My surgeon called with the results of the pathology report on my prostate cancer. “It’s all good news,” he said. The cancer was contained to the prostate and had not spread to the lymph nodes. “As far as I’m concerned,” he said, “you’re cured.”
From the moment of my diagnosis, I knew I was lucky. This is a form of cancer for which it’s possible to say a beautiful sentence such as that, because it is slow-growing and can be contained and taken out. That’s why another doctor told me when he gave me my diagnosis that if you’re going to get cancer, this is the one to get. That doctor caught it early and enabled my surgeon to get it out. Lucky, indeed.
Three months from now, I’ll get a PSA blood test again – the test that discovered my cancer. The hope – no prayer – is that the results will be nil to negligible, for if there are prostate cancer cells elsewhere in the body, they’ll be producing PSA. I’ll keep doing that for the rest of my life.
I’m getting ready for a talk this week at Philanthropy New York about giving and What Would Google Do? So I’d like your help on brainstorming what Googley philanthropy looks like. How would a transparent, networked, collaborative, even open-sourced, process-oriented, beta philanthropy as a platform operate?
Not being wealthy, I don’t know a lot about how philanthropies operate, though I have begun begging seeking funds in my new life at CUNY and so I am eager to learn more. That’s why I’m looking forward to the conversation and brainstorming at the event and here. So let’s examine a few of these notions.
A philanthropy is not about giving away money but about accomplishing goals and the internet and social connections give it new and more effective and efficient ways to do that. That’s why I think it makes sense for a charity to be transparent. In its challenge grants, the Knight Foundation urges applicants to open up their ideas to get more input. I’d think that even the MacArthur genius grants would benefit from open nominations. With transparency, givers open themselves up to getting more information, new ideas and suggestions, links to new and possibly better grantees from a public that will gather around them.
Mind you, I’m not suggesting for a second that philanthropy should become democratic. The philanthropist or foundation is responsible for the optimal use of its always-scarce resources and so it must decide where its money goes to meet is own goals and conditions. But I do think that – as with journalism, marketing, government, and most any industry – more information from interested people can only help. That’s why I’d like to see philanthropies open up their goals and processes using the web and social media: blogs, Facebook, Twitter (where I see a fair number of philanthropists and foundationsalready).
Once transparent, it’s a short step to becoming collaborative. The charity can ask the public for help in finding ways to meet a goal – and not just through seeking funding. It can use the internet to mobilize people to work together. Why will people go to the effort? For the same reason that the charities are giving money: because they care. Once more, I’ll call on the vision of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of time given to Wikipedia by people who care. This is what makes philanthropy ideal for online, I’d say.
Collaboration can take the form of ideas and the form of effort. Of course, it can also take the form of money. Challenge grants are common: At CUNY, we’re working to meet a $3 million challenge grant from the Tow Foundation right now; Knight does likewise for community foundations to encourage them to invest in local journalism; on every NPR fundraiser, there’s a matching challenge used to motivate the public to give more. Challenges work in some cases better than others but online presents a new opportunity to have grantees raise money from their publics when that’s helpful.
But even aside from challenges, there are advantages in collaborative fundraising online. A foundation can create an infrastructure that lets people piggyback onto its giving, structure, and management: ‘We gave $3 million to this effort and if you agree, you can give, too, and we’ll make sure your money is as well spent as ours.’ The charity becomes a mutual fund. In that sense, then, the foundation can extend its value not just with its money but with its expertise and structure. Except then, when the money comes from the public, the public becomes the boss and the charity merely helps organize and executes its desires.
Openness and collaboration at the start of the process – seeking and giving funds – can also extend to the end: sharing lessons learned, good and bad, from giving. About a year ago, one foundation I know sent out a report detailing its mistakes. I thought it was gutsy (though potentially a bit embarrassing for the grantees – that’s the risk). But that kind of openness about lessons learned can be valuable to others. So why wait until the end? What about being transparent during the process of a project, so adjustments can be made? That becomes beta philanthropy.
At the end, a foundation, charity, or philanthropy should act like a platform. They do now in the sense that they make good work possible with funding. But how else can they enable others to do the same good work and how can they thus extend their resources with knowledge, networking (from introductions to more formal structures), vetting, teaching, management, and more?
