BuzzMachine

Craig Stoltz does a masterful job summarizing the Farhi-Jarvis-Rosenbaum fest in six Twitter-sized bites. His 2 cents at the end: “Blame doesn’t matter. Journalists unwilling to think and work differently to save the profession should take the next buyout.” Couldn’t have said it better myself.

I am the honoree of an attempted hatchet job by Ron Rosenbaum in - what’s the name of that site? Salon? no, Slate (I always get them confused). I’ll spare you his three pages of bluster (O, for the days of scarce space on paper) and get to his point: He’s mad because I’m not acting sufficiently mournful and respectful at the demise of his friends’ journalistic careers (and perhaps his own). I’m “increasingly heartless” about these “beautiful losers.”

Sadly, Rosenbaum doesn’t debate the idea and history and fate of journalism, which might be productive or at least provocative. Instead, like a pissy third grader, he attacks me. Because of my opinion, he says he doesn’t “like” me anymore. Take that, Jarvis! You can’t sit at my lunch table ever again! He reminds me of that same third grader who, when he doesn’t study for a test and sees the results of his inattention, whines, cries, and stomps his little feet, declaring, “It’s not fair.” No, kid, life ain’t.

What I’m really doing is holding journalists responsible for the fate of journalism. How dare I? Rosenbaum says, “Not only does he blame the victims, he denies them the right to consider themselves victims.” As if victimhood gets us anywhere.

For the record, here is the nut of what I said in a blog post and Guardian column that inspired this attack. I was responding to efforts to absolve journalists of responsibility for the fall of journalism and its vessels by Paul Farhi, Roy Greenslade, and Adrian Monck:

My purpose in rebutting Farhi, Greenslade and Monck is not to flagellate journalists but to empower them. To take responsibility for the fall of journalism is to take responsibility for its fate. Who’ll try to save it if not journalists? There’s not a minute to waste whining.

But sadly, Rosenbaum doesn’t discuss that. He whines and prefers to mock me for going to conferences, advising news companies, and teaching journalists (helping to train more of them, not end up with fewer of them). I’m not sure what he’d rather have me do: Sit in my room and mope, sitting shiva for the past? Refuse to discuss the future of journalism? Tell newspapers when they call asking for brainstorming to fuck off and die? Would that be in solidarity with my hack brethren who did too little to transform journalism in the last 13 years of the web?

Just this morning I attended - busted! - another conference where I talked over coffee and croissant with chief executives of four newspaper companies as they brainstormed new models for news. I ran a conference at CUNY last week in new business models for news. I am starting an organization at CUNY to find, explore, and share best practices in new business models for news. I teach a course in entrepreneurial journalism in hopes supporting small sparks of innovation. Full disclosure: I also advise or invest in a number of related startups including Daylife, Publish2, 33Across, Black20, Brightcove, Outside.in (and haven’t made a penny on any et). I hope the profession - or someone - finds ways to save journalism.

Whether we save all the journalists today is entirely another matter and not my goal. Rosenbaum believes that makes me heartless. I think it makes me realistic. And we need some realism in this business. If Rosenbaum really wants to dislike someone, he might turn his spitballs toward my friends Scott Karp and Seth Godin, who declare that “the market and the internet don’t care if you make money.” There is no divine right for newsroom jobs. Nor is printing and trucking an eternal verity of the field. There is, instead, a need for journalism. That’s the problem to solve. That’s the opportunity to follow.

At the Foursquare conference this morning, I heard the voluble Sam Zell of Chicago say what he’s said before - he’s a realist. A few old hands in the industry shook their heads about him. I asked them to name three disrupters inside the newspaper business today. They failed. Whether Zell is your disrupter of choice, at least he’s asking the questions, challenging the assumptions.

Rosenbaum accuses me of “living the good life” as a consultant, professor, blogger, blatherer. I wish. When I worked for Advance and Conde Nast, I made many times what I do now. So why the hell did I leave? Because I wanted to be more a part of the future and believed I could best do that by working with students who will be that future, by helping companies from the outside with one other perspective, and by joining in and sometimes prodding the urgent discussion about new and sustainable models for news.

