It has been very exciting and busy of late.
A friend and colleague of mine, Colin Mulvaney asked me to help critique work on a new multimedia web site, surfing is the new career."
Alan Webber of 'Fast Company' fame has two neat posts. One on how should you measure the success of your business that I think is a must read and the other is about how to think about art and commerce.
So why all the business talk you ask?
Well, it has occurred to a number of us in the journalism field and in the business community, that it is the structures of news organizations that have to adapt to the new world we inhabit.
If you want a good introduction to how pricing has/is changing in the world, read this easy to understand e-book by Todd Sattersten. The production and distribution costs of newspapers is daunting when you compare it to a web site for users that costs 9 cents a month to run per client. So where do we go from here?
As before: it has to be compelling content; it has to be content people are willing to pay for because it will change/improve/alter/effect their lives; and it has to be accessible.
Mediocre will not stand out in the crowd.
On a side note: Here is a great documentary on making lemonade out of the lemons life hands you is inspirational.
Unless you have been living under a rock somewhere in the High Sierras, you might have heard that Apple announced their new iPad.
The video with Jony Ive and Phil Schiller is quite sharp. Ive is worth tuning in for alone because of how he conceptualizes design.
The reviews are starting to trickle in, some good, some OK. Two of the news feeds I tune into had their own reviews: truthdig and true/slant. I am actually not going to say much about the product at the moment. Do I think it is the instant game changer that the iPod was, no. Do I think it heralds the game-changer coming, yes.
As remarkable as the product is, imagine any of these marketing campaigns that Apple could launch:
* Apple could ship iPads to Stanford or UCLA and Johns Hopkins medical staffs and have an app developer work with those schools to revolutionize paperwork in hospitals.
* Imagine a Netfilx and Apple partnership where users could stream their Netflix account to their iPads and if they really liked a movie they could purchase the content to be saved to their pad and transferred to their home computer/entertainment center ala the iPod.
* Apple could announce a nation-wide innovation in education contest where iPads would be provided to the high school or magnate school that could best utilize the technology in allowing their students to create and improve the world.
* Apple could gift the performance artists improv everywhere with iPads to see what they could produce.
* Apple could send Emmy award winning Richard Koci Hernandez of San Jose Mercury News and Multimediashooter fame a bunch of iPads and see how he and the Knight Foundation could transform journalism and news.
- Imagine watching your favorite movie and having the script text running along side the film or beneath it.
- Imagine airlines loaning iPads to frustrated, stranded travelers to reschedule their trips.
The last time we had a major change in the transmission medium of information, we had the reformation of the Catholic Church. Hold on, I think this one will be just as big!
I can hear a number of questions from from friends and colleagues.
Q: Mike, what is up with the shift toward business and marketing coverage?
A: After looking long and hard at the news-on-paper business, I have realized that the major issues facing our business as a whole are on the business end, not the content end.
So, I began to explore what business innovators are up to, how this might influence journalism and multimedia, how marketing is changing in the business world and trying to determine what business we are in (more on that to come).
This year, actual we started with the school year, we/I am trying something new.
As the industry tries DMWL (Do More With Less), I thought it would be interesting and fun to start a program for local high school students interested in video and film. We watch videos, critique work and will be starting our first group project based on moments in January.
You can see some of what we have watched here at our syllabus under construction.
So far there have been great discussions and we average about six students. Some local video and film folks sit in from time to time to offer their perspectives and insights. A few of the students plan on attending film school next year, so hopefully we will find out if we helped them along their way.
Also over the holidays, Seth Godin 'published' this e-book that is a thought-provoking read. He was able to pull together a diverse group of people to provide short essays on 'what matters now.' It is worth the time.
If you did not catch Godin's innovative launch of 'Linchpin' you missed a fascinating idea explored to its fullest.
Instead of launching off on a book tour, Godin provided preview copies of the book to fans who donated money to the non-profit Acumen. What was really interesting is that many of us donated more than the suggested/requested $30 because it is a neat funding group.
So let's count the winners...Acumen gets a great boost and advertising, Godin's fans get to feel special because they are in on something different, Godin wins because his 'tribe' spreads word of his book and the book publisher wins because they put into action an innovative marketing campaign.
So I hear the obvious question: Mike, why are you reading so many business books?
The answer: next post.
I was lucky enough to get in early on Seth Godin's early release of his latest book 'Linchpin.'
I am about half way through the book, I am actually trying to savor and think about what he has to say and make me think about.
The good news is you are not crazy. There are reasons why you are frustrated at work, why school didn't make a lot of sense, and even better yet, there is a way out.