How do you think philanthropy can work differently given the tools of our new age?
: LATER: Here’s info on attending the talk Thursday morning. And here is Philanthropy New York’s blog.
A conversation with our Knight Foundation friends at Aspen inspired me to think through what an X Prize for news could accomplish. Then this week’s report in the New York Times about the awarding of the NetFlix X Prize – and the far greater value it created, not just for NetFlix, but for its participants and others – inspired me to buckle down and open that conversation here (and at the NewsInnovation site).
I’m not asking idly. With the right structure, I’d seek funding to administer such a prize at CUNY and we can hope that smart companies, organizations, and patrons will see that an X Prize could be a way to innovate aggressively and openly. Or is it?
We must start with a question: What is the core problem the prize is trying to solve? It can’t be just about getting more revenue for existing companies or thinking of another way to tell a story or, Lord knows, making something cool. The best expression of the problem will yield solutions that must be groundbreaking and new, quantum leaps undertaken on daring, hope, and hubris. Innovation won’t come from incremental changes to an existing structure. We know that too well.
Another key question is how success is measured – tangibly, metrically, from a distance, not emotionally. In something as amorphous as news, that’s going to be hard.
Next, we have to define news carefully – that is, broadly. News shouldn’t be defined as we do today, for the winners of the prize may create something we haven’t seen yet. Our definition of news is probably just about a community informing itself – better informed individuals and society (“better” as defined by them).
Finally, we have to recognize that the problems to solve are centered more on business issues than product issues – on sustainability – but that is not to say that the product should not be radically rethought as part of this process.
I see three key problems to solve for news (which I’ll make conveniently alliterative):
1. Engagement. In our most recent phase of the New Business Models for News at CUNY (funded by Knight), we used the sinfully low industry standard for engagement with newspaper sites: 12 pageviews per user per month. Facebook users have that much interaction with the service every day. Time spent online in social sites and blogs accounted for 17% of time overall – vs. 0.5% for newspaper sites, according to separate estimates (and advertising on social sites doubled while it plummeted for newspapers). For God’s sake, if news services were truly of their communities, they would have many times more interaction with many times more people in those communities and interaction would go far beyond reading.
Engagement is a core business problem. If you plug in higher numbers into our NewBizNews models – and we will, in our blow-out cases – you’d see much better businesses able to support much more news. You’d see news as a very profitable industry again.
So let’s say the first challenge is to multiply a community’s engagement with news. How is that to be done? Surprise me. Shock me. Invent entirely new ways, new platforms, means, and media to gather and share news.
How do we measure engagement? I would not measure by pageviews – in great part because I do not want contestants to just assume that it’s a site they’re inventing. See one more time Marissa Mayer on hyperpersonal news streams and me on hyperdistribution. News has to go where the community is and we no longer expect the community to come to it. It has to be of and among the community. Time is a slightly better measure of engagement but it, too, is shallow and can be manipulated with tricks.
No, engagement is more about ownership: people believing that and acting as if they owned this thing. It’s theirs – as Wikipedia’s and craigslist’s communities believe they own those properties and as each of us believes we own our Facebook pages or Twitter feeds or blogs. But an opposite danger lies there as well. One shouldn’t measure engagement by contribution (as many of us did in the early days of the web). Go to Wikipedia’s 1 percent rule.
So I’d say the measurement has to be made by a combination of metrics – say, time combined and attitudes: Take a baseline a survey of users of news sites today against certain beliefs – “My newspaper.com makes me part of the community of news”; “Newspaper.com is a member of my community of news just as I am”; “I feel a stake of ownership in newspaper.com”; “I feel a measure of control over newspaper.com”; “I feel a responsibility for newspaper.com”; “I am better informed with newspaper.com”. Then require that the new thing multiple some index of these factors by an impressive amount. If Facebook is 30 times more engaging than a newspaper site, then how about 10 times, even five times – that would make a huge difference in the business of news.
2. Effectiveness. This is effectiveness for media’s other customers, its paying customers: advertisers, or perhaps we should say marketers (to include ecommerce and not limit the business relationship).
