In case you didn’t see it, here’s Jason Jones of the Daily Show at The New York Times talking about “aged news” and challenging an editor to “find one thing in there that happened today.” Editor and Publisher sort of sniffs about why The Times would allow someone in to make fun of them. They might just have a sense of humor.
When I’m asked about Google’s weaknesses – and they do exist – I list its lack of transparency in certain areas of its business, especially advertising (even as we all need to be transparent if we want to be found in search), its policy toward China (where it should be a better defender of free speech), its size (just because government and competitors soon see too much success as a problem), the other frontiers it has not (yet) conquered (the live web, the social web, the local web, the deep web), and its sometimes unilateral power over its ad partners. The fact that Google ad rates are set by auction in the market insulates it fairly well from claims that it could use monopoly power to set prices. But the fact that Google decides who may and may not use AdSense does leave it vulnerable to accusations of misuse of power.
See Aaron Greenspan’s saga about his $761 small claims fight with Google about canceling his account. There are other such cases in the court. I don’t know the specifics of Greenspan’s others’ claims sufficiently to take sides in the disputes. Doesn’t matter. The point for Google is that it can’t win by holding the power itself. It will be accused of ruining little guys’ businesses (though in many cases, those business are spam blogs — and I wish Google would work harder to get rid of more of them faster) or of wielding a monopoly.
So what should Google do? What Would Google Do with Google?
I suggest that Google should hand over the power of adjudication of such disputes to the community of publishers and advertisers. It is in their interests, like Google’s, to maintain a credible marketplace that is not ruined by spammers and click-fraudsters. Google should still use its automated systems to eliminate them, as they pop up like zits on a geek. But when there are disputes, wouldn’t Google be wiser to hand the matter over to a wise council – whose members could be elected by Google’s community of business partners, small and large – to rule? That way, Google cannot be accused of being unfair and acting with unilateral power.
That, I think, would be the Googley thing to do. To paraphrase some of the rules in my book… It would hand over control to Google’s public. It would exhibit trust in that public. It would rely on the generosity of that public. It would be transparent, doing business in public. It would open-source the process. It would take advantage of the network Google already has and distribute the task. It would be a way to elegantly organize the community and its needs and rules. It would be a recognition that Google can make mistakes. It would be a case of doing what you do best and linking to the rest.
After joining in the tweetfire over the NYTimes’ slam on bloggers and bloggers’ slam back, Guardian colleague and friend Charles Arthur took the amazing move – have to try this sometime – of sitting back and reconsidering. And he saw what I was trying, without complete success, to express: the class of cultures, expectations, assumptions, and practices in online news:
OK: now see the publishers of Gizmodo, Engadget, Gawker, TechCrunch et al as the Davids, fighting the Goliaths of the New York Times and, of course, the Guardian and all the other papers. Should they fight on the same terms? If they want to get beaten, sure. They’ll never be able to find the experienced journalists, the experienced sales people, the special something that the papers have been able to build up over decades. The papers have the news process down pat. They can get those stories into paper-sized parcels and out to people so effectively there’s no room left.
So the blogs have to create their own battlefield, their own rules, and fight there.. . .
Such as what? Such as doing stuff that the papers won’t. Post rumours, and declare them as such; copy and rewrite like mad, so that how fast you can get the post up is more important than whether you checked it; let the readers in effect write the news; publish galleries of Photoshopped “is this the next iPhone?” galleries.
All the while, the Goliaths of the news industry stand by, shaking their heads. Hell, they’re doing it wrong! That’s not how you put stuff into a news parcel! It’s like this… hey, doesn’t anyone want it? Funny, the orders have dried up. And the Davids count the money they’re getting from adverts supplied against millions of page views. (They don’t have as many journalists as in a traditional news room, you say? Yeah. Life’s like that sometimes.)
There is one note of relief: unlike war, it’s not absolute. There’s plenty of room for everyone to thrive in this: the Davids and the Goliaths can live alongside each other. But the latter have to adapt so that they can get it right, and trade on the things that have got them where they are – which in effect means their brand reputation – and capitalise on it. Else those Boston Globe cuts aren’t going to be the last.