If nothing else Seth Godin is helping me realize that the questions I have been thinking about, asking myself and colleagues as the questions I should be asking.
You would be a fool not to get yourself a copy when it comes out. A number of friends will get copies of this, it is that important.
I asked for, I submit a long list, and received Alan Webber's book: 'Rules of Thumb: 52 Truths for Winning at Business Without Losing Your Self' over the holidays. Webber, of Fast Company fame, has really pulled together some great ideas. It is an easy and good read. I am going back through it a second time to really glean some best practices.
Good deal on the book here.
If nothing else his book is pressing me to re-think, imagine what business we are in, see the previous post.
The other amazing read this break was Seth Godin's re-release of his book 'All Marketers Tell Stories.'
Not surprisingly another home run, and this is the other major influence on my thought process regarding the biz.
It has been awhile....been doing a lot of thinking and reading lately.
I have been trying to imagine/think of what a visioning process would look like for newspapers, if you would like to help out take this survey.
The main question is: what business are we in?
Feel free to substitute the name of your newspaper for mine if you are from out of town.
The Bill Moyers interview of David Simon dovetails with a number of things I have been thinking about recently.
The current situation that most news on paper organizations have found themselves is an interesting combination of two classic graduate school thought exercises. The "Free rider problem" and "The tragedy of the commons."
The wiki definition of Free riders is: “[they] consume more than their fair share of a resource, or shoulder less than a fair share of the costs of its production. Free riding is usually considered to be an economic "problem" only when it leads to the non-production or under-production of a public good.” Sound like anything we are familiar with?
The 'Tragedy of the Commons' is similar in that it is a case when multiple people all acting in their own self-interest can destroy a common or limited resource.
So what do we have going on in the news industry? People are able to free ride the system in a number of ways: including reading content for free, even though there is a cost associated for gathering it, sites can link to other people’s content without incurring any cost, the web is seen as ‘free,’ even though practically there are costs.
From the tragedy of the commons side, news on paper organization have been providing free content on the web even though collectively they are all cutting each other’s throats because the ‘other’ is giving away content for free. There is a great deal of commentary on the web, and that makes it appear as there is also news, but the gathering of the commodity of news is not borne by the commons that utilizes the commodity.
So where does this leave us? David Simon argues "since we basically have become a market-based culture and it's what we know, and it's what's led us to this sad denouement, I think we're going to follow market-based logic, right to the bitter end." He is speaking about our economy in general, but it speaks volumes to news on paper and society.
One of his other great observations is that:
"You show me anything that depicts institutional progress in America, school test scores, crime stats, arrest reports, arrest stats, anything that a politician can run on, anything that somebody can get a promotion on. And as soon as you invent that statistical category, 50 people in that institution will be at work trying to figure out a way to make it look as if progress is actually occurring when actually no progress is."
If you haven't seen the Bill Moyers video interview of David Simon of "The Wire" fame, go watch.
I cannot say enough good things about this for any number of reasons.
My favorite quote is "It was about that which is-- has no value, being emphasized as being meaningful. And that which is-- has genuine meaning, being given low regard."
In case you missed it yesterday, Ahston Kutcher beat CNN to 1 million twitter followers.
While I am not a big fan of Twitter, I recognize that it works for people and has even helped a politician ruin his party's push for dominance of their state capitol.
Back to Ahston and CNN. In his claiming victory Ahston talks about how "We can and will create our media," he said in his speech on ustream.tv. "We can and will broadcast our media. We can and will censor our own media ourselves."
During the race, CNN talking heads would ask viewers to follow them on Twitter. What Kutcher was doing was a live stream broadcast, reading people's twitter messages out loud, asking questions and responding to questions. In other words, he was interactive and responsive, CNN was unidirectional. New school vs. old school.
Mainstream media just doesn't seem to get it. One of the most important things that happens during Easter that people don’t often reflect on, is that when Jesus dies, the curtain in the temple is torn apart, ie. there is nothing separating people from the holiest of holys.
Why is that important here...the curtain has been torn again. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. People do not need a multimillion dollar TV studio or printing press to get their message out. There are many streams of information that our outside of the control of the media and other information or entertainment technology.
The message is out of the bottle, what used to be controlled by a small group of agenda setters is becoming democratized. Welcome to the new world.
Our CEO forwarded a link to me that points out something so obvious you might have missed it.
Do you wonder what will replace news on paper in the future? You may be already holding one in your hand: the iPhone.
Mark Potts on his 'recovering journalist' web site references a post on Joe Poz's blog about the iPhone. Both posts discuss that they are able to customize what they used to get from newspapers on their iPhone with different apps (applications for those not in-the-know).
