Every address, every building, every business has a story to tell. Visualize your world that way: Look at a restaurant and think about all the data that already swirls around it — its menu, its reviews and ratings and tags (descriptive words), its recipes, its ingredients, its suppliers (and how far away they are, if you care about that sort of thing), its reservation openings, who has been there (according to social applications), who do we know who has been there, its health-department reports, its credit-card data (in aggregate, of course), pictures of its interior, pictures of its food, its wine list, the history of the location, its decibel rating, its news…
And then think how we can annotate that with our own reviews, ratings, photos, videos, social-app check-ins and relationships, news, discussion, calendar entries, orders…. The same can be said of objects, brands — and people.
Thinking about Google’s synchronicity made me turn search on its head in my head. Rather than having to query a data base — how aughties that is – we will be able to point our phone — or whatever we call it — at anyone, anything, or anyone and get its story or ask about it or tell our own story about it. The challenge — which Google, among others, is attacking — is to organize all that annotation around the place, thing, or person.
Local news organizations — if they were truly local — should want to do the same thing: organizing a community’s information so the community can organize itself. I call that, too, journalism. They are losing that opportunity to Google and Yelp (which this weekend was to be part of Google and then was not) and Foursquare — or at least they are losing the opportunity to work with and exploit what those companies are building, the next view of local. That’s the real definition of hyperlocal: what’s happening around me right now.
Witness these videos (via the Digital Strategy Blog [in German]):
About places:
And where you are:
And people:
And (from me): things and the communities that exist around them:
This is the new way I want to look at search: not to search a data base but to search my world, to see what is around me in new ways because I can.
The Guardian commissioned me to write a piece on Google founder Larry Page and Sergey Brin as icons of the decade. My kicker:
To understand the power of Brin’s and Page’s focus, go to Google’s home page now and type “weather in Ed” and stop there. Google will not only understand you want weather in Edinburgh but will give you the forecast right there in the search box; it will answer your question before you’ve even asked it. Google’s true holy grail is understanding, anticipating, and serving our intent.
When we’re using Google devices with Google operating systems and Google browsers and Google software to ask Google questions in text or voice or even pictures and Google gives us each the personal answers we need from any source – no, the best source – in the world, in the context of the moment and our needs, that will be the culmination of the Google age. Google’s next frontier is not to organise the world’s information, but our lives.
Tweet: Here’s what I think bankrupt newspaper companies should be doing.
The AP lists the status of six newspaper companies that have declared bankruptcy: Tribune, Freedom, Philadelphia, Sun-Times, Journal Register, Star-Tribune, representing 66 daily newspapers among them.
Mostly they are using bankruptcy merely to restructure the debt they shouldn’t have gotten themselves into in the first place — the debt that nearly killed them. Often they are leaving in place vestiges of the legacy management that made those bad decisions and did not make the brave strategic moves the digital age demanded. Tragically, none of them has used the great if difficult opportunity bankruptcy gives them to reinvent their businesses and themselves, as I suggest here:
Bankruptcy enables a newspaper company to shed its past. It can get out of contracts and leases for paper, printing plants, delivery, trucks. It can also get out of labor contracts, reducing severance costs. That is terribly painful but I fear it is as inevitable as the end of the ITU (the typesetters’ union). It offers a one-time chance to rethink, reinvent, and rebuild the company for the future. Is it better to stretch out the pain and never get anywhere? And if tough decisions and actions are not made, the likelihood that the company will die and all will be lost only increases.
This is another reason I say that the future of news is entrepreneurial. Given the opportunity of market leadership and 15 years since the introduction of the commercial web and then, failing that given the opportunity of bankruptcy to change, the legacy institutions can’t bring themselves to do it for any of many reasons: It’s too expensive to change and cut back; it’s too painful to corporate valuation and ego built on size over profitability to reduce the scale of the company; it’s too difficult to shift the culture (especially after much of the best talent left with buyouts); the strategic vision just isn’t there. Whatever, the tale is too often told.
Even so, it’s not too late for the legacy institutions. Perhaps foolishly, I refuse to give up on them. If these companies took just one or two papers each among their 66 to experiment with new models, to radically rethink and resize them and to learn instead of demolishing their old institutions brick by brick, they and their still-dying industry would be much better off; they might find a new way.