News sites – like most media sites – are still selling what they used to sell in their old media: space, time, eyeballs, scarcity. Google won business away from them by selling something else: performance. Google thus takes on risk on behalf of advertisers – if Google doesn’t deliver relevance and you don’t click, it doesn’t get paid – and so its interests are now aligned with its advertisers’. And because Google created an auction marketplace that takes advantage of abundance – there is no scarcity on the internet – then prices are lower. For an advertiser, what’s not to love? That’s why I roll my eyes when old media people complain that Google stole their money. No, Google competed and saved advertisers their money.
At the same time, I believe that news and media will be supported primarily by advertising and so they had best figure out new ways to serve advertisers – even as advertising shrinks. For purposes of sustaining news, I think it’s best to concentrate on local advertising, because – in the U.S., at least – most journalistic resource is expended locally, much of government is local, there is opportunity to grow there, and the crisis in the news industry is primarily local.
The solution cannot be about increasing clickthroughs to banners. That merely extends the bullshit online media are selling. No, it has to be about much richer ways to measurably improve merchants’ businesses: to add value.
Ah, but measuring it is the tough part for that itself sets the shape of the invention: Is it more people to a web site, more people to a door, more sales of particular merchandise, better brand awareness, better relationships? Help! What do you think?
At CUNY, with additonal funding, we soon hope to do more research with local merchants for NewBizNews to get a better sense of their needs. But then again, they may not know it until they see it. I’ve spoken with advertisers who still don’t understand why a customer’s Google search matters to them.
So for the sake of discussion, let’s say that one could take a test group of merchants and used the methods and means created by a contestant to utilize a relationship with online media of some form (that is, advertising) to improve their sales by N percent over N period with at least an N return on investment. In the end, it’s simply about improving their businesses, isn’t it?
Any multiple of this effectiveness would also have a profound impact on the sustainability and profitability of news (so long as it’s a news entity that makes it possible). In our New Business Models for News, we used what we believed – though some disagree – was a conservative $12 CPM ad rate. It was also conservative to presume old ad models: i.e., banners. But then Google’s Marissa Mayer turned around and talked about hyperpersonal news streams, emphasizing the business potential: If you know that much about people to be hyperpersonal and if you are incredible good at targeting – at discerning intent and delivering relevance – then the efficiency, effectiveness, and value of marketing there would skyrocket. An X Prize winner would think this way.
3. Efficiency. This is to say cost. What does it cost to produce news, to gather and share what a community knows? The closer that marginal cost can be brought to zero, the more news we can afford. That’s good for society.
That may not sound good for professional journalists, I know. And employment of journalists has been the default measurement of the health of news. (This is why I have quibbled with BusinessWeek’s Michael Mandel’s analysis, here and here.) But I’m not suggesting that there are necessarily fewer reporters (there will be fewer production people). Indeed, in our New Business Models for News, we ended up with a equivalent number of people doing journalism in our hypothetical market, only they weren’t all in a single newsroom. Most worked in entrepreneurial ventures that many of them owned, and they as a group devoted far more of their time to reporting. The net result, we believe is more journalism because it is more efficient journalism.
So I’m suggesting that journalists be made as efficient as possible and the way to do that is to make them highly collaborative and to take advantage of the work people are willing to do just because they care – the hundreds of millions of dollars people contribute to Wikipedia, adding value to it and making it both supremely efficient and incredibly valuable.
So I suggest this prize start with the goal of maximizing the journalism, finding the best ways to get the most relevant news to the most people at the lowest cost: the best way to make the most people feel well-informed from a sustainable venture. Once again, we must be cautious about the definition of news, not limiting it to the broccoli served cold currently. What do people want to know and need to know and how can we get that? What is the news that isn’t shared that has to be reported and investigated and why and how do we get that? So I might start by finding communities and having them define news and what it means to be informed, what they need to run themselves. Of course, we also need to define quality. This needs to be reliable and useful information.
How do you make a measurable contest out of that? I’m not sure. Perhaps we find a community and find out how many people want to know about, say, their school board and town board and tow events and then measure what they want to know now. Then the winners made their community better informed by the greatest margin at the lowest cost while still not losing money.
In the end, if we can find new and daring solutions to these problems of engagement (formerly known as audience), effectiveness (advertising), and efficiency (operations), we can improve news as a product (and process), its relationship with its public, its value to its customers, and its sustainability. That’s the goal. It’s going to take new thinking and experimentation to get there. An X Prize is one way to get that.
