Here’s what I think is a pretty solid business tip: I wouldn’t back or bet on a company and industry that’s described this way in today’s New York Times (my emphasis):
Like newspaper owners, media moguls are looking for new ways to protect their investment from the ravages of the Internet. And, as with the newspaper industry, the answer remains elusive.
I’d rather invest in a company that will take advantage of the new opportunities of the internet, not seeing ravages in the future but instead growth and profit. I’ve said often that protection is no strategy for the future. An industry whose strategy for the future is built on trying to keep us from doing what we want to do and resist the flow of the internet is an industry that is merely biding time. That should be the lesson they learn from newspapers and music.
Yes, I think that the tactic described in that story, put forward by Time Warner’s Jeffrey Bewkes, of enabling us to watch shows we’ve already paid for online makes sense. Indeed, I refuse to use HBO on demand on cable today because they want to charge me extra to watch what I’ve already paid for. So I’ll rush to the chance to watch my shows without having to go through the bother of recording them or paying for them twice.
But the real future is an on-demand future, an unbundled future. Once freed from the forced march of cable bundles, I will buy only the content I want to buy online, no longer being bribed into supporting the 90 percent of cable channels I never watch so I can get the 10 percent I want.
For that matter, what’s a channel? I was an an event last week with entertainment moguls of various camps and one asked another whether the channel would die. The second exec didn’t think so. At first, I agreed, as I pictured myself on the couch watching one of the channels I do care about.
But then I pictured my kids on the couch. They’re not doing what I do. They never just watch channels (tennis matches excluded). They live on-demand. They watch programming only through the web, Hulu, the DVR, on-demand channels. Some look at that future, our kids’ future, and see “the ravages of the internet.” They’re not long for this world; they’re only trying to delay the inevitable. They’re trying to swim upstream against the internet. But they’re only going to drown there.
I’m getting email pitches – filled with legalese – to contribute to Dan Abrams’ awkwardly named Mediaite (guess all the good URLs were taken). This is the same Dan Abrams – lawyer, thus the legalese, and failed MSNBC host and executive – who is starting a PR company – oh, excuse me, media strategy firm – to advise companies on media while promising access to media people – the same media people, one imagines, he is getting to write about media for his media site. Gawd, it’s positive hermaphroditic: A bunch of worms who can’t figure out who’s fucking whom how. I think I’ll stay away. Don’t want any of that on me. To quote the wonderful Jemima Kiss of the Guardian as she tweeted today about somebody switching the mouse on her desk: “hand cheese.”
When I write for HuffingtonPost or the Guardian’s Comment is Free or Silicon Alley Insider or Seeking Alpha, I just write and say what I think. Not for lawyer Abrams’ Mediaite. The email from fellow lawyer turned media person Rachel Sklar says they’re going to have “a number of great, regular paid columns and intend to have a number of paid contributors” but adds that payment is still being “hammered out.” I’d suggest bringing the hammer out when ready. “What does this mean for you?” she can’t help adding. ” Well, our goal is to develop these ideas, and eventually to pay certain top contributors a revenue share and/or stipend.” Eventually.
Then we get a 14-point list of rules. Including:
…3. Feel free to express any opinion, however unpopular; however, you must be able to support your arguments with linkable facts and/or original, verifiable reporting. We need to give the reader enough information to intelligently disagree with you; you need to be able to demonstrate to your critics why you are totally right and they are idiots…
9. NB: #3 effectively precludes racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic or otherwise unsupportable/repugnant views. Provable arguments mean rational, sane thought. Since you are all sane, rational people we’re not that worried, but it must be said….
11. We are happy to cross-post material from your website or another source, provided you have the rights to do so. If you wish to respond to reader comments, you may submit one “Update” to the post. Two is pushing it, especially since you adhered so strictly to #3. We’d rather you just attack the person on Twitter….
13. You retain all the rights to your work. In the event that we enter into a revenue-share or some other financial deal, we reserve the right to negotiate the terms on a case-by-case basis….
So we’re told to argue our points and not be repugnant and though we own our nonrepugnant thoughts, they reserve the right to negotiate with us for them. Should they have quit their day jobs?
I want to hug my blog. I don’t need any lawyers-turned-flacks-turned-media-commentators-turned-publishers. I can publish on my own. Right here. And I can be as repugnant as I want.