I consulted on my former employer, Advance’s, project to do that in Ann Arbor, killing the Ann Arbor News and starting a new, blog-based, community-based company and service, AnnArbor.com; the industry should be watching and learning from it. That’s one model, but my no means the only one. Our work at CUNY in new business models for news (funded by the Knight Foundation) presents another vision, also not the only one.
Before it is too late, I’d like to see these companies — especially companies still in or going into bankruptcy — try more models:
* staying in print but splitting up the functions of the company and outsourcing everything possible;
* investing in a widely distributed network of independent local and interest sites with the company adding value with curation and sales;
* creating a pure ad network;
* creating a very high quality product and — yes — charging a lot for it;
* creating a series of special-interest niche services and, in some cases, publications;
* creating the still mostly free but higher value craigslist with more curation for quality and more services;
* experimenting with new services for local merchants — especially those too small to ever have afforded big, inefficient newspapers — including helping them succeed through Google, Yelp, et al;
* creating citizen sales forces to scale while serving those small merchants;
* what else?
A few days ago, I had a related email discussion with John Paton, head of Impremedia, which rolled up a number of publications to become the largest Spanish-language publisher in the U.S. In the process, the company has made the difficult decisions to shrink by outsourcing and finding efficiencies and focusing and has changed its culture to put digital first. The industry should be watching these efforts as well. John asked why legacy companies are these days so often counted out in the discussion of the future of news. I recounted my views, above, and added that entrepreneurs have an easier time building from the ground up than big institutions do trying to rebuild from the top down. But I ended saying this: How can the legacy companies stay in the game? By acting like entrepreneurs, by bravely facing the new realities and by making bold moves to utterly transform themselves. It’s by all means possible. But it’s hard. And it’s rare.
Meanwhile, journalism schools are no longer content just to teach the inverted pyramid. A few weeks ago, I was at CUNY’s graduate school of journalism to help judge presentations from more than a dozen teams of young media entrepreneurs. There were some clunkers, as there always are, but there were also some scary good, real-world proposals from students who don’t have to think out of the box because they were never in one to begin with.
I tried to be courteous and deferential, partly out of a small fear that I may work for one of them someday. There are worse places to end up.
On the latest This Week in Google, we talked about many of Google’s product announcements and enhancements and though none on its own was earthshattering, as we added them up, I started to see synchronicity approaching — all the moreso last night when TechCrunch reported that Google’s negotiating to buy Yelp.
I see a strategy emerging that has Google profoundly improve search by better anticipating our intent and then moving past search to build hegemony in local and mobile (which will come to mean the same thing).
Add up Google’s recent moves in local/mobile:
* Yelp would bring Google a scalable platform to get information and reviews about every local business using community. Yelp enhances Google’s place pages. Place pages enhance Google Maps. Google Maps are our pathway to local information on what we still mobile phones but will soon see as our constant connectivity devices.
* Google distributed 190,000 QR codes for local businesses to paste on their front windows. Take a picture of it and Google will give you information about the place (see: above). Businesses have another reason to advertise on and be found through Google and its business center.
* TechCrunch also speculates that we could use these QR codes to check in to Foursquare, Gowalla, et al. Local is social.
* Google Goggles goes the next step and lets you take a picture of a place — or object (or soon, person) — and use that as a search request to get local information — or leave it.
Thus Google becomes a doorway to the annotated world. Everyplace has information swirling around it; Google organizes it and motivates and enables us to create more information for it to organize (more on this idea of the annotated world in another post).
* Google’s reported phone is said to have a “weirdly large camera.” If that camera becomes a key to visual search, that makes sense, eh? That also gives us a better way to take more geo-tagged photos, which better annotates the world and gives Google more information to serve back to us.
* Google is trying to get better at recognizing speech to prepare for a voice-controlled (read: mobile) web world. That, say Chris Anderson and Tim O’Reilly, is why they give away GOOG411 for free: to learn our voices. And now note that Google is asking people to donate their voicemails to Google’s effort to improve its own transcription. Search will become visual and aural (read: mobile).
* Google Earth is coming to the cockpit of the new Audi, giving drivers rich geographic data about where they are and where they’re going.
* GoogleMaps on Android will now tell you what’s nearby.
* Let’s not forget that Google will make money on local — Eric Schmidt said on CNBC a year and a half ago that Google will eventually make more on mobile than the web (which, to me, doesn’t mean phones; it means our constantly on connection devices). This is why Google bought mobile ad leader AdMob for $750 million.
