Chris Boese's Weblog

The "Great Wall" in journalism is not to blame for the decline of newspapers

Link: Journalism’s fatal disconnect with business - Lost Remote TV Blog.

I recently posted a longish comment on a post on the Lost Remote blog (I don't think it is strictly a TV blog anymore, as the masthead says "local media and the battle for the web"). Like many of us have, Lost Remote has engaged in a lot of soul-searching about what went wrong and what factors are to blame for this major shakeout in the Fourth Estate and the forced removal of what have to be thousands of veteran journalists from commercial participation in the profession (most blogs they are moving to are not yet commercially-viable).

At this point in my life, I've watched such shakeouts happen far too often, from my first days out of Journalism School in the mid-80s, although nothing as bad as what we see now.

I watched Radio majors graduating a few years after me immediately abandon their careers because of Reagan deregulation that allowed massive media chains to consolidate and automate radio properties on a scale that made that profession virtually disappear, just as print journalism is very likely equally hopeless for new journalism grads in the pipeline right now.

I watched 2-newspaper cities and towns become 1-newspaper monopolies, with the staff of one of those papers all let go (no matter what those bogus joint-operating-agreements stated). I was utterly demoralized then, yet that was nothing compared to what is happening now.

Much later, after teaching college for many years, I returned to journalism, this time in cable TV news, and again watched television newsrooms go through rounds of layoffs so regularly you'd think management was dosing on Ex-Lax.

These weren't Howard Beale-style layoffs made by cut-throat Faye Dunaways looking to corrupt the product (although there were those as well). Also rolling through TV and newspaper newsrooms were the deliberate purging of age and experience (where age became a liability in TV once you were over 30-- not on air, in the newsroom-- and over 40 in print) BECAUSE too much journalism experience meant you were more likely to protest at the full-on abandonment of journalistic standards and the embrace of presenting PR-created material as "news."

All small potatoes compared to what is happening now. Entire metropolitan areas may find themselves with NO newspaper of record very soon. This isn't just a convulsion in the field. It is a death rattle. I'm even following a Twitter feed called "Newspaper Death Watch."

So into this conversation comes analysis and blame, and the folks who are ready to pile on and claim traditional journalism was too hidebound and principled and worked itself into an anachronism (this argument is in alignment with the management philosophies that practiced illegal age discrimination in newsrooms, for its most crass purpose, because 20-somethings can be so green and easily intimidated as to abandon journalistic principles in ways that most veteran journalists are not).

So much of the blame centers around bizarre wrong-headedness in how to handle companion web ventures for newspapers, a primo opportunity that most newspapers missed out of sheer blindness to the media shift. Perhaps that is all that is happening now, paying the piper for believing the web was nothing more than a "horseless carriage," rather than a serious competitor for print, TV, and radio.

But with all the blame to go around, some go after the so-called "Great Wall" erected in the U.S. press between business/advertising and editorial content, a means to ensure that editorial stories were not being influenced by interested parties with axes to grind (a more than respectable purpose, and one I take a lot of comfort in, even though it may be, as Shakespeare put it, "more honor'd in the breach than in the observance."

There are many voices today arguing, "Tear down that wall!" They want to unleash journalism online and unite it with "pay-per-post" and sweetheart deals with advertisers, "creative" entrepreneurial solutions that will maximize SEO and online distribution systems with social media (the latter generally a good thing), while taking a pencil eraser to some seriously enshrined principles of journalistic ethics, even when only honored in the breach, because those things can serve to distinguish journalism from interested public relations and bald-faced marketing copy masquerading as editorial content.

I am not a fan of "objectivity" in journalism (pseudo-objectivity), a fiction which really only holds court in the U.S. press, and is dealt with far more sanely in international journalism. Removing point of view from reporting created a fiction, a lie, a form of posturing that hurts basic U.S. journalism to this day. All observations have perspectives, and good journalists will OWN and CLAIM their perspectives (as bloggers do), rather than pretend their eyeballs do not reside within their own heads. U.S. journalists are  usually forced to adopt a floating disembodied deity perspective, WHICH IS A LIE.

But I remain a supporter of keeping advertising and business interests separate from editorial interests, and working hard at keeping editorial copy, no matter what form of delivery it takes, from morphing into primarily marketing copy, essentially pissing away journalistic credibility in the process. Newsrooms and editorial filters don't create that credibility (and they've already lost a lot of it). It is earned every day with readers/listeners/watchers/co-creators.

So I say, "Don't Tear Down That Wall!" And here is my response posted to the Lost Remote blog post (sorry about the length, but I care too much about this topic to not carry on about it). I'll also quote some bits from Cory Bergman's original article to set some of the context.

Link: Journalism’s fatal disconnect with business - Lost Remote TV Blog.

Journalism’s fatal disconnect with business

Cory Bergman February 26th, 2009

With the Seattle Post-Intelligencer likely in its final days, I’ve been attending a few of the many panel discussions and meetups in town about the future of journalism. Here in Seattle, the home of Microsoft and hundreds of other technology companies, surely we can figure out a way to bring journalism back from the brink. Right?

But nearly every one of these discussions, attended mostly by journalists and academics, downgrades into a frustrating and largely meaningless exchange of ideas. The problem: journalists wash their hands of the business side of the equation. That’s the business guys’ problem, said one newspaper journalist. But it’s not. It’s everyone’s problem. And the “Great Wall” separating news and the business side has expedited newspapers’ decline.

Now, I’m not proposing using journalism to influence business decisions, directly or indirectly. I’m proposing leveraging a community through technology to help people make better decisions about their lives — including decisions to buy products and services — which dramatically increases revenue potential. Does Yelp violate journalism ethics by allowing a community to self-organize around business information? Of course not. Does it help serve the user? Absolutely. How about Zvents, a popular social events calendar? Same thing. Can the “business guy” build this all by himself, without the help of journalists, the people arguably closest to the user?

By splitting journalism and business into two buckets separated by a longstanding cultural divide, the two groups fail to collaborate on ideas that tap the strengths of both.

[...]

This level of collaboration and organization-wide commitment has been painfully missing in local media companies. Journalists want to do traditional news, which is repurposed online. Sales folks want to do traditional reach advertising, which is repurposed online. And technology folks, well, they’re usually understaffed and misinterpreted as the “IT folks.”

[...]

Some really great comments available at the original post as well, comments as valuable as the posting. Go read them.

Meanwhile,

Here's my response to Bergman and his commenters:

(I've tweaked my grammar a bit for clarity)

I personally find it extremely hard to believe there is a working journalist who doesn't know that the newspaper's costs are not covered by subscriptions and single copy sales.

This is a core principle of Journalism 101, and every possessor of a journalism degree (I can't vouch for the others) would have had to DITCH quite a lot of classes to have missed that key principle that is instilled in every budding young journalist from day 1.

And if not then, they hear it very quickly on the job, the first time they propose doing a story that has ANYTHING to do with a supermarket, which, as we all know, are TABOO simply because for most small newspapers, they are the biggest advertisers.

I patently disbelieve the problems facing this industry right now have anything to do with the so-called "Great Wall," which in and of itself has become so corrupted over the years by supermarkets and other big advertisers (back to school "special sections," anyone?) as fully as it has by the euphemism of "video press releases" and other similar "interested content suppliers" to newsrooms.

Holding the "Great Wall" to blame is nothing but a rationalizing scapegoat, a paper tiger, a straw man, and journalists are right to defend the little corner of that wall that is left.

Remove the wall, put the column inches up for sale (online or off) and you might as well forget about even calling it journalism, and let it all blur into the amorphous PR that is the REAL corporate agenda behind all this transitional cost-cutting. Hell, let's make them all look like the annual report dittoheads and fluff they will become (worse than it is already).

Whatever you do, don't blame corporate management for carrying too much debt, for sucking up too many papers into their massive behemoths, or for making these overly thick monsters into a giant red herring for the nuggets of real journalism that one has to look to find between all the fodder inserted for the advertiser and not the reader. It sure is awfully convenient for media conglomerate management to blame working journalists and throw us off the real trail.

Now, I will grant you this one primary point: journalists have become too disconnected from their communities, too isolated, too much in a bubble. That is their own fault, but it is also the fault of being part of a massive carpet-bagging corporate newspaper chain (as most of them are), parachuting into distant communities, with management brought in from outside and journalists encouraged to climb climb climb to ever distant metropolises.

Even with that weight, my friends over the years have mostly stayed rooted in communities, been part of them, stayed at single papers far longer than I could have. And do you know what they have faced? Constant corporate cutbacks on local coverage and reporters, CONSTANT, 20 years worth of constant. They fight to get inches for local stories around the AP copy used like so much filler, like so many Ann Landers columns or syndicated comics pages.