Let me make clear: If he had just started a blog or a group blog about media, cool. But announcing that he’s also starting a PR company offering access to media people makes it stink. And then trying to throw on the cloak of legalese does nothing to relieve the stench. I’m sorry but this smells.
: As I read Abrams Research’s site, it only gets worse: The media people sometimes won’t even know whom they’re advising.
Here’s an example of what they do:
# A Fortune 500 business believes the financial media has focused unfairly on a small change in accounting practices rather than significant increases in revenues.
* Abrams Research can bring together top financial journalists to advise that business on how to best convey its message.
My emphasis. Journalists?
: LATER: Here is Rachel Sklar’s response to me. And I still say craigslist is lower case.
Young Broadcasting, once – but no longer – a forward-thinking TV company, just filed for bankruptcy under the crushing $13 $1-billion debt load. This follows the bankruptcy of cable company Charter and, of course, TV-station-owner Tribune company. And let’s not forget radio giant Clear Channel, with $19 billion in borrowing, tapping its last-resort debt and Sirius-XM (whose stock I own) nearing bankruptcy while even Muzak crosses the line.
We’ve been wringing hands over newspapers and magazines but TV and radio aren’t far behind. Broadcast is next.
It’s a failure of distribution as a business model. Distribution is a scarcity business: ‘I control the tower/press/wire and you don’t and that’s what makes my business.’ Not long ago, they said that owning these channels was tantamount to owning a mint. No more. The same was said of content. But it’s relationships (read: links) that create value today.
Young tried to build relationships, once upon a time. At WKRN in Nashville, Mike Sechrist did amazing work starting blogs, buildilng relationships with bloggers, training the community in the skills of the TV priesthood. But he left and all that disappeared. Been there, done that, I can imagine executives saying as they try to stuff the hole in the dike with borrowed dollars. Didn’t work.
The local TV and radio business, once a privilege to be part of, is next to fall. Timber.
Now magazines are looking bad and worse by the day. The latest: A major distributor is adding a surcharge, according to Keith Kelly in the NY Post.
Anderson News earlier this week informed publishers that it would impose a 7-cent charge for each copy of a magazine that it delivers to stores, and warned that any publisher that refuses to pay the fee could no longer count on Anderson to distribute its magazines….
Publishers, which have until Feb. 1 to agree to pay the new fee, are balking at Anderson News’ move, which would drive up costs at a time when most magazines are hurting. Indeed, American Media, which is already on the brink of bankruptcy, could be hit with a bill of up to $12 million, one source estimated. Another source said People, which has one of the best sell-through rates in the business, could be hit with up to $15 million in extra charges….
Magazines have a sell-through rate of around 38 percent and the surcharge would apply not to just the copies that are sold but to all unsold copies as well.
And magazine advertising is falling in the dumper – and it’s sure to get worse as the impact of the crash deepens. The Wall Street Journal reports at 17% plunge in ad pages in the fourth quarter against a year ago. For the year, they were off 12%.
TV’s next as auto, retail, and consumer categories suffer.
And they say the business model for the internet is crazy. At least it has no physical costs. Oh, I know, media online is supported by advertising, too, but the real opportunity there is to replace mass ads with a mass of niche ads. That is what Google did. Though Google, too, will feel the impact of the crash, it has room to grow while mass media do not. The crash is only accelerating — as in pouring accelerant on a fire — the fundamental shift in the economics of media. The change is big, fundamental, and permanent.
Following my bum’s rush from a industry association meeting yesterday – not a big deal on any scale; just personally aggravating, insulting, and embarrassing – I got to thinking (now there’s the danger) about the future of the industry association … and of industries. I wonder whether there is much of one.
By being ejected yesterday, the group decreed that I was an outsider. By one definition, that’s clear: I’m not a member; I don’t pay dues. But by a more sensible definition – we’re in this together, we people who care about the future of news – I’d say they’re defining insider way too narrowly, dangerously so. As I harrumphed out, I said this is the problem with the industry: It is too closed, still. It is not hearing enough new voices and perspectives and ideas. And this trade association is only exacerbating that insularity. Instead of calling it an echo chamber, perhaps my aural reference should have been to a crypt.