Right. They have things to learn from each other if they can stop sniping long enough to notice how few of them are left standing on the battlefield. But their culture expectations get in the way. To continue Charles’ war metaphor: It’s the Redcoats vs. the rebels; the GIs vs the Vietcong. When the new guy breaks the rules, protesting that they’re doing it wrong does no good. Learn. That’s what I was trying to say.
* * *
I liked Charles post so much, I left what I think is my best comment ever. Others didn’t agree. It was:
Charles made one more somewhat related point in his post: Where are the publishing side people on Twitter and blogs and all that? What are they learning from the Davids/rebels/Vietcong?:
The Boston Glob Guild rejected The New York Times Company’s cutbacks. What the Guild should have done, I say, is reject The New York Times Company’s strategy.
Rather than nickel-and-diming-and-dollaring their way to survival through cutbacks (though I wonder how saving $20 million when you’re losing $85 million can possibly do the job; it’s a Band-Aid on a gushing artery) the Globe should find its alternate future not as a newspaper but as a journalistic service online.
The Guild should have demanded a strategy that transforms the Globe into a smaller but profitable venture that concentrates only on news and serving the community and not on printing and distribution, jettisoning huge costs but coming out with a sustainable plan.
But the union’s not going to think that way anymore than management is. They are, as this process all too painfully demonstrates, retrenched in their past, in their long-held definitions of their business and themselves.
So the possible futures do not look good: The Globe could die soon. The losses at the Globe could bring down The New York Times. Someone else could come in town imminently and create that nimble new news organization and kill the Globe.
Through the power of the link, someone I’ve never heard of riffs on the discussion this weekend about product v. process journalism from an artist’s perspective, adding this:
Think about the change from the camera in the 19th century to the projector in the 20th. The camera framed objects, alluded to three dimensions, stilled time. The projector blasted synthesis – one frame negating another and at eye blinking speed. We may think of blogging as the result of another technological frontier not unlike the camera and the projector.
A newspaper by its very nature stills time; states the fact wrapped in the eternity of print – it is a moment of truth stilled. A blog is more akin to the projector: the movement itself. Recording the changes of truth over time. Revisionist, processing, excluding and incorporating.
But what of the truth the blog seeks? In art that truth is the thing that is coming into being, it is intertwined with the perceivor.
When we discuss in blogs the movement from rumor to not rumor, when one moment’s truth collides with the next, what is the truth? Where does it end? When does it become fact?
If the truth must be corrected – wouldn’t the truth finally have to be the sum total of process AND product? Shouldn’t it be a document of changes which tells the truth about editing, as well as about the information being edited? And wouldn’t it imply information is only momentarily true. That the end of a story doesn’t have to do with truth it has to do with interest or the loss thereof?
Tim Leberecht, frog design’s VP of marketing and communications, riffs on my post about moving past selling advertising as scarcity and about decency as the new ad (my emphasis):
Equity is the accumulation, the repeated occurrence, of actions, interactions, and transactions that add value. The best way, then, to build brand equity is to repeatedly and consistently add value through all your interactions with customers. Advertising doesn’t add value; branded content does (information). Promotions don’t add value; branded entertainment does (entertainment). When you brand something, you don’t just market scarcity and advertise your products and services, you market your ability to add value that is relevant.
The web, and the social web in particular, reconciles artificial scarcity with relevance, and that’s why more and more branding dollars are moving online. It is the ideal forum for creating an abundance of scarce moments, thousands of small great ideas instead of one great big one. These small great ideas come to live in brief moments of attachment with customers that are personalized and truly relevant for them.
“Advertising is failure,” says Jeff Jarvis, and he thinks “media only get in the way of customer relationships.” And indeed, how will you make more friends at a party? Showing up with a big banner around your neck that says “I am a great friend” or engaging in a handful of conversations with strangers, listening to their stories and detecting affinities whilst accomplishing a sense of privacy that gradually becomes intimate? Right. In the end, that’s what we should be doing as marketers to build real, sustainable brand equity – creating publicity through intimacy, loyalty through decency.
What Would Google Do? got a nice bit of publicity in Croatia (I wasn’t so sure how good it would be when I saw the picture choices, but friends and Google translation say it’s OK).
