BuzzMachine

I’m sorely disappointed in Columbia Journalism School Dean Nicholas Lemann’s piece in The New Yorker about “journalism without journalists.”

I would have hoped for something more expansive, imaginative, open, creative, generous, constructive, strategic, and hopeful from the head of one of America’s leading journalism schools — from, indeed, the man hired to bring that school into the future — and from a leading light of American reporting.

Instead, Lemann pits professional journalist v. blogger — as if any more ink need be spilled on that putative battleground — and sets up his easy strawmen to tear them down.

His strawman king: that bloggers believe they will replace journalists. I don’t know a single blogger who says that with a straight face. But that is what professional journalists — fewer and fewer of them, actually — think they hear bloggers say and so they snipe back with very straight and sometimes red faces: ‘Yeah, you and who else?’

His next strawman is that some blogging is not journalism or is bad journalism and thus all blogging is not journalism because it is not performed by journalists. He points to some quaint examples of human speech in blogs — more on those in a moment — and dismisses it because it is not institutional and profound. Well, I can point to lots of allegedly professional journalism — somebody paid for it — in lots of newspapers — like the wee daily near me — and on lots of TV and radio stations in this country that is folksy, chatty, uninformative, badly written, and often utter crap. Does that mean that all professional journalism is crap? Of course not. It’s a lazy argument. And while I’m at it, dare I say that I can dig out lots of Talk of the Town pieces and letters from correspondents over the years in The New Yorker that did little or nothing to inform the nation and were written in a once-anonymous, faux folksiness that tried to simulate the humanity and real life you hear in the excerpts Lemann mocks.

The strawman he presents at the start of his essay is that bloggers think they are all inventing something new and that they are really just descendants of the pamphleteers who spread their words with opinion and agenda at the time of America’s founding, long before modern institutional journalism was invented. Stipulated. Says Lemann:

They were the bloggers and citizen journalists of their day, and their influence was far greater (though their audiences were far smaller) than what anybody on the Internet has yet achieved.

I don’t know a blogger who does not agree with that — at least writer-by-writer, if not regarding the medium as a whole. Bloggers proudly point to the pamphleteers as parents. They don’t say they are new against the history of conversation and publication, information and advocacy. Bloggers say they are new when set against the current conceit of institutional journalism that it is objective and dispassionate and is the steward of truth and trust — a kind of journalism that Lemann himself concedes is relatively new. Says Lemann:

In fact, what the prophets of Internet journalism believe themselves to be fighting against—journalism in the hands of an enthroned few, who speak in a voice of phony, unearned authority to the passive masses—is, as a historical phenomenon, mainly a straw man.

But he is a strawman of your making.

The next strawman is me: I am held up as an example of unrestrained blog snarkiness and for that he found quite the juicy tossed tomato, a snitfit I had in 2003 when The New York Times’ John Markoff trotted out his own strawman (one I’d thought to be extinct by now) about blogs being the next CB radio. Markoff also said that he didn’t need a blog because The Times is a blog. I fisked that interview with Markoff and looking back — this came out two weeks after the first Bloggercon — I have to say I still enjoy it. Lemann didn’t even quote my nastiest line: “You know, institutions worry about letting reporters blog without editing but they don’t worry about letting a jackass like this out without a leash.” Opinionated, blunt voices scare big-J Journalists. But we don’t always yell. Only when provoked.

And finally, if there’s any hay left, there’s Lemann’s belief that journalism’s standards were set by the professionals. I’d say they are still being set by the public who have always decided every day whom to believe and whom to trust — only now, we get to hear their decision process.

So Lemann continues to paint this as a fight: bloggers v. journalists. He continues to try to define journalists as the professionals, to define the act by the person who performs it (and, implicitly, the training he has) rather than by the act itself. He continues to try to limit journalism to journalists, wanting in his last line for reporters (note, he didn’t say reporting) to move to citizens’ journalism.

I so wish I had seen him instead imagine the possibilities for news when journalists and bloggers join to work together in a network made possible by the internet. I wish he had seen journalism expanded way past the walls of newsrooms and j-schools to gather and share more information for an informed society. I wish he had used his lofty perch to see beyond the horizon to a new future for journalism and the students he — and I — are teaching now.

But no. Pity.