And as I walked out, I started to wonder why the people in that room need a trade association anymore. Isn’t Meetup the new trade association? If people in the industry want to get together to talk about their problems and search for solutions together, can’t they just arrange a meeting at a Starbucks? And wouldn’t it be better to open the tent wider – to expand the definition of inside – and get new people with new ideas to those meetings?
I will volunteer to play host to such meetings here at CUNY. Helping news transform is part of our mission, so we should. I’ll bet other universities would agree. Indeed, as budgets are cut back and trade association dues are lopped off, there’ll be a need for such ad hoc meetings – more need than ever. (Note, by the way, that the outsiders are getting together on their own at News Barcamp and we’re playing host to part of it at CUNY.)
And the wheels kept spinning. If there’s less need for trade associations – if they could even be dangerous because of the very limitations that define them – then doesn’t that indicate a diminution of the role of the trade (or industry or guild or craft or union, for that matter) in the future, when the tools get democratized and anybody can pick them up, when you don’t win through control of scarcity anymore but through supporting abundance? The idea of a closed industry and its closed association controlling a closed segment of media or the economy becomes absurd. In short: Who made you publishers and not you?
: BTW: There was a report that it was the WSJ that had me bounced. I didn’t think that was the case and Jay Rosen tweeted some reporting: It’s not.
: LATER: A rather lengthy addendum, in response to a Jay Rosen comment, here.
I was invited to speak to a media trade organization today – I’ll spare them the specifics – with the assignment of provoking discussion about new models, which I’m happy to do, even if I do often hear the same old lines and take the same old arrows. I also hear new challenges and learn from that. I was also looking forward to spending the rest of the day with the group to hear about their ideas and opportunities and needs were and, at their invitation, to share a drink at the end of it. I was going to get a chance to catch up with people I’ve worked with over many years and meet some new people I was looking forward to getting to know and I would learn a lot. It was an off-the-record session, which may not be ideal – for them – but is pretty standard; I’m used to that and abide by the desire.
But after I finished talking and sat down to hear the next panel, I was ejected from the meeting. It wasn’t anything I said, I don’t think. It was that they now wanted a closed meeting. As I was rather unceremoniously rushed out, still noshing on my cookie, grabbing my coat and hat and trying not to let the door hit me in the ass on the way out, I turned to the room and said, “One last thing: Think open-source, people.” It got a laugh and even a hand.
I was angry – insulted and embarrassed. But the problem is worse for this trade group and its industry. Talk about an echo chamber. What these people need is hear more new voices – newer than old me. What they really need to do is share their challenges and ideas openly and hear new perspectives and new answers from unexpected sources. Hearing the same old stuff from the same old group will get them nowhere. Witness the last 15 years.
If I were such a group, I’d be bringing in people from many different backgrounds and perspectives – from bloggers to technology executives to inventors to investors to customers to kids – and share quite openly my business with them (it’s not as if media’s problems are a secret!) to get new ideas and solutions. But then, that is the reflex I have learned here, online. That, sadly, is still not how media people think. As a group – not to a man – they’re still closed. Too bad. That will hurt them. It already has.
: LATER: A rather lengthy addendum, in response to a Jay Rosen comment, here.
It’s time for new definitions of literacy just as we need new definitions of media.
I’ve been talking with lots of people lately – academics, foundation and government folks – about the need for more media literacy training today as media is becoming more expansive and thus confusing.
But I emphasize that media literacy today must encompass not just the consumption but the creation of media. Media literacy means being able to find and discriminate among sources of information and being able to create content and understand how it fits into the larger sphere of information and identity.
But now break media literacy down into its component definitions. What does literacy itself mean today: reading, finding, discriminating, what else?
Jack Miller, author of the survey, says: “This study attempts to capture one critical index of our nation’s well-being — the literacy of its major cities–by focusing on six key indicators of literacy: newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment, and Internet resources.” But, of course, the last of those has an impact on and even redefines all the other indicators.
And the problem is that even in its definition of the internet, the study still relies on views of media in pre-internet terms: “1. Number of Internet book orders per capita; 2. Number of unique visitors per capita to a city’s internet version newspaper; 3. Number of webpage views per capita to a city’s internet version newspaper.” What about reading – and interacting with and creating – new media not related to the old?