What’s cool is that within a day, this yielded a book contract for a local edition with a Croatian publisher.
Now I wish I could get similar publicity anywhere in the Spanish-, Italian-, Swedish-, Arabic- speaking worlds.
An alarm went off on some desk at The New York Times business section: Oh-oh, time to slam blogs again. But the latest assault reveals as much about The Times and the culture of classical journalism as it does about bloggers. Like the millennial clash of business models in media – the content economy v. the link economy and the inability of one to understand the other – here we see a clash over journalistic culture and methods – product journalism v. process journalism.
In The Times, Damon Darlin goes after blogs for publishing rumors and unfinished stories, calling it a “truth-be-damned approach” and likening it to yellow journalism, the highest insult of the gray class. He hauls out the worst example again – just as bloggers trying to go after MSM reporters do: the Steve Jobs heart attack rumor and Times WMD reporting (or Jayson Blair or Dan Rather), respectively.
Darlin leads with TechCrunch and Gawker sharing bogus rumors of Apple buying Twitter. He acknowledges that TechCrunch said in its post that it could not confirm the story. But still, he uses it to jump to the first of his broad-brush generalizations: “Such news judgment is not unusual among blogs covering tech. For some blogs, rumors are their stock in trade.” Couldn’t one say the same thing about political reporters who spread rumors and trial balloons, knowing they are just that, or business reporters feeding rumors and speculation about mergers or firings? Blogs are hardly alone in scoop mentality. Newspapers invented scoops.
When I tweeted about the story, calling it a slap to bloggers, Times Sunday business editor Tim O’Brien – who’d just issued his customary long string of tweets flogging his stories, including this one – responded: “isn’t about ‘product vs. process’ or ‘old vs. new’. it’s about people publishing things they don’t believe to be true. standards.”
One word: standards. But which standards? Whose standards? The Times’ standards, of course. They set the standard, don’t they?
Well, yes, they do, sometimes. Just not all the standards all the time. At my school, we say we teach what we call the eternal verities of journalism. But I also try to make sure the students are open to new worldviews and new methods and means of journalism. Those can come from bloggers and from the public we serve.
Darlin touches on one such new view when he writes:
[TechCrunch founder] Mr. Arrington and the other bloggers see this not as rumor-mongering, but as involving the readers in the reporting process. One mission of his site, he said, is to write about the things a few people are talking about, “the scuttlebutt around Silicon Valley.” His blog will often make clear that he’s passing along a thinly sourced story.
To quote Gawker founder Nick Denton, when we put up “half-baked posts” we are saying to our public: Here’s what we know, here’s what we don’t know, what do you know. I believe it is critical to clearly label that, giving caveats and context. The same is true of 24-hour cable news, where the viewer must become the editor, understanding the difference between what is known now and what what can be confirmed later (see: the West Virgina mining disaster). In short: We who publish must learn how to say what wedon’t know at least as well as we say what we know.
This is journalism as beta. I make a big point of that in What Would Google Do? – that every time Google releases a beta, it is saying that the product is incomplete and imperfect. That is inevitably a call to collaborate. It is – even from Google – a statement of humanity and humility: We’re not perfect.
Ah, but there’s the problem: journalism’s myth of perfection. And it’s not just journalism that holds this myth. It is the byproduct of the means and requirements of mass production: If you have just one chance to put out a product and it has to serve everyone the same, you come to believe it’s perfect because it has to be, whether that product is a car (we are the experts, we took six years to tool up, it damned well better be perfect) or government (where, I’m learning, employees have a phobic fear of mistakes – because citizens and journalists will jump on them) or newspapers (we package the world each day in a box with a bow on it – you’re welcome).
The posse of pros who jumped on me in Twitter this morning will say that they do make mistakes and corrections but first they always try to get it right – perfect – while bloggers instead spread rumors. But that’s where the fundamental misunderstanding comes. It’s a matter of timing, of the order of things, of the process of journalism. Newspaper people see their articles as finished products of their work. Bloggers see their posts as part of the process of learning.
I believe the contrast in methodology will become even more stark as we start using tools such as Google Wave to create news collaboratively in present-tense.