Section fronts, in some small towns, are all you get for local from the corporate chains. And barely the staff to fill section fronts. Inside those section fronts, it is worse than fishwrap. These papers in many cases were 100-year institutions and participants in community life, BEFORE the carpet-baggers moved in in order to build a pipeline to syphon local ad revenue out of communities and back into the coffers, or the corporate debt service so they could buy and gut more small town papers.

Journalists not knowing that subscriptions and single copy sales don't pay the bills? Get real. They are reminded of that fact every day that they go out into their communities and attempt to cover stories.

The bigger problem is that by letting advertising drive the bus (and I do support the ad model over a paid subscription model online) is that the advertisers became the REAL audience for the paper. Journalists who stubbornly refused to believe this are a dying breed, especially if they still wrote for communities and readers instead of winning awards and striving for their next step up the corporate chain ladder.

But the bulk of that 66% ad-supported content was as throwaway for readers as you could imagine. The ONLY reason many of those stories even existed was for the advertisers to read and file.

That's the disconnect that the online model will solve, with massive structural changes in the field. Just like women's magazines that place how-to put on make-up stories across from a make-up ad, newspapers allowed their relationships with advertisers to corrupt the papers to the point that their product became too irrelevant for real readers.

Journalism has to court readers again, to be sure, and teach advertisers that readers have more power than the advertisers' push model arrogantly denies them.

Some sure do like thinking turning journalists into entrepreneurs will save the world, and I seriously doubt that. Journalists getting even more cozy in bed with the people (advertisers) that drove their audience away will not bring the audience back.

Signs of a new appetite for skewering Far Right Talk Radio bloviators?

Link: What Letterman (and His Ilk) Get That Couric (and Her Ilk) Do Not. - Lambert to the Slaughter | Brian Lambert on Media and Culture | Mpls.St.Paul Magazine mspmag.com.

Brian Lambert writes a great column laying out what might be a true bottom for the end of the uncontested, logically-challenged, reign of the Talk Radio dictators over the minds of the witless.

See, it always bugged me, how karma never seemed to come back on these people, how they committed outrages against reason, logic, propriety, and even the English language and never paid a price for broadcasting their stupidity for so many to hear.

I mean, sheesh, I went around worrying about accidentally saying something stupid in front of a class of 28 college freshmen. I'm like most people, in that an ill-chosen extemporaneous word or phrase can keep me up all night, fuming, "Why did I say that THAT way?"

Not these folks, apparently. All the stupidity, and all the calling out of the stupidity, had no effect on their righteous obliviousness. They didn't even have the sense to be embarrassed, nor were the listeners parsing the logic all that actively either. Libel mattered little to them.

But now the "worm may be turning" on these folks, in the words of Brian Lambert.

We can only hope. But I like the way Lambert puts it best. (and for the record, I watched Rahm Emanuel frame the Limbaugh position on Meet the Press Sunday and came to the exact same conclusion Lambert and others did: it was a bit like shooting fish in a barrel for a guy like Emanuel, who is such a hilarious chess player, I just love to watch him work. I swear he must be a Scorpio.)

What Letterman (and His Ilk) Get That Couric (and Her Ilk) Do Not.

By Brian Lambert

One of the classic admonitions of political warfare says that when the other guy is doing a perfectly fine job of mounting the scaffold and hanging himself, you don't go mess up a good thing by warning him about the trap door.

Still ... this Rush Limbaugh as "Leader of the Republican Party" thing, with Michael Steele, chairman of the Republican National Committee offering a groveling apology to Limbaugh barely two days after asserting that he and not Limbaugh, a radio entertainer, was the "de facto leader" ... is beyond anything someone like me could ever hope for. (The only thing better was being live on KTLK a couple years ago when Limbaugh was brought in on his dope bust.)

The Rahm Emanuel strategy (his MO and prints are all over this one) of squeezing hapless Republicans into the position of either accepting Limbaugh, an unabashed cynic, as their "leader" or face an avalanche of "dittoheads" melting down their phone lines and e-mail is diabolically brilliant. Of course it wouldn't work if the Republican party weren't still a captive of its most hidebound and reactionary elements, the crowd with a near religious attraction to Limbaugh that has had its hands around the neck of actual conservatives for the last 25 years and is now preparing to yank back the lever that drops the party through the trap door.

[...]

Jon Stewart nearly wet himself with all the clips the 4% Republican "base" served up.

Frankly, after 20 years and hundreds of columns/blog posts about the bizarre hold talk radio entertainers have over their astonishingly credulous audiences and the fear they strike into the hearts of the mainstream press, I'm at a loss to flog it all over again. But the worm in this long-running act has turned. In a media universe where 5% of the total audience keeps you rich as Croesus, Limbaugh and other big name radio performers have a rock solid base from which to ride out the "deep recession". But good lord, look what makes up that base!

At least two things have changed dramatically: 1: Newer, fresher, funnier alternate-alternate media on TV (Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert) and all over the internet has succeeded in drawing a dark red margin around these characters that no one in media dared in their uncontested glory years during the Clinton administration. And 2: The "conservative ethos" that Limbaugh continues to defend as though it were handed to him from God himself, has exploded in everyone's' face.

[...]

What Couric (and her ilk) avoid saying is that Limbaugh's act has always been nakedly cynical. For people in the accuracy business they've never had the stomach to point out that he is flat out wrong about ... well, damned near everything. But now, as the "Limbaugh base" has been reduced to shrieking for Joe the Plumber in a ballroom of rabid acolytes, it is a bit like Joe McCarthy post-Army hearings. The rest of the country -- supposedly Couric's primary audience -- has been bitch-slapped by reality and is struggling to find a way out from under the slag heap of mismanagement and corruption that has overwhelmed them.

Couric can demure out of fear of offending Limbaugh (who she might bump into at an upscale Manhattan restaurant) and incurring the wrath of his  minions, but all she does is reaffirm in the minds of a healthy majority of viewers that she, like Michael Steele and those truly pathetic Republican congressmen who plead for Limbaugh's forgiveness, that she can not dare to speak candidly and truthfully.

This is a classic dilemma for journalism in the internet age. How assiduously to you stick to "objectivity" when one party in a story not only has been proven wrong, emphatically, and is constantly being deconstructed as frauds and fools by alternate "news" sources that are eating your lunch? In an appearance industry "objective journalism" suffers from a truth deficit. That is a competitive liability.

Letterman lives and dies by ratings as much as Couric, but has the guts/common sense/business acumen to reassert what is now a cultural meme. Namely, that the "principled, true conservatism" shtick of Rush Limbaugh has been revealed to be a sick joke. A profitable one for Limbaugh to be sure, and nothing that needs to be regulated out of business, but a cynical shtick and little more.

Should J-Schools plunge into the land of critical thinking Gen Ed Requirements?

Dan Gillmor poses the question, but having come from the land of departments with HEAVY "service" loads to institutions (English, Composition, Rhetoric), I'd sure add a MASSIVE caveat to this idea.

I mean, it is a great idea in principle. I support it fully, especially as Dan enunciates it below. However, in U.S. post-secondary institutions, what such an endeavor would probably bring with it (besides a TON of adjunct teaching jobs for newly-laid off veteran journalists, as keepers of the anachronistic journalistic tea service, as it were) is the purely EVIL specter of a TON of adjunct teaching positions, flooding the permanent academic ghetto underclass with even more second-class humanities teachers with no hope of ever entering the tenured ranks.

It would have to be done smartly and with foresight, with protections for faculty who could easily within a few budget years, morph into an army of opportunistic-administration classroom fodder, just as so many composition teachers are now. Something should be learned by the humanities evil experiments with its permanent adjunct underclass in the first-year composition general education requirements, requirements that at many institutions into first-year experience courses, beyond writing to learn, to embrace more critical thinking and reading goals.

What I'd want to know, Dan, is how these proposals are different from the existing programs, the existing service requirements, because these very ideas, including media literacy and cultural literacy readings, have long been part of first-year composition programs, and first-year experience programs, as well as honors seminars and the like.

And those programs are already being taught by faculty members in other disciplines, faculty enriched with a deeper disciplinary reading background in cultural studies and critical theory than most journalism faculty currently have. There is already a rich set of media criticism and popular culture course readers that attempt to do just what Dan proposes, and these courses are already being taught, albeit not by people with any background as working journalists.

How do we know this idea isn't the same thing in different clothes?

I'm guessing what Dan wants to see, in this particular moment for citizen and participatory social media, are better results from the critical media courses that are taught.

Here, let me lay out the gist of Dan's ideas. I'm putting BOLD on my favorite bits below.

Link: Journalism Education’s Future: Broader, Deeper in Community – Center for Citizen Media.

Journalism Education’s Future: Broader, Deeper in Community

Feb 7th, 2009

by Dan Gillmor.