I don’t want to mischaracterize Miller’s work. He is trying to connect various activities associated with literacy. The story about his survey says:
That concern was that declining newspaper readership was caused by increasing online newspaper readers. This was the same assumption that having a book available online meant fewer local booksellers and less use of libraries.
However, what Miller found was just the opposite.
Examining the data for this and his past surveys, Miller found that top ranking cities for library use also have more booksellers, and that cities with more booksellers also have more people buying books online, and that cities with higher per capita newspaper circulation rates also had a higher proportion of people reading newspapers online.
“Cities that rank highly in one form of literate behavior are likely to rank highly in the other forms and practices of literacy,” Miller said.
He noted that a literate society tends to practice many forms of literacy not just one or another.
Good. But we still need to redefine literacy – as we also understand that the internet is not a medium. To quote Doc Searls, the internet is a place. It’s a means of making connections and creating. I went around this track a few times with Howard Weaver in a different discussion. He said that “the internet is NOT a source of news; it’s a delivery system.” I argued that the internet is not just a means of delivery for one-way distribution of media as a product; the internet is a means of collaboration, creation, and curation (alliteration unintentional). Paper is a medium; the internet is not. Jay Rosen also pointed to the problem of trying to view these overlapping structures as if they were separate when he tweeted regarding Pew’s latest: “‘Net Overtakes Newspapers As News Source’ is a weird headline because newspapers are the main ’source’ of the Net’s news.” (For now, I’ll add.) And what’s a newspaper when a newspaper goes online? 140 characters later, Jay added: “People had organized their media headsets like so: print, radio, TV, now Internet! Re-organizing is so painful they’d rather not make sense.” The dictionary’s behind, too: “Media – the main means of mass communication (esp. television, radio, newspapers, and the Internet).” Except it’s not just mass now and it’s not just communication and the internet isn’t a medium; other than that….
So back to the start: We must redefine media as we redefine literacy.
Media is no longer broken into separate means of presentation and delivery; they are all mixed in together online (as I tell journalism students, while hacks in my era had to decide among media once for a career, now they must make that decision each time they go to gather and tell a story). The internet, as a replacement for media, brings in so much more functionality: the ability to search, create, analyze, curate, track, interact, follow….
Media literacy, then, must embrace all those activities and skills, not just reading but:
* knowing how to focus on a need for information and express that by crafting a query to find an answer;
* knowing how to judge the relevance and reliability of sources – including the PageRank-like skill of judging sources on sources;
* knowing how to create (and remix) content across all media types;
* knowing how to collaborate;
* understanding the impact of facts on perspective and perspective on opinion;
* understanding the impact of identity and anonymity;
* understanding the relationship of pieces of information that make up a larger story via links;
* understanding how to make and find corrections…
And on and on. There’s a lot of good thinking on the topic: Here’s Dan Gillmor’s list of principles of media literacy. Howard Schneider is running a Knight-backed curriculum in news literacy at Stony Brook; here’s a list of Schneider’s key skills. Here’s an article on Ofcom’s efforts in media literacy in the UK, which says: “A media literate person can access, understand and create communications in a variety of contexts.”
I’d like to see more discussion of new definitions of media, literacy, and media literacy. What do you think? What are the new definitions and new skills?
I came to that conclusion, unblogged, awhile ago because I saw the lines between media crumbling. I especially see this teaching journalism school. When I came into the business, we had to pick a medium for life (or at least until we went into PR). Now, every time a journalist does a story, she can and should pick from all appropriate media to tell it (and not just tell it, by the way). Today, still photographers shoot video with a still camera. Print reporters take pictures and make slide shows and shoot video. TV people write text. Magazine people make podcasts. And that was just the game of 52-card-pickup we began playing with old media. Now enter new media with data bases and animation and interactivity. What is Twitter? A medium? A conversation? Both? Yes. So how does one separate one medium from another? It’s impossible, I came to see.
Then On the Media called asking whether I fell into the media as plural or singular camp. Funny you should ask, I said. I was plural, now I’m singular.
Now Brooke Gladstone took this question from another angle as well: media as monolith. We complain about The Media. But I argued that media are is no longer monolithic thanks to the internet, because scarcity is dead, because the dinosaurs are consolidating only to hide from the cold wind of the future, because consolidation is thus no longer a threat, and because we can all make media. We are all media. We are the message.
So here’s the On the Media conversation. They don’t agree with me. But that’s fine.
