BuzzMachine

Nielsen holds a conference on “consumer-generated media” but won’t allow blogging. Can Nielsen perhaps measure the high irony and low IQ in that? [via Rubel]

I loved this comment from Michael Rosenblum on my response to BBC ONE Controller Peter Fincham’s speech before the Royal Television society, below, reacting to this line of Fincham’s: “User generated content is great but…..” Says Michael:

I think it only fair to point out to our friend at the RTS that Harry Potter was ‘user generated content’, that JK Rowling was not a ‘professional’. In the world of print, which produces some pretty good stuff, EVERYTHING is ‘user generated’. Soon, the same will be true in TV.

: Proving his point, The Times reports today that a talent agency is now scouting online video stars.

My Guardian column this week brings together a few posts furthering the notion that the internet obsoletes the institutional voice of the editorial writer (translated into British newspaperspeak: leader writer). Column here; nonregistration version here.

: The column is up at Comment is Free and generating interesting comments there.

A throwaway line I used in a post the other day keeps repeating on me like pepperoni pizza: If you want to be big in media in the future, make yourself into an API.

I’ve been wondering what it would mean for a news organization to turn itself into an API — that is, a programming interface that lets the public use and remix and also contribute information. Or put the question another way: What would Google do (WWGD) if it ran a news organization? And I don’t mean GoogleNew but any of the reporting organizations it could afford to buy (though I’m not sure why it would): The New York Times, the LA Times, CBS News, CNN. Or, for that matter, what would YouTube do? Or Firefox? What would it mean to open up the news? I’ll start with a few answers of my own. Please add yours:

* Let people — no, encourage — people to distribute your stuff for you. You can no longer spend a huge marketing budget to get people to come to you. So go to where the people are, with the people’s help. That’s what got YouTube seen: letting people put players in their own space, which in turn drove people to discover and dive into YouTube.

* Think distributed in your business, too. That is how Google makes much of its fortune: by taking its ads to where the people are and sharing just a bit of that wealth.

* Let people — no, encourage — people to remix your stuff. They’re doing it anyway. They’re taking a paragraph from here and a quote from there — or video from here and audio from there — to tell the story from their perspective. Stop thinking of that as theft and start thinking of it as a compliment. If you’re not being remixed, you’re not part of the conversation. And the conversation is the platform of the today. So feel free to set some rules — it’s only polite to attribute and link — but then open the doors and let people create more great stuff on not only your finished product but also your raw material (your quotes, your data, your cutting-room floor). Look at the great things people have built on top of Google, YouTube, and Firefox. You want to be part of that construction project. The BBC has started down this path. So should others.

* So be a platform for news. Enable people to use you to make connections to people and information. Provide the means for them to record those school-board meetings and share the fruits. Give people tools and training to accomplish what they want to accomplish. Create networked reporting tools that let the people join together in acts of journalism (see: NewAssignment.net).

* Experiment. Start labs for news and let the people in to create and criticize alongside you. Don’t be afraid of betas and don’t be afraid of failure. You can’t be perfect. You never could.

From this week’s Media Guardian podcast:

Emily Bell, editor-in-chief of Guardian Unlimited: “In the next two to three to four years, community goes from the edges to the core. Otherwise, you’re not going to have a business.”

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, at the Tory party conference in the UK: “We have 35 million blogs, doubling every six months. The average blog has exactly one reader: the blogger.”

Hmmm. Why own Blogger, then? Why place ads on them? Why diss them? Perhaps it’s because the core of Google remains not people but machines.

Pardon me for being unimpressed with Current.tv’s new outpost on Yahoo. They’re still not getting the internet. Worse, they’re dissing the internet. And that’s troubling from a content, interactivity, or business perspective. But it’s also puzzling from a political perspective.

The network still does not share its best stuff — or what it thinks is best — with the internet because they’re still afraid of pissing off cable companies, which still aren’t picking up Current in volume. Note that other networks — ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox — are no longer scared of pissing off their channels of distribution. But Current’s business model is predicated on getting cable carriage. I still say they should have built the first big, funded, citizen-created internet TV network. But they didn’t. They could have used Yahoo to get attention for what they put on the “air.” But they didn’t.

The network also remains quite controlling. They create videos that try hard to look and sound just like bad 7 p.m. syndicated unnews shows. They have uninformative but still costly travel pieces sucking up to Dubai … and then teasing a story next week on the sad lives of prostitutes there; they haven’t found their place on the flullometer. Oh, yes, they show videos created by the people. But they put those videos through a process of selection, a gauntlet the citizens have to run — still — before they are heard. Since Current started, YouTube obsoleted that model; the people no longer need to guys with the cables and antennas to be heard. But Current doesn’t see that. Current could have made Yahoo an opportunity to create an open network of the videos of the people. But they didn’t.

