BuzzMachine

I spent half a day hanging out at Howard 100 News recently. Why? A few reasons: First, I’m fascinated by efforts to both mock and reinvent the stilted voice of news. Second, I’ve been arguing and PowerPointing that we need to broaden the definition of news — and Howard 100 certainly does that: It doesn’t get much broader. Third, I wanted to include H100 in today’s Guardian column, which is up here (also here). Fourth, I’m a Stern fan, whether you like it or not. Fifth, I had nothing better to do. Sixth, they’re nice people. Seventh, I gotta like any news organization that has the balls to have the mission every other news organization should have: “No more bullshit.” Did I make up enough reasons? I’ll get to all those haughty, high-minded points in a minute. But first, the Howard 100 News….

: Just the elevator rides in the combined headquarters of Sirius and McGraw-Hill are a cross-cultural hoot: Business Week executives and rap stars and wack-packers, movin’ on up. I sit in the Sirius lobby and there goes Henry Hill, Goodfellas mobster, looking like a two-legged lizard. There goes the newest member of the Wack Pack with his handler.

Liz Aiello, the news director of H100 and a veteran of local TV news in New York, invites me to sit in on their morning news meeting. Only there is no room for it. Sirius wasn’t built with Howard in mind and their two floors are jammed already; every conference room is taken. So we sit in the lobby with a guy who seems to be there for a job interview as the staff streams in. They are a collection of journalists, comedians, and journalists who want to be comedians. In a now-famous moment, when Ed Bradley of 60 Minutes toured H100, he ran into one of the anchors, Ralph Howard, shocked to see a distinguished veteran of CBS News there. Ralph said he’s having fun. So is fellow anchor George Flowers, who told me he used to be a comedian and so this gig is kismet for him. Steve Langford is a sincere reporter’s reporter who relishes this job. Shuli is the comedian, who’s learning how to report and doing a good job of it. Some on the staff use a nom de satellite; they tell me that this is what freelancing radio people with many gigs do (though I, too, wonder whether it has something to do with being on H100). Penny Crone, a veteran of more TV stations over more years than I’d bet she’d be willing to admit — best known for having a voice like a quarry on a busy day — is using her own well-known name and is clearly having a ball. Except for Liz, the rest of them all work together in a tiny room about the size of my bathroom producing two hour-long newscasts a day. Yet they all seem to get along. Most newsrooms should be this much fun.

The news meeting begins and Liz tells the staff that they have to do a better job tightening up the timing of their shows, getting rid of dead air between segments and speeding up the pace. They want to sound realer than real news. They talk about their radio models: CKLW in its heyday, the RKO stations, 1010 WINS. They want to pepper us with the news. They talk with the technical directors about problems firing segments from their new digital system and they talk about moving monitors so they can be sure to see cues. They take this seriously. Stern’s program director, Tim Sabian — the boss — joins the meeting to emphasize the importance of getting the pace right. But then his cell phone rings and he has to run off for a crisis in the studio.

They talk about stories. Crone’s reacting to Howard’s promise to fire anybody who messes up his studio; she plans to interview the cleaning crew. Michele Gerson is talking to doctors about Howard’s girlfriend’s infrequent bathroom visits. Langford has a secret Project X they don’t talk about until they get the facts confirmed.

Sabian returns. His crisis has something to do with Henry Hill and finding a place for him to say that night. Crone says she likes Henry. Sabian says he wouldn’t do that to her. He shakes his head and mutters with a smile, “Show business.”

I hang out in the studio during the noon news, down the hall from the Martha channel and the gay and lesbian channel and the hiphop channels. Flowers and noon coanchor Erica Phillips rehearse their pieces to get the tone just right. They interview DJs from Shade 45, Eminem’s channel, who supposedly were having a feud with Howard (but in the presence of Stern, they turned into puddytats). And then comes breaking news: Henry Hill’s handlers let him loose for a few minutes on the street, when he said he wanted to get something to eat, and the supposedly on-the-wagon Hill came back in no time drunk as hell and throwing up on himself as he was held by Rockefeller Center guards. The Howard 100 News team was there and they come for a live report. Liz Aeillo comes by at the end asking whether the reporter, Lisa G, had tape of the amazed ritzy lunch patrons when they found out that this pathetic lump used to be a murdering mobster. That is a lesson in news gathering.