(more…)

Ana Marie Cox is now Washington editor for Time.com. When she arrived at Wonkette, she said she was unemployable because she was such an opinionated loner. So I don’t know whether this job qualifies as making it or selling out.

BBC Director General Mark Thompson announces his big reorganization for “360-degree, multiplatform content creation,” dismantling walls between broadcast and digital. This is not at all unlike newspaper newsrooms merging with online newsrooms; the media doesn’t define the content anymore. “Much of what we call new media,” Thompson said, “is really present media.”

Note in this chart from the Guardian how future media and technology — Ashley Highfield’s domain — wraps around everything else. Note also how they are not separate blobs for journalism on TV and journalism online. It’s all journalism.

Here’s how the BBC used to look.

This is a big cultural change for the BBC — and any media organization. Different tribes are being thrown in together and told they’d better get along to survive on the island. So Thompson lectures his staff:

I want to end with a different thought. New structures can be part of the answer but we know that - no matter how pretty they look on the chart! - they can never be a complete solution. Behaviours and values are vital too. Some of the biggest problems we face - the often poor and sometimes really bitter relationships between commissioning and in-house production for instance - are often blamed on structure but actually come down to the way we treat and respect each other and the extent to which we’re prepared to act as partners rather than rivals. In a converging 360 world, this isn’t just a question of being nice, it’s a question of survival. . . .

Now [if] this doesn’t sound like your kind of place, then it’s time for you to decide if the BBC is right for you. People - and I include senior managers and leaders in this - people who ignore the BBC Values and who would rather fight old battles or just sit on their hands won’t prosper anymore. They won’t get bonuses, they won’t get promoted, and if they won’t or can’t change their ways, we’ll ask them to go. Life’s too short and the challenges we face are too big for all of that.

Give that speech in every newspaper in America.

Note that Thompson’s reorganization tackles the inward network. I think the bigger challenge and opportunity is the outward network: the relationship with content and creators elsewhere.

I’m including this in the Guardian column I’m writing now; so more on this later.

Book legend Joni Evans eloquently answers John Updike’s bar-the-door screed about the digital world:

Updike does not have to join the revolution. Digitization is optional. The Internet operates in the world of Also, Either/Or, Not One Way. Updike’s intentions of privacy and intimacy are safe; his copyright thoroughly protects his choice to remain nonenhanced, nondigitized, nonhyperlinked and nonsearchable.

But what is good for John Updike is not necessarily good for the millions of authors the current system has locked out. Creativity does not flourish when books can’t find publishers or when audiences cannot be sustained. Those authors whose works remain unpublished, out of print, out of stock or out of date will be the ones to march in the digital revolution. Updike is a large, elite fish in a small pond. The digital pond is primarily for other species — smaller, less recognized, exotic fish that need the oxygen this new world provides.

Scott Collins, TV writer for the LA Times, reports that as newspapers are cutting their budgets, fewer and fewer are sending TV critics to the networks’ junkets.

At long last.

I had a nice chat with Collins about this on Friday and in his story, he’s right to say that I’m callously unsympathetic to the whining critics now on house arrest, far away from the press conferences and parties at the Ritz.

When I was a critic for People and TV Guide, I never went to the junkets. They seemed absurd: just press releases in 3-D. I believed it was the job of a critic to criticize. I said that the only that that separated me from the audience was that I got the tapes first, I couldn’t fast-forward through them, and I had to explain my opinion. It was not my job to buddy up to the stars and get insipid lockerroom quotes.

And today, as newspapers’ budgets shrink, as they close foreign bureaus, the last thing they need is more network flackery they can get from the PR Newswire instead.

Add to that the changing nature of TV; it’s not about three or even 30 or 300 networks anymore and it’s not about programmers’ schedules. It’s about an endless stream — a river, an ocean — of video of all kinds from all times and all sources. The old role of the critic, telling you what’s on TV tonight, is absurdly out-of-date.

And add to that the fact that everybody’s a critic today. This isn’t just about going to see the compiled opinions of the world converted into personalized data — ‘people who like Superman also like….’ It’s also about conversation. The Times reported last week that producers of shows are going to Television Without Pity to respond to debates among viewers about characters they love on shows they feel passionate about. They demonstrate that a show is not owned just by its authors but also by its audience. And these debates can (but don’t have to) influence those shows.

Art becomes interactive.