Accepting an award from Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School for Journalism & Mass Communication several months ago, former PBS NewsHour host Robert McNeil called journalism education probably “the best general education that an American citizen can get” today.

[...]

It’s open to question largely because the employment pipeline of the past, a progression leading from school to jobs in media and related industries, is (at best) in jeopardy. Yet journalism education could and should have a long and even prosperous life ahead — if its practitioners make some fundamental shifts.

Some of the shifts are already under way, especially in how journalism educators do their jobs. The Cronkite School, where I’m teaching, is one of many journalism programs aiming to be part of the 21st Century. The school understands at its core that digital technology has transformed the practice, though we hope not the principles, of the craft. This is welcome, if overdue; if newspapers have adapted fitfully to the collision of technology and media, journalism schools as a group may have been even slower.

But that recognition, while valuable, isn’t nearly enough. Journalism educators should be in the vanguard of an absolutely essential shift for society at large: helping our students, and people in our larger communities, to navigate and manage the myriad information streams of a media-saturated world.

We need to help them understand why they need to become activists as consumers — by taking more responsibility for the quality of what they consume, in large part by becoming more critical thinkers. And they need to understand their emerging role as creators of media.

In both cases, as consumers and creators, we start with principles.

For media consumers:

• Be Skeptical
• Exercise Judgement
• Open Your Mind
• Keep Asking Questions
• Learn Media Techniques

For media creators (after incorporating the above):

• Be Thorough
• Get it Right
• Insist on Fairness
• Think Independently
• Be Transparent, Demand Transparency

(See this recent paper, part of the Media Re:public project at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, where I’m a Fellow, for a fairly lengthy description of the principles and an explanation of why I believe they’re important.)

[...]

This applies not just to students studying the practice of journalism. The same issues are roiling public relations and advertising, the teaching of which is often housed in schools of journalism and communications. Not surprisingly, because modern commerce has been so much about selling things, those industries have been considerably more innovative, in the professional ranks, than journalism in recent years. Key leaders in advertising and PR are surely making their needs clear to educators, and one suspects getting results.

As noted above, journalism schools are starting to embrace digital technologies in their work with students who plan to enter traditional media. Too few are helping students understand that they may well have to invent their own jobs, however, much less helping them do so.

[...]

But I keep coming back to the issue(s) that should trouble anyone who cares about the future of self-governed societies. We’re not turning out the critical thinkers we need in a time when that skill has never been so important, particularly when the avalanche of data — some of it bogus and much of it irrelevant — has never been so difficult to handle.

One experiment, at State University of New York’s Stony Book campus, is notable. Howard Schneider is leading another foundation-funded program (so many of these are, raising an interesting question that I won’t go into here) that aims to make better news consumers and critical thinkers of all students, not just those enrolled in journalism courses. This goes only part of the way to what I’d like to see in journalism education, but it’s a very useful start.

Where would I take it, if I ran a journalism school? I’d start, again, with the principles listed above, and rework the how-to part of the curriculum to be more digital (that is, media-agnostic) and entrepreneurially focused.

[...]

Then, tackling the media activism challenge, my colleagues and I would:

• •  Persuade the president of the university that every student on the campus should learn them before graduating, preferably during freshman year.
• •  Create a program for people in the broader community, starting with teachers. We should be seeing every student take a basic media activist course at every level of education — not just college, but also grade, middle, and high school.
• •  Offer that program to concerned parents who feel overwhelmed by the media deluge themselves. Children especially need to learn to be independent thinkers and not take for granted that what they see, hear, or read is necessarily true or real.
• •  Provide for-fee training to communicators who work in major local institutions, such as PR and marketing folks from private companies, governmental organizations and others. If they could be persuaded that the principles matter, they might offer the public less BS and more reality, and they’d be better off for the exercise.
• •  Try to enlist another vital player in this effort: local media. The traditional journalism organizations should be making this a core part of their missions, but haven’t yet realized why, namely that their own trust in the community would almost certainly rise if they helped people understand these principles — not to mention the enormous value of truly engaging the audience in the journalism itself. New media entrants would benefit, too, if they embraced the principles of media activism to produce higher quality work and deepen their own conversations with their communities of geography and interest.

All this suggests a considerably broader mission for journalism schools and programs than the one they’ve had in the past. We’re not the only ones who can do this, but we may be among the best equipped. If we don’t, someone else will.

Steve Smith: Still A Newspaperman A holiday wish…and reminder

I am still struggling with the current decimation and carnage in the field of journalism, and it will never sit well with me. I've mourned the decline of this field since I was first released from J-School with my undergrad degree, right into the world of Reagan media ownership deregulation, the beginning of the end.

Historic 100-year-old papers started closing back then, in the late 1980s, bought up by chains, multiple-paper cities turned into media monopolies overnight. The Clear Channeling of the rural U.S., where I'd come from, was beginning, and it has taken all this time to penetrate to the biggest metropolitan news-gathering organizations in the country.

For a time, some things ran counter to the trend, idiosyncratic things. USAToday was founded, as if to thumb its nose at the decline, yet its modular design spread virally, literally vaporizing page real estate set aside for the work I did best: full page and double-truck photo essays and stories. I fled to grad school, fully aware I was being put out of business.

And Ted Turner, whom I got to meet in 1986, dared to open international bureaus, to populate the landscape with MORE news-gatherers while chain consolidation was reducing them. Fate favored Turner in the form of the Gulf War of 1991, vindicating his international coverage. Before then, people laughed at his staff-heavy spending as an indulgent whim of a boy-man who liked to race sailboats.

But Ted didn't work hard enough to fend off Time Warner, the chains bought up everything, profits rolled in at 20-30% for shareholders in those newly-public corporations, and the shareholders came to regard those kind of margins as a guarantee.

Much is made of the current debate about the newspaper numbers trending to zero. Much more of the debate between Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine and traditional journalists (on Christmas Eve, Jarvis proclaims: "No Hope").

[Pissing Match Links: Ron Rosenbaum Slate Salvo, Jeff Jarvis Snark Return]

I'm not surprised at the debate, just at its intensity. Clay Shirky reminds us that he predicted this vaporizing industry in the late 1990s. I was on the World Wide Web Artists Coalition listserv with Clay back at that time, and remember well when he was first making those arguments.

I did not dispute him then because of what I saw happening to photojournalism at that time: the value of my work, of most photographers' work, was trending to absolute zero, which also happens to be the value of poetry, another field in which I have a degree. Royalty-free CDs had already forced me to realize my copyright-based stock photos had just become worthless, because it cost me more to make the images than the market would pay, ever.

To paraphrase a familiar quotation: They came for the Image People, and the Word People said nothing. They were happy to let us fade away. More space in print for words (the more important bits, was their unspoken righteous assumption).

The Word People didn't want to see their own end coming. They didn't want to think that same trend would ever apply to them. But I was certain at the time that it would.

And then, in the early 2000s, the blog and citizen journalism movement arose, and I enthusiastically championed it, participated in it, and would again in a heartbeat. It was overdue. It was necessary. The gatekeepers HAD become drunk on their own power, not sloppy drunk, just too used to holding the keys to the kingdom. Ironically, I was by then working at CNN, covering another war in the Persian Gulf (from Atlanta), and building blogs for unembedded journalists on the ground in Kurdistan.

Now, the unthinkable is happening right before my eyes, the thing I have been preparing for for the last 25 years, and my heart just aches. I DO NOT WANT THIS FUTURE.

It was some of my J-School students at University of Montana who turned me on to The Spokesman-Review as a paper with an online site I really admired, ESPECIALLY because of the way it integrated photojournalism the way I remembered it, before images morphed off into newsprint postage stamps, like it used to be.  I often linked to original reporting from there, once I started following the paper. It reminded me of the old Detroit Free-Press, had that same feeling in the online edition.

So I knew the name Steve Smith before encountering this story, just as I knew Clay Shirky online when he was making his prophecies. But it is Steve Smith who reminds me below why I am so heartsick, and why I will continue to fight against this watchdog-less future.

Smith's sad post below reminds me of why this will always be my life's work, no matter what I end up doing for a living. Go read the unexcerpted original, especially if this is or was your field too. 

Link: Still A Newspaperman | A holiday wish…and reminder.

A holiday wish…and reminder

Good morning,

For all of the years I worked as a senior editor, I tried to end each calendar year with a memo to my staff thanking them for their hard work, reminding them of the good journalism we had accomplished and wishing them well for the coming year.

I have been struggling in recent days trying to craft a note from my voluntary exile, something appropriate for my former staff and, maybe, appropriate for others who follow this blog.

And I’m finding the words are not coming easily. Maybe it’s the bleak, snowy landscape in Spokane that has left me feeling so inadequate to the task. Or the knowledge that this holiday season has found so many of my former colleagues unemployed and struggling, sitting on the sidelines while our industry stuggles for survival.

