Chris Boese's Weblog

Dan Gillmor gives much-needed perspective on the journ-opoly's real market failures

Link: Dan Gillmor: Journalism monopoly was also a market failure - Advertising - Salon.com.

Dan lays it down tough, but he says some things that really needed saying, that needed amplifying.

I'm still pretty freaked over the general decline of the overall enterprise of public affairs reporting, investigative reporting, civic and civil society reporting and analysis, as these behemoth media monopolies falter like a single-species pine forest hit by the bark beetle.

But Dan is at least reminding us, reminding me, of something I knew, suffered with as the status quo, never quite reconciled myself to as the years rolled by, but found myself increasingly powerless to do anything about it to fight those monopolies, at least until the blog movement and the idea of citizen journalism came along.

Not that the pretty feeble but courageous citizen journalism and non-profit journalism efforts caused the massive monopolies to shiver in their boots. That mild contribution to the monopolies' death is just a thousand cuts, with the IDEA of the real masses, the huge reading publics accessing content for free online. Those readers were fed by an advertising-subsidized content machine, however, a machine created and delivered in an industrial, mindless assembly-line, tape-recorder-journalist-as-low-wage-line-worker model, not with a a critical thinking and analysis (even semantic parsing!) information age model (one could argue the Internet model is SEO-driven, nearly-bot-written content thinly scraped to follow trending topics... but that's a subject for another post!).

But the real death blow is being struck by the hand that fed the monopoly powers: advertisers cutting back in the face of the Great Recession.

OJR's Robert Niles: Writing skill is no longer enough to sustain journalists

Link: Writing skill is no longer enough to sustain journalists.

Boy, there's some intriguing stuff packed into this short Online Journalism Review piece by Robert Niles, stuff that gets said on the way to saying something else, and those are the bits that give me pause!

They seem to have more ramifications for the world of writing and literacy than they do for the world of vocational training for journalists, although they are also in some sense tossed off, and could use more support than a hasty generalization.

So I figure, why not look in at them here? Let's look beyond the practical vo-tech employment concerns and wax a bit philosophical.

First, to Robert Niles:

Writing skill is no longer enough to sustain journalists

By Robert Niles

What's the value of journalism?

The short answer is, of course, "whatever someone will pay for it." But a more thoughtful response gets at why people are willing to exchange something of value for news information.

Economics 101 teaches that if more people want something, and the scarcer it is, the higher the price. With millions of new websites competing for people's attention, advertising rates across all media have plunged, threatening news businesses that depend upon advertising income.

[Hmmm. Tell the Econ 101 argument to poets, and they may beg to differ.

While journalists have long had to contend with the idea that their best work has the value of the Daily Fishwrap, the thing that people pile up unread, throw away daily, or use to line birdcages, poets have lived with this deep knowledge, that their very best work, their best of the best, work that strives for standing the test of time, or ephemeral, contingent, and quickly forgotten work like performance art, has an economic value of precisely ZERO, since before the time of Gutenberg. 

A cautionary tale as social media sites and platforms inevitably rise and fall

Link:  FT.com / Reportage - The rise and fall of MySpace.

I've been around the social media block long enough (Geocities, Friendster, Tribe.net, anyone?), and this seems to apply to the seemingly "invincible" search engines as well (WebCrawler, AltaVista?): the one thing that seems as constant as death and taxes online is that the social sphere (the wisdom of crowds or mob rule) is fickle.

You may be up one day, but most surely, a day will come when you will be down (think about it, Blackboard!).

So while I never really got into MySpace, the larger story of the MySpace failure is a cautionary tale for any 800 pound gorilla entertaining dreams of invincible bigness.

This Financial Times article dissects the failures of the early leader dancing on the tensions between interactive communication models and mass media communication models, as News Corp tycoons demanded MySpace scale up to mass media audiences and oblivious mass media behaviors, effectively killing their own golden goose.

But is that what killed the MySpace social ecosystem?