So I have little sympathy with the mewling critics who complain to Collins that they’re missing out on the expense-account trips with drinks and shwag. Philadelphia Inquirer critic Gail Shister blurbs even the junket: “TCA is the Super Bowl of television coverage. Anybody who’s anybody is there and accessible.” Oh, yes, and the White House pressroom is where real news happens. Wake up and smell the free lunch.

I have even less sympathy for Shister and other critics whining about having to do something other than just write their columns from on high:

She’s resisted bosses’ entreaties to write a blog because, she said, she’d prefer to focus on her print column, which runs four times a week. But the noise from the Internet is permeating even her hermetically sealed cubicle. “Technology has compressed the whole notion of journalistic time,” she lamented. “The day of a scoop being a scoop for 24 hours is long gone.”

The day of the scoop is over. And the day of investing in a platform for one critic’s ego is long gone, as well.

If critics want to get together, it would be a better use of their time — and perhaps their bosses’ T&E — to reimagine the role of the critic, a discussion that has started — and, unfortunately, stopped — on this Arts Journal blog and continues regularly in the visionary thinking of critic Terry Teachout and in the work of my future CUNY colleague András Szántó. Maybe we should play host to such a discussion at CUNY. Anybody game?

As in other, weightier realms of journalism, I say that critics will act more as moderators, helping us not only find the good stuff but also sparking discussion. Yes, the critics will have opinions about not only quality but also about meaning; they will set culture in context as the good ones always have. But they can’t watch it all anymore. And they’re not the only ones with opinions and perspective. Now the culture can speak as well. So the greater challenge is to create a structure for that discussion, to make sense of it.

And this changes not only criticism, it also changes the art.

No, I say we’re never going to get to the day — long predicted — when we’ll all want to make our own endings to novels and movies. There is, by God, a role for authorship. But then again, a TV series isn’t like a film or a book (at least until books become more fluid); a TV series continues, it lives. If a show is successful, it is because the people formerly known as its audience feel as if they, too, own it; it works when it comes to life and becomes part of their lives. And so perhaps it is wise to include them in the process of creation. I don’t mean to rule by focus group, poll, or galvanic skin response. But if you are open to the people who love what you do, if you let them contribute, they will. So in that sense, even creators become critics and moderators and even the audience becomes creative.

Yes, it is time to reimagine criticism in a future without network tote bags.

My latest Guardian column looks at the British invasion of American news media — The Times print edition in New York; the BBC’s news channel on cable; the Guardian hiring Michael Kinsley and plotting assaults via Comment is Free and online and print — from this side of the Atlantic. (Nonregistration view here.) Snippet:

I’ve been picking up the Times of London on New York newsstands and I like to think that carrying it makes me the classiest guy on the E train (we still believe anything said in a British accent is smarter than the same thing said in our own). It also makes me wish that our Times here would learn a lesson from the former British broadsheets - and their readers - and convert to subway-friendly tabloid format. I’m enjoying reading the Times’ good writing. But it also feels out of sync in a few critical ways: first, of course, the news is five time zones staler than our local brands’. But what is more striking is that the ads inside your Times are for couches and computers and flights to New York - all in pounds sterling.

News Corp isn’t trying to sell print advertising here. So even at $1 a copy, there’s surely no profit in this. But that’s probably not the goal. Putting the Times on newsstands gives the brand presence here and exploits Rupert Murdoch’s advantage over his fellow colonisers - he owns the New York Post and its presses. So the print product is, I suspect, merely a vehicle to market the online product, where the real money will be. I think this is a harbinger of things to come for many media companies; old media will live to drive people to new media and print becomes what we like to call “value added” (read: “worth less”). And the strategy is working on me: I’m going to Timesonline.co.uk more often. Rupert has my mindshare.

I thought that I snagged the best possible boondoggle assignment in all journalism when People magazine sent me on a tour around America to find our best pizza.

But this beats that. Kristine Lowe in Oslo reports that a Danish media company assigned employees to buy sex from prostitutes and then rate them on the web.

“The idea was that the test should be enlightening, entertaining and naughty. However, many people found it unnecessarily offensive,” Hans Engell, Extra Bladet’s editor-in-chief, said in a press a release announcing that they would stop practicing this particular brand of ‘consumer journalism’ on the website in question.

I smell a reality show coming on.