Later, Lisa G appears on Stern’s show to talk about this incident and she says, with much hesitation and embarrassment — being a journalist, after all — that Hill had told her in a drunken fit of lust that, “I want to ____ on your face.” And the first time, through Hill’s gross drunken slur, it did sound like that. But Stern producer Gary Dell’Abate went to get the tape of Hill and they played it a few times. Turns out Hill was really slurring, “I want a Caramel Macchiato.” Like I said, accuracy matters. And at Howard, so does a good laugh.

I hang out a little while longer in the newsroom. Erica gets a soundbite from me, the media critic who happened by, about the Oprah/Frey mess (I say that I wish the next Oprah creation to fall would be Dr. Phil). I talk with George Langford — who’d just returned from Washington covering the Senate “decency” hearings — about story angles. I watch a newsroom hum. And there was my day at Howard 100.

: So now back to the high-fallutin’ points I raised earlier and made in the Guardian column (which I’ll repeat in different form here).

Is this news? Sure, it is. This is stuff that matters to Stern fans — and much of it would matter to any number of gossip pages run by outfits you’d easily call news organizations. If somebody wants to know what’s happening and somebody tells them, reliably, then that’s news. The H100 News team has to get their stories right or else they will lose credibility.

Want a safer example? When we started community sites at Advance Internet, one of the first was made by a local ballet school. Under the “news” tab, they reported that “the leotards are in.” That’s news. It’s not news because a journalist says it is. A journalist may not think that it matters, but if it matters in the life of a budding ballerina or Howard Stern fan, it is news. The same goes for news about the latest products from Apple, or a kerfuffle about blog comments at the Washington Post, or the top headlines at Digg, or the price my neighbor’s house sells for. News.

Is it journalism? Well, I’m not sure exactly what the definition of journalism should be today; I’ll punt that to another day. I just know it’s news. And I know that broadening the definition of news is a good and inevitable result of the internet shifting control of media to the edges: The people — even Howard Stern fans and ballerinas and Mac addicts — get to define what news is now.

: What fascinates me even more about Howard 100 is that — like Jon Stewart, Ricky Gervais’ Monkey News, and The Onion — they lampoon the voice of news. Note how hard the Howard 100 News team works to sound authentic: fast-paced, stentorian, sincere. They deliver the perfect deadpan sendup. They end up mocking the old voice of news and that mockery, from all these sources, eventually invalidates the old voice by turning it into a laughingstock.

The news needs to find a new voice. Even Andrew Heyward, the former president of CBS News, knows that. He said at a Museum of Television & Radio Media Center event and repeated on Pressthink:

We have to abandon any claim to omniscience…. We have to break down the tired formulas of television news and find a more authentic way of writing, speaking and interacting with the people and subjects we report on.

To old news folks, this is counterintuitive, but I believe that the voice of news must become more human to be credibible. We don’t believe that voice now because it is so separate, so staged and packaged. But when we get to know the person, we can decide whether to trust him or her. That, I argue, is why I trust the guys on Diggnation. It’s not slick, it’s scruffy and casual and that is its charm and its authority; we know these guys. The news makes plenty of artificial attempts to inject humanity. That’s why newspapers hire columnists: we token humans with opinions. That’s why TV news is overrun with happy talk. But we see through that.

Now, thanks to control shifting to the edge, thanks to the citizens taking charge, we can hear the true voice of people. In the future, news will no longer have one voice. News will be carried by the voices of the public.
Even Penny Crone’s voice.

I’ve been arguing for sometime that the real competitor to Google will not be the next big thing but lots of little things, like Oodle, for job search and now see more specialized searches at Kosmix for health (it’s prett good), travel, and politics. [via TechCrunch]

So Rocketboom’s ad auction came off with a rather obscure advertiser — TRM, an ATM and photocopy vending company — getting the privilege to be the first to promote on the hottest vlog … and to get free publicity because of it. Good for TRM and good for Rocketboom, valuing a week’s worth of commercials at $40,000 (and good for me not being made a liar predicting in The New York Times that they would be worth a high CPM).