(Note, it is not really dead, but it is acknowledged in this article that its 100M users are no longer contesting Facebook for leadership at 300M users.)

One could argue that as surely as MySpace rose, it would also fall, as surely as a small town church will split into two churches, as surely as Friendster begat Tribe begat MySpace begat Facebook (which will begat ???).

But back when this question of ascendancy between MySpace and Facebook was still in more open contention, I never once doubted Facebook would come out on top (and this wasn't just because MySpace often resembled the old Geocities pages either!).

But people argued with me. And I knew they were wrong, despite their very earnest and rational arguments, proofs, numbers.

It bugs me: How did I know they were wrong? I am wont to reflect on these things. I wouldn't just  cite my online research background in social ecosystems, user experience design work, or some other thing from my resume' (an argument based on authority or expertise, which seems to be a cheat in this instance, since I have never designed a site as successful as MySpace or Facebook).

So truisms and arguments from authority or expertise don't count, at least for this exercise.

So how did I just KNOW? How did all those other 300M users just know? What did we know?

Jonathan Zittrain warns: Beware the Rise of Closed Platforms

Link: Zittrain: Beware the Rise of Closed Platforms - GigaOM.

I love it when Jonathan Zittrain weighs in on things. Loved his book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, and mostly what he says here expands on ideas in there, focused on the platform side of things, and the growing lack of "generativity" and openness in the newer platforms coming out, like the iPhone and Kindle.

So if you haven't read the book, here's some pithy bits as summarized by Liz Gannes:

Imagine, if you will, that you bought a cloud-enabled toaster. And that one day, you got a sudden in-home upgrade to three toast slots from two. Then, just as suddenly, the new feature addition was rolled back. So you were left with two slots and some smushed toast. And then your toaster decided it wanted to start serving orange juice.

You don’t truly own the toaster — rather, according to Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain, “You entered into a service relationship with a breakfast-oriented provider.” That’s the tragic and giggle-worthy analogy Zittrain uses to illustrate his worry that the cloud computing model gives too much control to platforms, which must be trusted to do good.

[...]

His audience included co-panelist Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, a company Zittrain pinpointed as being at the center of the problem.

For instance, Zittrain called Amazon’s Kindle a device with “an operating system crying to get out.” To an even greater degree than with Apple’s iPhone, programmers can’t get direct access to develop on the Kindle platform, he noted. And Amazon retreating on the Kindle’s text-to-speech feature and zapping of U.S. customers’ copies of “1984″ — despite a convincing apology by Jeff Bezos — show the company can beam itself down to make the device less useful when it chooses.

[...]

Zittrain also pointed to Amazon Mechanical Turk, where people can be put to near-automated work that makes them effectively zombies for largely non-useful purposes such as giving five-star reviews for devices they’ve never used. In this case he thinks government regulation, like the FTC’s new blogging disclosure policy, could be a good thing — at least in the sense that it pressures Amazon to police tasks on its platform.

[...]

Clay Shirky and Laura Flanders on the sacred and profane in social media

Link: Clay Shirky on Twitter and the social media revolution | Online Journalism Blog.

For some reason, GritTV on my computer doesn't match audio to video very well, so besides looking like an out-of-sync old Japanese monster film, this is a terrific interview!

The bit I really listened to and took the most away from is about three-quarters of the way through the interview, when Clay starts talking about the way the Pirate Bay lawsuit morphed into the Pirate Political Party in Sweden, with ramifications for the European Parliament. I am definitely going to run out (figuratively, letting my fingers do the running) and find out more about that!

Also (and this relates to a recent post/discussion we were having on our Scatter/Gather work blog), the rest of the discussion from that point forward explores some of my favorite themes about how periods of great growth and intellectual energy are released in times when the sacred and the profane exist in very close proximity to each other. Except that isn't really the way Shirky put it (although others explore this connection, what in the field of Rhetoric you find in Bakhtin and his talk of the discourse of the "carnival")

The simplicity of Twitter, of course, is its genius. It has the power to do so much by doing so little. But that’s not the only thing that’s simple about Twitter. The service itself was only intended to share 140-character messages with the world. Its significance is its evolution. Everything from @replying and retweeting to using hashes and symbols can be attributed to the users. It has brilliantly allowed users to define it – almost entirely. As Shirky points out, “Most of the uses of Twitter were not imagined by the designers of the service – they were managed by the users of the service.”