Ad Age critic and On the Media cohost Bob Garfield is writing a book about how the open-source world changes marketing and, so, he’s writing it openly on a new blog.

The idea is to put it together, chapter by chapter, with ideas, criticism and corrections coming from all of you out in the Bobosphere. It’s no wiki; I’m the sole author. And it will be owned lock, stock and hypertext by my employer, Crain Communications. But who cares? It’s being produced in full public view for public view.

Go see his chapter outline and get to work.

Jay Rosen:

You don’t own the eyeballs. You don’t own the press, which is now divided into pro and amateur zones. You don’t control production on the new platform, which isn’t one-way. There’s a new balance of power between you and us. The people formerly known as the audience are simply the public made realer, less fictional, more able, less predictable. You should welcome that, media people. But whether you do or not we want you to know we’re here.

I can’t wait for they day when they think this is obvious.

I’m seeing a lot of avoidance of the elephant that isn’t quite in the room yet but is banging at the door:

Advertising is the next big industry to suffer huge upheaval thanks to the internet. They may think they’re already there, but they’re not, not by a long shot. In fact, it is the ad industry that is holding up the progress of other industries — newspapers, TV, radio, cable — that are already getting tromped on by that elephant. Advertisers can get away with moving slowly — for now — because they are the ones with the money. Funny how that works. But this won’t last for long, as one client and then one agency discovers that the lazy, traditional, one-stop-shopping of TV upfront and the big-media lunch circuit is inefficient, wasteful, untargeted, irrelevant, and ultimately damned irritating to your customers. Once that tipping point comes, dollars will start flowing to the upstarts online — not as many dollars concentrated in a few places as before, but spread out far and wide. As Bob Garfield pointed out in Ad Age and on On the Media, the upstarts aren’t quite ready for it, but once they see money sitting on the table, they’ll get ready fast (see my Ad Age piece on an open-source ad infrastructure for the distributed world). The day of reckoning nears.

There happen to be lots of links to stories that are avoiding that elephant from the last few days. Start with Richard Sikos’ New York Times piece about waiting for money to come online:

But one could make a case that the amount of focus on — and hype about — Internet activities at media companies has some kind of inverse relationship to the amount of near-term revenue they represent for these companies.

We’re still in the early innings, but given how much the Internet has already transformed the media and society, it’s surprising how little money traditional media companies make directly from it.

Don’t take my word for it. Flip through the financial statements of some of the biggest names to see what they say about their Web sales and profits. . . .

The less-cheerful view of the traditional media companies is that all their online efforts will not translate directly into more revenue or fatter profits. Thanks to aggregators, file sharers, pirates and other disruptors, more value will leak away or be stolen than will be gained by these companies.

This is not to say that online will never be an important — if not central — financial contributor to media businesses of all kinds. For some companies, though, it could serve increasingly as a promotional or marketing outlet, or as a cut-rate but widely distributed version of what consumers can buy in conventional formats.

It’s a good piece, but I’ll nudge on a few points.

First: Of course, there’s no saying that these new activities will lead to “more revenue or fatter profits.” They won’t. Period. That’s because there is now no scarcity of competitors for those dollars and ways to spend them more efficiently in more places. The amount spent on advertising likely won’t change, but the revenue will be spread thin.

Now this usually makes the proprietors and executives at those legacy recipients of ad dollars moan and gnash their dentures about where they are going to get the money to support what they do now. As Jimmy Wales once famously said to a famous news executive: That’s not my problem. The auto industry didn’t start worrying about how to make as much money as horse breeders and hay farms made; they started something new and the new industry grew to what the market will bear. That will be the same in media. There’s no saying that the old players will be as big as they were; the biggest growth in media, I’ll content, will come in the line called “others.”

That inevitability is being delayed, again, because the ad agencies and advertisers continue to play safe — or at least they think it’s safe — by giving more money to the old players, even if they are shrinking, and relying on the old means of measurement, even though there are now new and better things to measure.

So I’d ask friend Siklos to do the exact same story from the other end of the pipe. Follow the money. Look at why the ad agencies and clients are slow to change. Investigate their growing inefficiency. Expose their chickenheartenedness and make them scared (eventually, you did get fired for buying IBM and you will get fired for buying upfront TV). Look into how the media buying structure of most agencies is not built for this new world. Compare the cost of buying targeted attention in big, old media vs. in new media. Calculate the cost of irrelevance in advertising. Predict what the flow of money will look like in one, five, and 10 years. Somebody is losing $40,000-a-week marketshare to Rocketboom today; where did that money come from and where will the next $40k go next? I can’t wait.