But this is bad for big ad agencies and big advertisers who missed this boat bigtime. I’m not talking about any specific brand or company (disclosure: I know of some advertisers but I’m not talking about them; I’m talking about the ones that didn’t even have the courage to try). They should have been falling over themselves to grab this unique bargain. And they should be slinking off with their long tails between their legs now. Advertisers constantly whine that they want to do something new, but when something new comes along, they freeze because they can’t fit the new thing into their definitions of old and safe.

And here we have in a microcosm the explanation of why media is so horribly out of sync today: The public is valuing new media much more than the old, but the advertisers still value the old. Most every newspaper and in many cases TV networks and magazines have much larger audiences online, but the revenue for their old media properties remains much higher because the advertisers and agencies still value the old and the safe. They want metrics. They want control. They want guarantees. This, in turn, makes big publishers and producers play it safe because they don’t want to mess with the cash cow. And that means that advertisers miss the opportunity to reach a larger, younger, smarter audience in the new medium, which is — supposedly — what they’re dying to do. And that means that big media companies now face competition from a thousand Rocketbooms and a million Gawkers. That allows a TRM to come along and snatch away an opportunity from the big, lumbering giants. That is why small is the new big. Small be nimble, small be quick, small jumped over the conglomerates.

Or let me summarize the problem in one word. Big advertisers and big agencies are chickenshit. They need to grow some balls or else they’ll find new competitors running circles around them. The explosion — the rocketboom — that has already come to newspapers, magazines, TV networks, the music industry is coming next to the ad business.

Please take this, advertisers, as a friendly kick in the pants.

Take a few more bricks out of the anticompetitive walled garden real-estate agents have built around their unearned 6 percent commissions. The Times reports today on the imminent and much-anticipated launch of Zillow — a site from the founder of Expedia with big backing that will provide more open data on home prices — and throws in other sites aiming to break up the real-estate gang: Redfin, which will allow online bidding and negotiation, and PropertyShark, which takes listings in 15 cities. Add these together and you have the means to knock agents out of pricing and listing and negotiation.

There’s just one thing left: Scheduling visits and accompanying the buyers. I’d love to see someone start a concierge service to do this (and many other tasks): They don’t market or sell the house (hell, real estate agents don’t really, either) but only schedule appointments and accompany prospective buyers. Sellers and buyers can figure out pricing via Zillow; they can bid via Redfin; they can list via PropertyShark or Craigslist; they can handle closing and the next ripoff dying for a competitor — title insurance. And maybe we spend 2 percent on the cost of sale. And we keep 4 percent.

That day is coming — slowly, but it’s coming. The days of businesses that make their money by getting in the way are numbered.

Paid Content is reading the giant Lazard report urging the break-up of Time Warner so we don’t have to. Here’s The Times coverage. And Gawker quotes Michael Wolfe’s Vanity Fair column arguing that Time Warner doesn’t have a reason to exist.

In some sense, the best that people can say about Time Warner is it is somehow not like other companies—which are fundamentally about ownership and control. It’s a postmodern entity: the inevitable result of consolidation is that everything is connected in such a tortured and ham-handed way that nothing is quite connected….

No investor, man on the street, politician with his finger in the wind, or employee would tell you differently: Time Warner, along with all the other centralized, vertically integrated, horizontally organized, multi-platform-function media companies, is just too big. The idea of agglomeration without limit turned out not to be such a good one. A no-brainer bad one….

There may be nobody who actually believes in big media anymore.

And this, folks, is why I do not think that media consolidation is an evil ready to eat up the world. Media consolidation makes companies too big and too dumb and the marketplace will take care of them.

I can’t wait to get my proxy to vote on Icahn’s efforts to break up (AOL) Time Warner. I’ll vote yes.

Atom Films is starting a studio to underwrite productions for online. Note that they’re not spending millions on each but thousands. Small is the new big.

Diane Mermigas writes a good summary of the fuses lit under big, old media and how they’re burning down this year.

In truth, it all comes down to the caliber and vision of company management and leadership — something media and entertainment industries have in perilously short supply. In a quest to conquer the digital fast track, an aging ruling class is anointing their next-in-line top executives and their next-of-kin, few of which have the “right stuff” to reinvent these industries during the next several decades. While many will move their companies into the thick of a digital transition, few are skilled enough to ingeniously mine it.