This is neat: Ford named Brand of the Year for social media innovation

Link: Society for New Communications Research Announces 2009 Fellows` Choice Award Winners for Innovator, Visionary, Brand and Humanitarian of the Year | Reuters.

Neat write up below on Ford (I work for Ford at Razorfish).

Society for New Communications Research Announces 2009 Fellows` Choice Award Winners for Innovator, Visionary, Brand and Humanitarian of the Year

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(Business Wire)--The Society for New Communications Research (http://sncr.org), a global nonprofit research and education foundation and think tank focused on the latest developments in new media and communications and their impact on business, media, culture and society, today announced the Society`s Fellows` Choice Award winners for the Visionary of the Year, Innovator of the Year, Brand of the Year and Humanitarian of the Year as part of the SNCR Excellence in New Communications Awards program.

The 2009 SNCR Fellows Choice Award winners are:

* Visionary of the Year: David Plouffe, President Obama`s campaign adviser, for his successful use of social media communications tools and technologies in the 2008 U.S. presidential election campaign strategy

* Innovation of the Year: The Kindle, the popular software and hardware platform developed by Amazon.com subsidiary Lab126 for reading e-books and other digital media

* Brand of the Year: Ford for its innovative use of social media to improve the way the company communicates with its stakeholders

* Humanitarian of the Year: The Iranian Political Bloggers for their courageous use of blogging tools and Twitter to try share their experiences with the world and to try to effect political change in Iran

"The SNCR Fellows have chosen an incredibly impressive variety of individuals and organizations for this year`s award winners. These special award winners have the vision and success to provide a valuable example to others and we are honored to be able to acknowledge them through this awards program," commented Jen McClure, president, SNCR. 

[...]

The Society for New Communications Research is a global nonprofit 501(c)(3) research and education foundation and think tank focused on the advanced study of the latest developments in new media and communications, and their effect ontraditional media and business models, communications, culture and society. SNCR is dedicated to creating a bridge between the academic and theoretical pursuit of these topics and the pragmatic implementation of new media and communications tools and methodologies. The Society`s Fellows include a leading group offuturists, scholars, business leaders, professional communicators, members of the media and technologists from around the globe - all collaborating together on research initiatives, educational offerings, and the establishment ofstandards and best practices. For more information, email us at [email protected] or call +1 408.266.9658.

SNCR

Media: Jen McClure, 650-387-8590 [email protected]

What to think about the CNN.com redesign?

I've been checking out the screenshots and early weekend implementation of the new CNN.com redesign. Several of my journalist and non-journalist friends have been weighing in on links I've posted on Facebook (although my CNN buds have been keeping fairly quiet, as is proper. I did same in public forums when I worked there).

Disclaimer: I was a cyberculture columnist for CNN.com from 2002-2005, where I often had to advocate for certain "bloggish" types of discourse that were not generally permitted on the site because the online common wisdom or ways of knowing (crowd-sourced consensus on cyber-topics, usually) couldn't be traced to some important person quoted as saying "X" (an absolute requirement for CNN.com at the time), or because online "conventional" wisdom didn't necessarily jive with journalistic copyediting standards of "The Row" at that time.

Times have certainly changed, both in the network and with the site's embrace of citizen media (something I was also an early advocate for), and now, in its turn toward the site stylings of online "opinion writing" found at Huffington Post and The Daily Beast, among other blog and news aggregators (more on that below).

For what it's worth, a full archive of my CNN.com columns can be viewed here. I was employed by Turner Broadcasting from 2001 to the end of 2006, when I moved to NYC to take a position at Razorfish, ironically, the company responsible for the CNN.com 2007 redesign (UX and creative). I was not involved in the redesign at either company.

