A few notes upon reflection about the New Business Models for News Summit at CUNY:
* A few days after the conference, David Carr in the New York Times piled on the lamentations about more layoffs and cutbacks in the news business. On the Media continued the dirge a few days after that. There’s no news here. The industry is shrinking. We already know that.
There’s news in reporting on people who are trying to do something about it and create new models and enterprises for news. Those are the folks we had at the conference.
* A star among them was our own David Cohn, co-organizer of the conference, as he presented Spot.US, his Knight-Challenge-funded startup to create an infrastructure for readers to support reporters doing stories. David’s elevator pitch was a model for all my entrepreneurial journalism students. His enthusiasm, inventiveness, and ability to see opportunities where others see gloom was a model to the executives in the room. What I loved best was watching executives and investors from very big companies stuffing David’s pocket with their business cards. Who says the news business is dying? If you know where to look, it’s being reborn.
Other new models and views of news included:
> Charlie Sennott presenting GlobalPost as a means to support 70 freelancer correspondents in 53 countries around the world submitting stories and also turning their journalism into a process with their audience;
> Upendra Shardanand of Daylife and Scott Karp of Publish2 [disclosure: I have a relationship with both companies] presenting their infrastructure for the link (vs. the content) economy of news;
> Michael Rosenblum showing how training citizens in video can become a source of both content and revenue;
> Mark Josephson of Outside.in on a structure of organizing local content;
> David Chase of NextNewsNet on a local ad network and Adam Bly of Science Blogs on a specialized ad and content network;
> Colin Crawford on the transformation of IDG from a print to a digital company;
> Adam Davidson of NPR talked about the creation of the Planet Money podcast there.Late additions to the group included Debbie Galant, the monarch of the hyperlocal bloggers at Baristanet, who talked about running a business on the scale of the old independent bookstore, and Rachel Sterne, founder of citizen-journalism platform GroundReport.
* I was delighted that the amazing group we were lucky to bring together had moved past the old rivalries: business vs. edit, new media vs. old. I was also quite relieved to hear a universal sense of urgency about the need to find new means to sustain journalism. There isn’t a minute to waste.
As a result, we saw editorial and business people entering into frank conversations we don’t often hear, willing to reset assumptions and build new models. Included in that was a general acceptance that the cost structure of the news business is way too high and has to be cut. This slide from the Telegraph’s Edward Roussel resonated strongly in the room.
Roussel also said: “If you’re a newspaper group, your technology sucks.”
Just as Roussel was blunt and frank so was his fellow presenter on the topic of the disaggregated news organization, Dave Morgan, who quoted Gary Pruitt, CEO of McClatchy, from only the day before. Pruitt said: “We believe that the majority of the decline that we are currently seeing is cyclical and therefore temporary.” After heaping caveats of praise on Pruitt as an executive, Morgan called bullshit. Exactly so. We need tough, honest talk now.
* I was interested in seeing a conflict arise at the end of the day — one of the few, actually — on the relative value of content creators vs. editors. No one in the room would say that both aren’t valued and needed. But when push comes to shove with spare resources, there is a difference of opinion on what added value really means. Some put maximum resource into creating content: reporting. Some insist on the need for editors to create order, to correct and vet, to curate, as we say these days. The disagreement is only one of degree.
* I wish I’d had more people from other industries. When Tom Evslin got up to give his very good primer on network economics, he made a point of saying that he was not a journalist. After the conference, someone from an international technology company said he thought the people in the room were “not ready to make the leap” (perhaps so, but he should have heard similar folks a year ago; the change is striking). At Davos last January, I ran a session between news executives and tech executives in which the latter excoriated the former for throwing in the towel and convinced them that there was fight left in the news industry. The news business is, ironically, insular and it needs to hear that perspective. I also should have had more voices from women, bloggers, and our international participants. We could have filled two days with good discussion but decided, two weeks before an election, that wouldn’t have worked.
* Eric Stein of Google gave us some stats that show where the potential is. He said there are 23 million small businesses in America, six million of them with one or more employees. That is the new population of advertisers who never could afford newspapers. Though as I learned when I visited Gannett’s lab a few days after the conference, those businesses don’t necessarily operate with the same needs and assumptions as present newspaper advertisers and it would be a mistake to try to impose those practices. Stein also said that newspapers reach only 20 percent of advertisers in a market. In that other 80 percent lies much of the hope for the future of local news.
* I didn’t write down who said it but I wrote down this thought: We may want to reframe journalism not as an information business but as community-building.
* At the end of it all, we asked the participants to charge CUNY with next steps as we work to build the Center for Journalistic Innovation and raise money under a matching grant from the Tow Foundation. Among those tasks:
> Develop a baseline business model to provide a community with journalism. (See the post above; I agree that that is job 1.)
> Share best practices and lessons, including mistakes, from various countries. (That will be the main job of the New Business Models for News project in the center; we have the remainder of the MacArthur Foundation grant that funded this meeting to start that work and we just received a grant from the McCormick Foundation to continue it but we need to raise more.)
> Develop new models in detail to share with the industry. (This, too, will be the work of the New Business Models for News project.)
> Develop quantitative research on community needs. (I just spoke with the Knight Commission and found that they are working on that.)
> Collaborate with our business school to better equip journalists with business knowledge. (That’s my hidden agenda for teaching entrepreneurial journalism at CUNY. We’re looking at doing more.)
> Discuss curation in a journalistic context. (I just spoke with a museum curator about creating a symposium to do that.)
> Work on an infrastructure for news organizations to share and monetize original content. (Work on that began that very evening with another group meeting).* We had an incredible group of people at CUNY, which is a testament to their sense of urgency to work on the business of journalism. I want to thank them all and also thank the MacArthur Foundation for making this meeting possible and the McCormick Foundation for enabling us to continue this work.
After letting the work of the New Business Models for News Summit at CUNY sink in, I think we need to convene a working group from each of the discussions at the summit to move to the next step and build at least one concrete model.
When I stopped in the session about the reorganized newsroom, they pleaded for help as they continued to debate whether to cut what exists today or build from the ground up. It was my fault as I didn’t give them a specific task. I should have learned from the Economist’s Project Red Stripe and from a Davos session on innovation last year: Innovation springs from solving a problem — a specific problem, not the grand problem of the future of news and society.
So I proposed a problem to solve: What if a city, say Philadelphia, loses its paper tomorrow. What would you build in its place to serve the community? The group went to town. Rather than trying to hack at the old, they build something new.
They calculated the likely revenue Philadelphia could support online and then figured out what they could afford in staffing. Instead of the 200-300-person newsroom that has existed in print, they decided they could afford 35 and they broke that down to include a new job description: “community managers who do outreach, mediation, social media evangelism.” They settled on three of those plus 20 content creators, two programmers, three designers, five producers (I think they were a bit heavy on those two), and — get this — only three editors. (Which led to much discussion in the final plenary of the day, which I address in the post below.)
That was real progress. Usually in the newspaper industry, this discussion comes after the cutbacks occur as papers then try to figure out how to cope with what’s left. This group of edit and business and money people bravely built from the bottom up, relying on few assumptions about the past.