: Next see Rob Hof covering SuperNova for his Business Week blog, noting how two giants of mass-market advertising — GM and P&G — are starting to sing in a different key:

Two of the biggest marketers in the world showed up at the Supernova conference in San Francisco today and sounded more like Web 2.0 zealots than brand giants. Michael Wiley, director of new media, GM Communications, at General Motors, who’s responsible for GM blogs, sounded the most radical: “The existing advertising paradigm sucks,” he said. “It’s woefully inefficient. We give consumers virtually no information.”

He and colleague Curt Hecht, executive VP and chief digital officer at GM, have been meeting with social networking and media companies in the area the last couple of days, and Wiley sounds like a fan: “We see the new social media space as a place we can become engaged,” he said.

Likewise, Stan Joosten, Procter & Gamble’s innovation manager for holistic customer communication (how’s that for a title?), said P&G needs to experiment more with social media–carefully. “We have to stay out of some places” where people don’t want to see ads, he noted. But he says P&G wants to engage with customers wherever they are online.

I’ll be eager to see them put their money — big money — where their mouths are. And remember: It’s not just about finding new big media to take your big bucks: MySpace v. NBC. It’s about entirely new ways to place advertising and entirely new ways to think of what advertising should do.

The greatest challenge for advertising today is relevance.

: Now see Peter Preston in Sunday’s Observer with more reaction to Sir Martin Ice Age Sorrell’s blowing against the wind of the future.

Here’s the imminent end of everything, a mist of yellow doomfulness that suddenly affects the conventional media world, and newspaper journalism in particular. But keeping your balance also means keeping calm - for the wisdom of Sorrell wanders around many mansions. Five years ago he told a Yale audience that ‘the world is being Americanised’. But that was before he saw India. And, three weeks ago, he said that new media would ‘almost certainly’ not supplant existing ones.

Now, of course, gurus are allowed to change their minds or adjust their perceptions. And Sorrell, CEO of an umbrella holding company with 70 separate operators, 65,000 people and 950 offices in 92 companies, is allowed to correct course whenever he likes. Nevertheless, there’s an important countervailing thought here.

For aren’t J Walter Thompson and Ogilvy and Mather, historic names from the WPP collection, legacy businesses, too? And what precisely are advertising agencies and their great media-buying adjuncts for any longer? The legacy newspaper distribution business, under OFT pressure, is currently being asked whether driving diesel-fuming lorries along motorways in the middle of the night is the best way of getting millions of surplus copies to recycling dumps 24 hours later. You could ask much the same question about advertising agencies.

: Now see Liz Hoggard, also in the Observer, reporting from the adfest at Cannes, where the star of the West Wing, the creator of Sex and the City, and the queen of HuffingtonPost came to talk about what’s compelling in media today.

What both shows also had in spades was authenticity. . .

And JWT want to learn from that. Because the days of the 30-second TV spot are numbered. . . .

This means a new bar has been set for advertising, says Davis. Not only must their output be fresher, cleverer, edgier, but ads must become an art form in their own right, or at least move closer to the entertainment space. ‘The challenge to us is to stop interrupting what people are interested in and be what people are interested in,’ he says - or ‘make coitus interruptus the real intercourse,’ as Huffington puts it bluntly. That means goodbye to internet pop-ups, which drive the consumer mad, and more investment in ‘360-degree’ communication strategies - emails, text messages, flyers, chatrooms and podcasts which the consumer chooses to view. Customers are now co-authors of a brand’s ’story’. . . .

Consumers will happily spend time with branded communications but only on their own terms - and only if the content is engaging. It’s a brutal, Darwinian market out there, as veteran ad man Maurice Saatchi observed in his keynote speech, ‘The Strange Death of Modern Advertising’, given at Cannes last week. Only strong brands will survive, he insists. ‘The intellectual rigour of advertising - paring and editing down to a brutally simple thought - has never been more in demand.’

‘It used to be the company that owned the brand; now the consumer owns the brand,’ adds [Guardian Unlimited head of commercial development, Adam] Freeman. ‘They can either kill it or love it. Word of mouth is the most powerful marketing channel.’ . . .