Chris Matthews — who has been downright spiteful in his coverage of Hillary Clinton — reports that she is attacking back. But David Shuster, the correspondent, explains it all away: “Attacking the media is not new. Presidents and politicians have been doing it for a long time, usually to deflect their own problems, often to tap into a perceived voter hostility towards journalists. The problem for Hillary Clinton is that her charges may reinforce concerns about her credibility.” His illogic: Clinton says that some in the media want her to quit. Shuster says that though they have declared her campaign over, nobody asked for her to quit. And besides, he says, the continuing campaign is good for ratings. But then he then goes on to declare himself, “She will not win.”
Incredible. He says she can’t be credible accusing the media of bias because he says the media aren’t biased and he says you can believe that because he’s credible and so she’s not.
Media and Obama fans are trying to change the rules and kick Clinton out of the race. It’s no surprise that Obama would try to do that; it’s politics. But that media has accepted this meme is only further demonstration of their Obamalove.
This week’s On the Media is a mash note for Obama if there ever were one. My friend Bob Garfield repeats over and over that Hillary can’t win and then goes on to ask whether media should even be covering her or at least not as much as they are because, after all, he has declared her the loser.
Let’s get this straight (again): Obama, too, is not likely to walk into the convention with enough delegates to win. And then the rules decree that it should be up to the superdelegates. There is no rule that says they must act as a proporational whole or that they all should accede to the wishes of the majority. I’m not saying that would be a bad rule — indeed, I’ve long wanted national or regional primaries that count onlly the popular vote and I’ve long wanted to abandon delegate votes, not to mention the Electoral College, because — we need no better proof than 2000 — it can be gamed. But we are still stuck with our system and so both sides will maneuver within those rules. However, media and Obama think Clinton should not have that right.
Let’s put forward another scenario: Imagine that John Edwards had sparked voters more and that he stayed in the election until the convention, walking in as the kingmaker who could throw his support either way and crown the nominee. I don’t think we’d be insisting that whoever was behind — No. 2 — in the vote should be quitting before the convention. I don’t think we’d be insisting that Edwards had no choice but to throw his support behind the candidate with the most votes (though that candidate might make a wishful try to argue that). No, we’d realize that Edwards would decide where to throw his critical support based on (1) his self-interest, (2) his party’s best interest — which is to say, victory in November, and (3) his own beliefs (not necessarily in that order). We could only hope that those interests would all coincide. But that would be his decision.
Well, the superdelegates are all John Edwards. They have been charged with making this decision at the convention if there is not a nominee thanks to the fucked-up system of popular vote mixed with caucuses mixed with disenfranchising crucial states. The election remains close, not over, and for better or worse, it is going to be in their hands — not to mention the voters who’ve not yet voted. How dare media try to grab it away.
Hey, Obamalovers, the election’s not over yet. In the soon-to-be-immortal word of Bill Clinton: Chill.
: ALSO: Just to show there are no hard feelings with Bob — it’s politics — I’ll embed his masterful commercial for ComcastMustDie, which I see I forgot to embed before. One has nothing to do with the other but I’ll take the excuse to show how Bob and I agree about defeating something: cable companies.
What a difference a day makes. I’ve gone from SXSW to the McGraw-Hill Media Summit in New York. It certainly is a different crowd: jeans to suits and better haircuts and far more people trying to pitch. By the coffee table, I hear a guy saying, “We build communities for large brands.” That is something you would never hear at SXSW because the people there know that’s an impossibility.
* * *
Good PowerPointese line from Disney’s Bob Iger: He has shifted from protecting the brand to projecting the brand.
Another: He says Disney isn’t embracing the internet so much as embracing consumers and to be relevant to and reach them, they need to use the technology.
He says they will generate $1 billion in digital revenue in the company up from $750 million the year before (not including online sales to the parks). He says they’ve sold 4 million movies on iTunes and 40-50 million TV episodes, which pales into comparison to streams. Both are incremental — that is, new and additional — to their existing business. He says the DVD business won’t go away but there will be a shift to online delivery.
He cautions that social media isn’t just about Gens X and Y. It’s about kids now. He believes that the broaddband enabled computer will be come a primary entertainment medium for kids. “It’s just as important to them as television.”
