Xark!

When 'shoddy' is your biz plan

A journalism parable...

There's a chain store here called Marshall's that, (as best I can tell) operates by purchasing shipments of overstocked or otherwise devalued clothing and housewares at discount, and then retailing them at affordable prices.  In fact there are two of them in town, one east of the Cooper, the other west of the Ashley.

The margins in such a business are going to be low, which is not to say there isn't profit to be made: I venture into these places about once a year, and business is invariably brisk.

I noticed details as I shopped the West Ashley store Wednesday: Jackets hung with collars turned up; a bin of travel kits in disarray; clothing packed tightly into racks. The fitting rooms spoke the silent language of Third World squalor, and the checkout area was manned by one poor guy who struggled to resolve problem after problem with mislabeled or untagged items, using the intercom to call for price checks and assistance.at the registers.

Rock stars

This must have been taken last year at the first Charleston International Film Festival, but I just ran across it this morning whilst doing something else. If Farrah and Mitchell don't look like absolute rock stars in this shot, I don't know what a rock star looks like.

Of course, they're both actively trying to be creative people WITHOUT being rock-star celebrities. To me that just makes them rock stars that you don't secretly hate.

The flu will test who we are

"Flu is a highly political issue, to put it mildly," Terry Jones wrote this morning, and that's what I'm going to talk about -- not the science of it. Because science is only part of what we'll be facing in the coming days.

Whether or not history records April 2009 as the genesis of a global pandemic, there are some things we can expect with near certainty: Rumors, reports, controversy, credibility gaps and fear. So please bear these things in mind and, if you agree with these ideas, help spread them. Because fear is a deadly virus, too, and just as networked media can help spread it, network media can also serve as an immune system response to fear IF WE KEEP OUR HEADS AND WORK TOGETHER.

Flu: Don't panic, but pay attention

The biggest public health event of 2005 was probably the non-mutation of bird flu, a hyper-lethal form of influenza scientists call H5N1. Sixty percent of the humans who caught this virus died, but the good news was, few people caught it.

The paid-online-subscription pipedream

This isn't shocking news, but the InDenver Times website announced today that it fell short of its 50,000-paid subscription goal. The site, run by laid-off staff newsies from the newspaper that recently closed there, managed to sell only 3,000 subscriptions.

For those of you keeping score, that's 6 percent of their goal.

Why bother to talk about this? Hasn't the litany of pig-headed paid-content failures taught news executives anything?

And the answer is, apparently, that news executives are convinced they've failed in the past because they haven't been pig-headed hard enough.

Axioms for 21st Century Media

I found these yesterday while looking through my notes for something else. Lightly edited.-- dc

Feb. 11, 2009:

1. The present is functionally obsolete.
2. For planning purposes, the short-term future IS the present.
3. Planning for the short-term is not a strategy. It's like navigating solely by what you can see.
4. There is no map, and the future is not predictable. Consequently, shoot for standard formats (XML, RDF, etc.) and build products and systems to be adaptable and inter-operable.
5. Don't build your future on a rock. Build your future on a surfboard. We're not on dry land anymore.
6. Proprietary systems are rocks. Open Source systems are surfboards.
7. Own your data.
8. Think databases, not documents.
9. Unstructured data has a value that approaches zero as it ages.
10. Structured data is too formal to describe the messy world around us.
11. Semi-structured data looks like the Goldilocks Zone for news media.
12. The One With The Best Tools Wins.
13. Web 1.0 is to the Web as rotary phones are to telecommunication: Rotary phones still work, but they're irrelevant to what comes next.
14. The challenge is: Build tools that give humans superhuman abilities.
15. Technology is just evolution by non-biological means.

KK4 V.I.P R.I.P.

So a funny thing happened on the way to the beer ticket window at Kulture Klash 4: A guy looked at our wristbands and redirected us to the VIP Lounge, where free beer and food awaited us.

How did we wind up with VIP wristbands? Well, the most likely answer is there was some kind of screw-up, and we later heard rumors that something had gone wrong and flooded the lounge with people who weren't so important after all. Which I think is just divinely sweet.

But here's the lesson I hope the excellent people behind the influential Kulture Klash series learn from this glitch: You're misreading our new culture when you add a VIP room to your party.

Journalism ethics, 101

There was a short discussion of journalism ethics in Friday's API workshop at Temple, and it basically went like this: Ethics are well and good when you're making a lot of money, but when you've got to pay the bills, you can't be worrying about the finer points of such esoteric concerns.

I didn't respond at the time. It was another presenter's segment, and I was a bit taken aback. But I thought about it in the taxi to the airport, and I just want to make this statement -- to students, to journalists, to anyone who cares about such things:

Ethics exist to save your soul.

NAA solution? Invisibility!

Google exec Eric Schmidt spoke to the NAA today, then took questions like these:

Question: Google has been at the forefront of conditioning our audiences that a headline and extract is enough. So they've gotten to the point now where we do a Google search, come up with a list of topics or from Google News we look at the headline and extract and that becomes "enough news" in the Twitter world. So that what happens is that Google becomes the point in the middle between that audience, that consumer supporting the creation of that professional content. So the real question becomes how can the media industry in general partner with Google to help support that professional content when the headline and the extract is good enough.

Leave it to Jeff Jarvis, in this case, to write the speech Schmidt should have made. And there's one point in Jeff piece that Schmidt certainly did make in his Q&A:

News companies that don't want to be indexed by those evil Internet aggregators can end this exploitation RIGHT NOW! This instant. All it takes is one tiny line of code and Google's search bots will leave them alone forever.

The continuing death of irony

Poor Cal Thomas. In trying to argue a conservative Christianist case this week against the Iowa Supreme Court's wise decision on gay marriage, he wound up satirizing himself yet again.

When Meredith Willson wrote the wildly popular musical "The Music Man" half a century ago, Harold Hill proclaimed trouble had come to River City, Iowa in the form of a pool hall, which he claimed would corrupt young people unless the local citizens bought the musical instruments he was selling and got their kids into a marching band. He promised that playing music would keep kids from "fritterin' away their mealtime, suppertime, chore time, too" ...

Neither Willson, nor his mythical character Hill, could have foreseen what "trouble" the Iowa Supreme Court has brought on the state (and potentially the nation) when it unanimously ruled that denying same-sex couples the right to marry "does not substantially further any important government objective"...

(snip)

The battle over same-sex marriage is on the way to being lost. For conservatives who still have faith in the political system to reverse the momentum, you are — to recall Harold Hill — "closing your eyes to a situation you do not wish to acknowledge."

Thomas' problem? If you'll recall your Broadway history, The Music Man is a story about a con man. That "trouble" they had right there in River City? There wasn't any. Just a con man trying to sell musical instruments by manipulating a bunch of rubes via drummed-up fears of a corrupting influence.