Of course, you’re free to argue with what I say and call bullshit on me. I wish you would (and many of you do). That would be productive. Sticking your tongue out is not. Rosenbaum also complains about the aphorisms, blog headlines, and PowerPoint lines that emit from here. Fine, but they sometimes travel better than three pages of bile and bluster. “Do what you do best and link to the rest” may be cute but it also starts discussions.

Let’s have that discussion, Ron.

If Rosenbaum had reported about my reporting, he would have avoided some errors in his piece. (We’ll see now whether, like a good blogger, he corrects them.) He says that I recently heard and repeated a speech by Paulo Coelho in Frankfurt. Actually, I interviewed Coelho - reporting, that’s called - for my book and a Guardian column in Paris last summer. He says I lived by the World Trade Center on 9/11. Actually, I’ve said often that I was on the last PATH train into the center that day (Google skills would have gotten him that).

He also speculates about the reporting in my book. He wonders - rather than asks - whether I sought access from Google and was rebuffed. I did not and was not. I interviewed many people like Coelho. I chose not to seek official and controlled access to Google and in my acknowledgments in the book, I explain why:

Note that I am not thanking Google. I am grateful for Google’s existence, its lessons, and its inspiration—not to mention Marissa Mayer’s quotable advice online. But I want to note that I did not seek access to Google for this book because I wanted to judge it and learn from it at a distance. My admiration of Google, then, does not spring from any relationship with the company but from its incredible example.

Rosenbaum also speculates on my opinions. He says I don’t “seem to recognize distinctions of value.” What the hell does that mean? Even as he mocks my little law, he cites Gresham’s Law - a brief and quotable aphorism, a chestnut, itself: “Trash drives out value.” But I argue that the internet ends scarcity and enables great creation and with it new value. He complains about my trust in the market — “the same market that created this debacle and came close to destroying the economy.” I say at some level, if you don’t trust the market - the people, us - then you don’t value democracy, capitalism, education, art … or journalism (for why trust, empower, enable, ennoble, and inform the people if we all a bunch of idiots?). “He’s the Sarah Palin of gurus,” Rosenbaum says. “The crowd is always right.” Don’tcha know, it’s often more right than we give it credit for.

“Look,” Rosenbaum concludes, “there’s nothing wrong with Jarvis doing all this thinking and decreeing.” Gosh, thanks, Ron. But if you question my authority to discuss the future of journalism, I wonder who made you the DMV of the discussion.

: LATER: G’bless Paulo Coelho for his response to Rosenbaum in the comments:

Ron claims that I am a New Age guru. Please pass the message to him, as his blog does not have a direct place for comments (it is too complicate to leave any post there): he should sit and meditate, become a vegetarian, say OMMMMMMMM 250.352 times a day, smile while saying “Peace and Love” to strangers, read the Bragavad Gita every morning. Only then, he should sit and start blogging. For sure, his text will improve, his bitterness will dissapear.

: LATER STILL: See Michael Miner’s and Ken Sands’ thoughtful posts on the real issues.

Election days are — next to the days after Thanksgiving and Christmas — the worst days of journalism on the calendar. They are “yeah, we know” days. People shop. People vote. Tell me something I don’t know. Please. This is the journalism of filling space and time. We have to print an edition or fill airtime and this is what’s happening today and you’re going to come to us anyway so we’re going to tell you about it even if we have nothing — nothing — new and informative to say.

The journalism of links, on the other hand, would dictate that it’s not worth using resources to tell people what they already know because no one will pass that on and passing on is the new distribution chain for news. (People won’t just come to you anyway anymore.)

I’m not suggesting that news judgment should be determined just by what is passed around. We know how silly the most-emailed lists are; they’re the wacky stories, water-cooler journalism. Instead, I’m suggesting that if you can’t imagine anyone linking to your coverage — if you can’t imagine anyone saying “this was new,” “this is good,” “this was valuable,” “go here for more,” “I didn’t know this,” or “you should know this” — then chances are, it’s not worth saying and in the link economy it won’t get audience, and so it’s not worth making.

In that link economy — in the Googleverse — you stand out above the level playing field by creating something uniquely useful, informative, compelling, or valuable. As other news organizations cut back, they will more and more point to good work done elsewhere. So another way to ask this question is, “have I contributed something to the press-sphere (and will I get attention as a result)?” For elsewhere in the sphere, others are doing what they do best and linking to the rest.