I spent yesterday marking the dangers around Sidewiki. Today, I’ll say what I think Google should do with it: close the toolbar app, open it up to the entire conversation, and turn it purely into an API. And probably buy Technorati.
I read a great deal of the discussion about Sidewiki yesterday: much of it in the comments on my blog post, much found through search in Technorati and Google News, much through trackbacks, much on Twitter, much through links on sites I read, and a tiny bit on Sidewiki itself (sorry, can’t find a URL to link to that).
Some of the comments said the conversation is already fractured and my trail would seem to prove the point. That was the common word – fractured. But I’d quibble with the choice and argue that the conversation isn’t broken; that it is occurring just where it should be: in the cloud, where it is controlled by no one.
I did complain about bifurcating the conversation on my own site and that’s because Google presents a second opportunity to comment from a site with comments and I do not see how that adds value there; it separates people. We should be doing the opposite.
I also complained about losing control of the comments and some folks, not surprisingly, thought they had me in a gotcha moment: “Hey, Jarvis, you tell newspapers to get over it and give up control but when it comes to you … heh, heh, heh.” OK. I, too, chose the wrong word. I should have complained instead that Sidewiki robs sites of the responsibility for comments. Many of the people who joined in my crusade yesterday said they work hard on the conversations on their sites to make sure they retain civility and quality – as good sites do – but now they can’t exercise that responsibility with Sidwiki comments that will appear essentially on their sites. Google promises an algorithm. Algorithms may be good at killing spam – albeit with syncopated delays – but they will not be good at policing the subtleties of trolls, prejudice, unfair competition, grudges, pettiness, and hate; those are human sins and it takes humans (and perhaps God) to see them.
The Guardian spends a great deal of resource on Comment is Free doing just that and when the conversation is about the Mideast, it knows from sour experience that it has to add extra precautions. There were no open comments on its Blogging the Koran. But now, with Sidewiki, there will be. Let’s say the Guardian gets too restrictive. Then there’s always the cloud. You can go to one of its competitors or create your own site and complain about what’s said on CiF and no one – except your hosts there – can stop you. That’s the essence of free speech on the internet.
It’s perhaps inconvenient that the conversation is distributed but wherever there’s such a problem, the wise see opportunities. Technorati saw that years ago and tried to bring the conversation together not by creating the ultimate conversation site but by adding organization and thus value to the conversation across the blogosphere. That was very Googley.
Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it accessible – not take it over and centralize it. That’s what so many fear about Google book search: that is it not just linking to books but serving and thus controlling them (I still believe the settlement can cope with that). That is what I fear about Sidewiki: that it is not adding value to the conversation by organizing it but instead trying to hijack it. I’m surprised how tonedead [a happy typo I'm holding onto] Google is in this case. David Sleight called Sidewiki “a failure of empathy.” Or as a father says to a little kid: “What were you thinking?” One more metaphor: Google thinks its Snuffleupagus – big but cuddly and good – and just doesn’t realize that some people see it as a potential bully and so it has to act accordingly. With size comes responsibility.
So I think Google saw a problem where there wasn’t one: The conversation is not broken and doesn’t need fixing. It saw an opportunity to enable people to comment on sites that do not have comments – and to gain more beloved metadata from us about those sites – but it bigfooted the entire conversation trying to solve that; it went for a fly but put its fist through the wall. It wasn’t Googley.
Now I suggest that Google stand back and have that don’t-be-evil conversation about its mission and how it can add value to the conversation and to our collected knowledge about sites and entities without trying to take it over. Start by following Dave Winer into the cloud.
Google could try to organize – but not hijack – the entire conversation; no one has really done that yet. It could analyze comments on sites and understand them better and perhaps even try to find quality in them and their authors. It could use Friend Connect and Facebook’s APIs, as it has started to do, to enable those authors to establish and collect – on their own, via APIs – and burnish their identities across the web. It could bring together conversation about sites, whether those are blogs or companies’, as Technorati has done with blogs (that’s why I think buying it and putting it out of its strategic and technology misery would be the neighborly thing to do). It could then release an API (as it has done for Sidewiki) that doesn’t draw the conversation into one place but enables anyone to put up the conversation. So rather than starting another conversation, Google organizes it.