Next, if time had allowed, we would have taken the newsroom group next door to the network group, which was foundering a bit, trying to figure out how to apply networks such as Glam’s to this challenge. They, too, didn’t have a specific problem to solve. But the newsroom group would have brought theirs: How could 35 journalists possibly serve Philadelphia as 200-300 had? I see one option: with the help of networks of independent agents working collaboratively. So let’s figure out how those networks would operate in terms of content, technology, revenue, education, branding, and so on.
Then we could go down the hall to the group working on new structures for news organizations: the disaggregated news company as presented earlier in the day by Edward Roussel of the Telegraph and Dave Morgan, ex of Tacoda. They also talked — as everyone did through the day — about the need for a drastically lower cost structure for news organizations (see Edward’s chart).
Next stop: The group working on public support to see what slice of journalism might be underwritten by the community or foundations. It wouldn’t be much but ProPublic, David Cohn’s Spot.us, and Charlie Sennott’s GlobalPost are trying to prove that the public can at least help.
Last and more important stop: revenue. Fred Wilson, leading the discussion, summed up its discovery in a tweet: “clickable will sell joe the pumber a text ad that $goog will route via outside.in geotag to the boston herald.” (Translation: Clickable sells Joe an ad on Google, which will appear on a local story on the Herald site thanks to Outside.in’s ability to understand the geography of articles and target appropriately. Moral to the story: No one is any longer going to own the market alone. Revenue, like reporting, will be collaborative.)
If you add up the work of the groups, you start to see a shape for new news. But there’s much more work to be done to make it concrete. If we take the work that the groups began and bring it to the next level with a clear problem to solve — e.g., replacing a metro newspaper — then I think we will begin to see new models, new ways to organize news companies, new ways to produce news, new revenue opportunities, and new relationships with the community take form. And this, in turn, could yield a methodology and attitude to create more new models.
Under the auspices of the New Business Models for News Project and Center for Journalistic Innovation at CUNY, I hope we can bring in MBA students to help create financial models. We would share these models and the discussion that builds them openly.
We at CUNY can imagine no more urgent work in news: creating the means to support it.
My CUNY colleague Sandeep Junnarkar has put together a great panel to explore the future of video journalism online on Nov. 6, 6-9p at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism, 219 W. 40th St., 3rd floor. Says Sandeep: “Come hear a lively discussion on the future of Web video journalism, featuring Travis Fox, Emmy-award winning video journalist from The Washington Post; Rachel Sterne, founder and CEO of GroundReport, a citizen journalism platform at GroundReport.com, Benjamin Wagner, vice president of MTV News and Daniel Greenberg, director of production at WNET. This is not a discussion about tools but about new forms of video storytelling.” It’s free but you need to register to guarantee space here.
The journalism of filling space and time.
Election days are — next to the days after Thanksgiving and Christmas — the worst days of journalism on the calendar. They are “yeah, we know” days. People shop. People vote. Tell me something I don’t know. Please. This is the journalism of filling space and time. We have to print an edition or fill airtime and this is what’s happening today and you’re going to come to us anyway so we’re going to tell you about it even if we have nothing — nothing — new and informative to say.
The journalism of links, on the other hand, would dictate that it’s not worth using resources to tell people what they already know because no one will pass that on and passing on is the new distribution chain for news. (People won’t just come to you anyway anymore.)
I’m not suggesting that news judgment should be determined just by what is passed around. We know how silly the most-emailed lists are; they’re the wacky stories, water-cooler journalism. Instead, I’m suggesting that if you can’t imagine anyone linking to your coverage — if you can’t imagine anyone saying “this was new,” “this is good,” “this was valuable,” “go here for more,” “I didn’t know this,” or “you should know this” — then chances are, it’s not worth saying and in the link economy it won’t get audience, and so it’s not worth making.
In that link economy — in the Googleverse — you stand out above the level playing field by creating something uniquely useful, informative, compelling, or valuable. As other news organizations cut back, they will more and more point to good work done elsewhere. So another way to ask this question is, “have I contributed something to the press-sphere (and will I get attention as a result)?” For elsewhere in the sphere, others are doing what they do best and linking to the rest.
At the Telegraph, online editor Marcus Warren just told PaidContent: “We are doing what we do best, main content, but also linking to the rest, as Jeff Jarvis would put it.” Or as Marcus Huendgen just said in Der Westen, “Do the fucking links.” Yes, I’m gratified at the spread of that meme. It’s not just advice. It’s a recognition of the new architecture of news and media.
A few years ago, the Associated Press did a lot of research among young people as it prepared to create a news product for them. One meme they heard again and again: “Don’t tell us what we already know.” Don’t waste their time — and your dwindling resources.
So I come to you today over-informed about how many people are standing in a random line or about a random machine that broke down and got fixed — because that’s where the reporter was standing and she had nothing else to tell me. Don’t bother.
I’m in the Emirates lounge getting ready to fly to Dubai for a World Economic Forum (Davos) meeting of the Global Agenda Councils. I’m on the one devoted to the future of the internet, which is humbling. (Full disclosure: The travel expenses are paid by the airline and the government of Dubai.) I’ll report from there as wifi allows.
Tom Evslin is celebrating the FCC’s decision to open up the white spaces between old TV channels to unlicensed use (to create, for example, “wi-fi on steroids,” as Google’s Larry Page has put it).
This is hugely important. It could provide the means to connect more of America. It could provide the competition that assures us both reasonable prices for access and open and unfettered access (for, in a competitive marketplace, the provider that limits our use will be the provider that loses). This will bring more innovation. It will lead to new businesses. It will help educate people. It’s a big deal. Tom’s list of benefits:
* Within a year there could be new, cheap radios and commercial services that make mobile broadband available with greater bandwidth than cable offers today AND at lower prices.
* Mobile phones on these frequencies will be much cheaper to use AND will have much better data capability than they have today.
* Since the US is the first country to make so much desirable spectrum available for open unlicensed use, the door is open for a wave of innovation here and the invention of products and services which will eventually be used around the world.
* Much of the concerns many of us have had about tollgates on the Internet and an end to open interconnection will evaporate since the barrier to providing Internet access will be much lower and the power of the existing cable-telco duopoly diluted.Note this historic moment: I’m praising the FCC.
(Here is my op-ed on opening up the white spaces.)
And here is my essay for the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on the internet as a right:
The internet is a right. We have reached the point at which enabling and assuring open, unfettered, and universal access to the internet should become a hallmark of civilized societies. The Global Agenda Council stands in a position to make this the goal of nations.
In civilized societies, universal education is a right. In some nations, health care is a right. Some other services provided in the common good may require payment but in developed nations are nonetheless considered rights: access to clean water and electricity. In the United States, even telephones are a right, as users pay fees to subsidize the cost of getting lines to all people. In the United Kingdom, television is a right insofar as the government levies a tax to support it. Such rights may be met publicly or privately.
Access to the internet â and open, broadband internet that is neither censored nor filtered by government or business â should be seen, similarly, as a necessity and thus a right. Just as we judge nations by their literacy, we should now judge them by their connectedness.
It is in societiesâ enlightened self-interest to enable such access. The WEF Global Agenda Council can demonstrate this to nations by cataloguing, quantifying, and demonstrating the many benefits that will accrue with universal access:
* In business: Jobs will be created. New and higher skills will be learned and used. Companies can find new efficiencies. Entrepreneurism will be fostered (and using web 2.0 tools, less capital â in a capital-starved time â will be needed to start new companies that create jobs and wealth). Innovation will be sparked. With access, jobs may move into once-isolated areas of the world. Businesses can, at the same time, reach worldwide markets.