At the Telegraph, online editor Marcus Warren just told PaidContent: “We are doing what we do best, main content, but also linking to the rest, as Jeff Jarvis would put it.” Or as Marcus Huendgen just said in Der Westen, “Do the fucking links.” Yes, I’m gratified at the spread of that meme. It’s not just advice. It’s a recognition of the new architecture of news and media.

A few years ago, the Associated Press did a lot of research among young people as it prepared to create a news product for them. One meme they heard again and again: “Don’t tell us what we already know.” Don’t waste their time — and your dwindling resources.

So I come to you today over-informed about how many people are standing in a random line or about a random machine that broke down and got fixed — because that’s where the reporter was standing and she had nothing else to tell me. Don’t bother.

After letting the work of the New Business Models for News Summit at CUNY sink in, I think we need to convene a working group from each of the discussions at the summit to move to the next step and build at least one concrete model.

When I stopped in the session about the reorganized newsroom, they pleaded for help as they continued to debate whether to cut what exists today or build from the ground up. It was my fault as I didn’t give them a specific task. I should have learned from the Economist’s Project Red Stripe and from a Davos session on innovation last year: Innovation springs from solving a problem — a specific problem, not the grand problem of the future of news and society.

So I proposed a problem to solve: What if a city, say Philadelphia, loses its paper tomorrow. What would you build in its place to serve the community? The group went to town. Rather than trying to hack at the old, they build something new.

They calculated the likely revenue Philadelphia could support online and then figured out what they could afford in staffing. Instead of the 200-300-person newsroom that has existed in print, they decided they could afford 35 and they broke that down to include a new job description: “community managers who do outreach, mediation, social media evangelism.” They settled on three of those plus 20 content creators, two programmers, three designers, five producers (I think they were a bit heavy on those two), and — get this — only three editors. (Which led to much discussion in the final plenary of the day, which I address in the post below.)

That was real progress. Usually in the newspaper industry, this discussion comes after the cutbacks occur as papers then try to figure out how to cope with what’s left. This group of edit and business and money people bravely built from the bottom up, relying on few assumptions about the past.

Next, if time had allowed, we would have taken the newsroom group next door to the network group, which was foundering a bit, trying to figure out how to apply networks such as Glam’s to this challenge. They, too, didn’t have a specific problem to solve. But the newsroom group would have brought theirs: How could 35 journalists possibly serve Philadelphia as 200-300 had? I see one option: with the help of networks of independent agents working collaboratively. So let’s figure out how those networks would operate in terms of content, technology, revenue, education, branding, and so on.

Then we could go down the hall to the group working on new structures for news organizations: the disaggregated news company as presented earlier in the day by Edward Roussel of the Telegraph and Dave Morgan, ex of Tacoda. They also talked — as everyone did through the day — about the need for a drastically lower cost structure for news organizations (see Edward’s chart).

Next stop: The group working on public support to see what slice of journalism might be underwritten by the community or foundations. It wouldn’t be much but ProPublic, David Cohn’s Spot.us, and Charlie Sennott’s GlobalPost are trying to prove that the public can at least help.

Last and more important stop: revenue. Fred Wilson, leading the discussion, summed up its discovery in a tweet: “clickable will sell joe the pumber a text ad that $goog will route via outside.in geotag to the boston herald.” (Translation: Clickable sells Joe an ad on Google, which will appear on a local story on the Herald site thanks to Outside.in’s ability to understand the geography of articles and target appropriately. Moral to the story: No one is any longer going to own the market alone. Revenue, like reporting, will be collaborative.)

If you add up the work of the groups, you start to see a shape for new news. But there’s much more work to be done to make it concrete. If we take the work that the groups began and bring it to the next level with a clear problem to solve — e.g., replacing a metro newspaper — then I think we will begin to see new models, new ways to organize news companies, new ways to produce news, new revenue opportunities, and new relationships with the community take form. And this, in turn, could yield a methodology and attitude to create more new models.