Online, we often publish first and edit later. We do that on blogs. One could say that 24-hour TV news does that, though I rarely see the editing. Even a division of The New York Times Company – About.com (where I used to consult) – does its work in that order. (That is why About had dozens of writers for every editor [I don't know the mix today], while The Times has three editors for every writer. That level of editing before publication is what makes The Times The Times – both from a journalistic perspective and, today, from an economic perspective; it may be what makes a newsroom like that unsustainable.)
Online, the story, the reporting, the knowledge are never done and never perfect. That doesn’t mean that we revel in imperfection, as is the implication of The Times’ story – that we have no standards. It just means that we do journalism differently, because we can. We have our standards, too, and they include collaboration, transparency, letting readers into the process, and trying to say what we don’t know when we publish – as caveats – rather than afterward – as corrections.
The problem with this tiresome, never-ending alleged war of blogs vs. MSM (Arrington attacks The Times) and MSM vs. blogs (The Times attacks Arrington) – (Mark Glaser scolded me for rising to The Times’ bait – is that it blinds each tribe from learning from the other. Yes, there are standards worth saluting from classical journalism. But there are also new methods and opportunities to be learned online. No one owns journalists or its methods or standards.
is not business model; it is not a job; it is not a company; it is not an industry; it is not a form of media; it is not a distribution platform. Instead, journalism is an activity. It is a body of practices by which information and knowledge is gathered, processed, and conveyed. The practices are influenced by the form of media and distribution platform, of course, as well as by financial arrangements that support the journalism. But one should not equate the two.
The pity is that there are Timesmen who already are using these new methods. I see bloggers there asking readers to help them with stories, admitting they don’t know everything yet – which means they are publishing incomplete news. I wish one of those people had been assigned to this story (if it needed to be written at all) and that such an open-minded, curious journalist could have seen and explained these different worldviews and how they are clashing as they also merge. But that, apparently, was not the assignment.
Nobody’s perfect – not even journalists . . . especially not journalists.
Reporters and editors make mistakes. Indeed, they are probably more likely than most to do so. For just as bartenders break more glass because they handle more beer, so journalists who traffic in facts are bound to drop some along the way.
Yet too often, they won’t admit that. What is plainly obvious – even a matter of liturgical confession for people of many faiths – is heretical to the reporting cult: People are fallible. But journalists too often believe they are not.
I was one of them. We were trained to seek and attain nothing less lofty than truth. Accuracy. Objectivity. We were the trusted ones. Impartial experts. Fair and balanced.
Alan Rusbridger, editor of London’s Guardian, said at a 2007 meeting of the Organization of News Ombudsmen at Harvard: “Since a free press first evolved, we have derived our authority from a feeling – a sense, a pretense – that journalism is, if not infallible, something close to it. We speak of ourselves as being interested in the truth, the real truth. We’re truth seekers, we’re truth tellers, and we tell truth to power.” But then he quoted Walter Lippman saying in 1922: “If we assume that news and truth are two words for the same thing we shall, I believe, arrive nowhere.”
It is time for journalists to trade in their hubris and recapture their humanity and humility. And the best way to do that is simply to admit: We make mistakes.
Craig Silverman’s examination of the art of the correction in his blog and now this book could not come at a better time for journalism. For the public’s trust in news organizations is falling about as fast as their revenues (and, yes, those may be related). One way to earn back that trust is to face honestly and directly the trade’s faults. The more – and more quickly – that news organizations admit and correct their mistakes, prominently and forthrightly, the less their detractors will have grounds to grumble about them.
But for journalists, to admit mistakes is to expose failure; corrections, in this logic, diminish stature and authority rather than enhance them. . . .
But this discussion should be about so much more than just errors and corrections. This is about new and better ways to gather, share, and verify news. And it is about a radically different and improved relationship between journalists and the public they serve. These changes in the culture and practice of journalism will not just bolster journalism’s reputation but expand its reach and impact in society.
I’m well aware that I have been painting myself in a corner – or rather, I fear that media and journalism are:
I’ve been arguing that charging for content online – news content – is futile and that print as a vehicle for advertising and a source of profit is unsustainable. Thus, online advertising is our only hope. But advertising will decline. For I’ve also been saying that the internet enables direct relationships among companies and customers: Your product is your ad and customer your ad agency. That’s the ideal. It’s only when that doesn’t work that you need to advertise. Advertising is failure. Welcome to the chaos scenario.