What they did do is create a small and uncompelling collection of videos — a few made by them, a few made by others — about things like driving and flying. Why? Because there are ad dollars there (well, in the case of automotive, there aren’t as many ad dollars from automotive as they may have thought). Making money is fine. But when I saw a button called “action” on Yahoo’s Current, I thought it might be about taking action in the country and the goverment. No, it’s about going fast. Odd, considering how going fast on the ground or above does have an impact on global warming.

Al Gore, inventor of Current and the internet, has been dissing the latter lately. He respects broadcast to the masses more than conversation with the niches. That’s the old way to look at the world in both media and political terms. I’m surprised he hasn’t updated that view and started living it. He also has created venues that are closed, controlled at the center, not generous at the edges. That, too, is the old way of media and politics. So what does this say about Gore the politician these days? I’d say it makes him look out-of-date, not so current.

My Guardian column this week tells the success story of Netzeitung. Since I haven’t written about that here, I’m copying the full column below (it’s also here).

A grand experiment in the future of news is succeeding. Pity most of you can’t read it, since it’s in German. But thanks to an accident of school scheduling that plopped me into a German class, I’ve been able to follow Netzeitung.de since it was founded in Berlin in 2000 as a net-only newspaper. It’s not a blog, a search engine or an aggregator. It is a newspaper without the paper, but with 60 journalists reporting the news. Netzeitung has not only survived the internet bubble and a ping-pong game of corporate sales, it has acquired other media properties; it is starting an ambitious effort in networked journalism with citizen reporters; and it is set to be profitable this year. Ausgezeichnet!

Dr Michael Maier, Netzeitung’s editor-in-chief and business head, is an experienced and respected journalist: former editor-in-chief of the Berliner Zeitung, Stern and Vienna’s Presse. No blogger, he. When I met him after he and his partners brought the concept of a netpaper from Norway - where its big sister, Nettavisen.no, is still in business - Maier was adamant that he would have his own staff producing news. I tried to push my populist agenda of interactivity and citizens’ media, but he would have none of it. He was starting a newspaper, dammit, and newspapers have reporters.

In the years since, Netzeitung was bought by Lycos, then by Bertelsmann, then by Maier and a partner, who sold it to Scandinavia’s Orkla, which itself is being acquired by the press baron David Montgomery. Maier says he is glad none of his many masters was a traditional German newspaper, for he doubts he could have developed Netzeitung under its roof. I agree. I got nowhere trying to convince American publishers to try a paperless paper. They are addicted to ink.

Netzeitung remains impressive in the breadth, depth and the timeliness of its reporting. It is among the internet’s most cleanly designed news sites. Maier says the service now serves 1.2 million readers per month. It reportedly will earn €8m this year. It has acquired other large German sites for technology, health and cars. It recently took over a Berlin radio station, and so the online site produces both radio shows and podcasts (what’s the difference?). And it produces online and videotext news for German TV. This experiment in online news has become a budding media empire.

But what brought me back to revisit Netzeitung is its latest effort: Readers-Edition.de, an online paper by and for das volk. True to form, Maier insists that the people must report: “We don’t publish commentary.” So citizen reporters submit news and photos on politics, sports, technology and business. Netzeitung, the parent, puts the best on its home page and then pays the contributors.

Maier says his online journalists were at first afraid of these interlopers. But he also says his reader/writers are better at working with links than ordinary reporters, are fast (helping him scoop competitors), and are smart (they gave him an exclusive on a revival of the 60s radical group the SDS).

One reason we bloggers like blogging is that we have no editors. But the Readers-Edition contributors do: a team of fellow reader/writers act as volunteer moderators with the help of one Netzeitung journalist. They get together in meetings across Germany to share tricks of the trade. They even share rejected stories so contributors can learn what it takes to make the grade. Now that’s transparency.

I wonder whether this model could work elsewhere. The other citizen-written online newspaper of note, South Korea’s OhmyNews, has had difficulty replicating itself in other countries; its political and media landscape may be unique. And when I ran online sites in the early days, I tried to copy what I saw on German sites by having volunteer moderators keep peace in chatrooms. It worked in Germany, where users respected rank, but not in the US, where moderators got power-mad and users revolted.

I would love to see both Netzeitung and Readers-Edition spread, for we need more answers to questions asked at nearly every journalism conference I attend, namely how will we support journalism in the future? What are the business models for news? How does journalism survive post-press? I hope the answers lie in creating vibrant and successful newspapers that do not depend on paper. I hope the answers lie in creating networks that allow professional and amateur journalists to work together. And I hope the answers are also in English, since I didn’t pay much attention in that German class.