[...]

But I am not, by nature, melancholy and certainly not so when I think about the profession to which i have devoted my life. I remain an optimist, if not about the future of newspapers, certainly about the future of journalism.

In struggling to find words for this post, I went back to a speech I gave some years ago to a convention of college journalists. I excerpted a portion of that speech for my farewell note to the staff of The Statesman Journal in 2002. As I re-read that excerpt this morning, I found it still conveys my core beliefs. It expresses my optimism as well as anything I could write today. And so I am going to plagiarize myself for this year’s holiday note.

This is what I wrote in 2002. I re-dedicate it to the staff of The Spokesman-Review, which is doing such good work during the current weather crisis, to my professional friends and colleagues and to the countless students with whom I have worked in the last year.

[...]

Several years ago, Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University penned a book titled “What are journalists for?”

What a terrific question that is.

Here’s my take:

Journalists exist to serve – not ourselves, not our bosses, not our friends, boosters, advertisers or benefactors.

We exist to serve citizens in the exercise of their citizenship.

Let me say that again…we exist to serve citizens in the exercise of their citizenship.

And in serving citizens we adhere to certain core values:

Values of community
The marketplace of ideas
The First Amendment
Honesty and truth-telling journalism
Voice to the voiceless
Defense of the defenseless
And in all of this, we are fearless.

That is our calling.

And it is a calling – I believe that with all my heart - a call to service.

If you pursue this calling, this is what you can expect:

Long hours

Low pay

Disappointed parents and frustrated lovers

Generally primitive working conditions in buildings you hate in cities where you’d never want to live.

Your friends will be people just like you, except there won’t be too many of them.

Public officials will distrust and despise you. But, not to worry, many of your loyal readers or viewers will distrust and despise you, too.

A good day will be one in which no one calls to scream in your ear – except that’s a bad day, too, because you obviously haven’t written anything important enough to arouse anyone.

Your spouse will wonder why you don’t know the meaning of a 40-hour, five-day workweek.

And your kids, should you be in a meaningful relationship long enough to have any, will describe you as a “writer” during their show and tell in the hopes classmates will think you do something respectable, like writing pornographic romance novels.

Statistics say you will experience divorce, alcoholism and heart disease at rates higher than the norm. You’ll probably smoke – or wish you could.

You won’t retire to a beach house in Florida. Hell, you probably won’t live to retirement.

But even knowing this in advance, some of you in this room, most of you I hope, are going to pursue the call to service. Already, you can’t imagine doing anything else.

And I am so grateful for that.

I am grateful for the people just like you who work in my newsroom. They are our best and brightest and I am proud every day to be their editor.

They have brains. They have heart. The have the fire in the belly and the courage of their convictions. They bring guts to the party. They work harder than sane people should work and then, on the day when something happens in our world that could change everything, when history hangs in the balance, they are there to write the story.

[...]

And by following in their footsteps, no matter the challenges, you are sustained, whether you work for The New York Times or the Statesman Journal or The Oregon Daily Emerald. You are part of a great tradition that stretches back 250 years. And while we are humbled daily in the practice of that tradition, we must also be proud and honored and steadfast as its stewards.

What's happening to journalism and journalists right now

You hear the news of the layoffs across the board, hitting the big papers, the big TV stations, the big chain media conglomerates (Gannett, Time Warner, Tribune Co).

But it doesn't really sink in until you understand an ENTIRE GENERATION of experienced journalistic talent is being lost. Yes, that was also lost in the late 1980s (I remember 800 people laid off in a fell swoop when the two Little Rock, AR newspapers merged, because that town wasn't big enough for the two of them, according to Gannett. That was repeated in Tulsa, repeated in Anchorage, AK, repeated everywhere). 

But the current purge is making the Reagan media deregulation, which ushered in the era of media monoculture monopoly, the anti-thesis of the "penny press" which, like the blogosphere, let a thousand journalistic flowers bloom, look like child's play.

Instead, the consolidation of the Reagan years left the media ecosystem INTENSELY vulnerable to a single attack of a bark beetle that seems to be wiping out dead tree media, among other things. And that was all in the name of protecting 20-30% shareholder profit margins in the 80s (not exactly an easy PR move to make, to tell all those people you were depriving of their livelihood that it was all in the name of profit margins that retailers and manufacturers haven't seen in decades).

The excuse now is that the gaping pie hole of the Internet isn't sucking up enough of the costs of print media, so to old media monopoly barons that means CONTENT CREATORS have to go. Because no one on the Internet craves news content and analysis, or topical or beat coverage at all, nuh-uh.

You don't think this is screwing up our world? Read the story below, and cry, not for this resilient laid-off reporter. Cry for yourselves, because we will all be deprived of ready access to his and other talented writers' work.

Except for that profitless, frictionless, RSS distribution system that is the Blogosphere.

All Hail the Long Tail!

Link: Gannett reporter made "independent" by noon: Former Gannett environmental reporter becomes "independent" by noon.

Former Gannett environmental reporter becomes "independent" by noon

By Bruce Richie

I started out this morning as a reporter for the Tallahassee Democrat. I ended the work day as an "independent journalist."

At 8:45 I headed over to Marpan Recycling to work on a story about the state's goal of achieving 75 percent recycling by 2020. That was the goal spelled out earlier this year in a comprehensive state energy bill. And the goal is about three times as much as the state is recycling now.

At Marpan, they're recycling about 2/3 of the construction waste that comes in. Concrete, metal, cardboard and wood are the main products that are sold to recyclers along with mulch.

Marpan's Kim Williams said the state could boost recycling if people purchased more products from recycled materials to boost markets. Starting in January, all construction waste now going to Leon County's landfill will go through Marpan first for recycling.

Upon heading into the office shortly after 10, I was called into the office of Executive Editor Bob Gabordi. I knew what was coming, especially when I saw managing editor Africa Price there.

I was being laid off, Bob explained, and he asked if I had any questions. I could have responded more politely but frankly I was annoyed. My job had already been changed three times this year, and now I was being put out of work. But we shook hands, they offered to help me and I offered to help them in the future. There was a modest severance package.

   Then I went home. I checked my e-mails. I returned a few phone calls. And I didn't know what to do next.

   So I ate my lunch and went to work.

   I went to the same state hearing that I had been planning on going to. But now I wasn't a Tallahassee Democrat reporter.

[...]

About 100 people attended, many of them from county recycling programs. Speakers chimed in with ideas about how the state could better educate residents to recycle or how it needs to create new markets for recyclable materials.

It seemed like news to me, but I was the only reporter there to cover it. And I wasn't even a newspaper reporter any more. Perhaps the other media were at the Environmental Regulation Commission meeting across town, where an important vote was scheduled on whether to adopt California's auto emissions. Or maybe they were not there either.

Earlier this year I would have covered the ERC instead. But my environmental reporting job got axed on Aug. 1 and I was reassigned to cover Leon County. Since recycling is inherently local, I figured I could at least cover the interesting concept of recycling 75 percent of our waste.

In this age of change, I feel certain there is a place for me to report on the important issues in Florida's Capital. Maybe I'll become a blogger, combined with some freelancing, combined with being on welfare. The reality hasn't really set in yet.

[...]

Six Apart Gives Journalists TypePad Pro Accounts for Free

Link: Six Apart Gives Journalists TypePad Pro Accounts for Free | The Blog Herald.

Link: TypePad - Why Blog - Journalist Bailout Program.

The TypePad Journalist Bailout Program

Because your Tumblr and Tweets, while clever, will not pay your bills.

Hello, recently-laid-off or fearful-of-layoffs journalist! We're Six Apart (you know us as the nice folks who make Movable Type or TypePad, which maybe you used for blogging at your old newspaper or magazine) and we want to help you.

We're a company founded by bloggers, and we've supported online journalism from the beginning. During a time when so many great journalists are worrried about losing their jobs, we want to do what we can to help. So we've put together a program to put you on your first steps towards independence.

Wow, this is wild. I knew there were many reasons I've always got on so well with the folks over at Six Apart, since back in the early days, but here's something amazing. Turns out my old acquaintance Anil Dash is behind it. I love his post about the rationale behind it, here.

As demoralizing as all the newspaper, magazine, and media layoffs are, and despite Tina Brown over at The Daily Beast trying to scoop up all the laid off journalism talent she can snag away from Arianna Huffington over at Huffington Post (What, are Daily Beast and HuffPo going to become like the Elephants' Graveyard, the place where old journalists go to die?), good old Six Apart, makers of Movable Type, Typepad, Vox (and do they still own LiveJournal?) is opening the door to journalistic self-publishing.

What a relief! The problem I had with using Typepad with the sometimes technophobic journalists that I built blogs for (not all) is that they often have trouble setting them up in the first place, putting up the basic design. On the other hand, Typepad usability is the best (I think) for handholding noobs, and its interface still after all these years FEELS the most friendly.