Now it gets worse – for media, that is. Ryan Jones blogs about Green Mountain Coffee’s “growth story without ads.” Jones does this on his personal blog, but it’s worth noting that he happens to be a global brand manager for the largest advertiser there is, Procter & Gamble, and he’s paying attention.
For Green Mountain, it’s the company’s behavior that is its selling point. Its morals become its marketing. We’re going to see more of that, especially after the financial crisis bared such distrust of companies. Jones writes:
Here’s a number that will shock some traditional marketers…Green Mountain says it only spent $17 Million on Marketing on a business that is upwards of $800 Million in revenue. What? To achieve this, Green Mountain is probably using a smart strategy where they leverage the Product as the ad and customers as the ad agency (see this speech by Jeff Jarvis ). According to AdAge, Green Mountain has been relying on sustainability efforts to build its reputation & brand. Historically, the company has avoided traditional marketing, considering itself a “discovery brand.” Only recently has (more traditional) consumer marketing become a part of the equation.
With such incredibly low marketing costs, Green Mountain can afford to have ultra-high quality coffee, pay its people well, give back to coffee growing communities, and give back to charity. And this is exactly what Green Mountain is doing. . . .
Green Mountain is a values based company with a strong sustainability driven purpose. They integrate their values with their business operations and “put their money where their values are” by donating 5% of their pre-tax earnings to social and environmental causes. Green Mountain has also long been an advocate of high quality, farmer friendly, Fair Trade coffee…it now seems that Fair Trade coffee is gaining more traction in the minds of consumers.
In my last book and what I hope will be my next one, I say that when the internet makes price transparent and competition on price thus all but impossible, and when you sell commodity products (as P&G sort of does) then one frontier for competition is virtue: more responsible products, more responsible companies. Given the choice of two toilet papers, maybe you’ll take the one that’s sustainable from the company you trust.
Now add the Zappos gospel: Your customer service is your advertising. Treat people will and they will advertise you.
Blogger Jones quotes Gary Hirshberg of Stonyfield Farms Yogurt, who considers “advertising to be the fertilizer of traditional business.
You spray it on a field of consumers to grow their awareness and hopefully incite them to try your product. Then, you hope that a trial leads to a purchase, then to repeat purchases, and finally, if you are fortunate, to true product loyalty. But just as with conventional farming practices, where petroleum-based fertilizer is needed to grow each succeeding year’s crops, a fairly high % of your revenue has to be plowed back into buying more advertising to keep next year’s crop of product users growing. That money thus becomes unavailable for enriching your product and deepening your relationship with the consumers you already have. You’re left to depend year after on what your advertising can deliver.
Here’s what I said on the topic in What Would Google Do?
Start, of course, by investing in your product or service. Tobaccowala said no amount of advertising will make up for a bad product. “Stop this yelling and screaming about what’s your Facebook strategy,” he tells clients. “Make absolutely certain that you have a great product or service. Make absolutely certain you have great customer service. Those are the first two rules of so-called advertising in this world. If you don’t have those, don’t pay any money to anyone to do anything.”
Then turn the relationship with the customer upside-down. First, invest in customer service, making it a goal to satisfy every single customer. Remember that your worst customer is your best friend. Second, invest effort in social tools that enable customers to tell you what you should be producing; hand over as much control to them as you can (I examine this idea from another perspective in the chapter on manufacturing). The goal must be to produce a product people love. All companies claim that customers love their brands. But I mean customers love your product so much they want to tell the world—that kind of love, Apple love. Third, hand over your brand to your customers—recognizing that they have always owned it. Don’t tell them what your brand means. Ask them what it means.
Every product is great; every relationship is satisfying—shoot for nothing less. So now you are spending quality dollars and relationship dollars over advertising dollars. You have handed over control of the product and the brand and gotten out of the way. If you haven’t gone out of business by now and convinced every boss, board member, analyst, reporter, and stockbroker that you’ve gone mad, then it probably worked.