David Carr gets this exactly right (or so I think because I’ve been saying the same thing), finding a lesson in the sock-puppetry at the New Republic:

But there is a broader lesson here, a cautionary tale about the mainstream media’s engagement with the Web. Blogs, which may look like one more way to publish, are first and foremost a way to listen, something that journalists at established outlets don’t necessarily do well.

The cliché about not arguing with people who buy ink by the barrelful is in the process of being replaced by another: best not to pick a fight with people who have gigabytes of text at their disposal unless you are interested in a duel on equal footing.

Reports are swirling that News Corp. is considering starting a magazine out of MySpace, with Nylon as a partner. Says AdAge: “The editorial mix would likely cover standout MySpace members and their interests, from music to their social scenes.”

Years ago now, when Time Warner made its disastrous merger with AOL, I suggested to editors there that they should start an AOL magazine making the people in its boards and chats the stars. Went nowhere. Even right after the merger, there was no hope of synergy within what as then AOL Time Warner.

If I were to make that suggestion today, I’m not sure I’d push for a magazine, especially to News Corp. (where I used to work, on a magazine). Why not a TV show? You want a reality show? MySpace is a reality show. Or make a show out of all the YouTubes that the MySpacers make famous; it already is a network. MySpace as a brand could be everything that Current isn’t.

: LATER: J-prof Andrew Grant-Adamson reports that students in his class couldn’t rustle up enough support for a MySpace magazine. Doesn’t bode well.

The Online News Association just announced that Mark Cuban will be their keynoter this year. Yow. Now on the one hand, Cuban could be perfect, for he has been pushing back at reporters and making his interviews with them open, even over their wailing and whining. But on the other hand, Cuban is most decidedly imperfect, for his latest venture, Sharesleuth.com, raises no end of troubling ethical and journalistic, if not legal, questions about his media activities.

Mark Cuban has made his career and his fortune on dumb money. He sold his first company to CompuServe, a failure acquired by AOL, another failure. He sold his next company, Broadcast.com, to Yahoo, which promptly did nothing but kill it even as broadcasting came onto the internet, yet Cuban walked away with something in the billions, allowing him to have fun, buying a sports team and starring in a TV show, which was also a failure. He invested in another well-known company sold to AOL; return to Square One. Yet people still invite him to share his wisdom. That’s because he loves to be provocative and he’s good at that.

But now Cuban is making smaller killings from the dumb money of smaller players who’ve invested in bad companies. Now one could say that’s just the way the stock market works: smart wins, dumb loses. But Cuban has given himself an advantage: He started an apparently journalistic enterprise in Sharesleuth to find the bad companies . . . so he could short them first.

What’s wrong with that? That’s what a prospective student at CUNY asked and so I went to read the controversy at Sharesleuth and the defensiveness at Cuban’s blog and here’s what I come away with:

* Cuban says he is being transparent: He says he warned us that he would trade on the information Chris Carey, his editor at Sharesleuth, digs up. Except that he’s not transparent at all — not until after a story about a stock is released. He has a period of utter opaqueness when he knows a company is crap and you don’t — nya, nya, nya — and so he gets to trade on his information and take money not from the offending company but from the poor shlub on the other end of Cuban’s trade.

* Cuban tries to say that he is underwriting this journalism to do what journalism is supposed to do: help the poor shlub. Except he already took the shlub to the cleaners. Doesn’t wash.

* Cuban also has to be aware that his celebrity will have an impact here. He argues that he’s just sharing what he knows about a company after he took advantage of the information he paid to gather about it. Generous, eh? Except he has to know that a site he, Mark Cuban, underwrites and promotes — he was, after all, a TV star… for a few minutes — will have an influence on the market for that stock. Is that company insider information? No, it’s Cuban information. But he can move a stock and he acts on that knowledge before the rest of the market can.

* It becomes a bit of self-fulfilling prophecy, doesn’t it? Cuban and company find a company they think is suspect. Cuban and company investigate and find smelly fish. Cuban shorts the stock. Then his guy reports what’s what to the world. The market gets a whiff. Then the stock falls. Then Cuban profits. You have to trust Cuban and company not to use their power to manipulate. After what he does to little investors, do you trust him?