When I was teaching my journalism seminar at the University of Montana, I could have gone with a free service, like Blogger (WordPress wasn't really a player yet at that time), but I forced the students to use the paid Typepad service, and because of it, got them up and running in the shortest time possible.

And the moral of this story, imho, is never underestimate the amount of handholding new users may need.

And at the same time (from Typepad's POV) it may also attempt to hang on to a professional user base that is being increasingly lured away to module, online magazine-style themes that are increasingly becoming popular on WordPress.

I'm looking forward to a new slew of journalists taking control of their profession from the corporate publishing interests, dictating better story selection, sounding off about the state of the field, with this terrific move from Six Apart for Typepad!

Link: Six Apart Gives Journalists TypePad Pro Accounts for Free | The Blog Herald.

Six Apart Gives Journalists TypePad Pro Accounts for Free

by Thord Daniel Hedengren

Six Apart has a clever “program” up to get recently laid off journalists to start blogging. They’re calling it the TypePad Journalist Bailout Program. Basically, it gives journalists these things for free:

• A TypePad Pro account for free. Usually costs $14,95/month.
• Enrollment in the Six Apart Media advertising program, to get the ad dollars rolling.
• An extra push on blogs.com.

They also offer support and whatnot, all for free. The only thing the journos need to do is send a link to their last piece for a newspaper or similar. And according to the post, there’s been an overwhelming interest in this, so they’re lagging a bit behind on setting the accounts up, but no word on closing the program.

You know what? This is brilliant!

My hat’s off to whoever on Six Apart that came up with this idea. It’s a great way to get journalists blogging, since most of them (or us, in some cases) just need an economic incentive and a set platform to get started. The pure notion that you’ve got everything set up, and ads rolling right away, well, that’s bound to attract a lot of people.

Me included, actually. I’m a bit curious to this, but since I haven’t been sacked from any of my writing gigs yet, I don’t think I can apply. Too bad.

Great work, Six Apart, and a great PR stunt as well!

 

You know marketers are confused about Earth Day when...

This takes the cake. I happened to catch a page from the NY Post while in the subway today. An ad for Bloomingdale's department store in NYC caught my eye.

A sexy-looking guy is featured in some green-ish hued jeans and a blue t-shirt with the word "PEACE."

The promotion is for an Earth Day event at Bloomingdale's, called "Dress for the Planet."

OK, so what's wrong with this picture? The store wants to support Earth Day, is running a promotion, with a supposedly low-energy free concert, and is collecting old, "gently worn" clothing, which it will exchange for a pass to buy at a discount some NEW machine-ripped and gently fake-worn clothing!

No, it isn't even that reasonable. This is USING Earth Day as an opportunity for a SALE, like on President's Day or Labor Day. Sales exist to drive consumption, expressly, to INCREASE consumption (go to Bloomies and hack up a lung, you think that might make 'em happy?).

Bloomingdale's marketers are saying, "Oh, Ye Wonderful Earth-conscious People, come to our store and support the planet by BUYING more stuff that kills the planet!"

George Orwell would have been proud. This is truly doublespeak at its finest.

What does it mean (as Martin Luther might say) if those responsible for fueling the engine that drives the industrial consumption of the planet (not to mention the low-wage slavery of most of its people) not only to claim to be on the side of NOT DOING the very thing that is their highest goal as a corporation (increasing share-holder value), but also encourage us to follow the same contradictory purpose and HONOR THE EARTH by coming out to Bloomingdale's for a great sale for a good cause, you know, DESTROYING THE EARTH?

And the PEACE the sexy model's T-Shirt proclaims? Consumption, and the energy its engines require are precisely what fuels our current imperialist oil WARS, not to mention reinforcing energy-rich totalitarian states that big multi-nationals and super-powers keep in place, despite the violences and suppression (the opposite of PEACE) enacted against those peoples.

Yes, yes, we can all join in! Sing along in our anthem, follow the bouncing sale price label! Let us all celebrate Earth Day in the properly capitalist interpretation of its meaning, by CONSUMING THE EARTH MORE!

Increased consumption is, or can be made to be, after all, the answer to EVERY question. The Bloomingdale's sale proves it.

Is Amazon trying to monopolize the empowering "citizen media" Publish-On-Demand market?

UPDATE 3/30/08: A commenter below (A.F. Stewart) has left a link for an online petition against Amazon's new policy, and I wanted to make it live and promote it also up here at the top of the post:

Buy buttons have now been disabled, (PublishAmerica and Whiskey Press) and Amazon's policy is to do it to all who don't fall into line.

Voice your protest, sign the petition.

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/protectPOD

Thanks for the link, A.F.!

Link: Amazon.com Telling POD Publishers - Let BookSurge Print Your Books, or Else....

http://writersweekly.com/the_latest_from_angelahoycom/004597_03272008.html

I am republishing this courageous post from Writer's Weekly in its entirety, in order to help spread the word. That Amazon.com (normally quite supportive of key aspects of the Citizen Media Movement and its most democratizing elements) would attempt such a thing just leaves me speechless.

I hope I'm wrong, and I hope that the negative PR from such a heavy-handed move by a key gatekeeper rebounds badly and forces Amazon to allow the POD books the same rights and privileges as ANY published book with its own ISBN number.

Could you imagine Amazon dictating such a policy to any small university or literary press? What about selected political publishing houses devoted to giving voice to the Thomas Paines of our day?

Amazon made its name by becoming an online equivalent of our Library of Record. Google has now entered that arena, and the competition was necessary, but we can't expect the Barnes & Noble to take up that mantle, and I don't think it could; its interface is too weak and its devoted user base too also-ran. Many of the affected writers are turning to B&N as an alternative, and that could be a good move, if for nothing else, it could help B&N become a better true competitor to Amazon, but B&N has a long way to go.

Could it really be that Amazon is trying to bite the Long Tail that feeds it?

The Internet can be a truly open space only so long as our searches remain honest. Both Amazon and Google have an obligation to citizens of cyberculture not to go all border collie on us and use their power as gate-keepers at their leveraged choke-points of power as oppressive agents of social control against more democratizing forces online.

I hope to follow this issue more in the future, as I learn more about what's happening here, and Amazon's reaction to a public backlash. I should note that key groups particularly affected by this development are FANWRITERS, a massive constituency of fan fiction writers online who develop their skills and corpus of works in specific fandom communities. I have analyzed this social citizen media phenomena in my dissertation, and in the years since, have followed the careers of many successful writers who have "graduated" from fandom audiences to POD, often bringing their own quite sizable audience of fans with them. The effects of this move by Amazon below on the vast worlds of specific fandoms is just chilling.

The good news, which Amazon may not have realized, is that online fandoms are not simply intensely-focused affinity groups. As I also found in my dissertation, they are highly-organized activist organizations. While charities (on the positive side) cable television production houses and networks (on both the positive and negative side) are most often the targets of their organized activism (other sectors of politics and business should take note!), these fandom groups can easily turn on a dime and activate their bases against any target.

If Amazon should step back from this oppressive policy and I somehow miss it, please let me know, so I can also note the change here, when it happens. I have no interest in sharing this outrage in error, nor do I want to lose my faith in Amazon.

Say it ain't so! Please!

Link: Amazon.com Telling POD Publishers - Let BookSurge Print Your Books, or Else....

http://writersweekly.com/the_latest_from_angelahoycom/004597_03272008.html

March 27, 2008

Amazon.com Telling POD Publishers - Let BookSurge Print Your Books, or Else...

BREAKING DEVELOPMENT: We were notified by a PublishAmerica author that her book was available for purchase through Amazon on Tuesday but today the "buy" button for her book on Amazon is gone. We researched some other PublishAmerica books and it appears the "buy" button on Amazon has indeed been removed from the vast majority of their book pages.