* In education: Simply making the worldâs digital knowledge accessible to and searchable by anyone in a nation is a huge step forward in informing and educating a people. Encouraging popular use of the internet is also a magnet drawing people toward literacy. Connecting whole populations enables anyone connected to become educated. Schools can become disaggregated and reaggregated so students can find classes anywhere and classes can find students anywhere.
* In government: Connectivity will connect citizens with more services and can bring more transparency to government as citizens come to expect accessible and open information. Citizens will become more involved in politics and will be able to coalesce and act around issues and needs.
* In society: We can only speculate on the long-term effect of universal connectivity on society, but creating more ways for more people to connect with each other over greater distances and periods of time will surely have a positive impact on understanding and even friendship.
Though it might seem a bad time to propose such an aggressive goal â in the midst of a financial meltdown â it can also be argued that this is precisely the right time. As governments spend funds on infrastructure to stimulate economies, the financial and societal benefits of building and extending the digital infrastructure â over, for example, roads and airports â would be great. Favoring digital over physical assets will also have the environmental fringe benefit of favoring online communications and collaboration over travel.
Part and parcel of this discussion must be an examination of the definition of openness. The internet is itself an embodiment of free speech: the First Amendment brought to life. By its openness, we may judge a societyâs freedom of speech. Gating access against content, applications, and uses must be discouraged. At the same time, there needs to be an acknowledgment of the economics of access: If you use more water, even if having access to it is a right, you pay for it. In some nations, on the other hand, there is no practical limit to the free education one may receive. So what should the economics of a universal and open internet be? There also needs to be a discussion of security for users and for the internet itself.
(See also a very good discussion about this notion here.)
A quick video from my hotel room:
I’m at the final plenary session at the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Councils meeting in Dubai. In the last two WEF events I’ve attended, I’ve heard rumblings that were predictive of crises and trends to come; that’s what happen when you bring together the world’s machers and thinkers, as happens in Davos. Two years ago, the rumble I heard was about rising food prices. One year ago, it was about the need for global financial regulation.
Now some may say — as someone from OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) did here — that WEF, or its members, have been more a part of the problem than the solution. I don’t know about that. At least we can say that WEF has not been equipped to act quickly enough to forestall those crisis in food and credit. So it seems that this meeting is an attempt to respond to that, to set agendas more than spot them.
Today’s meeting began, of course, with a report from a cluster of councils on finance. Suzanne Nora Johnson of Carnegie issued a strong statement.
“The outlook for the global economy is the worst that many of us have seen in our lives,” she said. “There is no country, there is no industry that will be completely immune…. The current crisis is rooted in global macroeconomic imbalances. We are in this together.” This, she said, was “a problem of risk management. No one did a good job.” There was excessive risk taking and leverage. In that, she included not only the industry and governments but media and households. “It has undermined the perceived advantage of open capital markets and at the extreme has even questioned the value of capitalism today.”
The groups endorsed two short-term responses: First, “everyone who is engaged in this crisis has to have a seat at the table. There has to be a global, coordinated response both in crisis management and in the ongoing regulation of our markets.” Second, “the intense government responses to date must continue… with much better communications and transparency of government objectives.”
More the intermediate and long terms, the groups proposed:
* “Building the capacity and capability of our regulatory authorities both in national and international forums.”
* Many government improvements in the private sector need to continue.”
* Greater linkages between macroeconomic policies and regulators.”
* “Transparency of information is not enough. There needs to be more synthesis and analysis in the aggregate.” (And, no, I don’t know what that means.)
* “The rules of engagement of government in private sector need to be defined.” There is a
* “Continued investment in the private sector … in the emerging markets./”
* “The underserved need to be engaged.” Though there is a need for government intervention, she said,Some other themes from other groups:
* Networks. We are not only more connected through the economy, environment, and security but we now have the means to connect — the internet — to create and innovate and make decisions. Telephony is be a bridge to greater connectedness as it links with the internet. By the end of 2010, Paul Twomey of ICANN pointed out, 5 billion people will have mobile phones and more and more they will have internet access. The global governance group called for a Marshall Plan to bridge the digital divide.
* The need for global governance (not global government, they were careful to point out). The governance group argued that world trade works because of global governance but finance is broken because it does not. They said that this will require some relinquishment of sovereignty.
* Capitalism isn’t broken “It would be sheer folly to allow our faith in the system to be shaken by the financial crisis,” said the economic development group. That was a majority opinion, I’d say, though not unanimous, as one comment from the floor revealed.
* Mobility. The governance group said that problems cross borders without passports but we expect solutions to move with passports. The economic development group urged a “global system of global migration” but admitted that with unemployment soaring, it’s not the time to push this; they suggested instead working it out quietly (that’s not very transparent).
* Changing demographics. The economic development group said that with life expectancy extended by two decades and with a huge growth of the older demographic, retirement laws should be changed. That, too, they suggested is not best taken on while employment is rising.
* The environment and sustainability group — which called for “a fundamental reboot” in 2009 — said that the crisis in fuel, finance, and food were “just canaries in the coal mine. They are early warning signs that the system is not sustainable.” Of course, environment was on many tongues, but I didn’t hear much new about the agenda except continued efforts to communicate urgency.
* Involving more stakeholders as also on many minds with more calls for including more people. That is a permanent challenge for WEF.
* Freedom of speech. Too little was said about that except whispers about taking on the topic in a nation that does not value and protect speech. At least someone from the entertainment group — yes, frivolous entertainment — said that freedom of speech is essential so people will be able to tell their stories and understand each other better. Amen. I wish that had come as a strong statement from the internet and media groups as well. Show biz shamed us.
* The group on society and values said it in their way, reminding the group of “the moral imperative to develop the promise of every human being.” That, of course, also touches on poverty discrimination, and education.
* The power of data and information is implicit in calls for transparency but the potential is greater than that, requiring systems to gain value from data. The health group talked about that and how “data is a public good and should be in the public domain.”
* Moving beyond data and information — which is where too many think the value of the internet stops — Don Tapscott made a good appeal for baking openness and involvement into finance (why not open-source risk management algorithms?) and government (the internet enables a national brainstorming).
* An unspoken theme I saw through the three days here was control: those who had it losing it and not knowing what to do, not understanding that — according to Jarvis’ First Law — today, when you give up control, you win. That, to me, is the fundamental change occurring here. I am in the midst of those who control and they must learn, according to David Weinberger’s Corolary, that there is an inverse relationship between control and trust.
* Crises are an opportunity for change.
Some people in the room, me among them, thought we are devoting, though understandably, too much attention to fear, risk, failure, regulation, and control. Some believe — in the end, most, I hope — that innovation and creation and invention are the real cures and the real means for growth and I hope we concentrate on them. WEF head Klaus Schwab does address the theme in his closing: “entrepreneurship in the global public interest.”
There’s more, of course. Now we’re getting to the point of people standing up to say we’ve forgotten their issue. That could go on forever.
I’ll write later about my own group on the future of the internet and about impressions of Dubai.
It’s ridiculous to think that in four days I could get a true sense of a nation or region I’ve never been to before. I think I could spend 40 years in this desert and not figure it out.