You see, it’s not just about transparency — and I like to toot the transparency horn at every opportunity. It’s about conflict of interest. Whom are you serving, Cuban? If you say you are committing acts of journalism, exposing bad companies and outdoing the business journalists you despise, then you are saying you’re serving the public and the public should be able to trust you to do that. But no, the public in this case is the aforementioned poor — now poorer — shlub. So you’re not doing journalism, you’re serving yourself. Well, that could be OK: You hire your private analyst to find turkeys to short and you short them. But then you use your public prominence to reveal what you now know and that all but assures that the stock will fall, making your short a good investment. I’d call that a virtuous circle except . . .

Is everything unfair in love, war, and Wall Street? Yes, but some things are less fair than others. And it’s hard to sit up on a journalistic high horse — to ridicule the rest of journalism — even as you take behind-the-scenes advantage of your knowledge and the impact of your prominence. This, of course, is exactly why news organizations have policies requiring either not owning a stock or revealing ownership in companies you cover or not trading on them when you write about them: so you can judge whether to trust them and so they cannot take advantage of moving the market for a stock. If a professional reporter did what Cuban did, he would be fired … and Cuban would probably write a blog post attacking him.

There has been much discussion of this online. See this excellent editorial in the Star-Telegram:

It’s too bad that Cuban couldn’t let his investment in Sharesleuth stand on its own. He had to use it as a tool in a side deal to make himself a few more bucks to add to the gigazillion that he already has.

In the process, he cast doubt on Sharesleuth’s efforts.

See Gary Weiss writing on his blog:

It’s a shame that an ethical rich guy– one with the public spirit Cuban lacks — hasn’t stepped into the breach and set up a genuine financial investigative reporting outlet to examine crummy stocks. But as a public service, not as a source of pocket money.

Of course, there is yet another alternative, which is that mainstream media outlets crank up their coverage of stock fraud.

Securities Litigation Watch, a blog, says — and others quoted here agree — that Cuban’s actions are not illegal but that Cuban…

…has found the previously unexploited Achilles’ Heel of the insider trading laws and fired an arrow deep into it. The result is that for the first time, a legal form of what most people would consider “insider trading” exists and can be replicated by anyone with (a) the resources to hire a skilled investigative journalist, (b) the ability to generate a readership on the Internet.

And see the comments on Sharesleuth itself: This poster tries to give analogies that explain why Cuban’s activity doesn’t seem right:

I see a huge contradiction in providing information on what you personally believe to be a scam (in escence, posting a “do not enter” sign) but then on the other hand potentially making a financial gain (shorting the company stock). Essentially, it seems, indirectly partaking in the named fraudulent operation and knowingly so. This is even magnified by the fact of Mr. Cuban shorting the shares PRIOR to the report that it appears he has direct input.

In the report D’Arnaud-Taylor and his wife are demonized for selling the company shares into the open market, and maybe rightly so. But how are the buyers of Mr. Cuban’s short sell any less a victim than the buyers of D’Arnaud-Taylor sells? If both are aware that the underlining business that the shares represent to be a perversion of truth are they not each participants? (though Mr. Cuban on lower level understandably so). Is not the instrument of the fraud the stock itself?

Another commenter identifying himself as a shareholder in the company that Sharesleuth pilloried — an aforementioned poor shlub — says:

On the outset, it appears that you have good intentions Mr. Mark Cuban. Your plan is to uncover the “dirt” on companies to save investors from losing out, correct?…So this might make you a “hero” to some people…and I might agree with that EXCEPT for the fact that you appear to be making a decent profit on all of this negative hype you are building up. In a sense, you are profiting off of the unsuspecting shareholders (like me), who have put their trust in the companies you are digging up “dirt” on.

The honorable thing to do would be to NOT trade on the companies that you write about, thus giving your readers a chance to exit…or if you do trade wait for 30 days after the article has been released.

If you happen to uncover true “dirt” about a company, and that company is truly an “evil” company, than the shareholders are victims, correct? So, in essence, what you are doing now is profiting off of victims before they have an opportunity to escape.

Another shareholder:

So this is suppose to “help” people avoid investing in poorly managed companies or just plain bad companies…unfortunately the average investor got the info too late. I was down over $1200 by the time I was “informed”. Mr. Cuban I appreciate your work, but a little heads up for the little guy would have been nice. I know $1200 may only be lunch for you, but it is a lot more than that for most people. I love the Mavs, I love you, but this hurts. That’s just $1200 less I have to spend on Mavs tickets this year.

You see, journalism is, in the end, about trust and credibility and this is what Cuban is doing to his. Mind you, Cuban is right to ridicule the trust and credibility of stock analysts and much financial journalism that just sucks up what those analysts and company flacks feed them. They, too, don’t protect the public. But just because they’re bad, does that mean you need to be? Two wrongs, etc.