PublishAmerica issued a press release today that states, "PublishAmerica will not comply with Amazon's ultimatum, and will not allow that company to dictate who will print PublishAmerica's books, and at what conditions."

~~~~~

Some Print on Demand (POD) publishers are privately screaming "Monopoly!" while others are seething with rage over startling phone conversations they're having with Amazon/BookSurge representatives. Why isn't anybody talking about it openly? Because they're afraid - very, very afraid.

Amazon.com purchased BookSurge, a small POD publisher/printer back in 2005. Amazon also lists and sells titles for the largest POD printer, Lightning Source, which is owned by Ingram (the large book distributor). According to their website, Lightning Source serves more than 4,300 publisher clients and has more than 400,000 titles in their system.

You'd think Amazon's purchase of BookSurge might have made things a bit uncomfortable between the two companies. However, they continued to work together, getting books on demand to Amazon.com's loyal customers. Things appeared to be cruising along just fine, but perhaps not anymore.

Reports have been trickling in from the POD underground that Amazon/BookSurge representatives have been approaching some Lightning Source customers, first by email introduction and then by phone (nobody at BookSurge seems to want to put anything in writing). When Lightning Source customers speak with the BookSurge representative, the reports say, they are basically told they can either have BookSurge start printing their books or the "buy" button on their Amazon.com book pages will be "turned off."

The book information would remain on Amazon, and people could still order the book from resellers (companies that list new and used books in Amazon's Marketplace section), but customers would not be able to buy the book from Amazon directly, nor qualify for the coveted "free shipping" that Amazon offers.

Don't believe it? I didn't believe it either. I am Angela Hoy, the co-owner of POD services company BookLocker.com and publisher of WritersWeekly.com. I am well-known in the industry for my activism performed through WritersWeekly Whispers and Warnings. Over the years, we have helped writers recover tens of thousands of dollars in fees from deadbeat editors and publishers, helped them negotiate better contract terms, assisted writers in obtaining payment after their copyrights have been violated, and even assisted police in collecting evidence to prosecute criminals who have preyed on writers. I am also the author of 11 non-fiction books.

Still doubting the reports could really be true, I emailed an Amazon/BookSurge representative who's been trying to get us to talk to him by phone. John Clifford of Amazon/BookSurge called me at 12:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 26, 2008.

My first comment was to tell him we heard a rumor that POD publishers who didn't use BookSurge would have the "buy" button on their Amazon.com book pages turned off.

He said, "What? Who told you that? That's not true!"

I told him I'd heard some rumors from the "POD underground."

He said he'd previously tried to talk to my husband, Richard Hoy, the President and CEO of BookLocker. I explained that we had a very bad experience with BookSurge in the past and that he was, naturally, hesitant to do business with them again. (Google the words BookSurge complaint without any quotes to see other customers' comments about them as well.)

He claimed the people who worked for BookSurge back then are probably all gone (but that didn't explain the more recent complaints). He made his sales pitch, talking about percentages and such, and said many POD publishers are resisting their attempts to convert to BookSurge. Mr. Clifford also said BookSurge's aim was to help Amazon customers get their books faster.

What he didn't say was that Lightning Source not only packages books for Amazon customers in boxes that feature an Amazon.com return address label, but also drop-ships those orders directly to Amazon customers at Amazon's request. Hmm...

He stated several times that books not converted to BookSurge's system would be "taken down." Since that wasn't exactly what we'd heard, I asked about books that perhaps weren't selling well, that aren't good candidates for converting to BookSurge (books that would remain for sale through Lightning Source, but would never be converted to BookSurge due to the time/expense involved).

Contrary to what he stated at the very beginning of our conversation, Mr. Clifford finally admitted that books not converted to BookSurge would have the "buy" button turned off on Amazon.com, just as we'd heard from several other POD publishers who had similar conversations with Amazon/BookSurge representatives.

Mr. Clifford said authors of those books could participate in the Amazon.com Advantage Program, meaning they would have to pay Amazon $29.95 per year PLUS 55% of the list price of their book, as well as buy and then send those books to Amazon directly for them to warehouse and ship to customers.

I explained to him that we had more than 1500 books in print and that it would take quite awhile to convert all of those over to BookSurge's system. He said as long as the relationship was "moving forward" that the "buy" button would remain active on our authors' books that had not yet been switched.

Another comment Mr. Clifford made was that their eventual desire is to have no books from other POD publishers available on Amazon.com.

WHAT ARE THEY THINKING?!

I have to wonder if Jeff Bezos is even aware of what is going on within his organization. Here is Amazon's Vision Statement, taken directly from their website:

"Our vision is to be earth's most customer centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online."

What it doesn't say is, "Our customers can buy any print on demand book they might want online...as long as we also get paid to print it."

Nobody likes being backed into a corner, and saying "do this or else" naturally breeds angry rejection and hostility. If we did agree to sign the contract, pulling and transferring files to Amazon/Booksurge would take an enormous amount of time and money. From the POD publishers we've talked to, and from our own experience at BookLocker, we could all be looking at a dire and immediate threat of revenue cuts if we refuse to sign the Amazon/BookSurge contract. Most importantly, there could be an outcry from and potential financial hardship on the authors, who are completely innocent in all of this.

In BookLocker's opinion, and the opinion of all the fellow Lightning Source customers we talked to, the Amazon/BookSurge proposal does not appear attractive at all (yes, we obtained the contract and the file submission specifications). Amazon/BookSurge would make money two ways on Amazon.com sales - first the fee for printing the books, and then 48% of the list price of each sale through Amazon.com. Lightning Source allows its customers to set their own discount rate for Amazon and other retail sales, and does not force POD publishers or authors to pay "48%."

Furthermore, it could take the larger POD publishers months to submit their book files to Amazon/BookSurge, at a considerable cost and number of man-hours. This makes the deal even less attractive. Finally, while the initial list of books submitted by POD publishers could be submitted to Amazon/BookSurge for free, the contract states future books would cost $50 each to process. The cost for individual authors to publish through BookSurge is considerably more, with an average publishing package cost of more than $1,000.

Since Amazon/BookSurge does not offer Ingram distribution (Ingram distribution is considered imperative in the industry for bookstore sales), any company that accepts the Amazon/BookSurge deal, who desires to keep offering Ingram distribution, may need to maintain two copies of the book files. Since the Amazon/BookSurge current specs don't match the Lightning Source specs, future book files, both interior and cover, may need to be formatted separately. So, they would have to pay double the setup fees and might have to do double the formatting work as well...or pay designers to do double the formatting work.

Likewise, self-published authors who believe they must have Ingram Distribution AND an active "buy" button on Amazon to be successful may need to pay double the setup fees (to a POD publisher AND Amazon/BookSurge), and also may need to create two separate sets of formatted files.

In the event where two versions of a book might be available, Mr. Clifford said the Amazon/BookSurge version of the POD book would trump (override) the version offered by Lightning Source on Amazon.com.

AMAZON WAS BUILT BY BOOKS....That Were Written By AUTHORS

When authors get wind of this, we believe they are going to be livid. Authors are also readers. They love books. We suspect they buy from Amazon in droves. I, myself, have been an Amazon junkie for years, not only heavily promoting Amazon.com in my non-fiction books for writers and on our very popular website, WritersWeekly.com, but also listing my own books for sale there, ordering other authors' books, DVDs and numerous other products as well. I pulled up our Amazon customer account and looked at our receipts. We've spent $1508.81 at Amazon.com in the past six months. Multiply that by the number of authors this will affect...authors who, like me, have a multitude of websites to choose from when doing their shopping online.

In addition, authors participate in the Amazon experience, via blogs on the website, by posting reviews about other books, and more, activities that help to continually make Amazon bigger and better. Authors are a loyal bunch! For years, they've been faithfully sending their readers to Amazon.com, again and again, even when they earned lower royalties for doing so.

It's not inconceivable to think that this group, if shoved against a wall like this, won't simply pledge their allegiance elsewhere. Let's face it, BarnesandNoble.com offers free shipping on orders of $25 or more, too. Authors can change the links to their book pages on their websites, in their ezines and press releases, and even in their email signatures to their book's page at BarnesandNoble.com. Authors can spend their own money elsewhere as well (as I plan to do). I imagine BarnesandNoble.com will be very happy to process the extra book sales that could result from all of this.

Amazon.com might also upset countless companies that have Amazon Affiliate bookstores on their websites (many authors have these, too!). If Amazon/BookSurge were to follow through with turning off the "buy" buttons for thousands of POD titles, customers following those links from other websites could be confused and annoyed. After clicking on a link, they would find no easy way to purchase the book directly from Amazon, and no way to obtain free shipping on that book, even if they're willing to buy more products to meet the $25 free shipping threshold. One would think Amazon must know the free shipping strategy works to upsell customers on additional products. That's why they offer it. Without it, these customers could have no incentive to buy more products because the product they surfed in to buy does not qualify.

One has to wonder if traditional publishers will be next? Will Amazon eventually require all books sold through Amazon.com to be printed by BookSurge?

Let's all hope and pray this situation is one huge, misguided idea from some mid-level management person and not corporate policy being dictated from the office of Jeff Bezos.

What can you do? Let Amazon know what you think about this "offer" by Amazon/BookSurge.

The names of their Officers and Directors are here: http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=97664&p=irol-govManage

Amazon's Investor Relations Team email address appears near the bottom of this page: http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=97664&p=irol-faq

Their address is:

Amazon.com, Inc.
P.O. Box 81226
Seattle, WA 98108-1226

Next, tell your author friends, your book buyers, your website visitors, your ezine subscribers and everyone else about this situation. Amazon.com was built on books. Books are written by authors. Unfortunately, it appears authors may ultimately be the innocent pawns in this power struggle.

