Then he dashed to the UN because there was a vote happening. But he didn’t run to report. He ran to the bureau to do another stand-up with another background. Again, what happened in the vote was commodity knowledge. Anybody could have read it.
So there is a reporter not reporting. But, of course, that is hardly unique to CNN. How much of the dwindling, precious journalism resource we have – on national and local TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines – goes to original reporting, to real journalism? How much goes to repetition and production?
Journalism can’t afford repetition and production anymore.
Every minute of a journalist’s time will need to go to adding unique value to the news ecosystem: reporting, curating, organizing. This efficiency is necessitated by the reduction of resources. But it is also a product of the link and search economy: The only way to stand out is to add unique value and quality. My advice in the past has been: If you can’t imagine why someone would link to what you’re doing, you probably shouldn’t be doing it. And: Do what you do best and link to the rest. The link economy is ruthless in judging value.
The question every journalist must ask is: Am I adding value?
Look at a service such as PaidContent. They have a small (though growing) staff and they choose carefully what they do, whether it’s worth it to send someone to a conference, whether they can add reporting to a story that’s already known, how they can curate links to the best of coverage that already exists. They fire their bullets carefully, economically, to contribute maximum unique value. PaidContent doesn’t – and can’t afford to – record stand-ups or rewrite others’ reporting for the sake of rewriting it or waste money on production and design niceties.
That’s the way that journalism will have to be executed in the future: efficiently.
I’ve been wanting to get funding to perform an audit of the journalistic output and value of the entire legacy structure of news in a market. It’s not that the current state of news should be the model for the future but it is where the discussion begins: ‘How do we make sure we’ll maintain this level of reporting?’
Once journalism becomes efficient, I think it can do much better than maintain what we have now. When we cut out all the incredible waste – those standups and rewrites and frills and blather – and when we have an ecosystem that rewards unique value, as the internet does, then I think we could end up with more journalism, more reporting.
Bloggers have had to learn that, too. Just linking to and commenting on others’ reporting won’t get you much attention. Every blogger who does original reporting and tells the world something it doesn’t know but wants to know learns that this is how to get links and audience. Arianna Huffington told Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger in London months ago that she was hiring reporters because their stories get more traffic; it’s enlightened economic self-interest. This is a lesson we teach our journalism students at CUNY, when we have them add reporting to the conversations that are going on online.
Whether you’re a blogger or a new form of news organization, you’re going to have to ask with every move whether it will add value to the news ecosystem. If it doesn’t, you shouldn’t do it.
In the link economy, the value given to original reporting will rise. The ability to waste money on old practices of egotistical journalism will plummet. And what is left standing, I think, is more efficient and valuable reporting.
For a long time now, I’ve been pushing hard the idea of journalist-as-curator. It appears that curators are looking at journalists and worrying about their loss of control, as evidenced by this post about the death of the curator, inspired by journalists – the Guardian – and curators – the Saatchi Gallery – enabling the great unwashed to help curate a show:
Museum curators and print journalists have a lot in common, in that it is their skills that turn an amount of information into something worth giving a damn about. There are plenty of other places to find out about the DefCon of journalism, especially the ever increasing problem of how to get paid. At this current moment in time, the museum curator is “safe”, got nothing to worry about. “It will all blow over”. The fact that there is a gallery in London who are going to offer thousands of people, many without art history degrees, the ability to choose what goes on the wall. The first step new media did to try to kill old media was to make the skills unimportant under the banner of “democratising”. “Everybody can get involved!” also means “It doesn’t matter what you know!”. Suddenly, your art history or archaeology degree isn’t looking so important, your museum post-grad may not be enough and your years of experience don’t mean much in the world of facemuseumtube when your job can be done by a thousand unpaid contributors. Curators may be safe now, but they would do well to look over their shoulders to their destitute journalist buddies.
Every priesthood, it seems, is having a fit over loss of its centralized control: How dare people pick what they like without history degrees or share what they know without journalism degrees! The nerve!
Except the irony in this comparison is that journalists need to learn better curatorial skills. Yes, in a sense, they’ve always curated information, collecting it, selecting it, giving it context in their stories. But now they have to do that across a much vaster universe: the internet. I hear all the time about the supposed problem of too much information online. Wherever you see a problem, I advise, seek the opportunity in it. There is a need to curate the best of that information (and even the people who gather it). We have many automated means to aggregate news (including Daylife, where I’m a partner). Curation is a step above that, human selection. It’s a way to add value.