Cuban is, of course, unrepentant. He goes off on a rant that, as near as I can tell, reasons that news organizations make profits so why shouldn’t he? He says:

Every media outlet has an agenda. Given that almost all are public entities, the primary agenda is Earnings Per Share. When was the last time you read the New York Times say they were going to proactively choose to lower their earnings this quarter and for the next several quarters so they can invest in doing a better job of reporting ? Or that they planned on expanding the number of pages dedicated to their journalistic endeavors at the expense of shareholder return ? Anyone ?

Well, actually, I’ve sat in public meetings with Times editors as they talk about the cost of maintaining a Baghdad bureau and that is not a financially motivated decision. I’ve watched papers add pages to cover big news — as an editor, I’ve done it myself — when those pages came with no advertising and thus only brought loss. I’ve sent reporters on trips to cover stories that would bring no revenue. Why do journalists do these things? To serve the public. Haughty but true.

And what this brings out is the equally haughty question: What is the nature and mission of journalism? Is it an effort to serve the public over oneself ; is that a key element in the definiton? That’s where the Cuban case would lead us, I think. Is journalism now about getting any information from any source with any agenda? Well, I’ve argued that we all do have agendas and the worst thing is for them to be hidden. Is journalism about trust and credibility? And can we trust and believe Cuban when he’s making money on the information he can afford to gather and disseminate?

I sure as hell hope there will be ample opportunity to discuss this and challenge Cuban at the Online News Association. Are they presenting him as some paragon of journalism? Some new kind of media mogul? Some opponent of journalism’s old ways? Or a circus act? I’m bringing popcorn.

If Cuban had just started a new journalistic endeavor to show the way and shame the business press into reporting and investigating — not to mention to create jobs for reporters — he might have been welcomed with open arms. I’ll bet that there are plenty of ripped-off shareholders out there who’d have gladly contributed to make this a success. And advertisers would want to talk to an audience of smart investors. But by turning this into a personal and shady profit center, by trying to play the bad boy in this arena as he does in the basketball arena, he harmed his endeavor, his reputation, and even the nascent movement in independent journalism. Just so he could make a few bucks. Now that’s what I call dumb money.

: LATER: Mark Cuban responds on his blog. He digs up every snarky thing I’ve said about him and that’s fine. My view of Cuban is encapsulated in what I said at the start of this post. He doesn’t really respond to the ethical question about reporting on the company from a position that can move the market for it while having an interest in that market. I would very much like to see him explore that more. He lists the stocks he has shorted and their status so we can judge whether he has had an influence. I do think that Sharesleuth is bigger — and, in so many ways, better — than a blog comment and so its influence will surely be different. Cuban says that trust is built with getting the facts right. Amen, brother, amen. It is also built, in this age of transparency, with both revealing and avoiding, when possible and when necessary, conflicts of interest. You see, I’m a big fan of Sharesleuth and Cuban starting it in every aspect except that conflict, which does undermine trust.

See the comments on his post and this one; lots of good discussion. And I’ll repeat that I hope there is this sort of discussion at ONA. There are a few vital debates here. One is about reporting on companies and protecting the public and how we find better ways to do that than relying on newspaper business writers who are good at nothing so much as retyping press releases and quoting analysts who are good at nothing so much as spitting up company lines. The other is about journalism and what expectations and standards the trusted will operate under, whether that journalism is performed by a big, old, professional institution or by a renegade upstart company or by individuals or networks of all of the above. I’m not sure what the answers are in either case but I think we need to explore them through these debates.

: LATER STILL: Mark Glaser writes a very good summary of the good, the bad, and the ugly of Cuban and Sharesleuth. See also Gary Weiss’ next post.

I’m about to cut off comments on posts having to do with the Middle East. A few people come in and take it over repeating the same angry arguments over and over until it escalates into scuds v. cruises. I don’t even both reading them. I suspect you don’t, either. I love interactivity. But who could love this?

: LATER: I closed comments on two posts for a few hours. They are back open. Can we please try not to fight WWIII here? Discussion is wonderful. Disagreement is wonderful. Even argument is wonderful. But shouting hurts the ears.

Comment is Free had me write a post about Thomson’s news stories made by computer. A commenter comes up with the blog comment algorithm. For example:

Put one keyword in, say ‘CIF’ from the top of this page, and you get the following, ready for use almost anywhere on CIF:

“This is a deeply offensive piece. It all comes down to how the Israelis/Palestinians started all of this in 256BC/1917/1948/1967/2000. To deny this is deeply anti-semitic/rabidly Zionist/Islamophobic. Only what I expect to read on this bigotted site lately.”