That means they can get the sports feed they want, weather, find what is playing at the movies near them and they can customize WHAT THEY WANT. It used to be the news on paper was one size fits all, not any more.
You can even volunteer via the iPhone with the Extraordinaries.
I know that news on paper companies don't want to do it or recognize it, but they are now in the computer/media/technology field and that means innovation, every 18 months. Sorry, that is reality.
Arianna Huffington hits the nail on the head with her latest post 'the debate over online news: it's the consumer, stupid.'
As with most things in our world, the consumers are voting with their feet and walking away from newspapers to the internet. Sorry, it has already happened. We can cry about this, or we can stand back up and lead, follow or get out of the way. My fear is that a number of news on papers are getting out of the way.
'Charlie Rose summarized what I(Huffington) was saying: "We have seen the future and it is here. It is a linked economy. It is search engines. It is online advertising. That's where the future is. And if you can't find your way to that, then you can't find your way."'
A former colleague just posted a link to Alan D. Mutter's Reflections of a Newsosaur and his latest post about how failing newspapers bring me joy post written by an anonymous blogger (supposedly). My colleague wondered if she had been part of the giant 'journalistic cabal,' although if you read Joe Bageant's 'We've let corporations and media rob our souls' and you might start to think they are both on to something. But I digress...
A look-see over the newsosaur's blog highlighted a number of topics for future posts:
In the depths of our economy and the journalism field, some words of hope.
Andy Hall over at wemedia.com writes about his take away thoughts from the recent conference in his post "Words of hope in an era of calamity."
As we all know and recognize, we are undergoing a monumental shift from print to digital. The dominant medium of expression for over 500 years is giving way to something new that none of us fully understand. As with all deaths and births, it is exciting and frightening.
Andy shares some positive thoughts about alternative forms of journalism and news gathering, and that I believe is where the future will be. There will just not be newspapers (in whatever form) and TV; there will be citizen journalists, there will be small non-profits, there will news aggregators, there will be small staffs of news gathering and analysis organizations.
There will always be the need for gatekeepers, analyzers and referees and that is where journalism needs to find its new home.
As they taught us in grad school, always question your own assumptions.
A fine example from today. In our Local section, our center piece was a 'blog scrape' from our CEO’s blog where he reports that he found a Facebook page where local college kids posted things they missed about Bakersfield. Actually kind of fun and tied into our sister-products version of March-Madness where local icons went head to head in brackets.
The problem is, how many of our readers took their paper over to their computer, logged on and typed in the log address to take a look. I wonder... My educated guess is that we have two distinct audiences: a digital one and a print one. DO WE assume that there is crossover, do we have proof that readers do this?
Let’s suppose that a reader, me, for example went and did this. Sadly, the center piece could not be found on bakersfield.com, I could go to our CEO’s blog, but the post the packages referred to I could not find on this quickly, and if you know anything about Facebook, you have to be a member to log in and then search for this page.
So, what have we done today?
We assumed print readers care about Facebook and social networks (which they might), we have assumed people will use their paper to visit the internet, and if we really did believe that, we have now frustrated them because they can’t get to the original content/posting easily.
good news:
The Huff-post announced plans to fund long-form and investigative journalism on the web.
of interest:
One of our former staffers has started a blog where she discusses in detail many of the decisions TBC made in migrating to the web.
This was originally going to be a discussion of newsless.org's interesting post on 'There is only us,' until I read Nicholas D. Kristof’s 'The Daily Me.'
Newless argues that news is becoming unbundled from the traditional mode(s) of distribution. I prefer democratization, but it is not my post. The argument is that the power of packaging news and advertising is diminishing. The role of journalist has been released from the monopoly of newspapers and news television; anyone can be a journalist now. This is both an exhilarating and scary concept.
Kristoff points out that we as thinking animals like to read opinions that we agree with. We also, to a smaller extent, like to read opinions that are caricatures of the people we disagree with. So if we are now the editors of 'The Daily Me' as he calls it, society will become more confined to its mental bunkers that people will not have to leave.
If you contrast these two articles I start wondering about the future. To me the future of journalism is to play referee and point people to good, well-founded content and illustrate how badly thought out other content is. I think it will also be to aggregate content that people should consider fro0m multiple perspectives.
The bad news is that we just want to read the perspectives we agree with. One of the advantages of the newspaper is that it tried being all things to all people, and that was problematic. But having fielded a few angry reader calls, I know that the newspaper made you think, made you experience emotions and made you call to express your opinion, and that will be lost.