I think that curators have things to teach journalists and that’s why I’m planning a symposium on curation at CUNY, bringing together museum curators, event curators, possibly even sommeliers to share their views of the value they add to collections of things, people, information – or wine. Note that one of the suggestions I make in What Would Google Do? is to capture the data of dining room – which wines went well with which dishes, according to diners – to crowdsource the job of the sommelier. Yes, every priesthood is vulnerable to the crowd.
I love it when folks extend the ideas in What Would Google Do? to their own companies. Peter Cameron-Inglis imagines Googley insurance in a cooperative community:
A Chamber of Commerce could be a perfect platform for this idea. Our local Chamber of Commerce acts as a referral/partnering agency right now with Underwriters Insurance. But, what if it started a cooperative insurance offering of its own and the coverage of claims were voted on by the board based on a collective set of rules. We live in a social community and fraud would be less likely if those of us who were insured through this cooperative program were held accountable by our own business colleagues and friends. I think it could work. What do you think? Wow or Whoa?
At McSweeney’s Robert Lanham pitches his course in “Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era.”
As print takes its place alongside smoke signals, cuneiform, and hollering, there has emerged a new literary age, one in which writers no longer need to feel encumbered by the paper cuts, reading, and excessive use of words traditionally associated with the writing trade. Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era focuses on the creation of short-form prose that is not intended to be reproduced on pulp fibers.
Instant messaging. Twittering. Facebook updates. These 21st-century literary genres are defining a new “Lost Generation” of minimalists who would much rather watch Lost on their iPhones than toil over long-winded articles and short stories. Students will acquire the tools needed to make their tweets glimmer with a complete lack of forethought, their Facebook updates ring with self-importance, and their blog entries shimmer with literary pithiness. All without the restraints of writing in complete sentences. w00t! w00t! Throughout the course, a further paring down of the Hemingway/Stein school of minimalism will be emphasized, limiting the superfluous use of nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, conjunctions, gerunds, and other literary pitfalls.
Please don’t make me tell you he’s being ironic. That’s one problem he doesn’t cover in his syllabus: commenters who can’t read.
Not that I’ve been invited or will be, but if I were, here’s what I would say in testimony to Sen. John Kerry’s hearings on failing newspapers. (What the hell, after writing a fake speech for the Newspaper Association of America, I might as well make this an oeuvre.)
* * *
Senator, thank you for inviting me to speak at these hearings. But, with respect, I believe you are investigating the wrong issue from the wrong angle and in any case, I am not sure what role you and government should have in this matter.
Newspapers are going to die. That is wrenching, of course, for employees – not just journalists but the rarely mentioned pressmen, drivers, and classified ad takers – who will lose their jobs, and the stock- and bond-holders who are losing their investments in these failing and over-leveraged companies.
But this upheaval is no different from that overtaking automakers, auto dealers, retail chains, banks, airlines, music companies, and soon other media sectors that are suffering and dying in a reshaping of the economy that is more profound than a mere financial crisis and more fundamental even than a recession or depression. We are undergoing a millennial transformation from the industrial, mass economy to what comes next. Disruption and destruction are inevitable.
Should government’s response to this change be to try to forestall it? I don’t think so. I fear that we are bailing out the past when we should be investing in the future. We are throwing huge amounts of money to shore up business models we know are failed and are delaying the innovation, reinvention, and investment we need to climb out of this hole and build a new economy. But that is a subject for another day.
On the matter of newspapers specifically, let us first acknowledge that they are not victims of fate; their owners controlled their fate. Newspapers and their proprietors – and, in many cases, their professionals – have had a generation to reinvent themselves and bring journalism forward into the next age: 20 years since the start of the web, 15 since the introduction of the commercial browser and craigslist, 10 since the invention of blogs and founding of Google. They didn’t reinvent themselves because, understandably, I suppose, they did not want to disrupt their comfortable, powerful, and profitable monopolies. But that responsibility was theirs. Is it not ours, as taxpayers, to make up for their lost time.
The issue I believe you are trying to address is not the fate of newspapers at all. It is the fate of journalism. But on that score, I am an optimist – to a fault, perhaps. Though a majority of journalists polled by The Atlantic magazine recently said that the internet was harming journalism, I believe the opposite to be true. The internet has provided no end of opportunities to journalism, for communities to gather, share, and organize news in new ways; to reach and serve new communities and audiences; to use all available media to inform the public; to find new efficiencies – both in the means of production and distribution and also in the practice of journalism itself. This is what I teach my journalism students.