I’ve never seen a clearer case of there being no there there than here. When you come to Dubai, you can’t help looking for the real Dubai. That’s because everything around you is extravagantly made up.
I stayed in the opulent Jumeirah resort complex that is so lavishly designed that one wag said even the sea looked fictional. Out of my balcony, I stared at the fabled Burj Al Arab hotel, which looks like a sail on the ocean and is boldly beautiful on the outside.
But on the inside, I expected to see the Little Mermaid hopping out of the fountain.
Lore has it that when the hotel opened its design was minimalist, but when the ruling sheikh saw it, he asked when it would be finished. Out came Disney shades of pink and blue by the barrel and enough gold leaf to rescue Iceland’s economy.
With a newfound friend from the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Councils - the reason we were here - I went up to the bar atop the Burg and we passed on what was proudly advertised as the world’s most expensive drink as we gaped at the next world’s tallest skyscraper, an incredibly huge glass stalactite, and at the palm islands being built and built upon on the water.
Dubai has two skylines (this is just one of them) and they are dotted - no, filled - with cranes building them bigger and higher.
In an effort to show us the real Arabia, the government of Dubai (which paid for the conference as well as my travel and that of many or most participants) and a local developer bussed us with police escort an hour out into the desert past vast stretches of nothingness - I have seen the middle of nowhere - with gargantuan construction sites running in full gear in the cooler night.
We arrived, almost randomly, at the ruins of a fort (I wonder what it was defending) laid out with carpets and catering and camels (who were not happy) and young boys twirling guns (”al Qaeda in training,” one Brit wagged). We still had not arrived at the real Dubai.
The day before, looking for Dubai, I’d made the mistake of going to the Mall of the Emirates with its hundreds of stores and infamous indoor ski slope, just because it was so over the top. But I came away depressed because it was only an extreme extension of the malling of the world that I lament (and wonder whether whether eBay and Etsy can cure) in my book. All our stuff is now the same.
I suppose we should be flattered and relieved that a nation - especially an Arab nation, no? - chose to copy so much of America. But why did they chose as their inspiration Vegas (sans sins), malls, grossly conspicuous consumption, and Hollywood pap? I wasn’t sure whether I was sadder for them or us.
So I went looking for old Dubai downtown. But before I went there, a local told me that what I was more likely to see was old Bombay. True, but I did feel better riding the boats across the canal and shopping in the souks.
Ethan Zuckerman, who was on our World Economic Forum team and who I’d want to travel the world with, passive aggressively steered us all into a “pure vegetarian” restaurant called the Evergreen and expertly ordered up a feast for six that cost 25 percent less than a drink at the Burg. And we had a very nice chat with the Indian owner.
The essence of Dubai, it turns out, is that it’s not Dubai at all. In the United Arab Emirates of which Dubai is a part, 85 percent of the residents and workers are foreigners - from construction workers to hotel staff who washed the stone outside every morning as I jogged past (labor is that cheap here) to young journalists to bankers - who will never have the rights of citizenship. The vast majority of the population does not speak Arabic. There are a half-dozen thriving newspapers in English (odd sight these days); that is the lingua franca. So the economy is imported.
Having said all that, Dubai is an amazing accomplishment of its monarch, who is always but always referred to in the newspapers as His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai. One day, a page-one, over-the-fold story said the Sheikh had been honored by a foreign leader for being good to horses. It reminded me of reading about the DDR’s leader in East Berlin’s papers in 1981. The Sheikh’s photo, always looking stern, adorns most shops in the old city (you can buy lots of sheikh schwag there: sports medals, paper crowns and hats, wrist bands, and even paper eyeglasses with his picture).
With my fellow members of the internet Global Agenda Council, I got to meet the Sheikh in a private audience. The greatest moment of the meeting and the entire trip: Dave Sifry greeting the sheikh: “Hi, Your Highness.” His posse cracked a grin. We tried hard not to.
Ethan Zuckerman eloquently and respectfully raised the issue of Dubai’s censorship online. When you try to go to any of many sites here, you get a page with a link that lists in cold clarity the forbidden zones: sex, crime, terrorism, and certain top-level domains (one of which happens to be from the land that doesn’t exist here, .il). As he will in an essay he wrote coming out of the WEF (which I’ll link to shortly), Ethan talked about the feedback loop the internet provides and how it loses value and returns false results when it is restricted.
I asked the Sheikh about the free-zone Media City and Internet City he built to attract those industries and the university adjuncts they are creating in the UAE with many American and European institutions. One of his aides explained that in 1971, when the government was formed, Dubai had one high school, no university, and only 45 university graduates. Today it is educating 90-odd percent even of its women in college.
Dubai has built a huge economy and it is still building feverishly. At the summit, a frequent topic of conversation was Dubai’s fate in the credit crisis as construction of gigantic complexes stretch as far as the eye can see across the flat sands. At the closing of the meetings, our cohost, the head of a giant construction company and member of the ruling government, told the group with a charming smile that Dubai’s just fine and has seven quarters of run room on serving the debt. More than one media executive said afterward that somebody should have stopped him from protesting too much. The next day, the headline in the paper was about panic selling of real-estate stocks here.
I spoke with media people who live here and love or like it. One is an executive who left Paris and finds business here faster and freer. Another is a young reporter who, apart from “extortionate rents” (but in a complex with a pool she wouldn’t get elsewhere), is getting great experience (I see an opportunity for my journalism students). Another is an old hand who speaks Arabic and has been here for 15 years and wouldn’t leave.
In an email, friend Fred Wilson - who went trolling for new companies in Slovenia this summer - asked about the place. The reason to consider Dubai, I think, would be as an offshore base to start a company. There are obvious tax advantages. For a certain sort of person, the lifestyle could be desirable: lots of shopping, Lord knows; plenty of American food (Fridays and food courts!); a great tax situation; no winter; and a beach that looks as if it, too, were imported.
Dubai is either an act of fiction or of the future. I arrived thinking the former; I leave wondering whether it could be the latter. In a sense, what we see here is a real-life model of the virtual world we are creating online, crossing borders and cultures and linking in whatever’s needed to make money: capital, cheaper labor, imported expertise and education, infrastructure. Except online, we are all citizens of the internet.
I’ll probably go back next year for the next WEF GAC summit and I’m sure I’ll still be looking for the real Dubai, getting in a car to find a real town and a real souk, finding someone who can explain the place to me. I’m not sure I’ll ever find it.
[Disclosure: To repeat, the Dubai government paid for the summit, for my travel, and for that of many or most participants as its sole sponsor.]
: Later: Here’s Ethan Zuckerman’s account of his time in Dubai.
The last thing newspapers need.
I’m still shaking my head over the American Press Institute’s announcement of a closed-door, invitation-only emergency meeting of only CEO-level newspaper executives to, in the words of E&P “ponder ways to revive the newspaper business.”
This is the last thing the newspaper industry needs.
First, these are the very same proprietors of the newspaper industry’s decline. What they need is not the same old executives but new people with new ideas. That’s what I brought into my summit on new business models for news and I wish I’d had time to bring in 20 more innovators who are executing new ideas.