That will require a new generation of graduates from the Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Steven Spielberg school of mavericks and free-thinkers. It also will require a new standard for innovation and imagination, concepts that these weary industries have difficulty budgeting for much less mandating.

Can the incumbents do it? I’m not sure.

She goes on to give them their assignment. It’s very simple: Empower the consumer.

Companies will need to be thoughtful about reshaping industry economics and logistics according to the new rules of play.

The bottom line: they likely will make more money than they do today beckoning to the whims of emancipated consumers….

If the likes of Google (through search and other online analytics) and Apple (through portable devices) taught us anything in 2005 it is that empowering consumers is very good business….

…it looks like the “killer application” of new media is what the consumer wants, when they want it, where they want it.

Amen.

It’s internet-culture day at The Times. Below, I link to a story about the internet exploding TV. Shortly, I’ll have a post about the Times story on Amazon’s author blogs. And there’s also a story about the net and musicand, again, how the public is finally able to decide who the stars should be:

Even as the recording industry staggers through another year of declining sales over all, there are new signs that a democratization of music made possible by the Internet is shifting the industry’s balance of power.

Exploiting online message boards, music blogs and social networks, independent music companies are making big advances at the expense of the four global music conglomerates, whose established business model of blockbuster hits promoted through radio airplay now looks increasingly outdated….

In a world of broadband connections, 60-gigabyte MP3 players and custom playlists, consumers have perhaps more power than ever to indulge their curiosities beyond the music that is presented through the industry’s established outlets, primarily radio stations and MTV.

“Fans are dictating,” said John Janick, co-founder of Fueled by Ramen, the independent label in Tampa, Fla., whose roster includes underground acts like Panic! At the Disco and Cute Is What We Aim For. “It’s not as easy to shove something down people’s throats anymore and make them buy it. It’s not even that they are smarter; they just have everything at their fingertips. They can go find something that’s cool and different. They go tell people about it and it just starts spreading.”

There are several signs that as more consumers develop the habit of exploring music online they are drawn to other musical choices besides hitmakers at the top of the Billboard chart - a trend that suggests more of the independent labels’ repertory will find an audience.

On the Rhapsody subscription music service, for example, the 100 most popular artists account for only about 24 percent of the music that consumers chose to play from its catalog last month, said Tim Quirk, Rhapsody’s executive editor. In the brick-and-mortar world, he estimates, the 100 most popular acts might account for more than 48 percent of a mass retailer’s sales.

“It’s no longer about a big behemoth beaming something at a mass audience,” Mr. Quirk said. “It’s about a mass of niche audiences picking and selecting what they want at any given time.” …

But no factor is more significant than the Internet, which has shaken up industry sales patterns and, perhaps more important, upended the traditional hierarchy of outlets that can promote music. Buzz about an underground act can spread like a virus, allowing a band to capture national acclaim before it even has a recording contract, as was the case this year with Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, an indie rock band.

Is every star in the new world as big as the stars in the old world? No. But neither is the industry dependent on a blockbuster economy; success has new definitions and so does fame.

Small is the new big.

I obnoxiously ask who wants to own content from the media-company perspective. That question is usually asked, of course, from the creator’s perspective. On-Demand Media, a good blog, asks it from the consumer’s perspective:

Bill Gates says that CDs and DVDs will be the last physical form of media. I’ll go further and say: soon consumers won’t even be caring about owning files….

What does owning media let you do? It lets you play what whenever you ‘own’, provided you have the right devices, the media is handy, etc.

Now what if someone came and offered you a way to carry on with your practice, i.e. to be able to play what you ‘own’ whenever you want, in perpetuity, without having to worry about downloading, synching, or copying files (or worrying about physical media, of course)?…

What counts is the practice, not the thing.

Yup, life is about verbs. Or at least the internet is. And media should be.

Fred Wilson wants a transparent ad marketplace:

But there are some things that aren’t yet right about this market.

For one, there really isn’t true price transparency. And there isn’t true performance transparency….

And as I alluded to in the previous paragraph, it is not yet possible for any publisher to run any ad as long as the price and terms are acceptable to both parties. There are a few places where this happens in the online advertising market, like affiliate networks and paid search (sort of). But there are many more places where the advertisers and publishers are contained in walled gardens.

So, I believe that right now, we have a marketplace, but it’s a nascent marketplace.