That’s mobile. Now look at some of its search enhancements to better intuit intent:
* Go to the Google home page. Start typing “Weather in Lon” and stop there. Google will not only suggest that you want weather in London, it will give you the forecast for London right there in the search box. You didn’t even finish typing in what you wanted to ask and Google gave you the answer without you even having to click and go to a site.
Google’s holy grail, they’ve long said, is to anticipate your intent. That explains, I think, some of Google’s other moves.
* Google DNS is supposed to speed up the web for you (speed is a big Google cause these days) but it also gives Google an invaluable source of data about web usage: who goes where when and before and after what sites looking for what. Now, your ISP knows that. But with DNS, Google could know that. It makes Google smarter about the web and its content as a whole, certainly, and so long as it is careful about privacy, it can enable Google to target to us better.
I see a day when search (like news) is no longer one size fits all. Search will be customized, personalized, and targeted to us and our contexts: who we are and where and when we are asking for something. This, I think, could mean the slow death of the dark art of SEO.
* How will Google get us to use its DNS? Well, I’ll bet it will be the default in computers equipped with Google Chrome OS. And I wouldn’t be surprised of the Google Chrome browser can provide some of this data to Google.
* Google launches social search. This creates more context and gives Google another clue to intent.
Now add back in all the mobile developments above. This gives Google more context to anticipate our intent.
But that’s not all. I’ve said for sometime that Google is behind in battles for the live and social web and was going to say here that it was bypassing those strategies to concentrate on mobile/local. But as I wrote the post, I saw more threads in both live and social.
* Google added Twitter to its search results. That’s pretty much a BFD. But it shows they’re trying to grapple with the live web. And that’s why there are never-ending rumors about Google buying Twitter.
* Wave is an important shift in the metaphor for content creation, making it collaborative (read: social) and live. Google added social tools to Google Docs. It make Docs a path to publishing (and being found via search) on the web. Creation itself is a social act once it enables us to connect.
* Add in the social bits above: Yelp is a community tool; QR codes and visual search will let us talk about places and things and find each other and meet; Foursquare and Gowalla make local social and Google could help them.
Last night, after the Yelp report, I tweeted this: “Yelp + GoogleMaps + StreetView + PlacePages + GOOG411 + Google Goggles + Android + AdSense = Google synchronicity”. Om Malik piped in: “@jeffjarvis I love your unrelenting belief in google. I think u need to start look at world in a non-search context.” But then I said – and others agreed: “I also think Google is starting to look at the world in a non-search context (i.e., local, live, mobile)”.
I believe that’s what we’re seeing here: the start of Google’s view of itself after search. Not that search will go away but it will become less important in the shifting mix of out rings of discovery. And if search is going to stay preeminent, it had better update itself profoundly.
: See also Gina Trapani’s excellent roundup of Google’s amazing 2009 developments.
: LATER: Kara Swisher says Google is also eying real-estate search Trulia.
TechCrunch reports that Google is in negotiations to buy Yelp. Makes perfect sense. Google is ready to make an assault on local with its Place Pages and QR codes on local establishments and augmented maps and directions and mobile…. This turf was newspapers’ and phone companies’ to lose and lose it, they will.
Or as I put it in a tweet: “Yelp + GoogleMaps + StreetView + PlacePages + GOOG411 + Google Goggles + Android + AdSense = Google synchronicity”
I just had my three-month check-up after surgery for prostate cancer and the news so far is good: My PSA (a measurement of the antigen produced by the prostate, which shouldn’t be there once the gland is gone — unless cancer cells are elsewhere causing trouble) came in at <0.05, just what it’s supposed to be, I’m told.
In the interest of continued transparency for the sake of those who follow, here are the other updates (TMI warning):
When my surgeon, Raul Parra, came into the examining room at Sloan Kettering this morning, he said, “How are you?” I said, politely, “Fine, how are you?” And he replied, “No, how are you?” It’s the one time when someone really means the question. And the answer is that I do feel fine; I feel great, in fact. I get tired still and fellow patients warned in comments under my previous posts that’d be the case. But other than that and the two items I’ll go into next, I wouldn’t know I’d had major surgery only three months ago. The wounds are healed, the pain is long gone, and I can carry on as before.