I also wish I had invited more people from other industries to bring other perspectives. At Davos last year, I ran a session at which technology executives - among them, VC Joe Schoendorf, LinkedIn’s Reed Hoffman, and Cisco chief John Chambers - scolded newspaper exeutives for giving up and not reinventing their industry. At my summit, a technology executive observed that the news people - as far as they’d come - were unwilling to “take the leap.” The industry needs to hear these worldviews: tough love.
Second, closed-door is exactly wrong. What they should be doing is asking for help, ideas, perspectives, models, worldviews, and suggestions from outside their industry.
Instead, they will be “a facilitated discussion of concrete steps the industry can take to reverse its declines in revenue, profit and shareholder value.”
If they haven’t figured out those steps by new, I’d say getting them into a room together isn’t going to do it.
The facilitator, James Shein of Northwestern’s management school, told E&P: “It’s important for companies to see how far along the ‘crisis curve’ they’ve traveled, and there are concrete steps organizations can take to halt and even reverse that journey. We’ll use those tools to illuminate for newspaper industry leaders the urgency of their situation, and lay out the steps they will need to take to begin the renewal process.”
If they don’t know by now how urgent it is, then I’d say they’ve failed the vision and IQ test. Any foodl could see that newspapers’ straits are dire.
The summit is only two days away, but if I were the API, I’d fly in people from Google and a bunch of successful tech companies as well as innovators and entrepreneurs in news and let them do all the talking.
I am the honoree of an attempted hatchet job by Ron Rosenbaum in - what’s the name of that site? Salon? no, Slate (I always get them confused). I’ll spare you his three pages of bluster (O, for the days of scarce space on paper) and get to his point: He’s mad because I’m not acting sufficiently mournful and respectful at the demise of his friends’ journalistic careers (and perhaps his own). I’m “increasingly heartless” about these “beautiful losers.”
Sadly, Rosenbaum doesn’t debate the idea and history and fate of journalism, which might be productive or at least provocative. Instead, like a pissy third grader, he attacks me. Because of my opinion, he says he doesn’t “like” me anymore. Take that, Jarvis! You can’t sit at my lunch table ever again! He reminds me of that same third grader who, when he doesn’t study for a test and sees the results of his inattention, whines, cries, and stomps his little feet, declaring, “It’s not fair.” No, kid, life ain’t.
What I’m really doing is holding journalists responsible for the fate of journalism. How dare I? Rosenbaum says, “Not only does he blame the victims, he denies them the right to consider themselves victims.” As if victimhood gets us anywhere.
For the record, here is the nut of what I said in a blog post and Guardian column that inspired this attack. I was responding to efforts to absolve journalists of responsibility for the fall of journalism and its vessels by Paul Farhi, Roy Greenslade, and Adrian Monck:
My purpose in rebutting Farhi, Greenslade and Monck is not to flagellate journalists but to empower them. To take responsibility for the fall of journalism is to take responsibility for its fate. Whoâll try to save it if not journalists? Thereâs not a minute to waste whining.But sadly, Rosenbaum doesn’t discuss that. He whines and prefers to mock me for going to conferences, advising news companies, and teaching journalists (helping to train more of them, not end up with fewer of them). I’m not sure what he’d rather have me do: Sit in my room and mope, sitting shiva for the past? Refuse to discuss the future of journalism? Tell newspapers when they call asking for brainstorming to fuck off and die? Would that be in solidarity with my hack brethren who did too little to transform journalism in the last 13 years of the web?
Just this morning I attended - busted! - another conference where I talked over coffee and croissant with chief executives of four newspaper companies as they brainstormed new models for news. I ran a conference at CUNY last week in new business models for news. I am starting an organization at CUNY to find, explore, and share best practices in new business models for news. I teach a course in entrepreneurial journalism in hopes supporting small sparks of innovation. Full disclosure: I also advise or invest in a number of related startups including Daylife, Publish2, 33Across, Black20, Brightcove, Outside.in (and haven’t made a penny on any et). I hope the profession - or someone - finds ways to save journalism.
Whether we save all the journalists today is entirely another matter and not my goal. Rosenbaum believes that makes me heartless. I think it makes me realistic. And we need some realism in this business. If Rosenbaum really wants to dislike someone, he might turn his spitballs toward my friends Scott Karp and Seth Godin, who declare that “the market and the internet donât care if you make money.” There is no divine right for newsroom jobs. Nor is printing and trucking an eternal verity of the field. There is, instead, a need for journalism. That’s the problem to solve. That’s the opportunity to follow.
At the Foursquare conference this morning, I heard the voluble Sam Zell of Chicago say what he’s said before - he’s a realist. A few old hands in the industry shook their heads about him. I asked them to name three disrupters inside the newspaper business today. They failed. Whether Zell is your disrupter of choice, at least he’s asking the questions, challenging the assumptions.
Rosenbaum accuses me of “living the good life” as a consultant, professor, blogger, blatherer. I wish. When I worked for Advance and Conde Nast, I made many times what I do now. So why the hell did I leave? Because I wanted to be more a part of the future and believed I could best do that by working with students who will be that future, by helping companies from the outside with one other perspective, and by joining in and sometimes prodding the urgent discussion about new and sustainable models for news.
Of course, you’re free to argue with what I say and call bullshit on me. I wish you would (and many of you do). That would be productive. Sticking your tongue out is not. Rosenbaum also complains about the aphorisms, blog headlines, and PowerPoint lines that emit from here. Fine, but they sometimes travel better than three pages of bile and bluster. “Do what you do best and link to the rest” may be cute but it also starts discussions.
Let’s have that discussion, Ron.
If Rosenbaum had reported about my reporting, he would have avoided some errors in his piece. (We’ll see now whether, like a good blogger, he corrects them.) He says that I recently heard and repeated a speech by Paulo Coelho in Frankfurt. Actually, I interviewed Coelho - reporting, that’s called - for my book and a Guardian column in Paris last summer. He says I lived by the World Trade Center on 9/11. Actually, I’ve said often that I was on the last PATH train into the center that day (Google skills would have gotten him that).
He also speculates about the reporting in my book. He wonders - rather than asks - whether I sought access from Google and was rebuffed. I did not and was not. I interviewed many people like Coelho. I chose not to seek official and controlled access to Google and in my acknowledgments in the book, I explain why:
Note that I am not thanking Google. I am grateful for Googleâs existence, its lessons, and its inspirationânot to mention Marissa Mayerâs quotable advice online. But I want to note that I did not seek access to Google for this book because I wanted to judge it and learn from it at a distance. My admiration of Google, then, does not spring from any relationship with the company but from its incredible example.Rosenbaum also speculates on my opinions. He says I don’t “seem to recognize distinctions of value.” What the hell does that mean? Even as he mocks my little law, he cites Gresham’s Law - a brief and quotable aphorism, a chestnut, itself: “Trash drives out value.” But I argue that the internet ends scarcity and enables great creation and with it new value. He complains about my trust in the market — “the same market that created this debacle and came close to destroying the economy.” I say at some level, if you don’t trust the market - the people, us - then you don’t value democracy, capitalism, education, art … or journalism (for why trust, empower, enable, ennoble, and inform the people if we all a bunch of idiots?). “He’s the Sarah Palin of gurus,” Rosenbaum says. “The crowd is always right.” Don’tcha know, it’s often more right than we give it credit for.