So I could finally put the broader conversation about the ideas in Buzzmachine on Buzzmachine, adding functionality that let my readers follow links and authors. So I could create a consumer site tracking what people are saying, good and bad, about, say, computer makers. So I could use apps to track conversations about topics that mattered to me. So I could track authors and what they comment about across the web.
Google would add value to the conversation – as I firmly believe it adds value to news – without competing with its creators. That is what I argue to news creators: that Google doesn’t want to become one of them but instead wants to succeed by helping them succeed. It’s a great argument, so long as it stays true. Books bring the same opportunity and challenge for Google.
In a sense, Google thought too big, bigfooting the conversation everywhere. But the real problem, ironically, is that it thought way too small, creating a new conversation instead of trying to organize the conversation that is the internet itself. That would have been so much Googlier, don’t you think?
: LATER: I neglected to cover the question of the toolbar app itself. If Google doesn’t create a separate conversation, then there would be no means to add comments via the toolbar. I’d suggest that a toolbar app could display content about a site or its topics; there’s nothing to stop Google or any toolbar or browser plug-in maker from doing that. This still means that malicious content could be associated with a site but Google wouldn’t be in the position of enabling and hosting it, only displaying it. I would suggest, however, that anyone who thinks they can use this to display advertising associated with a site atop that site should look up the Gator link in my post below: danger and lawyers await.
Google just introduced Sidewiki, which enables anyone to comment on a page using Google’s toolbar.
I see danger.
Google is trying to take interactivity away from the source and centralize it. This isn’t like Disqus, which enables me to add comment functionality on my blog. It takes comments away from my blog and puts them on Google. That sets up Google in channel conflict vs me. It robs my site of much of its value (if the real conversation about WWGD? had occurred on Google instead of at Buzzmachine, how does that help me?). On a practical level, only people who use the Google Toolbar will see the comments left using it and so it bifurcates the conversation and puts some of it behind a hedge. Ethically, this is like other services that tried to frame a source’s content or that tried to add advertising to a site via a browser (see the evil Gator, which lost its fight vs publishers).
So this goes contrary to Google’s other services – search, advertising, embeddable content and functionality – that help advantage the edge. This is Google trying to be the center.
Quite ungoogley, I’d say. And mind you, I’m a known Google fanboy. Hell, I wrote the book.
If Google wanted to enable the conversation or collect more information about pages to be smarter about them – thanks to our smarts – fine, but do that at the edge, guys. This is wrong for the internet and, I’ll predict, bad PR for Google.
MORE: I know I’ll be asked whether I think this is evil. As I just said in a tweet, somebody should have asked the “is it evil?” question. That’s why it’s there. I sense no one did. Evil means inconsistent with Google’s mission and morals. Google is about supporting the internet – adding value to it more than extracting value from it (and from those who create the value… at the edge). That would be evil.
: LATER: On Twitter, Google’s Matt Cutts says: “@jeffjarvis points taken, but if it gets larger group of people to write comments on web, that can be good. Plus API allows data to come out” And: “@jeffjarvis and I do see one very nice use case where people can add their comments about scammy sites, e.g. work-at-home scams.”
Points taken as well. It would enable sites without commenting functionality to get comments, including negative comments. In the case of a spam site, OK, that could be useful. But that could also include attacks that one now must monitor (watch out, Google: every story about Israel and race and Obama and health care will attract venom that affects my site but is not under my control).
I don’t think this was done maliciously at all. I think Google didn’t think through the implications.
I’m in favor of beta process; that’s what I wrote in my book. But it’s still incumbent on the developer of something new to try to think through these issues before the dangers are unleashed. At least ask.
: LATER: So now in the Sidewiki, there’s a parallel discussion going on, separate from this. There’s no opportunity to respond in threads. I have no control over the content associated with my site essentially on my site. What has been added? Each of those people could have and normally would have commented right here. They get their comments on their Google profiles, but with Friend Connect that could be done from the comments here. The side comments have their own URLs and a push to promote them on Twitter and Facebook, which means that Google gets Googlejuice instead of me.