~~~~~

[...]

Angela Hoy is the publisher of WritersWeekly.com, which offers free job listings and paying markets for freelance writers every Wednesday. Subscribe at WritersWeekly.com. She is also the publisher at BookLocker, which offers full-service, affordable print on demand publishing and free ebook publishing.

~~PERSONAL POSTSCRIPT TO AUTHORS FROM ANGELA~~

There is no reason to panic. We are not aware of any cases yet where the "buy" button has been removed. It is possible, after recognizing everyone's concerns, that Amazon might change its mind.

If they do turn off the "buy" buttons, though, not having an active "buy" button on Amazon.com is not the end of the world.

After selling books for eight years, it has been our experience that "chance purchases" of self-published books on Amazon.com are not the norm. Authors slap books up on Amazon.com all the time, don't market them, and sell zero copies. For most self-published authors, sales are almost always author-driven, meaning the bookstore link you use in your marketing efforts is what's driving your sales, not just simply having your book listed on Amazon.com.

We know from experience that the customer is going to buy your book from where you tell them to buy your book. If you want your customers to qualify for free shipping, you can send them to BarnesandNoble.com, and tell them their order might qualify for free shipping (many people don't know BarnesandNoble.com offers free shipping!).

Beware the coming social network wars?!

Link: Google and Friends to Gang Up on Facebook - New York Times.

What's up with this? A big "secret source" expose' on deep background? A coming onslaught?! The underdog forces of Google (ahem) and some conspiracy, some cabal, dare we say a back room deal? They are all marshalling their forces to SAVE US ALL from the utter takeover of the world by....

Facebook.  (er, Microsoft? The 1.6 percent solution?)

(full disclosure... these days I somewhat resemble that solution)

Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!

Oh no! Not the old frumious Bandersnatch!

What? You don't believe we Facebook users are in imminent peril? Well, just look at this secret-sourced NYTimes article below, and tremble with fear! Then you can say a little prayer that Google and friends are there to save us from ourselves.

Link: Google and Friends to Gang Up on Facebook - New York Times.

Google and Friends to Gang Up on Facebook

By MIGUEL HELFT and BRAD STONE

Published: October 31, 2007

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 30  —  Google and some of the Web’s leading social networks are teaming up to bully the new kid on the block — Facebook.    

On Thursday, an alliance of companies led by Google plans to begin introducing a common set of standards to allow software developers to write programs for Google’s social network, Orkut, as well as others, including LinkedIn, hi5, Friendster and Ning, according to people briefed on the plans. Those people asked not to be named because they agreed to keep the alliance’s plans confidential.

The strategy is aimed at one-upping Facebook, which last spring opened its service to outside developers. Since then, more than 5,000 small programs have been built to run on the Facebook site, and some have been adopted by millions of the site’s users. Most of those programs tap into connections among Facebook friends and spread themselves through those connections, as well as through a “news feed” that alerts Facebook users about what their friends are doing.

“It is going to forestall Facebook’s ability to get everyone writing just for Facebook,” said a person briefed on the plans. The group’s platform, which is called Open Social, is “compatible across all the companies,” that person said.

“Facebook got the jump by announcing the Facebook platform and getting the traction they got. This is an open alternative to that,” the person also said.

[...]

[Oh, OK, I get it. It isn't Facebook itself that is an offensive smell unto the heavens, it's the closed platform. Because we all know, none of those companies ever tried to advance any closed platforms themselves before, right?

I'm sensing crocodile tears, in other words.

Now, generally I'm the first one to rant against walled gardens, most often right here in this blog. Yet for some reason, I have no interest whatsoever in MySpace, which is much more open than Facebook.

Most of my work online is outside any walled gardens, in the blogosphere. And yet.

And yet what is this REALLY all about? (Alfie?)

I don't like walled gardens, yet I DO like to keep my EMAIL private. And I patronize both Facebook and LinkedIn, which are fairly (but not perfectly) tight on keeping email spammers away by creating an Opt-In Whitelist out on the Cloud.

And THAT, folks, is the real frumious Bandersnatch in this saga.

Google and friends might SAY it is about open standards. They might SAY it is about improving the quality and interoperability of the social networking experience. Yaddah yaddah. I remember back in 2003 or so, when open source advocates were trying to set up an open FOAF standard like RSS, to be published with any page. Yeah, I tried it just to try it. Man, did it sucketh muchly.

Where were all these Great and Terrible OZ Champions of open standard social networks then, back when the interfaces were rough and clunky and only geeks would touch it? Back when the idea was just starting to take shape? Nowhere to be found.

And I bailed just about as quickly as I tried it out. The reason? Because OPEN platform with FOAF meant ANYONE could get at any social links I chose to put in that space (including spammers), and that was precisely what I didn't want. That stuff is myowndamnbusinessthankyouverymuch.

So are we supposed to buy that this is somehow the sequel of that grassroots foray?

Here's what I think: Google and friends got a whiff of many chips really are on the table, the real threat Facebook poses, and got their noses bent out of joint because they were being forced to play Facebook's game to get a piece of the action

THINK: what has really been the BIGGEST killer app since the birth of the Internet?

There's only one answer to that question: email.

And how much has the basic interface of email changed or substantially been improved on since the bad old days of Pine and all that gnashing of teeth?

Email is still a reverse-chronological list with items you open and close, save or delete. Even Gmail and others out in the Cloud have not substantially altered anyone's single experience of email (other than gmail's "never delete anything" mantra, which is still ominous to me).

We are all inundated by spam now, of course, because of the frictionless direct mail and fraud space, but aside from the spam filter industry that has arisen to put up walls and have them breached and put up new walls and have them breached, what is happening to improve or change our experience of email?

I personally find the interface of the reverse-chronological email In-Box list oppressive. I'd like to delete it from my life. It hides important things I want to remember. They get pushed off the screen as other more recent, less important things arrive.

That is the nature of an interface ruled by clock time and screen boundaries instead of by values and human needs. It persists because on a basic level its utility serves better than any alternative so far, SO FAR.

The reverse-chronological list email interface rules humans and social groups, rather than humans and social groups ruling it.

People who matter to me are forgotten in the exigence of the email moment, just as TV occupies our front minds with trivia and disrupts the values most of us would consciously choose, if we were indeed conscious and controlling the interfaces that dictate our lives.

Trivial email as sonambulistic distraction on par with TV? I think it could be, yet email is probably the most important thing in my life, STILL. I blame the interface, not my quality email connections.

I'd like to put relationships in the center of my online experience, not a reverse-chronological clock.

People at Earthlink and other proactive ISPs often urge us to make liberal use of the blacklists and whitelists they enable for us, but those tools are not useful to me at all.

Blacklists are useless because spammers are a moving target.

Whitelists are useless because they are like your own personal Emily Dickinson, "A Soul Selects her own Society," shutting the door on the divine majority.

The old classmate or distant cousin can't find you if you erase yourself from online spaces in the name of protecting yourself from spam.

If you build the moat around your castle too wide and deep, no one will be able to get in.

It defeats the purpose of being online in the first place: to connect (and not to buy things endlessly trying to fill needy emotional holes in our souls, WWW=TV II, as many online ventures desperately want us to believe).

Interfaces must serve the users AND their social groups, and not the other way around. And when interfaces do not serve, social groups should be empowered to reshape fluid interfaces to fit their needs and wants. This was what I found in my doctoral research in the late 1990s, and we are apparently still learning this lesson now.

Facebook is hot right now because it has seized a middle ground, allowing us to both HIDE and CONNECT. One foot in water, one foot on land. That's a walled garden I can live with. Not invisible, but not vulnerable either, because basically the Emily Dickinson in each of us is still in charge, and can shut the door on any divine majorities she pleases.

Google and its secret superfriends who think they are going to save us from ourselves by luring us away from Facebook (uh, just like Google Video persuaded all those avid YouTube users to abandon the YouTube communities and choose Google instead?) are actually operating out of fear, the SAME FEAR that sent Bill Gates into the browser wars with Netscape.

Why did Internet Explorer seek to crush Netscape? Because Microsoft saw the browser as a primary competitor for Windows, the browser as new OS platform. From the standpoint of Microsoft, if Windows is a shell that sits on top of MS-DOS, a browser can also become a de facto shell that sits on top of Windows, potentially superseding it.

Did Microsoft buy that 1.6% stake in Facebook for this same reason, jockeying with Google? It does seem to be High Noon a lot these days between Microsoft and Google, but I have no insight into any of that competitive business activity. I'm interested in interfaces and platforms.

I think Google and friends believe Facebook is fast becoming The Platform of the Cloud, a platform that sits on top of the browser in the same way the browser sits on top of the OS.

Our primary interfaces will always be a moving target as fickle users and social groups gravitate toward the interfaces that resonate and are most useful to them.