Under the auspices of the New Business Models for News Project and Center for Journalistic Innovation at CUNY, I hope we can bring in MBA students to help create financial models. We would share these models and the discussion that builds them openly.

We at CUNY can imagine no more urgent work in news: creating the means to support it.

A few notes upon reflection about the New Business Models for News Summit at CUNY:

* A few days after the conference, David Carr in the New York Times piled on the lamentations about more layoffs and cutbacks in the news business. On the Media continued the dirge a few days after that. There’s no news here. The industry is shrinking. We already know that.

There’s news in reporting on people who are trying to do something about it and create new models and enterprises for news. Those are the folks we had at the conference.

* A star among them was our own David Cohn, co-organizer of the conference, as he presented Spot.US, his Knight-Challenge-funded startup to create an infrastructure for readers to support reporters doing stories. David’s elevator pitch was a model for all my entrepreneurial journalism students. His enthusiasm, inventiveness, and ability to see opportunities where others see gloom was a model to the executives in the room. What I loved best was watching executives and investors from very big companies stuffing David’s pocket with their business cards. Who says the news business is dying? If you know where to look, it’s being reborn.

Other new models and views of news included:
> Charlie Sennott presenting GlobalPost as a means to support 70 freelancer correspondents in 53 countries around the world submitting stories and also turning their journalism into a process with their audience;
> Upendra Shardanand of Daylife and Scott Karp of Publish2 [disclosure: I have a relationship with both companies] presenting their infrastructure for the link (vs. the content) economy of news;
> Michael Rosenblum showing how training citizens in video can become a source of both content and revenue;
> Mark Josephson of Outside.in on a structure of organizing local content;
> David Chase of NextNewsNet on a local ad network and Adam Bly of Science Blogs on a specialized ad and content network;
> Colin Crawford on the transformation of IDG from a print to a digital company;
> Adam Davidson of NPR talked about the creation of the Planet Money podcast there.

Late additions to the group included Debbie Galant, the monarch of the hyperlocal bloggers at Baristanet, who talked about running a business on the scale of the old independent bookstore, and Rachel Sterne, founder of citizen-journalism platform GroundReport.

* I was delighted that the amazing group we were lucky to bring together had moved past the old rivalries: business vs. edit, new media vs. old. I was also quite relieved to hear a universal sense of urgency about the need to find new means to sustain journalism. There isn’t a minute to waste.

As a result, we saw editorial and business people entering into frank conversations we don’t often hear, willing to reset assumptions and build new models. Included in that was a general acceptance that the cost structure of the news business is way too high and has to be cut. This slide from the Telegraph’s Edward Roussel resonated strongly in the room.

Roussel also said: “If you’re a newspaper group, your technology sucks.”

Just as Roussel was blunt and frank so was his fellow presenter on the topic of the disaggregated news organization, Dave Morgan, who quoted Gary Pruitt, CEO of McClatchy, from only the day before. Pruitt said: “We believe that the majority of the decline that we are currently seeing is cyclical and therefore temporary.” After heaping caveats of praise on Pruitt as an executive, Morgan called bullshit. Exactly so. We need tough, honest talk now.

* I was interested in seeing a conflict arise at the end of the day — one of the few, actually — on the relative value of content creators vs. editors. No one in the room would say that both aren’t valued and needed. But when push comes to shove with spare resources, there is a difference of opinion on what added value really means. Some put maximum resource into creating content: reporting. Some insist on the need for editors to create order, to correct and vet, to curate, as we say these days. The disagreement is only one of degree.

* I wish I’d had more people from other industries. When Tom Evslin got up to give his very good primer on network economics, he made a point of saying that he was not a journalist. After the conference, someone from an international technology company said he thought the people in the room were “not ready to make the leap” (perhaps so, but he should have heard similar folks a year ago; the change is striking). At Davos last January, I ran a session between news executives and tech executives in which the latter excoriated the former for throwing in the towel and convinced them that there was fight left in the news industry. The news business is, ironically, insular and it needs to hear that perspective. I also should have had more voices from women, bloggers, and our international participants. We could have filled two days with good discussion but decided, two weeks before an election, that wouldn’t have worked.