My incontinence is almost over. Almost. Every time I have a few dry days in a row and think I am about ready to throw away the pads, I am struck down as if by God punishing my hubris … with a drip. Damn. If you see me in the halls suddenly grimacing in frustration and anger, that’s what happened. I’m hopeful I’ll be rid of the pads soon. But truth be told, if this half of the condition never got any better, I’d find it livable — far better than what I’d feared. For that, I’m grateful.
The impotence is another matter. Not a bit of progress there. And it’s not just that I can’t have an erection, it’s that the poor thing is chronically deflated, like the Balloon Boy’s craft at the end of its flight. I could be assured victory in a small-penis contest with Howard Stern. Yes, you know a man is talking about his penis when juvenile jokes start. Here’s how silly a man’s mind can get: I’m going to Munich in January and enjoy going to the (co-ed) sauna in the hotel there but I’m once again feeling like George in Seinfeld’s shrinkage episode. Yes, it matters.
I can have orgasms but they’re strangely muted, as if wrapped in cotton. And they are quite strange being dry (the seminal vesicles are removed with the prostate.) I’d also been warned about that. I was prescribed Viagra but stopped taking it for a bit when I was getting palpitations and I feared an onset of afib (my heart arrhythmia; don’t I sound like an old coot, recounting my ills?). I’ll try Cialis next. The doctor said the nerves he moved out of the way and spared in surgery can begin healing anywhere from three weeks after surgery (I’m not so lucky) to two years. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.
That trip to Munich comes on the way to Davos and this year I’ll be participating in a dinner about prostate cancer led by Dr. Jeffrey Drazen, editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, and including Dr. Patrick Walsh, who, Dr. Parra explained to me, is the father of radical prostatectomy and the nerve-sparing procedure (thank you, sir) along with other leading doctors. What the hell am I doing there? I’m to bring the patient’s perspective.
I plan to say that publicness has benefitted me and that I wish the doctors would, in turn, be more public. The response I got from my posts here was helpful not only in the support I received but especially in the information I got from fellow patients who proceeded me and told me in frank and brave detail what I would experience. I owe them all. I’ve argued before that doctors should use the web to become curators of the best information they have. And together, the more we talk about this, the more we will bring it to the attention of men who should be screened and take away the mystery, fear, and stigma associated with cancer and surgery affecting our penises.
My bottom line: I am glad I was screened. I am glad I have written publicly about the experience. I’m glad I had the surgery. And I’m very glad today to see that less-than sign: <0.05.
Tweet: Content farms v curating farmers: Deeper insights in Demand Media’s model & finding opportunity in finding quality.
I spent an hour on the phone the other day with Steven Kydd, exec VP of Demand Studios, to understand their model—using algorithms to assign content creation based on search and advertising demand and to minimize cost and maximize revenue—because I wanted to learn a deeper layer of lessons than I think we’re hearing in the discussion of Demand’s allegedly evil genius.
The talk thus far misses their key insight and the opportunities they create. Much of what I see online is fear that Demand Media—with the slightly rechristened “Aol.” following fast behind—will cheapen content and flood the internet—that is, search results—with crap that’s just good enough to fool algorithms. Some also fear that while putting content creators to work they will put better content creators out of work: the dreaded deprofessionalization and deflation of media.
Michael Arrington marks the end of “hand-crafted content” (somewhere I hear Nick Carr and Andrew Keen cackling maniacally). And Read Write Web’s Richard MacManus worries that the web’s quality will suffer.
They may be right. But then again, the internet has always been filled with crap. So the challenge has always been how you find the cream. That’s where opportunities lie. That’s what Google saw. The new question is whether Google can keep ahead of the content farms and continually find new and better ways to find better stuff. I’ll bet on Google over crap-creators. But they better get cracking.
This is why, when I proposed an X prize to solve media’s key problems at Yale symposium, Clay Shirky responded with a call for work on what he called “algorithmic authority.” A few of my students’ proposals in my entrepreneurial journalism class tackled just this problem with discovering and prioritizing content for us: one using humans aided by algorithms, one using algorithms aided by humans; neither operated like a one-size-fits-all search engine (but then, soon, Google won’t either).