That should cover all necessary disclaimers. All I'm doing here is giving my impressions on the 2009 redesign (largely positive, I'll tell you why), in spite of my friends' initial reactions on Facebook (largely negative, I can speculate why), and what I think may have been lost from what I considered a visually stunning "liquid" (the gray modular look) redesign as proposed by Razorfish and executed by CNN.com in 2007.

What follows is my opinion and my opinion only, and in no way represents the views of any of my employers, past or present.

Dan Gillmor proposes some "New Rules of News." I pick my favorites.

Link: The new rules of news | Dan Gillmor | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.

Constantly risking absurdity and death... er, no. That's Ferlinghetti.

Um, clearly risking IRONY without death, Dan has waded into trying to define what journalism is yet again! Thanks Dan! Don't know what I'd do without you, and I mean that seriously (having taught from and even blurbed, I think, your terrific book We the Media).

But for the irony! It's so postmodern!

From this insightful list of 22 New Rules for News, we first must talk about Rule Number 11...

11. We would never publish lists of ten. They're a prop for lazy and unimaginative people.

I guess lists of 22 are OK then? Numerologists would tell you 11 and 22 are Master Numbers that can't be reduced, linked to both channeling IDEALISM into the planet from a higher plane (one more than 10 items) and working as a MASTER BUILDER, some kind of journalistic Freemason, I guess.

There you go, Dan. Always trying to moving things to a higher level! Lists of more than 10 items are OK. Whew! [grin]

I jokes. But some good stuff to chew on in this list of 22 items. Because Dan doesn't wade into the polemic that surrounds so much of the debate about the future of journalism (but instead has characteristically put his money where his mouth is, to work as a practical master builder of sorts for the highest kind of idealism the religion of journalism can sustain) I find it interesting picking his brain on this stuff.

Some things I agree with. Some I don't. Some are more important. Some less. Which inspired me to add my (for what it's worth) two cents.

How about a list of my 10 favorites?

First, the set-up (so it makes sense):

Dan sez:

You may have noticed – you could hardly miss it – the blizzard of anniversary stories last month about the fall of Lehman Brothers, an event that helped spark last year's financial meltdown. The coverage reminded me that journalists failed to do their jobs before last year's crisis emerged, and have continued to fail since then.

It also reminds me of a few pet peeves about the way traditional journalists operate. So here's a list of 22 things, not in any particular order, that I'd insist upon if I ran a news organization.

He's got me at Number 1, which just happened to be one of my pet peeves too, especially when I worked in TV-Land.

1. We would not run anniversary stories and commentary, except in the rarest of circumstances. They are a refuge for lazy and unimaginative journalists.

Dan tells my friend Grayson Daughters that the "lazy and unimaginative journalists" line was added by the editorial process at the Guardian, and that he wouldn't have used that term himself. I would have! If I'd have stayed in newspapers instead of morphing into cable news, it probably wouldn't bug me so much. But if I have to see ANOTHER Coney Island hot-dog eating story, I'll barf up all the hot dogs those guys are eating.

Sad shift work, really, was what it was, for 24-hour news staffers who couldn't get those days off. I didn't mind the national election rituals. But certain non-holidays that lead to a pre-set mandatory programming mantra of cliche's could just make me run around the room screaming. Like the hurricane preparation story, as the hurricane is of course "bearing down," right before it starts to "wreak havock."

How about the Super Bowl Sunday bizarro land programming as a national holiday?

OK, maybe it isn't a refuge of "lazy and unimaginative journalists" at all. Nope, I'm sure it isn't. They dread those godawful assignments. The mandate for such "coverage" comes from on high, editorial/management, that you MUST stack a show a certain way on those cliche' days. Mother's Day. All the stories about these days have to have several invocations of "We" in them, and the on-air staff have to chuckle or sigh sadly along with the same remarks from the year before.

I have to stop. I'm giving myself nightmares.