* Eric Stein of Google gave us some stats that show where the potential is. He said there are 23 million small businesses in America, six million of them with one or more employees. That is the new population of advertisers who never could afford newspapers. Though as I learned when I visited Gannett’s lab a few days after the conference, those businesses don’t necessarily operate with the same needs and assumptions as present newspaper advertisers and it would be a mistake to try to impose those practices. Stein also said that newspapers reach only 20 percent of advertisers in a market. In that other 80 percent lies much of the hope for the future of local news.

* I didn’t write down who said it but I wrote down this thought: We may want to reframe journalism not as an information business but as community-building.

* At the end of it all, we asked the participants to charge CUNY with next steps as we work to build the Center for Journalistic Innovation and raise money under a matching grant from the Tow Foundation. Among those tasks:
> Develop a baseline business model to provide a community with journalism. (See the post above; I agree that that is job 1.)
> Share best practices and lessons, including mistakes, from various countries. (That will be the main job of the New Business Models for News project in the center; we have the remainder of the MacArthur Foundation grant that funded this meeting to start that work and we just received a grant from the McCormick Foundation to continue it but we need to raise more.)
> Develop new models in detail to share with the industry. (This, too, will be the work of the New Business Models for News project.)
> Develop quantitative research on community needs. (I just spoke with the Knight Commission and found that they are working on that.)
> Collaborate with our business school to better equip journalists with business knowledge. (That’s my hidden agenda for teaching entrepreneurial journalism at CUNY. We’re looking at doing more.)
> Discuss curation in a journalistic context. (I just spoke with a museum curator about creating a symposium to do that.)
> Work on an infrastructure for news organizations to share and monetize original content. (Work on that began that very evening with another group meeting).

* We had an incredible group of people at CUNY, which is a testament to their sense of urgency to work on the business of journalism. I want to thank them all and also thank the MacArthur Foundation for making this meeting possible and the McCormick Foundation for enabling us to continue this work.

Mikiane.com suggests (en Francais) that the journalist is a DJ. I like that. It’s a bit less haughty than what I’ve been saying lately: The journalist is a curator. Curators work in stuffy museums where they control everything in sight and tell people where to go; they package their world, like a newspaper, in a box with a bow. DJs work in the cacaphony of a dance floor, which is more like life. It’s up to the folks on the floor whether to dance to the tunes the DJ sets.

The Christian Science Monitor is turning off its press and going fully online. I heard about this at my conference on new business models for news last week and said it makes perfect sense. The Monitor is a powerful and respected brand that already serves an international audience. I hadn’t looked at it on paper in decades but I’ve read its stories online. Paper was a drag. At the Times story reports, there was discussion among more editors and publishers at the conference about giving up the press. We’ll see more of this.

My Guardian column this week reprises discussion on the blog about moving past the article as the fundamental unit of journalism.

We’re holding the New Business Models for News Summit at CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism today. Students will be live-blogging at newsinnovation.com. The amazing Rachel Sterne will be broadcasting on GroundReport.com.

On my “run” through a wet Hamburg this morning, I listened, as is now my daily habit, to the NPR Planet Money podcast. The show - made by Adam Davidson, Alex Blumberg, Laura Conaway, and David Kenstenbaum - is a superb example of journalism as process not product.

The internet allowed NPR to break its format and schedule and meet an urgent need to explain to the public what the hell is going on. What else is journalism for? The podcast - and two shows that played on This American Life - have been hailed by many, including me, as the best explanatory journalism on the crisis. The story is too big to handle with a three-minute story here and another there. It requires a process of reporting, explaining, following up.

Planet Money’s narrative unfolds with the news itself. They don’t try to tie up all the loose ends by the end of each podcast. Instead, they tell us that they’ll follow this angle or that and answer open questions. The other day, for example, an interviewee told Davidson that the bailout money could be used by banks to pay dividends or buy back stock. He said just what I was thinking: Our blood was boiling. He didn’t have the rest of that story then. Instead, he told us that he’d be sure to follow the angle.

The audience also joins in, asking questions, which the Planet Money team patiently and intelligently answers. This, too, forms the podcast.

It’s a process.