I think we may see search fall as the sole or even key means of discovery and filtering of quality content. I see three rings of discovery today: search (Google); algorithms (see: Google News, Daylife); and humans (see: Twitter). Note again that Bit.ly alone causes as many clicks a month—one billion—as Google News. Human power rises again. That’s what Fred Wilson says today when he argues that social beats search, because “it’s a lot harder to spam yourself into a social graph.” As search becomes more personal and no longer universal, SEO as a dark art and as the fertilizer for content farms will diminish and the social graph — our own circles of authority — will become more important in search as well. So I have faith that there are solutions to stem any rising tide of crap.
This is how I put it in a tweet: “algorithm-aided human writing will meet human-aided algorithmic curation; quality will rise.”
In all of this, I caution us not to miss Demand’s key insight: that the public should assign the creators, including journalists. The public often knows what it wants to know. I learned this lesson when I consulted at About.com and saw how they monitor search queries to see where there are questions for which the don’t have answers. When that happens, they go write answers; Demand automates the process. Makes sense.
This is not how we have operated in media: We decided which questions to answer because we asked them. What hubris! Today, I teach my students to find conversations on the internet and add journalism to them in the form of answers, corrections, reporting, explanations. In 2007, my students in a seminar at Burda in Munich and in my class at CUNY asked why the public doesn’t assign us and my entrepreneurial students in two classes have worked on that problem. Jay Rosen just started playing with this notion at ExplainThis.org, creating a platform for the public to ask reporters to report their questions. Demand and About are doing the same thing, only through search queries. Jeff Sonderman compiles some more examples. Where appropriate, reversing the assignment pipe is a good idea.
Demand is also creating a system they say will find the best writer for each assignment. We are free to disagree with their methods and results, but there’s insight here, too. Two students in my entrepreneurial journalism class won a grant to create a platform to do just this with local and hyperlocal news assignments (note that Kydd told me Demand isn’t touching news); I’ll report more on their project as it gets closer to launch. Can’t news organizations learn and steal some lessons from Demand? What if you wanted to create a content asset — say, a complete travel guide — and you opened up the process and its discreet tasks to a marketplace of paid contributors, enabling you to do larger projects at lower cost than before?
I always tell my students: Wherever you see a problem, look for the opportunity. That’s Arrington’s point: The next generation of content creation is here; deal with it. If you don’t like what Demand et al are doing, see the opportunity in it to surface quality content and to create competitive quality stars whose creations rise not just through algorithmic search cynicism but through human recommendation. Dig to the next layer.
* * *
I got lots of details from Kydd about the Demand method. In their view, they have combined content-creation and social-media platforms to enable content creators with “spare cycles”—his nerdy words—to earn money.
Kydd says 11 community members contribute to each article by fulfilling the discreet functions Demand identified: writing, copy-editing, copy-chiefing, reviewing titles, managing topic pages, checking facts. That is done by freelancers. The staff directs, edits, curates, and manages them. The algorithm makes all this more effective as it tracks content and ad demand and writes headlines for pieces it says will get traffic and earn money. Editors are 1.5 times more effective in creating assignments that will generate traffic, Kydd said, but the algorithm is 4.9 times better than creators.
Kydd said Demand pays from $0 (with revenue sharing) to $100 per piece; it averages at $20. Copy editors make $2.50-$3 per piece, which works out to $15-20 an hour. He said these people like to wake up and know there’s work they can do—there are 100k assignments waiting for takers right now—while they wait for old, human editors to respond to pitches. He said they also like being paid twice a week. Kydd said Demand employed 4,500 creators (text and video) and 400 copy editors in the last 30 days.
What amazed me most is that Demand uses its method not only for service content but for jokes at Cracked.com. Could an algorithm and social network replace Jay Leno? Easy.
: Paul Marcum tweeted today: “Prediction: increasing clutter from algo content farms + mobile app convenience will have even @jeffjarvis paying for news by 2011.” I responded seeing the irony here: that value will come from aggregation and curation of quality content. But imagine then if the aggregators become more valuable than the creators and start charging; the creators (i.e., Murdoch) will go batshit. I’ve argued that in the link economy, there are two creations of value around content: from those who make the content and from those who bring together the public around it. Where is there greater value? We’ll see….
: LATER STILL: See Upendra Shardanand (founder of Daylife, where I’m a partner) on the need for new tools to create new handcrafted content. Problem is, he says, we’re using old text tools. See my related posts on storytelling and post-page media.
Tweet: Report from my entrepreneurial journalism class: Cause for optimism
Wednesday was the best day of my year: the jurying for my entrepreneurial journalism class at CUNY. The jury awarded four businesses a total of $57,000 (thanks to a grant from the McCormick Foundation). Here’s how it works.