Asked what’s the trick for an old-media company to get it, Iger responds, “Hire new people.” He says you need people who look at technology as a friend not a foe, not talking about challenges and fragmentation. (The kind of people at SXSW.)
Google is no threat, he says. Disney is a popular search term. He knows that Google sends him people and rather than seeing Google’s ad sales on top of that as a problem, he wants his company to find ways to make the experience of coming from Google better.
He talks about Disney as an American brand worldwide. He says he respects the need for local creation of content and so in local markets they set up creative centers, not just distribution centers. (I wish he were around in 1991 when my bosses at Time Warner killed — muzzled — my column at Entertainment Weekly because I dared to say that local content support could be a good thing. “How can you say that?” demanded one of the company’s editors. I stopped writing my column then, in protest, and soon quit the magazine. This was only one of my problems.)
* * *
Next, a panel with big, old media companies: Julia Wallace of hte Atlanta Journal Constitution, Jon Klein of CNN, Kinsey Wilson of USA Today, David Westin of ABC.
“The paper I read most often is the Pocono Record,” says Raines, ex-editor of the New York Times. He says that local is the value of local newspapers. And that quote will float around his old shop in a few minutes.
Asked about the Times, Raines says they need to decide whether to go head-to-head nationally with Murdoch and the Journal. I thought it was the other way around. Isn’t the national report the high ground? Raines says no. He points to the Washington Post’s contraction strategy, pulling back into inside the Beltway. He says that the Times may need to come up with a contraction as opposed to an expansion strategy. “Common sense tells you that when your stock was at $54 in the mid 90s and it’s now at, what, $18 and the son of an Alabama construction millionaire has bought 20 percent of your company… your stock price cannot sit there.”
What should the New York Times do? Lightning round. Klein: “Stop writing about themselves.” Wallace: “Become that voice for the intellectuals of America on any platform.” Wilson: Long pause. Then he agrees with Howell — contraction. Westin: “It sounds right … that they’re in a middle ground that is not sustainable right now, neither fish nor fowl.”He says he doesn’t know whether the contraction is about local or a set of subjects of readers. Raines: “I think Julia’s idea of going for that elite, intellectual audience is a sound one.”
Klein answers moderator Jon Fine’s question about what job they’d fill first if they had a budget to start a new news product: “I’d hire data miners.” Right. Hunters. Gatherers. Searchers. Vetters. Curators. Right. “If you do it the right way, you’ve got the audience telling you an awful lot.” And that helps.
Fine gives a question that came in response to his blog post on the panel: Is there a supply-side problem? Is there too much news? Will there be a consolidation. Well, I’d say, there’s not too much news. But choice hurts one-size-fits-all products. There’s a supply-side problem for them, but it’s not that there is too much. There’s just too much for the old control point.
Wallace says the demand for news is higher than ever. I agree. And, as I’ve said before (but can’t link to it because there’s no wi-fi in this auditorium… grrrr) we are in the post-scarcity economy. Those who made their business by controlling that scarcity are the ones in trouble. And that is these guys if they don’t change their essential models, which they’re trying to figure out.
Westin says that they will not win on covering, say, the bridge collapse because that news is a commodity. But the Rep. Foley story is where they will win because that was reporting. There, he argues, there is an undersupply. Wilson says that is the discussion happening in newsrooms across the country: minimizing commodity effort and maximizing unique reporting value.
Fine asks them how they’d organize their newsrooms if they were doing it from scratch today. Klein says they’d have a lot fewer people. He tells about taking a feed via Skype (because Jeff Toobin went to law school of Eliot Spitzer and was on an island with no satellite uplinks); today, he says, he’d buy a lot fewer trucks and buy more laptops. (Or soon mojo phones, I’d say.)
Asked what is its high ground, its unique value, Wilson gives a characteristically smart answer: He says that USA Today is perceived as a down-the-middle voice, something it has cultivated since the start and something that is more valuable in a time when news organizations are perceived as having agendas. But then he acknowledges that it is difficult to bring that to online when the web wants voice and perspective.
I ask Klein what they’ll do when people out here are broadcasting live from their phones via Qik.com and Flixwagon.com etc. He says that iReport.com will be “a home for unvetted material.” He says they haven’t dealt with live material but they’re getting there. He wouldn”t put the CNN brand on it until it is vetted.