My Guardian column this week is a columnization of the post I wrote last week rebutting Paul Farhi’s absolution of journalists in the fall of journalism. The point remains:

My purpose in rebutting Farhi, Greenslade and Monck is not to flagellate journalists but to empower them. To take responsibility for the fall of journalism is to take responsibility for its fate. Who’ll try to save it if not journalists? There’s not a minute to waste whining.

Paul Farhi of the Washington Post issues a resounding apologia for journalists in the American Journalism Review, arguing that the fall of newspapers isn’t their fault. Then Roy Greenslade leaps up with a resounding hear! hear! They echo a defense earlier this year from Adrian Monck (who had decreed, “The crops did not fail because we offended the gods”).

Though I respect these three men, I must call bullshit.

The fall of journalism is, indeed, journalists’ fault.

It is our fault that we did not see the change coming soon enough and ready our craft for the transition. It is our fault that we did not see and exploit — hell, we resisted — all the opportunities new media and new relationships with the public presented. It is our fault that we did not give adequate stewardship to journalism and left the business to the business people. It is our fault that we lost readers and squandered trust. It is our fault that we sat back and expected to be supported in the manner to which we had become accustomed by some unknown princely patron. Responsibility and blame are indeed ours.

Farhi’s rationalization on behalf of his fellow journalists makes many bad assumptions and blind turns and Greenslade only follows him down those alleys, piping in with (my emphases follow) an “unhesitating answer” of no to accusations of journalistic guilt. “There cannot be any doubt that journalists themselves … cannot be held responsible for either the financial woes of the industry nor for the public turning its back on the ‘products’ that contain their work.” He piles on: “They are blameless.” They have “no reason to feel guilty…. It isn’t our fault…. The truth is that we are being assailed by revolutionary technological forces completely outside of our control…. We journalists are not [his emphasis] paying the price for our own (alleged) failures…. you are not the cause of the current calamity.”

The hack doth protest too much.

Farhi assumes that a newspaper is a well-defined product that is no longer supported by classified and retail advertisers and that’s not our fault. He acknowledges that newspapers should be updating their sites, adding Twitter, social networking, Google Maps, and more video. But he ignores the greater need and opportunity to rethink and reinvent journalism itself.

The internet does not just present a few glittery toys. It presents the circumstances to change our relationship with the public, to work collaboratively in networks, to find new efficiencies thanks to the link, to rethink how we cover and present news. No, the essence of the problem is that we thought the internet represented just a new gadget and not a fundamental change in society, the economy, and thus journalism.

By maintaining the newspaper and its newsroom as essentially static entities, Farhi also makes the common and dangerous assumption that their budgets are also fixed: They are what they are because they always have been and so that’s what they need to be. So it’s not their fault that they need to be supported at that level. But newsrooms are terribly inefficient and too many of their expenses were fueled by ego. We bear business responsibility. That is why I am teaching business in a journalism school, so we can be better stewards.

Farhi glosses over — in an unjournalistic way, I’m afraid — the state of the business and its relationship with its public. He brags that almost 50 million Americans still buy papers and so, he argues, readership is not the issue. But circulation is down more than 14 percent since 1970 and since then population has risen by 50 percent, so the adjusted loss is 74 percent. If steady, circulation should be 92 million today. Penetration is roughly half what it was: a mere 17 percent vs. 30 percent. I’d say our relationship with readers is a problem — in more ways than one: A Gallup survey says 52 percent of Americans do not trust news media, up from 30 percent in 1972. Are the two tied? Of course, they are. Who’s responsible for that?

“The critics have it exactly backward,” Farhi says. “Journalists and journalism are the victims, not the cause, of the industry’s shaken state.” Victims? As Farhi says to the critics, “Oh, please.”

Victimhood is an irresponsible abdication of responsibility, a surrender. He might as well declare newspapers dead: Oh, well, we did our best, but everybody around us fucked up and so they’re going to go away now. How dare they do this to us?

My purpose in rebutting Farhi and Greenslade is not to beat up journalists but instead to empower them. The reason to take responsibility for the fall of journalism is to take responsibility for the fate of journalism. Who’s going to try to save it if not for journalists? We are indeed responsible for the future of journalism and we have about one minute to grab that bull by its horns.

(This is why I am holding a conference at CUNY on new business models for news. There is not a minute to waste.)