“Look,” Rosenbaum concludes, “there’s nothing wrong with Jarvis doing all this thinking and decreeing.” Gosh, thanks, Ron. But if you question my authority to discuss the future of journalism, I wonder who made you the DMV of the discussion.
: LATER: G’bless Paulo Coelho for his response to Rosenbaum in the comments:
Ron claims that I am a New Age guru. Please pass the message to him, as his blog does not have a direct place for comments (it is too complicate to leave any post there): he should sit and meditate, become a vegetarian, say OMMMMMMMM 250.352 times a day, smile while saying âPeace and Loveâ to strangers, read the Bragavad Gita every morning. Only then, he should sit and start blogging. For sure, his text will improve, his bitterness will dissapear.: LATER STILL: See Michael Miner’s and Ken Sands’ thoughtful posts on the real issues.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the benefits of publicness and transparency. This week also reminded me of the perils.
This was hardly the first time I’ve suffered a personal attack, nor will it be the last. Although I will say that it made for a particularly awful day - bad taste in the mouth, unsettled feeling at the pit of the stomach, vulnerability, disappointment - I’m certainly in no position to seek sympathy. I’m a blogger who has done my share of snarking. I spent years as a critic and got poison-pen responses from fans and actors. I know I’m being blunt with my opinions about journalism because I think that’s both necessary and working, but I also know it rubs some people wrong. So be it.
I was gratified at the support of friends. But I was more bothered than anything that I got email from my parents wondering who this Ron Rosenbaum was (and why was he attacking their son). Even bloggers have mothers.
This isn’t about my publicness. It’s about the next person who hasn’t experienced this before and comes online to create or share and gets stabbed. What happens to her willingness to open up in public? If she reverts to her shell, what do we lose? What impact does this have on the quality of the conversation? What impact does that have on the reputation and value of the medium?
My stock answers to these questions - coming always from my optimistic defense of online conversation - have been: Don’t pay attention to the bad stuff, pay attention to the good stuff. And: We all can tell who the assholes are. And: Don’t judge the medium by its worst. And that’s all fine and true until you are reminded what it feels like to get that dull blade from behind.
I happened to see PR man Richard Edelman yesterday and so I asked for his high-priced advice on what to do in these circumstances, which he gave. No surprise, he advised not to stoop to the level of the sniper, which is exactly what I did, responding in kind, because I felt like it. Edelman said to respond with the facts and to return to the principles, which, of course, is just what I should have done (and will do with another post later). “You must stay in character,” he said. “You must not rise to the bait. You have more to lose.” Actually, I didn’t need to go to a PR expert for that. It’s what my father always advised.
Edelman acknowledged differences in media and time. On Fox and MSNBC, one does respond in kind; the one who’s loudest wins. In years past, PR people might have advised clients to ignore and hide. But that doesn’t suit the blogosphere, he said.
There’s an old social norm at work here that is, I think, an extension of old media, which says: You put yourself out there, so you put yourself at risk for getting attacked. This implies it is almost your fault for getting attacked. This is a basis of the public-figure defense in libel, the presumed right to go after people in the public eye. Once you become public, you give up the cloak and protection of privacy.
But now we are all public. Does that norm still hold online, when 180 million people have started blogs and countless more put videos on YouTube and photos on Flickr? Are they all, should they all be targets for the snipers and snarkers? Well, they all could be. But what’s our attitude about that? Is there a new norm emerging?
Online has developed one system to deal with attacks, and it came into play this week: Someone will remind the participants not to feed the trolls. Feeding the trolls not only encourages them but degrades the conversation and, again, devalues the medium. The trolls and their followers hurt the internet. So don’t feed them. Another system, also in play this week, kicks in when someone tries to get the discussion back on track to talk about the issues and ideas that are being ignored. One norm that has developed is that it’s proper etiquette to link to responses to an attack (note that Rosenbaum has not granted even that simple courtesy). Finally, there is humor.
Other systems don’t work. Sites are forever looking at automated means of getting rid of the dross. Where is the troll algorithm? And I hope we don’t revert to suing for libel, for that will put a chill on conversation and, as Susan Crawford has pointed out, libel law becomes irrelevant as we all have the means of response (which I took).
I wonder whether more new systems will emerge. I’ve argued that violating one’s own privacy with beer-party pictures will become less important thanks to the doctrine of mutually assured humiliation. That will become more and more the case under Zuckerberg’s Law, which decrees that “…next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before.” We’ll all be vulnerable. In the company of nudists, no one’s naked.
The conversation is well worth the trouble. I am the obnoxious optimist. I do trust the wisdom of the crowd, the market, the public and I believe that we will all benefit the more that we are all public and the more our institutions are all transparent. But I fear losing the conversation and wisdom and contributions to it from people who get the shiv in the back once too often (which for some will be once). It’s one matter to read stupid attacks and gather around them as entertainment. It’s another to be on the wrong end of them and I need to be reminded of that as I was this week.
Maybe that’s what happens: We all get attacked once and become wiser for it. Or we all get attacked and become nastier for it; that’s the fear. There were always be trolls, fools, idiots, and assholes; there are in life and so they will be here on the internet. That doesn’t ruin the internet any more than it ruins New York. The question is whether and how we can see and protect the value of the internet. Optimist that I am, I believe we will.
: LATER: By the way, I see I’m being baited by another person who only attacks people and only to get attention and links. I’m not even watching what he says; I stopped watching him two years ago. Just a note: This is why I love Twitter. I blocked him. And now my world is free of this troll. It feels good. And, no, I’m not going to give him the satisfaction of a link, either.
I’ve been privileged to hear Michael Rosenblum’s spiel often and it’s inspiring. Here is video of a particularly good version of it delivered to newspaper editors in the UK (part I, part II, summary). He makes it clear that the sane response to new technology is not to fight against it and he shows how. I brought him into the Star-Ledger, where he trained a roomful of pencil-pushers to make good video stories in a week, which yielded this, and I brought him into CUNY, where he empowers students to find that they can make good video. Michael, like me, gets attacked for attacking the defensiveness of old media. But he’s doing something about it. He’s renewing them.
Out of the dire need to cut back, news organizations are at last looking out and forming networks. Newspapers in Ft. Worth and Dallas are going to share news. Newspapers in Ohio have been doing that. Now TV stations in Philadelphia are setting up a separate company to make video.
It’s a start on a model that I think will be important in the regeneration of the news industry. And it’s a short step from sharing with fellow news organizations to sharing with independent agents in the public (starting with your own former employees who set up blogs and then working with blogfers).
Sharing will replace syndication, I think. That’s why I’m not confident in the success of CNN’s effort to set up a new wire service to compete with the AP, Reuters, and AFP. It might work for international coverage because it’s hard to share content with a source in another language and there’s a vastly different base of shared knowledge. But domestically and locally, I think that sharing and reverse syndication (a la Political) will win the day.
Piece by piece, new models emerge.
Holding a conversation with Google.
I can’t wait to get the Google iPhone app that answers questions asked by voice:
Tim O’Reilly called this one a year and a half ago, I think, when he said that GOOG-411’s core purpose or fringe benefit was that Google would harvest our voice samples and out of them create the best voice recognition online. Now Google can answer any question we ask (we’ll see how well it works sometime today).