Quality dollars, relationship dollars, and now decency dollars. Except decency doesn’t have to cost you anything, or not much. If you can compete on the basis of morality, of making the right decisions and treating customers, not to mention the planet well, that starts to look like an efficient and even inexpensive marketing strategy.
So here’s the real punchline: Advertising ends up having nothing to do with media. They become decoupled. Audience no longer yields advertising. Hell, advertising isn’t advertising. It’s relationships. Media only get in the way. There’s the corner we’re painted into, the chaos scenario, perhaps the doomsday scenario for media.
A journalist who has been unemployed for a year, Steve McGookin, is taking to playing music in the New York subways. It’s not quite as bad as it sounds. As a journalist, he’s approaching this as a project to write and blog about, a curiosity to fulfill. Once a journalist….
I’m planning to play on the platform for a while to get a sense of what the city’s buskers face every day and be able to tell their stories a little better. Then, for the price of a Metrocard, I’ll go wherever the music leads me; I’ll talk to the musicians it leads me to and I’ll introduce them to you.
I’ll do the same thing at a different station around the MTA map, at different times of the day, for forty-eight days. . . .
But playing at the stations is just a starting point; I’m doing this, first and foremost, to be doing something creative and be telling stories again, but also to spread the word about some of the remarkable musicians who – in most cases – make riders’ days a little brighter.
Just like newspapers these days, he’ll be passing the hat. Paid content and micropayments are in.
Seriously, I wish him luck and will be reading the blog with interest.
You have to love – or at least pay attention to – Digg’s new advertising system enabling users to vote on ads: The more that users digg an ad, the less the advertiser pays. That’s a reversal of advertising but it’s the way advertising probably needs to go: The better your relationship (which springs from a better product and service), the more your customers will market it for you, the less you’ll have to pay to market it. That is the ideal. Advertising is failure.
Or look at it another way: We in media – including us online with our banners and buttons – are still selling scarcity – and pricing it that way – when there is no scarcity. Google sold performance instead and that motivated it to create ever more ads across more of the internet – aka Adsense – to get ever more relevant ways to be ever more effective.
I’ve been wanting for sometime to have users vote on ads and tell a site which ads are worthwhile to them and which are not. This creates data that valuable for the advertiser (who likes me, who doesn’t?) and it enables media and marketing to become far more effective (Google allowing us to correct the targeting assumptions it makes about us reduces our irritation with irrelevant ads and improves Google’s effectiveness).
When I tweeted this earlier, Angus Batey worried that popularity can be a danger, and that the better-resourced companies that can create better (more entertaining, popular) ads will win. Except I’d say that may be the case with old advertising – commercials – but it’s hard to do that with text ads on Digg: Fool me once (“Free Sex Now!”) and I’ll vote you down the next time. The Digg system rests on a Cluetrainy need to deliver authentic value and relevance – like Google’s ads.
The future of advertising needs to be selling – that is, enabling – relevance instead of selling scarce space, time, or eyeballs. The future needs to be about adding value – relevance – rather than selling scarcity (extracting what the market will bear). I’m not sure whether Digg’s system is a step in that direction; Batey’s right that there could be unintended consequences. But it’s worth watching. I hope Digg shares data and experience in its fascinating experiment.
In the midst of the UK’s MP expenses scandal – and as Gordon Brown’s government teeters, with nudges over the edge from The Guardian itself – the paper asked its columnists and then its readers to reform, even reinvent government. The results are in and are fascinating.
Tom Clark’s writeup in today’s paper service is quick to point out that this is a survey of Guardian readers with their baggage in their left hands. But that makes it even more surprising that, for example, 70% say they do not support demographic quotas as a means to configure Parliament. They want to change voting and the structure of Parliament and they want a constitution. May I recommend a First Amendment?
What’s exciting about this is that it turns the usual discourse around, shifting from complaining about government to doing something about it, taking responsibility. After the destructive comes the constructive.
: Speaking of…. See also Kevin Anderson’s report from the Deutsche Welle conference on the need for journalists to focus more on solutions than problems. More here.
: And see Lloyd Shepard’s tweet: “sheesh. when voting is a process of elimination, you know democracy’s in trouble. this is how people end up supporting arsenal”