But what about supporting journalism as a business? Here, too, I am an optimist and this is why we are exploring new business models at my school. We can and will debate the specifics of these plans – what the costs will be; where the revenue will come from. But the real question before us is whether there will be a market demand for journalism – I believe there will be – and whether the market will meet it – I believe it will. But the proof will come only in execution.
I urge you, Senator, not to equate journalism with newspapers and its future with its past. Journalism, like the other industries I listed, is going through a transition into a new economy and one could argue that the sooner it gets there, the better. This transition must take its course.
What can you do to help? As little as possible, I’d say. For I fear government intervention in the press and speech. And even if you were to bring government’s resources to bear, it’s necessary to ask who would benefit – the incumbents who delayed too long or newcomers, The New York Times or The Huffington Post?
And what form would such help take? Tax breaks raise the problem, again, of who the beneficiaries would be. Direct subsidy should be seen as a direct conflict of interest. Legislation to allow newspapers to collude? Beware that precedent. How about the suggestion that newspapers be enabled, even encouraged to shift to not-for-profit status? That would also forbid them from making editorial endorsements, taking voices out of the democracy when we need more voices. And I, for one, am not ready to declare surrender int he effort to find sustainable business models for news. No, I do not think you should try to directly subsidize and influence the business of newspapers.
But there are other things you could do to help secure the future of journalism.
For one, I would like to see our government follow the leads of the U.K. and Australian governments in making ubiquitous and open broadband connectivity a priority and a promise. This alone would yield more innovation and entrepreneurship. It would assure that all citizens could be informed by the journalism that emerges.
For another, I would urge you in Congress to make transparency the default of government. All of government’s actions and information should be open, shared publicly and permanently, and searchable. When that happens, we will not have fewer watchdogs on our government as newspapers die. Every citizen can become a watchdog, contributing to a new ecosystem of news.
For another, I would like to see media literacy taught in our schools – and today that must be defined not just as consuming but also as creating media. The more people who can share and speak, the healthier, if louder, our democracy will be.
I would ask you to create further tax advantages to support innovation, creation, and entrepreneurship in any industry, including news. Every sector of the economy and society needs this support.
So rather than holding hearings on the death of newspapers, I would like to see you hold hearings on the future of news in our new knowledge economy made possible by the internet.
: UPDATE: In The Times, Saul Hansell offers these notions for congressional consideration:
# Require all government jobs to be listed only through classified ads in newspapers.
# Publish the Federal Register as a supplement to Sunday papers.
# Divert some of the stimulus money to buy newspaper subscriptions for every high school and college student in the country.
No, I say, subsidies to sinking ships is not the answer. They’re still sinking. It’s another example of bailout-think: bailing out the past instead of investing in the future.
If Congress cares about a robust press, then encouraging the infrastructure to enable the invention of that press is what’s needed.
Sen. John Kerry is going to hold hearings about the failing newspaper industry. To do what, exactly? Bail them out? God, no. So what’s the point? And who’s he going to invite? Newspaper people? Why not invite the entrepreneurs and innovators and bloggers who are inventing the future of news? Why not hold hearings to support that, instead? We’ll be happy to share the business models we create at the New Business Models for News Project, Sen. Kerry. There is a future for news. It’s not the same as the past.
Mark Penn writes in the Wall Street Journal that there are now more paid bloggers than CEOs.
Already more Americans are making their primary income from posting their opinions than Americans working as computer programmers, firefighters or even bartenders.
Paid bloggers fit just about every definition of a microtrend: Their ranks have grown dramatically over the years, blogging is an important social and cultural movement that people care passionately about, and the number of people doing it for at least some income is approaching 1% of American adults.
The best studies we can find say we are a nation of over 20 million bloggers, with 1.7 million profiting from the work ,and 452,000 of those using blogging as their primary source of income. That’s almost 2 million Americans getting paid by the word, the post, or the click — whether on their site or someone else’s.
As much as I would like to believe that blogging is a lucrative profession, I’m not sure I buy it — not quite yet. He says that bloggers with 100,000 readers a month are making $75k. Name a few. Still, the trend is heading this way and I’m certainly happy to hear talk of blogging as a business model.