It has been a week and a half since my prostate surgery and I’m doing great. I’m walking a couple miles a day (can’t run for a few weeks but even when I do run it’s not running), eating normally, sleeping well, now able to sit and stand and cough and burp without feeling as if I was hit in the belly with a Volkswagen.
I just returned from my hosectomy: the last dread. After everything else one goes through, this is the least of it. But I am damned glad I didn’t know just how long a Foley catheter is; I’m surprised I didn’t choke on it. The nurse fills the bladder with saline, then deflates a balloon also filled with saline (which is what keeps it in), then pulls, and then it’s my job to catch what comes out in a jug. “Just don’t get my shoes wet,” she says, “they’re expensive.” Mission successful. An hour later, I just went to the bathroom for real. Mission successful. Life is good.
But it turns out my pharmacist was wrong: I will be wearing man diapers for a few weeks along with a man pad inside – the belt and suspenders of the urologic trade. I feel as if I’m walking around with a padded codpiece – which is ironic, considering what’s still not going to be happening for awhile in that department.
They tell me it’s going to be a difficult few weeks and then it will start getting better over the next few months. That’s why I’ve canceled trips – that and I am still recuperating. The one thing I heard from people who’ve had my same robotic surgery is that you feel too good and then push it and then regret it. Today’s a case in point: I was determined to go into Manhattan for my class but my wife and my substitute, Steven Johnson, convinced me I was wrong.
Bottom line: The new normal is looking more like the old normal every day. I remain very lucky.
This morning, Glam.com – the model of the new network model of media – extended its Twitter aggregator, Tinker.com, into news at Tinker.com/news. It’s very simple and that’s what makes it intriguing: headlines mixed with current discussion of them.
Yesterday, New York Times digital strategy head Martin Nisenholtz also talked about adding value to Twitter and news here.
“If you go out and search Twitter, it doesn’t work very well,” he said. “It’s very literal.” But if The Times can build multiple search products for Twitter that better understand context, there “is a lot of power in organizing and curating this world.” Therefore, the company is looking into building similar Twitter aggregators for what could be “thousands of categories,” he said.
Note, by the way, that Nisenholtz was misquoted in Twitter yesterday (which I retweeted) saying that 10% of Times inbound links came from Twitter. He emailed to correct. What he said was that they were about to move into the top 10 referrers, based on the current growth rate.
Also note, by the way, that Glam just reached profitability. Many media execs I know scoffed at Glam but now they’re dying and Glam’s growing. The network model works. And the link to people’s conversations – in both these examples – will not only help media but will be a key driver of value. I’ve pointed out here before that Google News causes a billion clicks a month but so does Bit.ly (and it represents only part of Twitter’s traffic). At the Knight-funded Aspen event on new business models for news, Marissa Mayer said we must find the ways to insinuate news into everyone’s stream (and, I’ll add, vice versa).
In fact consumers never really were paying for content, and publishers weren’t really selling it either. If the content was what they were selling, why has the price of books or music or movies always depended mostly on the format? Why didn’t better content cost more?
A copy of Time costs $5 for 58 pages, or 8.6 cents a page. The Economist costs $7 for 86 pages, or 8.1 cents a page. Better journalism is actually slightly cheaper.
Almost every form of publishing has been organized as if the medium was what they were selling, and the content was irrelevant. Book publishers, for example, set prices based on the cost of producing and distributing books. They treat the words printed in the book the same way a textile manufacturer treats the patterns printed on its fabrics.
Information – Bloomberg terminals, stock newsletters – is a different business. Publishers flatter themselves when they argue they are in it.
What happens to publishing if you can’t sell content? You have two choices: give it away and make money from it indirectly, or find ways to embody it in things people will pay for.
The first is probably the future of most current media. Give music away and make money from concerts and t-shirts. Publish articles for free and make money from one of a dozen permutations of advertising. Both publishers and investors are down on advertising at the moment, but it has more potential than they realize.
I’m not claiming that potential will be realized by the existing players. The optimal ways to make money from the written word probably require different words written by different people….