Rules 2-3 are from the glory days when citizen journalism was a bright and shiny new thing. It still has great promise, and I'll invest as much energy in it as ever, but oh boy, the rumbles I hear from the trenches. There's a lot of blogger payola not disclosed on the ground in some state and local political wars!

Rocky Mountain News Postmortem by John Temple, former editor/publisher

Link: TEMPLE TALK: Lessons from the Rocky Mountain News - Text and video of speech delivered at UC Berkeley Media Technology Summit at Google in Silicon Valley.

I couldn't resist pulling some really interesting and insightful quotations from the text of this speech by John Temple at the UC Berkeley Media Technology Summit. I'd noted the earthquake the closing of the Rocky Mountain News sent through the journalism world back when it happened, and this follow-up sort of gives it additional context.

Background on John Temple: (bio pulled from his blog)

"John Temple is the former editor, president and publisher of the Rocky Mountain News, which printed its final edition after almost 150 years on Feb. 27, 2009. Under his leadership, the paper won four Pulitzer Prizes and numerous other national awards for journalistic excellence. Temple also served the E.W. Scripps Co., owner of the Rocky, as vice president/news of the newspaper division."

Here are some links to places you can read or catch the entire speech, online:

Lessons from the Rocky Mountain News - Text and video of speech delivered at UC Berkeley Media Technology Summit at Google in Silicon Valley

The death of the Rocky Mountain News in February rippled around the world. Many want to understand what happened and what we can learn from the loss of Colorado's oldest newspaper.

Today I kicked off the UC Berkeley Media Technology Summit at Googleplex (the company's headquarters) in Silicon Valley.

The following is the text (The link takes you to Scribd, where you can print out the speech. I have also attached it below. I apologize for any inconvenience people have had trying to access my presentation) of my speech. You can also see a video of my presentation (the keynote slides, with my voiceover) at  Vimeo. Here is a link to the keynote slides themselves.

But here are the bits of the speech that jumped out at me (and has been gathering steam around Twitter too, I think). It is a tremendous look at something, a moment, I think, that will be seen as a key turning point in media history. Forgive me for taking the bits out of context (indicated by elipses . . .). Also, all indications of emphasis are mine.

[...]

Recently, when I asked my former colleagues at the paper for reflections on their experience since its closure, Bernie Lincicome, a fine sports columnist, wrote me back: “I feel like the cadaver being asked by the funeral director, how did you like the flowers?” I’m not sure what that makes this talk. Maybe the funeral director being asked to perform his own autopsy and offer guidance from the other side on how to save the lives of others suffering the same malady.

[...]

So some pretty smart people were at the top of the company that owned the Rocky Mountain News. Yet none of that was enough for the Rocky to survive in the Internet era. The Rocky published its final edition on Feb. 27 of this year, the first major paper to shut its doors after the economic crash of the fall of 2008.

On the day the closure was announced, Scripps CEO Rich Boehne told the staff assembled in the newsroom: "You are the model of what a great newspaper should be. It's a tragedy for the industry that you disappear."

[...]

 As one former Scripps executive told me in talking about what has happened to the newspaper industry, words that I think apply to the Rocky, “We had all the advantages and let it slip away. We couldn’t give up the idea that we were newspaper companies.”

Well, Scripps isn’t a newspaper company anymore in what was its biggest market. And today I’m going to walk you through the lessons I think might be taken from its largest paper’s failure. While this is going to be a newspaper-centric talk, I believe you’ll find that the lessons apply broadly across radio, TV, magazines and other media, too.

But before I subject the past to scrutiny, you need to know I don’t exempt myself from criticism. I was the top editorial person for the Rocky’s final 11 years and part of the business leadership team. I bear my own share of responsibility. It’s easy when looking back to see things that might seem obvious to us today, but it was a lot more difficult when we were in the thick of the fight, and most of the revenue growth and almost the total revenue pie came from the main newspaper product.