This is about mobile, of course. Eric Schmidt told Jim Cramer a few weeks ago that in the future, Google will make more from mobile than from the web because it is a better targeting opportunity and targeting — relevance — is Google’s real business. This is also about the next real operating system of the internet. Microsoft has its voice-recognition software, of course, but Word isn’t where this battle will be fought. The sidewalk is the place.
The Obama administration has named two of the greatest brains online to its FCC review team: Susan Crawford and Kevin Werbach. And there are few agencies that need review so badly. Bravo!
Tuesday night, I’m joining in an NPR Intelligence Squared debate - Oxford format - on the motion, Google violates its “don’t be evil” motto. I’m speaking against - surprise, surprise. Esther Dyson and and Jim Harper of CATO are on my side; on the other are Siva Vaidhyanathan of the University of Virginia (who’s also writing a book on Google), Randal C. Picker of the University of Chicago, and Harry Lewis of Harvard. Gulp. (The debate will be aired later. They’re charging $40 for tickets to the live event.)
Here are draft notes on my opening. I’m writing it out but will treat this more as an outline. As always, I would be grateful for your thoughts.
My opponents have a high bar to get over. Google should be presumed virtuous until proven evil. Just because it could be evil does not mean it is. Just being big and powerful does not make it evil. In this country, we tend to value success until one becomes too successful, and then we become suspicious. How much success is too much? That is our problem, not Google’s. No, my opponents must bring the evidence of Google’s misdeeds to prove their case. I don’t envy them.
I grant that Google could be better.
* In China and in other nations where free speech is attacked, Google should use its power and influence - which are greater than even it seems to know - to refuse to issue censored search results. I wonder whether the risk of life without Google could lead to revolution. But in its defense, Google argues that a hampered internet is better for the Chinese than no internet at all.
* I also wish that Google were more transparent about the business arrangement in its ad networks. Google demands transparency from the rest of us - if we want Googlejuice - but it is too often opaque itself. But opaqueness has long been standard procedure in business.
Evil? No.
Leavening the impression of - or fear of - evil is Google’s virtue. Google does good. Our world is a better place because of Google. Consider:
* Google has opened up the world’s digital knowledge to everyone. We can answer any question, satisfy any curiosity, fix any error of fact in the blink of an eye. I wanted to know just how fast that is, so I asked Google how fast an eye blinks and in .3 seconds it told me that a blink takes .3 seconds.
* Google respects the wisdom of the crowd - that is the essence of the PageRank that determines which search results are most relevant. Google also enables us to recapture our wisdom, as it does with its analysis of flu trends based on our searches for related words.
* Google connects people. Young people today will never lose touch and I hope that will lead to better friendships and better behavior.
* Google’s ads are helping to support the creation of the next generation of content. I made $4,500 in Google ads on my blog, Buzzmachine, last year. Granted, I shouldn’t have quit my day job but Google made my blog profitable.
* Edward Roussel, digital head of the Telegraph in London, has argued that declining newspapers should consider handing over the work of technology, distribution, and ad sales to Google so they could become efficient and profitable and do what they do best: journalism.
* Google created platforms on which others can create products, companies, jobs, value, and wealth. About.com, Platial.com, Outside.in, EveryBlock.com exist only because Google made them possible. With Google’s ads, maps, hosting, services, and promotion, new creations bloom.
* Google shows us the way to a new economy that will be built out of the wreckage of the financial crisis. No longer will companies grow to critical mass by borrowing huge amounts of capital to make huge acquisitions. In the Google age, they will grow by creating networks on platforms. We have much to learn from Google’s ways.
One might say that its vow not to do evil is the height of hubris. Google is undeniably arrogant. But its executives say the evil motto is valuable inside the company because it allows any employee to question any decision. It’s not a bad rule. Indeed, I wish Google’s covenant had been chiseled over many a door on Wall Street. If only, in the poisoned process that led to the financial crisis, enough people had asked whether seeking and issuing toxic mortgages and making and selling toxic assets were evilâinstead of someone elseâs problemâI wonder whether weâd have reached this nadir.
As we try to understand and navigate a new world built on links, connectedness, networks, openness, transparency, publicness, trust, generosity, efficiency, niches, platforms, speed, and abundance, we would do well to ask ourselves, what would Google do? Google is not evil. Google is an example to us all.
Heh..
Craig Stoltz does a masterful job summarizing the Farhi-Jarvis-Rosenbaum fest in six Twitter-sized bites. His 2 cents at the end: “Blame doesnât matter. Journalists unwilling to think and work differently to save the profession should take the next buyout.” Couldn’t have said it better myself.
Guardian column: The Google economy.
My Guardian column this week argues that we’re witnessing not just the collapse of the financial (and auto and newspaper…) industries but the birth of a new economy best seen through - you guessed it - the lens of Google:
The financial crisis might be damaging countless companies around the world, but last month Google announced another quarter of growth, with profit up 26%. When it reported similar results two quarters before, The New York Times’ headline proclaimed, “Google defies economy.” It should have read, “Google defines economy.”
In this crisis, we are witnessing more than the failure of mortgages, derivatives, banks, and regulation. We are also seeing the dawn of a new economy; one best viewed and understood through the lens of Google, the one company that â by design or by luck â is built for the emerging world order.
Google’s first advantage is being digital. Who wants to be in the business of stuff any more â building cars, printing newspapers, selling CDs, growing food? Owning and controlling stuff was the basis of most business. And the reflexive response to a collapse in finance and equities used to be to return to the real: buy property. No more. Now the best retreat is to the value of knowledge.
In a sense, Google itself is built on a derivative: its data on data. Like the derivatives that got us into this mess, Google’s are based on creating abundance. But unlike those corrupted financial products, Google’s metaknowledge creates new and real value.
In Google’s economy, small is the new big. Of course, big is still big â Google itself is gargantuan. But it doesn’t grow by borrowing capital to buy companies (likely no one will for some time to come). Instead, Google created a network for an abundance of new advertisers and a platform for countless new businesses, all independent of Google. Indeed, Google does not want to own the assets â content to commerce â upon which its empire is built.
To succeed like Google, companies will build networks and platforms as it does. eBay’s platform enables thousands of merchants to sell more than America’s largest department-store chain, Federated. In Google’s era, the mass market is replaced by a mass of niches. So by continuing to track and measure only the biggest businesses â as the FTSE, the Dow Jones Average, and Nielsen ratings do â we miss sight of the small economy.
Another hallmark of Google’s economy is transparency. Even as Google remains opaque about details of how it does business â its ad commission, for example â it demands transparency of the rest of us. For without openness, we get no search-engine optimization, no precious Googlejuice. Regulators, customers, and citizens, too, surely will demand more transparency in business now that we have been so badly burned by secrets hidden in what are now glibly called toxic assets. Online, the truth is often just a link away.
This link economy that is the real basis of Google’s success, can also bring business benefits for other industries. Struggling and rapidly shrinking newspapers can now specializeâa local paper becomes more local and links to national coverage. Do what you do best and link to the rest, I tell editors.
Marketers are also beginning to learn that with direct links and relationships with customers, they may reduce ad spending. But relationships between companies and customers must be built on trust, and trust comes from handing over control. David Weinberger, author of Everything’s Miscellaneous, puts it this way: “There is an inverse relationship between control and trust.” Post-meltdown, the public will demand control â the internet and Google provide tools they will use to seize it.