The reason I’ve been writing about existing forms is that I don’t know what new forms will appear. But though I can’t predict specific winners, I can offer a recipe for recognizing them. When you see something that’s taking advantage of new technology to give people something they want that they couldn’t have before, you’re probably looking at a winner. And when you see something that’s merely reacting to new technology in an attempt to preserve some existing source of revenue, you’re probably looking at a loser.
When Google Wave was announced, I got all jittery-happy about the possibilities it presented for news. Now, from a Belgian site, via a German site, I find a video interview with Wave’s project manager, Stephanie Hannon, speculating about its use in news:
Journalism is a business – that is how it is going to sustain itself; that is a key precept of the New Business Models for News Project. But is it still an industry dominated by companies and employment?
In the first part of his analysis of the news business, BusinessWeek chief economist Michael Mandel equates bad news about news with the number of journalists employed. He charts newspaper jobs falling from more than 450,000 in 1990 to fewer than 300,000 today and calls that depressing – which it is, if one of those lost jobs is yours. But it could also signal new efficiency and productivity, no? Looking at these numbers with the cold eye of an economist whose magazine and job aren’t on the block, perhaps it is nothing more than the path of an industry in restructuring. Perhaps it’s actually a signal of opportunity. Indeed, Mandel then laid that chart atop one for the loss of jobs in manufacturing and found them sinking in parallel, with newspapers just a bit ahead on the downward slope today. “Not good news, by any means,” he decreed.
But there is the nub of a much bigger trend: the fall news as an industry paralleling the end of the industrial economy. That’s not just about shedding the means of production and distribution now that they are cost burdens rather than barriers to entry. It’s about the decentralization of journalism as an industrial complex, about news no longer being based solely on employment.
A few months ago, I quibbled with Mandel’s BW cover story arguing that America has experienced an “innovation shortfall.” There, as here, I think he’s measuring the wrong economy: the old, centralized, big economy. In both cases, he misses new value elsewhere in the small economy of entrepreneurs and the noneconomy of volunteers.
I return again to the NewBizNews Project, where we modeled a sustainable economy of news at between 10-15% of a metro paper’s revenue – about as much as any of them bring online – with an equivalent amount of editorial staffing but those people are no longer all sitting under one roof; they work in – and oftentimes own – more than 100 separate enterprises. I return, too, to the Wikimedia Foundation calculating the value of time spent on edits alone with it adding up to hundreds of millions of dollars.
In both cases, tremendous value is created at tremendous efficiency outside of the company and in great measure outside of employment.
So is employment the measure of news? No. Is it the proper measure for every industry? Not necessarily. Is it the measure of the economy? Not as much as it used to be. Media is becoming the first major post-industry. Others will follow. You just have to know where to look.
* * *
It’s one matter when new value is created outside old companies in industries such as retail – in WWGD?, I cited $59.4 billion in sales from 547,000 merchants on eBay in 2007 vs. $26.3 billion in 853 Macy’s stores – but another matter when the employment is replaced in industries built around priesthoods: journalism, education, even government and medicine. Then not just economics but behaviors change.
Few of you should care but for those who do, here’s a chronicle of my experience in robotic surgery for prostate cancer. I post it here mainly for the ongoing Google value to those who follow me into the O.R.
At 9a Monday, I walked into the bright operating room at Sloan Kettering and faced the robot. Pictures of it on the manufacturer’s web site make it look small, like something that might screw in radio knobs on a Cooper Mini: friendly. In person, the robot is huge, like something Sigourney Weaver would defeat in space: imposing. I saluted it and backed away. Its arms stood at ease, each covered in plastic to maintain its sterility. I also saluted the surgeon, Dr. Raul Parra, who works many feet away at a console that gives him a video view inside me – much magnified – and delicate control of the five arms poking inside my belly. They also pump me up with CO2 to give the robot room to work and the doctor room to see. One friend made reference to me becoming a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon and envisioned shooting me down over Broadway.
The waiting-room nurse told my wife that they put patients under anesthesia an hour before surgery begins because that’s how long it takes to set up the robot and patients tended to get a little freaked seeing an alien beast assembled over them, ready to drill in. It’s one matter to be scared of needles, another to stare at a robotic arm with electric scissors on the end.
