: I wrote this post earlier and added a line from the road on my Treo but accidentally erased it. Two kind souls send me the text again out of their RSS readers. Thanks. You can see I need the help!
The click heard 'round the world
: Martin Nisenholtz, the very smart and focused head of New York Times Digital, gave a visionary speech this week to the Information Industry Summit [via PaidContent] in which he says that media is awaiting its Pong, its application that unleashes something wholly new and with it a new creative class and a new industry.
Martin keeps dancing around the idea that weblogs could be that thing. He won't take the last step to annoint them. ("The jury is still out.") But perhaps he's reluctant because he's using the wrong word and thus looking at this thing too narrowly. Yes, a weblog per se won't change the world. But citizens' media will. And the weblog is the proof of that concept: It is the Pong. It is the click heard round the world.
Martin lists many characteristics of this messianic Pong he awaits and I agree with all his criteria: It evolves media past its current roles of "sorting, distributing, and making accessible content created principally for other formats, to creating content that is native to the computing world." It brings users "new and original ways of communicating." It, like the Web, "is designed to foster social interaction, not just information retrieval." It causes a "control shift" giving the user that control. He sets up a test:
: First, the medium must be large, global and spawn a new profitable industry.
: Second, the medium must be expressive. It must delight people on an emotional level. It must become a regular part of their life experience.
: Third, the medium must ultimately engender a new collective class of creative people. Think of film, with actors, directors and set designers; or videogames, with art directors and programmers; or newspapers, with reporters, editors and photographers....
Ah, but Martin, that new creative class is nothing less than the people themselves. The citizens create. That is revolutionary beyond creating a new, closed industry that employs a new, limited cast of trained professionals, a new priesthood. This is more than Pong. This is Gutenberg, baby!
But my friend Martin remains cautious even as he is visionary (that's why he's successful):
Many are now postulating that Web logs – or blogs – are the pong of electronic publishing. These new forms blend a unique stew of audience input, amateur content creation, the editing of outside content sources and other attributes. They evolve – in part – from the forums and chats that ran on Compuserve twenty years ago, in part from email, in part from newsletter publishing, in part from search, in part from content syndication.
The jury is still out. Certainly, Web logs delight their audience. Five million people each day read a Web log. [Nice new stat - ed] Even though Web logs began as a form of amateur publishing (all new forms begin with passionate amateurs because a professional class does not yet exist to create in the new medium), we are now beginning to see more professionals entering the fray, and the form seems to be developing a division of labor in some instances.
So we satisfy two of the new criteria at least.
The last one – and often the most challenging – is our first criterion. The form must evolve into a profitable business if it is to sustain the professional class required to attract mass audiences. Indeed, it is possible that blogs will remain a vibrant amateur medium, much as CB and ham radio have over the decades. Standing here today, that would be my bet. But I could be very wrong.
Ouch! Not that CB thing!
No, the problem is that you can't look at this industry the way you could look at others. This is all about the -- thank you, David Weinberger -- small pieces, loosely joined all adding up to something gigantic. It's not the top or the tail of Clay Shirky's beloved power-law graph; it's the rich, meaty middle. And that will add up to a new, profitable industry -- listen to media mogul Hubert Burda: "But if the audience is there, a business model will emerge. I’m sure of it." And that business model will be on a new scale, broad and flat, not tall and AOL-Time-Warner-vertically-integrated. Each little component -- each company -- in this new industry has a very, very low cost of entry (try zero) and tiny overhead (try a spare bedroom) and low staff (try one). So profitability comes quickly. My magazine startup, Entertainment Weekly, went through $200 million before it broke even; Nick Denton went through a few thousand.
But it's not there yet.
A business infrastructure is desperately needed and I have many thoughts on that -- but not now.
And this Pong we have will grow more sophisticated -- it already is. Pong begat Doom; blogs will beget... well, we're not sure yet.
Citizens' media is already exploding past the limitations of a mere weblog with new forms of media -- not just the obvious audio, video, and graphics but also media that communicates, media that calculates, media that categorizes itself, media that carries with it ratings of its own reliability, media that relates. Martin, in his speech, also notes more elements coming together: Infrastructure that allows anyone to watch anything... A shift in the media day to noon because of connected devices are now at the center of the consumer's day... Control shifting from the center to the edges of the network... A host of new content-creation technologies... New devices for consuming media anywhere...
That, still, is merely technology. It's not revolutionary, just spectacularly and beautifully evolutionary.
What's revolutionary is that citizens' media is created by citizens, giving them an entirely new relationship with media. That, again, is the new creative class Martin is looking for.
All this was inspired just by the first half of Martin's speech. There's a second half...
A new architecture
: I've been talking lately about using feeds and RSS as a new architecture for the content on my news sites. I can create a town page using feeds of paper headlines, internal and external blog headlines, forum thread heads, weather, classified listings, restaurant specials, video reports.... It's all just feeds.
It's more than that, of course. I've been thinking about how I'd architect news if I had a clean slate. This gets down even to the level of how you'd write a news story. There's no longer any need to write in the background; you can link to it. Ditto analysis. There's no such thing as a deadline or an edition; you add to the story as you find out more. It's friendlier because it's briefer and easier to consume. It's better organized. It's more informative because it can include reports and photos from witnesses in the audience. It's more accurate because you can include fact-check-your-ass challenges from readers. It's more compelling because it includes interactivity. It's better presented because it can include video or audio or programming, whatever it needs. It's more responsive because, well, finally the audience can respond.
That's just the architecture of presentation. That also affects the architecture of storage: Each element -- each news post -- is identified and linked to related items by the writer and by the audience. And, obviously, this affects the way the news is gathered, by whom, with what.
Martin, in his speech, also speculates on a new architecture for news:
There is no primary media format in this new journalism. It is all media combined. All of the assets available for storytelling are seamlessly available and can be offered for the sole purpose of telling the story. Aggregation and sorting are rapidly becoming media independent. In part, this is because the means of production are advancing to allow creative teams to work seamlessly across media – and to tell stories in new, non-linear ways.
And don't forget that the audience will link these elements together, too. That is a key to the value of weblogs: editing by the audience. But Martin sees that, too, for he says that in this new world, "News reports become a focal point for social networking. Again, we see this bubbling-up in Web logs today." Later, he says, "the social extensions of the journalism become deeply embedded into the product itself." Right, and that "social" element adds value; it tells you what the audience cares about; it adds their viewpoints; it adds their facts; it creates linkages; it edits.
He also sees the need for a reputation system because "while deception is possible even in the most controlled context (think about Jayson Blair at The Times), the casual online encounter is rife with potential fraud." He adds: "Ultimately, journalism is about trust." I say the goal isn't to create such a system but to create a system that captures the reliability ratings of the audience. Technorati already does that: The cream rises with links. But that's still more quantitative than qualitative. I link to the BBC but these days, that doesn't mean I trust them anymore.
Martin and I don't agree about all of this. He sees big value for an "aggregator" (not a program but a company) to "build and maintain this news universe." I think that function is already distributed to the audience. He's not sure weblogs are the Pong he's looking for. I am sure. But we agree about where this is headed ultimately and how important it is.
It's an important speech.
Brutal Honesty, Inc.
: I agree with Corey Bergman that "brutal honesty" is the news-media trend of today. I say Howard Stern started it. You can expect that I'll throw both FoxNews and weblogs into the mix. Corey notes t he trend with Dennis Miller on CNBC plus "think Daily Show combined with Anderson Cooper 360. Or MSNBC's Countdown. Miller is aiming for 20 and 30-something (male) viewers who would rather trade the stiff formality of TV news for their X-Boxes. And I think he's on the right track."
...