The big message from Cannes is that advertising must respect the intelligence of its audience - if it does not prompt consumers to think smart, it will be instantly dismissed. Advertisers want your brain as well as your wallet.

And there’s the other great for advertising today: respect. That means you can’t talk to us like dummies anymore. you have to talk to us human-to-human.

: Now hear lines from Saatchi at Cannes on the state of the ad industry:

“At the tender age of 50 it was struck down in its prime,” he says. “Mourners at its grave side are now embarrassed to admit they knew the deceased.” . . .

He quotes from the Gospel of St John - “In the beginning was the word and the word was God.”

“No copywriter could put it better. The word is the brands’ protector, guide and saviour. The word comes first, for a brand, before all actions in all media at all times. The word is the saviour because in each category in global business it is only possible for one brand to own one word. Take great care before you pick your word because it will be the god of your brand.”

He cites an Interbrand study that strong brands need few words. And that top brands need just one word. The question is how do you find that word, afterall there are 750,000 words in English.

Research by M&C Saatchi showed that 80% of marketing directors agree strongest brands can be described in one word. But only 10% of the marketing directors could describe their brands in one word.

Nowadays only brutally simply ideas get through. Reducing the complex to the simple requires the painful necessity of thought. The ruthless paring down of paragraph to sentence and sentence to word.

“It is said that Charles Dickens was paid by the word. Times change. Now marketing directors’ pay should be inversely proportional to the number of words in their strategy statemment.”

Less is more. . . .

The same applies to the world’s great revolutions. Marxist socialism.

In a paragraph read the communist manifesto. In a sentence read the lines on Karl Marx’s tomb. In a word - “justice”. . . .

: LATER: I just watched Sorrell’s speech at Cannes. It’s positively wacky. The man has nothing to say of the slightest relevance or value. A classic case of fiddling-while-the-biz-burns.

: THIS JUST IN: The real tipping point will be the decline of TV’s upfront. Ad Age says tomorrow:

For a decade the marketing world has been wondering when the digital revolution would finally cut into networks’ upfront payday. The smart money says this is shaping up to be the year, and TV’s take could be down as much as $600 million.

Although sales chiefs are still dickering, agency executives and analysts forecast the market to wind up anywhere between $8.5 billion and $9 billion. Either way, that represents a correction from last year’s $9.1 billion haul, itself down from the $9.3 billion raked in for the 2004-2005 season.

Stuart Elliott, the Times ad columnist, jumps into the rhetorical trap of the newspaper writer stretching for a lead. He takes one event — one press release, in this case — and tries to make a trend out of it or argue that another trend is disproved so as to justify writing a whole column about it. Elliott takes the launch of a USA Weekend spinoff on health and says that print is not dead. Well, no one — not even this online triumphalist — has said that print is dead. Print is changing and in many cases, its audience, advertising, and margins are shrinking. Elliott does not even bother to note that plenty of other new Sunday newspaper supplements have been announced to great fanfare, only to fizzle: Parade’s teen magazine died and Time Inc.’s Life looks like it gets about $2 in ad revenue. If this health supplement succeeds, it will be because of regulatory requirements to print pages of side effects about advertised prescription medicines. So it may well succeed. And, as always, other magazines will be born and die every year. But Elliott stretches one dot on a graph into a trendline, ignoring all those other pesky dots there. Take it from an old columnist: It’s an old columnist’s trick.

TV Guide just bought Jump the Shark and I think there’s a lesson in this for publishing: What started in 1997 as a web site that quickly found a community became a best-selling book and that helped drive the web site. Howard Stern took notice and so founder Jon Hein made frequent appearances on radio — finally moving there — and that helped drive the web site, which drove the book. More people, more content, more promotion, a bigger brand. And so now TV Guide will bring Jump the Shark to all its platforms, buying JtS for an undisclosed but apparently juicy sum. And round and round it goes (until, of course, it grows too big and jumps its own shark, but that’s another story).

This all started because a smart and funny guy had a good idea and the internet’s tools and connections allowed him to create a franchise with a community of contributors, not gatekeepers. And though the book brought in lots of bucks, in the end, the real franchise and value lived online because it could keep growing there. Print had an important role in this success story, but it’s not the whole story.