Trust itself is becoming the basis for new business. eBay’s systems enable customers to anoint merchants with trust; Amazon demonstrates that we trust the opinions of fellow customers over critics; PayPal and Prosper help us make trusted transactions; Google knows which sites we trust with our links and clicks. We don’t trust banks anymore; hell, they don’t trust each other. In Google we trust.
Google manifests the business of trust in its famous decree, “don’t be evil.” Etch that over doors on Wall Street. If enough people had asked whether getting and issuing toxic mortgages, and making and selling toxic assets was evil â instead of someone else’s problem â I wonder whether we’d be in this mess. Our meltdown was not inevitable. But the transition to a Google economy is.
I was with David Carr until he got to the classical music critic.
Using Circuit City’s ill-fated decision to get rid of its veteran clerks as a metaphor, Carr laments newspapers getting rid of their experienced talent. Kicks to my groin aside, I’ve also lamented that. I’ve argued that when newspapers offer buyouts - and when it’s often the best and the most experienced who choose, often wisely, to take them - they should at least offer to help set up these journalists as independent agents with blogs and ad networks (which I’m seeing happen in one market; more on that later). But I’ve also argued that newspapers must focus on their key value and can no longer afford ego and commodified news.
So when Carr takes on the Tampa Tribune for laying off its editorial page editor, a columnist, the movie critic, and the classical music critic, he loses me. Of course - regardless of what the groin-kickers say - I have sympathy for those jobless journalists, just as I will for the GM SUV assembly-line workers sure to lose their work and even a few of the Lehman Brothers veterans.
But if newspapers are to survive as news organizations, they must focus on their key value and fast. And the key value of a local newspaper is, on its face, local reporting. Says Carr:
But there is a business argument to be made here. Having missed the implications of the Web and allowed both their content and their audience to be scraped away by aggregators and ad networks, newspapers are now working furiously to maintain audience, build new ad models and renovate presentation. But they wonât stay relevant to readers with generic content ginned up by newbies with no background in the communities they serve.Well, my first quibble is that aggregators are sending them traffic and ad networks are sending them revenue, if they want. My second is that movie reviews are pretty much generic content unless your name is Ebert.
I’ve argued that newspapers should have spent these last five years retraining all these people to take on new-media skills, inventing and promoting new products, and focusing intensively on local value. Then, perhaps, they might have been in control of their fates. They didn’t. Now they’re in a crisis.
When a bunch of newspaper executives gathered last week - behind closed doors - to recognize their crisis, they said the might get together again in six months. Steve Outing asks whether they have six months.
One rotten apple? Kill Johnny Appleseed!.
It’s barely worth dignifying with a link but Howard Witt writes a letter to Romenesko wondering whether, Mark Cuban has been brought up on insider-trading charges, his Sharesleuth.com would cover the news. Witt uses this as an opportunity to dismiss any value from all bloggers: “I’d say this is yet another example of why the nation cannot possibly expect to rely on all these pseudo-journalistic blogs that are supposed to become the future of journalism when all the newspapers disappear.” Oh, jeesh. OK, you play the Cuban card. I’ll see you with a Jayson Blair and raise you with a Judith Miller.
Good on Richard Perez-Pena for reporting on new sites doing strong local reporting and investigations — and good on The New York Times for playing it on page one: “As Americaâs newspapers shrink and shed staff, and broadcast news outlets sink in the ratings, a new kind of Web-based news operation has arisen in several cities, forcing the papers to follow the stories they uncover.”
OK, so there was one reflexive snipe at the internet: “Their news coverage and hard-digging investigative reporting stand out in an Internet landscape long dominated by partisan commentary, gossip, vitriol and citizen journalism posted by unpaid amateurs.” Yeah, yeah, yeah.
What Perez-Pena’s story makes clear is that there are new models for creating reporting, that there is a demand for that reporting, and that there are journalists who will do it.
The business angle bears further investigation — and we’ll do that at the CUNY New Business Models for News Project (finishing a MacArthur Grant and starting on a new McCormick Foundation grant).
Perez-Pena says that “publishing online means operating at half the cost of a comparable printed paper, but online advertising is not robust enough to sustain a newsroom.” Actually, the cost is way less than half; I refer you to Edward Roussel’s chart from the New Business Models for News summit.
Revenue is also way less than half — and much or all of that is coming from contributions in the sites Perez-Pena profiles — but it’s also important to measure how much is spent on such reporting from big organizations today — how much are we trying to replace (or increase!) — and how this fits into a bigger ecosystem of local news, the new press-sphere.
News will not come from one organization anymore. It will come from a collection of organizations, networks, individuals, companies, technologies, and collaborative projects each operating under different business models. What Perez-Pena profiles is a slice of the new news pie. It will take other slices from other players to add up to a whole.
Still, the recognition by the Gray Lady of these new girls in town is an important moment in the evolution of news.
Come see Brian Storm, proprietor of the much-loved MediaStorm at CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism tomorrow, Thursday, starting at 6:30. It’s open to the public but space is limited, so sign up here.
So The New York Times Company is now worth less than it paid for the disastrous Boston Globe. It has cut its dividend to save cash, which - PR protestations aside - could lead to a family revolt, a la Wall Street Journal, LA Times, and Orange County Register.
The Times Company - just like GM - has to undergo a radical restructuring and fast. That’s heresy in both cases. Both are Institutions. They were presumed to be immutable and eternal, even holy. They’re not.
In the current credit market, taking the company private - though cheap at $900 million market cap plus existing debt - is difficult if not unlikely. Sale? Simon Cast has wondered whether Guardian Media Group - backed by the Scott Trust - should buy The Times Company. I fear that the ballast of The Times could bring down the good ship Guardian. Selling off assets? Not now. There is no white knight.
The Times is indeed a national treasure and a national necessity. As local media become more local, we will have only The Times covering the nation and the world with the Washington Post covering the nation, mostly, and the Wall Street Journal vying to compete. Look at London, where the Guardian, the Times, and the Telegraph, at the high end, compete to cover the world. Three quality national papers do the job well. Germany, France, and other nations also depend on national papers. I have confidence that our three papers could do the job. The Brits are lucky to also have the BBC; CNN has pretensions to fulfill its role here and elsewhere but it’s more a pretender; our broadcast network news operations are weak tea. No, we need The Times.
So how would you restructure it? (Please spare us the kneejerk kicks to The Times’ groin. We’ve heard them all.)
In March - when it would have been easier to sell assets and accomplish change - I made my suggestions for restructuring:
I’d spin off New York metro as a separate product and turn The Times into a national - and international - service and brand purely. The metro product would have a big staff, a small audience in the city, and thus a difficult P&L, but this shift would take much of the staff cost of the newsroom off the books of the national product and let it focus is work. The three national papers should compete for links - even share revenue for them - in a reverse syndication model. In addition, I’d create curated content and ad networks independent sites (it has a start in its relationship with Freakonomics); The Times or Post or Journal could build the high-quality Glam of news. The Times newsroom should be rebuilt from zero for its new structure, emphasizing national coverage and digital. The Globe should be drastically restructured, sloughing off its print and distribution businesses. I’d now say it should make the leap and shift completely online. That is, turn off the presses. In March, I said they should sell other assets. Too late now.
But that probably doesn’t go far enough. How would you rethink The Times?
Refresh.