Blog software opened web publishing to legions of non-specialists, creating new social network interfaces, a reborn and empowered public Commons through simple publishing interfaces (not discounting any of the many private, group, and intranet blogs in use out there, as publishing can be both public and private and inbetween).

Gmail is trying to get us to move the same old email interfaces into new wineskins, out on the Cloud, but Google has not substantially changed the basic function of reverse-chronological list email interfaces that have been with us since Pine.

So what do I get from Facebook? Right now, at least (until Facebook, as many tools I've tried before, changes my basic experience on the site, and I bail), I think I get what could be the successor to email-as-killer-app.

For the first time ever in my online experience, I'm not just getting another platform. I think I'm getting something that could replace email as the central interface and portal for me online.

I mean, I've been on the web since 1993, and regardless of how well the browser interface has conquered the world, it's clunky one-way "interactive" features kept it from ever upstaging email as my primary on-ramp online.

Personally, I think Facebook has the potential to edge out email as the ultimate killer app, and that raises higher stakes for all business players involved, more so than just adding another rung in the infinitely beckoning and totally temporal platform "layer" wars.

But I'm not done pointing up some things from the NYTimes article that set me off on this tangent. Here's some more juicy bits:]

The alliance includes business software makers Salesforce.com and Oracle, who are moving to let third-party programmers write applications that can be accessed by their customers.

The start of Open Social comes just a week after Google lost to Microsoft in a bid to invest in Facebook and sell advertising on the social network’s pages outside the United States. And it comes just before the expected introduction by Facebook of an advertising system next week, which some analysts believe could compete with Google’s.

[...]

For now, however, Facebook has become the preferred platform for software developers.

By teaming with others, Google hopes to create a rival platform that could have broad appeal to developers. A person briefed on the plans said that the social networks in the alliance had a combined 100 million users, more than double the size of Facebook.

[...]

[You know, that unnamed person above is waving something phallic-shaped around, but it sure ain't 100 million users. This smells like someone blowing PR spin to me. I don't care how many "registrations" they can name in articles like this, they wouldn't be shitting little gold bricks in this special competitive alliance if they thought those 100 million users wouldn't ditch them for Facebook in a heartbeat. Anyone can read trend reports and see which way the wind is blowing.

I mean, Google Video's attempts to trump YouTube also underestimated the power of the YouTube community. Google cried uncle first.]

The developers of some of the most popular Facebook applications, including iLike and RockYou, are expected to be present at a party Thursday evening when they will announce that they will tailor their programs to run on the Open Social sites.

The effort faces several hurdles. Developers may not see the advantage to writing programs that run across such remarkably different networks as, for example, LinkedIn, which caters to business professionals, and hi5, which is popular in Central America.

[...]

Google has not been able to establish itself as a force in social networking, and it clearly wants to. “One of the things to say, very clearly, is that social networks as a phenomenon are very real,” Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said in a recent interview. “If you are of a certain age, you sort of dismiss this as college kids or teenagers. But it is very real.”

Google said it has advertising relationships with several social networks, including a $900 million partnership to sell ads on MySpace, which the company said is performing well. Google is also making some money on Facebook, through ads that run inside applications that are used on that network.

A person familiar with Google’s efforts said that those applications have been far more effective for advertisers on social networks than users’ personal pages. “It is early, but those ads work very well, whereas the ads in overall social media platforms have shown less performance,” the person said.

[...]

[This is the New York Times and all, but I really hope the article above was not based on that single unnamed source, because that person is clearly a PR spinner releasing a trial balloon in advance of a more official announcement.

The New York Times wouldn't hinge this entire story on a single source, would it? I know it's pitiful, but there are a few things in this era of declining journalistic standards that I'd like to be able to trust, even if I do know better than to trust anything (except bloggers!).

One, two! One, two! And through and through
  The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
  He went galumphing back.

"And, has thou slain the Jabberwock?
  Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!'
  He chortled in his joy.

 

Read the NYTimes for free!

Link: Times to Stop Charging for Parts of Its Web Site - New York Times.

Long-awaited, one of the most ridiculous decisions in the history of journalism has been reversed! I've ding-donged about the upcoming death of TimeSelect already, so I'll avoid too much gloating and instead focus on why the decision was so stupid and obviously ill-fated, to lock up a significant portion of the site, its "newspaper of record" historical archives, and influential stable of op-ed columnists, including two, Frank Rich and Paul Krugman, that this sorry excuse for a democracy can LITERALLY not be without.

What the Times essentially did was remove itself from the public agora, the forum, the space where democracy is deliberated, by trying to create a walled-garden of commodities to literally spit in the face of an evolving online "public square" or "commons."

The generica of strip mall and franchise nation has long gobbled up most of the physical public squares or commons, except for old venerated ones, like the Boston Commons. Levitown and the culture of the automobile has created a beast, the Burbs, to isolate people from more traditional senses of community, what Hannah Arendt would call our "civil society," or our less self-consciously active participation in our own communities, rather than staring into the passively-programmed sonambulism, the television.

I say less self-consciously active because sure, many people strive and work very hard at being active in their communities, and good for them. There was a time where just being alive and breathing meant you participated in your community, without having to drag yourself away from the TV to do it, rather than having to be guilted into making something for the bake sale or to participate in clean-up volunteer day at your local park.

I know people like to lump together time spent staring at the boob tube with time spent online, but I would argue that those spaces demand quantitatively different activities from our brains, the kinds of things the interactive version of the New York Times challenges us to do all the time, to talk back, argue, blog, Digg, bookmark, and so on. Yaddah yaddah, and let's all go read Michel de Certeau, "The Practice of Everyday Life," to see how ordinary people seize the day and control their own means of production.

Meanwhile, this is me making fun of what the Times has to say about its "taking down that firewall!"

Link: Times to Stop Charging for Parts of Its Web Site - New York Times.

Times to Stop Charging for Parts of Its Web Site

 

By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

Published: September 18, 2007

 

The New York Times will stop charging for access to parts of its Web site, effective at midnight  tonight.

The move comes two years to the day after The Times began the subscription program, TimesSelect, which has charged $49.95 a year, or $7.95 a month, for online access to the work of its columnists and to the newspaper’s archives. TimesSelect has been free to print subscribers to The Times and to some students and educators.

In addition to opening the entire site to all readers, The Times will also make available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain. There will be charges for some material from the period 1923 to 1986, and some will be free.

The Times said the project had met expectations, drawing 227,000 paying subscribers — out of 787,000 over all — and generating about $10 million a year in revenue.

“But our projections for growth on that paid subscriber base were low, compared to the growth of online advertising,” said Vivian L. Schiller, senior vice president and general manager of the site, NYTimes.com.

What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYtimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.

“What wasn’t anticipated was the explosion in how much of our traffic would be generated by Google, by Yahoo and some others,” Ms. Schiller said.

[You know, just to belabor the point, but y'all may have not anticipated it, but if you had listened to the chorus of netizens AND new media theorists online, you would have found 80-90 percent of the people anticipating that explosion.

The New York Times may not have anticipated it, but just as MANY MANY people saw quite clearly the fiasco the US invasion of Iraq was to become, long before the ill-fated invasion ever began, a person really didn't have to rent a clue-by-four to know that building a walled garden in the open range of the public online agora would be a disaster, would effectively MUZZLE the newspaper's OWN VOICE.

It boggles the mind, how, in a world, an Information/Knowledge-based society where rising influence (whether in bits, wampum, poker chips, what-have-you) is worth more than any devaluing currencies, that a newspaper that wants to be essentially the nation's newspaper of record would deliberately undermine its own influence.

It would be like if you had nice sharp teeth, and you said, "You know what? These teeth are over-rated and get in the way of my big fat lolling tongue. I think I'm just going to pull these teeth out and de-fang myself. Yeah, that ought to increase my power and influence in the world. I ought to be able to reach more people, larger audiences that way."]

The Times’s site has about 13 million unique visitors each month, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, far more than any other newspaper site. Ms. Schiller would not say how much increased Web traffic the paper expects by eliminating the charges, or how much additional ad revenue the move was expected to generate.

Those who have paid in advance for access to TimesSelect will be reimbursed on a prorated basis.

Colby Atwood, president of Borrell Associates, a media research firm, said that there have always been reasons to question the pay model for news sites, and that doubts have grown along with Web traffic and online ad revenue.

“The business model for advertising revenue, versus subscriber revenue, is so much more attractive,” he said. “The hybrid model has some potential, but in the long run, the advertising side will dominate.”

[...]

Many readers lamented their loss of access to the work of the 23 news and opinion columnists of The Times — as did some of the columnists themselves. Some of those writers have such ardent followings that even with access restricted, their work often appeared on the lists of the most e-mailed articles.

[...]