While he’s inside, the surgeon tries to peel back and preserve the nerves that encase the prostate because they’re the ones that enable erections. In some proportion of cases, the patients get that magic talent back; in some cases, not. That’s why doctors now prescribe Viagra before and after (“use it or lose it,” another doctor said to me – a new answer to, “not tonight, dear, I have a headache”). The surgeon takes out the seminal vesicles, which means that orgasms, when and if they return, are no longer messy. Out go a few lymph nodes. And, of course, out goes the prostate and a piece of the urethra with it. That’s why men also have problems with continence. “We have to re-potty-train you,” said my doctor’s nurse.
After surgery, the doctor said my cancer appeared to be contained to the prostate. That’s the key question. If it is, then my PSA – which was rising and led to the discovery of my cancer – should fall to nil. If it isn’t contained, then the cancer can spread to the bones (that’s what killed my grandfather) and then treatment could include radiation and hormones (to cut off the testosterone that feeds prostate cancer).
When I woke up in full morphine-induced stupidity, I had five small holes in me – the largest just big enough to bring out the prostate – and two drains, one in my side (which was taken out before I left the hospital – a very eerie experience, having a foot-long french drain pulled out of your belly), the other where I had been dreading it. When I scheduled surgery, the nurse volunteered to show me a Foley catheter. I declined. Funny, she said, everybody does. In my mind’s eye, I saw a thin stick up my dick and that was bad enough. But I woke up to find a garden hose coming out of my penis (the subject of one of my earliest tweets once I got my iPhone and lucidity back). As the Howard Stern Show’s Gary Dell’Abate told me about his stent up there, the problem isn’t so much pain as feeling things move where they shouldn’t.
I wrote a Guardian column about choosing to reveal my cancer on my blog and the benefits that come from it. There’s no greater symbol of giving up privacy and embracing publicness, I think, than writing about one’s penis, especially when it malfunctions. But in the hospital, I lost every last vestige of modesty. There’s just no point. Nurses need to fix things there and give instruction on how to cope with the catheter and you are completely, utterly exposed. There’s a young, female nurse, speaking at eye-level to my penis telling me what to do with it as it sits in extreme repose. Think Seinfeld’s shrinkage episode; cold water and catheters have the same effect. By Tuesday, my last bit of third-grade immaturity about the subject of penises died.
Now I have to manage my catheter. Warning: appetite spoiler coming. As my wife said to the kids, “Daddy’s going to be disgusting for a few days.” I have to empty and change a bag strapped to my leg during the day and a bigger one that hangs by my bed at night (but it’s not big enough to get me through the night and let me tell you, you don’t want this thing to back up). As with all challenges, once you’ve faced it, it’s not as daunting as the dread.
My pain isn’t awful, either. I have enough Vicodin to keep Artie Lange or House happy for a month but so far I haven’t used any, just one sleeping pill to date. It hurts my stomach to stand up and lie down – and, gawd, you don’t want to burp or cough and I don’t want to know about sneezes – but that’s momentary. It’s really not bad.
If I had chosen radiation instead of surgery, I would not be dealing with problems of plumbing malfunctions now, but there’s a chance those could come in a few years. And it’s also not possible to be assured that the cancer is gone. There’d be more hanging over my head. So at my age, I’m still glad I chose this course: out, out, damned spot.
I’m well aware how lucky I am. Prostate cancer can be cured; the treatment has its inconveniences but nothing next to so many other forms of the disease. Mine was caught early but my timing was good insofar as robots had been invented and perfected. My unit at Sloan Kettering was filled with nothing but prostate cancer cases like mine. My wife sat in the lobby and saw parents wheeling in a child’s dolls and books for a long stay. That’s what makes the place break your heart. My inconveniences are easily put into perspective.
As I finish this post, it’s Thursday afternoon. I’ve slept through the night, avoided most plumbing disasters, just took a mile walk (at a crawl’s pace), am eating well, and have even had a first glass of wine. I’m probably doing better than I thought I would. One friend took over my class this week and another will next week, but in a fit of optimism, I hope to have my hose-ectomy on Wednesday morning and then go into the city for school that afternoon. We’ll see. In any case, it’s good to have cause for optimism.
I’ll continue to update you on my condition, as warranted.
At 9a Monday, I walked into the bright operating room at Sloan Kettering and faced the robot. Pictures of it on the manufacturer’s web 