The thing that gets me so excited, though, is that is so clear where all of this is headed.

Toward massive liquidity

Toward total price and performance transparency

And toward a completely open marketplace where anyone can run anyone’s ad campaign.

And in the process, we will build something that is easily a factor of 10 and maybe a factor of 100 of where we are today.

So, let’s make it happen.

Well, Amen. This is what I was pushing for starting in March with a proposal for an open-source ad call and there is movement in some quarters on this. We need:

1. Open-source metrics — measuring not just traffic but influence and more — with open reporting.

2. An open-source ad call so any advertiser can put together an ad hoc network of the best sites, so any publisher can join the best ad campaigns, so any network can extend reach with any sites for any campaigns.

3. An auction mechanism to match buyers and sellers.

4. The ability to layer on top of this analystics and trust networks (i.e., specifically approved sites that meet advertisers’ needs).

This will be the real Google slayer: an open, transparent, virtually frictionless marketplace where buyer and seller can find and deal with each other openly and where buyers get more value because of greater efficiency and sellers get more value because they sell more than just the words on their pages: They sell their influence, authority, relationships, trust.

Yes, let’s build it.

Brad Feld invested in Judy’s Book, yet another effort to get people to submit reviews of local merchants and such. Fred Wilson concedes that the same issues folks like me raised with Riffs hold for Judy’s Book. Judy’s Book tries to encourage people to submit reviews by having them earn coffee cards and iPods — paying them, in other words. Paying for contributions is great. But it just indicates that it is otherwise difficult or impossible to get people to contribute content. And I’m not sure this will scale any better than previous efforts have.

I go to the North Jersey page and the questions I see are about earning those spiffs, not about good Mexican restaurants. And even if I did find those reviews, I don’t know who these people are; I don’t know whether to trust their taste. So such efforts have two problems: Getting enough contributions — which is a lot of contributions, since you’ll want to cover most vendors in most areas — and then worrying about the quality (aka trust) of those contributions.

Feld says part of the reason he invested in Judy’s Book is because it comes from Andy Sack, who created the very similar Abuzz, which was a success … well, at least it was for Sack and his investors (including Feld). But Abuzz was bought by the New York Times Company and proceeded to be a bust. There were efforts to get us involved when I was working at Advance and I resisted them all for the same reasons then as I do now:

1. It’s hard to scale local.

2. It’s hard to convince people to contribute content to me when they can now control content on their own.

If, instead, you can find ways to harness (aggregate, link to, make searchable, whatever) the content that people create under their own control and connected with their own identities (aka trust), then I think that will be superior.

There are models for local that may work, just not in a neat, centralized way. Baristanet is one. NashvilleIsTalking is another. Both leave control and content and trust and identity at the edges.

If you can figure out a way to enable that — with search, functionality, ratings of the raters, and revenue — then I think you’ll have a winner. Until then, I will wish luck to Judy’s Book and Riffs and other such services. But I think you’ll be just a centralized waystation on the path to a distributed future. Think edgey.

I let Umair Haque’s Bubblegeneration blog pile up like unread, guilt-inducing copies of The Economist and The New Yorker and anything Clay Shirky writes because it takes time to read and let sink in what he has to say. So here’s my homework, Umair on:
* Media 2.0
* Peer production.
* Edge Competencies.
* Network economics.
* The fabled attention economy.
* And here’s a current post on edge compentences and newspapers, which warns:

Newspapers are canaries in the coal mine. The economic shift that is disrupting the structure of the media industry is deep and pervasive; within the next five years, it will touch all consumer-facing industries. What’s happening to newspapers should serve as a warning signal to players across markets that the deep economics of consumer-facing businesses are undergoing radical change: change as fundamental as that which marked the shift from the industrial to the knowledge economy. To understand this change, let’s define the problem the news market is facing.

The publishers, like the rest of the media industry, are facing a radical shift in industry economics; a structural disruption. Barriers to entry have been vaporized, as have switching costs. At the same time, the market power newspapers could exert over content creators and advertisers is eroding….

News executives must invest in the new media value chain. … What are the segments of this new value chain? As we’ve outlined, microplatforms allow prosumers to create personal media. Smart aggregators syndicate and distribute it. Reconstructors build individualized ‘casts of media for communities of connected consumers….