Because one of them could be the next Google – or Condé Nast or ESPN or AP or, better yet, something entirely new – I won’t reveal too many specifics. One of the products is a platform for news assignments I hope we’ll help deploy soon; another a mobile sports application; another a creative, algorithmic answer to filter failure; and the fourth – the one that is already public – a clever omnimedia project about the provenance of fashion called ClosetTour.
It was a tough decision for the jury. Other impressive ideas were a human – rather than algorithmic – answer to filter failure (aka editing); a specialized women’s travel service; a specialized local real estate service; a cool food idea; two business-to-business ideas; one hyperlocal/hyperinterest site; one service for a local Hispanic ecosystem; a service for NGOs; a commercial service for artists; and one idea whose three-word elevator pitch is so clear I’d give it away if I said more than one word (“news”).
There are some key insights in the students’ ideas. A few were built around the need not just to create content but to curate it. Most are highly targeted. Some saw the potential in specialized local services. Some saw the need to go mobile to service the public. Some are international. Some are multimedia. A few saw the need to make news fun, others to make news useful. Some realized that news will be created by new people in new relationships with media. You’ll be interested to know that some plan to charge users (and I endorsed those plans, unlike Mr. Murdoch’s).
This was a great class. My favorite part of teaching it is holding our board meetings, when I work with them one-on-one on every aspect of their plans: elevator pitch (utterly critic, or jurors and customers will be lost); needs statement (why does the world need this thing?); market analysis (whom are you serving?); market research (aka reporting); competitive analysis; product plan; revenue plan; marketing/distribution plan; operations (cost) plan; launch plan; and the ask (how much they want from the jury and what they’ll do with it).
Because I was out for a few weeks after my surgery, we started holding our meetings on Skype video, which works quite well, and continued in person at my whiteboard (how were companies started before dry-erase?). While I was out, friends Joan Feeney and Steven Johnson filled in, along with my associate for the class, Dan Shanoff (who not only knows journalism and the web but – bonus points – has an MBA). All three were on the jury, so they saw the incredible transformation the students and their ideas – not to mention their presentations and confidence – undergo over the term.
This is my third year teaching the class and a few things are predictable: Some high proportion of students will come into class declaring that they don’t need to worry about all this business and revenue stuff because they’ll be not-for-profit. They also tend to want to do good for its own sake. I beat their altruistic, communistic instincts out of them and turn them into passionate capitalists, emphasizing that no matter where the money goes at the end of the day, they’d better have money left over – aka profit. Their enterprises and their journalism must be sustainable or they and their businesses won’t survive. I don’t do this just to corrupt them but to give them – especially these days – a strong dose of hard reality. My not-so-hidden agenda is to teach journalists business so we can be better stewards of the business.
The jury this year was again stellar: in addition to those above, David Carr of the NYT; Fred Graver, comedy writer and entrepreneur (you should see his business plans); Charlie O’Donnell, VC from First Capital; Mark Potts, founder of GrowthSpur; Betsy Morgan, former CEO of Huffington Post; Lee DeBoer, entrepreneur; Upendra Shardanand, founder of Daylife; John Paton, CEO of Impremedia; Peter Hauck, Nancy Wang, Jeff Mignon, and Jennifer McFadden, my colleagues on the New Business Models for News Project; Elizabeth Osder, consultant and teacher.
The students get four minutes to present their ideas, the jury four minutes for questions. After almost three hours, we retire to the jury room (wine-and-cheese equipped) and the deliberations are worth the price of serving. Some complained that one student’s idea – a content idea – wasn’t really a business, that someone should just hire the student to make it a book or a site or a show. David Carr issued a winning defense of the strategy, arguing that journalists won’t all be hired; they need to make their own way to the sea (he always talks in metaphor); that is, they will need to make their own work into businesses to make it sustainable. He also urged this student not to turn out something in just one medium but to make it take advantage of every bit of functionality that will be on the mythical tablet we’ll all soon be using. He won the day.
We discuss the ideas and the students’ innovation and potential to succeed (do the have enough resources and the right skills?), identifying where the jurors see the most heat until we have, by a process of painful elimination, landed on the likely recipients. Then we debate how much money they actually need.