That said, the first lesson I hope people who care about the future of local news take from the Rocky’s experience is this: Being a “great newspaper” isn’t enough in the Internet era. You have to know what business you’re in. We thought we were in the newspaper business. Working on the Web, you need to think of now and forever. At a newspaper, people largely think about tomorrow. Thinking about tomorrow isn’t enough anymore. Consumers today want services when, where and how they want them, and they want to be able to participate, not just receive.

A telling smackdown for those who blame the "Great Wall" of Journalism for the field's decline

LINK: Andrew Alexander - The Stumbles That Led to an Ethics Blunder - washingtonpost.com.

The upshot of the Washington Post's ongoing influence-peddling (influence for sale) debacle is that some tone-deaf business managers and execs with some kind of distant understanding of journalism walked into this nightmare with their unthinking eyes open, somehow ignoring warnings (or hiding documents that would lead to the warnings) from the editors and beat reporters whose influence was being peddled, at pay-to-play dinners at the publisher's house, no less!

But what if that isn't the story at all?

With the rampant decline of journalism, there has been no lack of voices calling out blame for why newspapers are dying (duh, ad revenue is down in a Great Recession, people!), some of them claiming that the "Great Wall" that was erected in the interest of journalism ethics between a private company's business interests and the editorial integrity of its product was the REASON for the decline, and they've claimed journalists are not doing "enough" to contribute to the bottom line of the company that kept them fed.

That that journalistic integrity actually produced the product being offered for sale (and/or ad-subsidized giveaway) was little remarked upon, except as an object of derision.

They've claimed that journalists are not DOING ENOUGH to be INNOVATIVE in thinking about ways that they can PAIR their work with SALES AND MARKETING opportunities (as if those total sell-out Back to School "editorial" vehicles and their seasonal and non-seasonal ilk are not enough!).

So media critic pundits, many of them online media promoters, sprang up overnight, touting entrepreneurial journalism and more INNOVATION in the "creative" partnerships between the editorial side and the business side as the next big thing, the thing journalists have to be a part of, have to embrace, have to stop saying "No" to, because their always citing the Great Wall, the ethical divide between the reporter's eye and the business interest (always already being undermined, going back 25 years) had become a tired anachronism, something that was an overworn tradition, HOLDING THE BUSINESS INTERESTS BACK.

Oh boo hoo! Those poor business interests. They want to compromise the thing they presume to sell so they can sell it better. Are they just oblivious to the fact that turning their product into pure influence-peddled SHITE also makes it harder to sell? How frakking "innovative" is that?!

[Creative Commons image by Steve Webel]

Well, I could make that point until I'm blue in the face, but I don't have to, because the enlightened publisher and executive (and some editorial) staff at the Washington Post appear to have done it for me.

The greatest scolds as this scandal has unfolded have been some bloggers and many of those these media pundits who are also blaming journalists for not being "entrepreneurial" enough in their thinking about innovation in journalism.

And the scolds are all bandwagon-ish in their disapproval, as if this idea of an "innovation imperative" that would tear down the Great Wall had nothing to do with it. Why isn't anyone pointing out that the WashPo was trying to be "innovative" with their business model?

Probably because the Great Wall still means something, you suppose? Perhaps they would argue that the issue is one of degree. Erode the Great Wall by bits in the name of innovation, but, oh my, this goes too far!

But tell me, how far is too far?

LINK: Andrew Alexander - The Stumbles That Led to an Ethics Blunder - washingtonpost.com.

A Sponsorship Scandal at The Post

By Andrew Alexander
Sunday, July 12, 2009

The Washington Post's ill-fated plan to sell sponsorships of off-the-record "salons" was an ethical lapse of monumental proportions.

Publisher Katharine Weymouth and Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli have now taken full responsibility for what was envisioned as a series of 11 intimate dinners to discuss public policy issues. For a fee of up to $25,000, underwriters were guaranteed a seat at the table with lawmakers, administration officials, think tank experts, business leaders and the heads of associations. Promotional materials said Weymouth, Brauchli and at least one Post reporter would serve as "Hosts and Discussion Leaders" for an evening of spirited but civil dialogue.