Finally, importantly, jurors volunteer to mentor various businesses. CUNY provides an incubator to help them succeed. I will work with the students to agree on benchmarks they must meet to receive the next piece of funding.
Two years ago, the students who won grants got jobs instead, though one student in particular made use of her proposal by bringing it into the major paper where she works. That’s one of the goals of the class and program: to infuse legacy institutions with innovation and entrepreneurship. Last year, three students won grants and they are all starting their businesses now. Next year, I’ll report back on the progress of this year’s winners.
* * *
The morning before the jurying, I was invited to meet with some of the lions of journalism – former top execs at the AP and Dow Jones and various metro papers – to present and discuss our New Business Models for News. My message: that the future is entrepreneurial not institutional, that news will come from ecosystems instead of corporations, that the transition may be too painfully impossible for their former companies. I invited them to leave their meeting and come to join our jury. I wish they had.
The starting point for an entrepreneur, I told them, is not what has been but what can be. In some cases, the opportunity they see will be to undercut the old order – ‘craiglisting’ content next. In some cases, the opportunity they see will be to do journalism in new ways that were never possible before we had this incredible linking and collaboration platform. I spent my career working with the institutions and I still will. But now I favor working with the entrepreneurs. I believe they are our future. It’s that future I saw Wednesday afternoon.
This is why I am going to devote myself more and more to entrepreneurial journalism at CUNY. More on that later.
: AND: Here’s Dan Shanoff’s post on the class and here’s Nancy Wang’s.
It’s accepted wisdom in the news tribe that journalism is storytelling. They have become synonymous. Journalists are storytellers. I hear that over and over again, especially in discussions of journalism education, and when I do I see everyone’s head nod. Lately, I’m not necessarily nodding.
I’m not so sure journalism is storytelling anymore.
One reason: There are so many new forms of journalism emerging. Data is (are) journalism. Platforms that enable communities to share what they know and need to know are becoming journalism (Fred Wilson: We will cover ourselves“). Algorithms that aggregate and cluster and prioritize news are journalism. Collaboration and crowdsourcing yield journalism that doesn’t necessary end up in story form. Journalism can be a stream (see Twitter from Iran). Journalism can be a snapshot of current knowledge (see Wikipedia). Journalism is a process (which make take the form of Waves soon). But stories are products.
Another reason: By taking the role of the storyteller, journalists claim a position at the center of the story. They also claim possession: It’s my story to tell. I’ll decide what the story is. I’ll tell it my way. The storyteller is in control. Storytelling remains essentially one-way (comments and questions come after the story is told). Storytelling is about telling.
Now, of course, stories and the telling of them will still be a part of journalism; often it is the value a journalist can add. Look up storytelling and journalism on Google and you’ll find no end of effort to update storytelling in multimedia.
But if we continue to assume that our role is that of the storyteller, and to limit ourselves to that, then we risk closing ourselves off from forms of gathering and sharing information that do not end up in the form of stories, that are not structured and told. When we open ourselves up, we can think of journalists as enablers, as community organizers (not just of information but of a community’s ability to organize its own information), as teachers, as curators (how could I get through this without using the word at least once?), as filters, as tool makers, as algorithm writers.
Here’s the December edition of the Guardian’s MediaTalkUSA.
I give myself much credit for bravery for having somebody who really knows radio — Laura Walker, head of WNYC — and somebody who’s funny — Baratunde Thurston of the Onion — on the panel as I’m not good at either. They are great guests. We talk about Murdoch v. Google and Murdoch v. government and Murdoch v. Huffington (with sound from the two at the FTC hearings on jouranlism); Oprah and Stern leaving broadcast for new pastures; AOL & Demand media’s automated editing; and more. I really was nervous having Walker there; I did more retakes than ever!
And here’s the latest edition of This Week in Google with Heather Gold as a guest. She’s also funny. I’m surrounded. (It was thanks to TWiT that I discovered and met Baratunde and had him on my podcast.)
I’m delighted to see CNN investing in Outside.in – and in local and in the notion of distributed, scalable networks of content. AOL, Yahoo, MSNBC, NBC, ABC, and other big guys are investing in local. But local doesn’t need big guys to succeed and Outside.in is the proof: it is a curation of lots of independent local ventures that do what they do because they can and want to. I have immense respect for Outside.in’s management, Steven Johnson and Mark Josephson and I’m delighted to see an endorsement of and support of their vision.
