Xark!

Reading Louis Menand: Commercializing anti-commercialism

"Nearly all American culture is commercial. It is either market-driven, as in the case of popular music, paperback fiction, and movies; or it is advertising-driven, as in the case of radio television, newspapers and magazines. And this culture is, of course, only an aspect of the American way of life generally, in which virtually every good – food, housing, furniture, clothing, cars, shaving creams – is understood to be designed to extract the greatest possible profit from the market conditions available, and to be susceptible to alteration the instant those conditions change. Because it is the chief tool for making conditions change, thereby creating new areas of demand and new sources of profit, advertising has become for most people the symbol of the thoroughgoing commercialism of American life.

The worst thing about the paywall question

Like a lot of people in the news business, I'm interested in the results of 2011's big bets on paywalls -- the New York Times version and Rupert Murdoch's Times of London version. We're several months in, and I still haven't seen much of substance.

Which was why I jumped on this piece when API's SmartBrief service led with it on June 27. But does the reporting it contains really justify the headline "Murdoch's Leap Finds Converts in Cannes as Paywall Use Grows?" Read it. I'll be here when you get back.

(Tap tap tap tap...)

Kerosene Journalism & the quest for the atom

Since the new-media conventional wisdom machine is having another loose conversation about the “atomic unit” of journalism (thank you, Jeff Jarvis, for kicking this one off), let's use this fleeting moment of attention to advance the subject toward its ultimate destination.

Future journalists are going to be in the information business, not specifically the storytelling business, or the analysis business, or the Tweeting business, or the liveblogging business. What separates the information contained in all these existing journalistic forms from the journalism that will be valuable in the future, is that the future will require us to store the new information we report in ways that are efficiently usable by computers.

So thank you, Mr. Jarvis, for pointing out that quality reporting need not result in an article. Thank you, Jonathan Glick, for noting that mobile interfaces are changing the way we consume news. Thank you, Amy Gahran, for saying that we need better word-processing and browser tools. These aren't exactly new ideas (Jarvis, Gahran and many others have been making similar points off and on for years now), but the recent cascade of discussion makes this a noteworthy moment.

The flaw in this line of conversation is that it ends at the water's edge, by the banks of a river of change that separates the confused state of modern journalism from a future that may offer astounding rewards.

FOX News' historic mistake

Here's a large statement with scanty evidence, yet one I believe nonetheless: 21st century media historians will record that the decline of Fox News Channel as a dominant force in right-wing politics began on May 16, 2011.

Not that Fox is showing any particular signs of immediate weakness. It dominates its two cable news competitors in most meaningful measures, and essentially owns the conservative news brand in America. Conventional wisdom says that Fox – which holds the distinction of being simultaneously the country's most trusted and least trusted TV news channel – will be a dominant player in the news business for the foreseeable future.

 But sniff around Fox for a while and see if you don't catch a whiff of decay.

Rethinking advertising... in 2005

Author's note: What follows is a lightly edited version of a white paper report I gave my bosses at The Post and Courier newspaper in December 2005, describing an approach to 21st century news media and advertising that Steve Buttry (who developed his version independently in 2007) and Chuck Peters would later name C3, for Complete Community Connection. I first blog-published this text in September 2006, because I was shocked that nothing had come of it. Five years later, I'm not shocked. Things were moving rapidly in the web world in 2005, but things do not move rapidly in the news media industry.

For the record, The Post and Courier bosses who received this white paper never invited me to discuss it with them.

Readers, buyers and users
The print-newspaper business model is contradictory and more than a little confusing: We attract readers by covering news, which they pay to read. But the heart of our businesslies with sellers, for whom we deliver the attention of buyers via advertising. This is a conflict. For our brand to be valuable, readers must see it as independent of advertiser interests. To keep that reader trust, traditional newspapers have long erected “firewalls” between their news and advertising and editorial departments.

But we have a secret: Those firewalls come with built-in doors and windows. For all our talk about independence, no newspaper wants its editorial department to go around casually angering advertisers. Sure, we do it, but we don’t do it lightly. Not for long. And when we do, even for the best of reasons, we hear about it from those advertisers.

The danger in the doldrums

This morning's day-off multi-tasking: watching coverage of the horrible 8.9 earthquake in Japan while reading my various feeds, which included finally taking on the Bill Keller column about aggregation. It includes this passage in the ultimate graph:

There is no question that in times of momentous news, readers rush to find reliable firsthand witness and seasoned judgment. (In the first hour after Mubarak fell, The Times’s Web site had an astounding one million page views, and friends at other major news organizations tell me they enjoyed a similar surge.) I can’t decide whether serious journalism is the kind of thing that lures an audience to a site like The Huffington Post, or if that’s like hiring a top chef to fancy up the menu at Hooters. But if serious journalism is about to enjoy a renaissance, I can only rejoice. Gee, maybe we can even get people to pay for it.

So here's a thought question: How many "times of momentous news" do we experience in a typical month? With the exception of you news junkies (and you know who you are), how often do you hear something that sends you rushing to your top media channels to find out more?

I don't have answers to that, other than to say "not that often."

Which points to an overlooked problem in media: If you get most of your attention on days when people are urgently paying attention to an event, but you make your money by selling ads on less-interesting content day after routine day, what does that do to the way you structure and value your newsroom resources?

The future, on the cheap

I read a post yesterday about a profitable hyperlocal news site, and here's my summary: the owners hold down costs by paying freelancers to write articles. Their secret sauce, apparently, is that unlike similar hyperlocal formulas being pushed by Patch and The New York Times, The Alternative Press doesn't waste money on unnecessary expenses - you know, frivilous journalism stuff, like hiring editors.

Result? They've got their overhead down to a triumphant $0.28 per unique user.

“We're the only profitable hyperlocal here today and our business model works,” founder Michael Shapiro told an MIT enterprise forum late last month.

So, let's review.

Advertising is not enough

The ongoing death throes of TBD, a Washington-based local news site that launched in April, attract my attention because a talented friend of mine joined the venture last spring. I remember wishing him well in a coffee shop 11 months ago while thinking “I've got a bad feeling about this.”

Here's why, and it's not a complex answer. TBD, like practically every other for-profit media business in America, relies on advertising to pay its bills. The pitch for Web-only news ventures like TBD is that they'll turn a profit on low revenues because they come without the legacy costs of their newspaper-backed Web competitors.

What gets overlooked in these proposals is just how low those revenues typically turn out to be. Despite a rebound from their crash in 2009, Web ad rates remain so dismal that it's difficult to make money producing journalistic content online even when your company's main expense is newsroom payroll.

An FAQ for my semantic journalism essay

Since several readers yesterday seem to struggle with some of the big-picture concepts in my essay about standards-based journalism in a semantic economy, I'm taking this opportunity to build a better cognitive bucket for all this information I'm shoveling your way. And it seems like the big problem is understanding what RDF is and how it might work in this context.

Rather than doing this in essay form, I'm going to try it as an FAQ.

Standards-based journalism in a semantic economy

Abstract: This 2,600-word essay describes how a news-media industry equipped with semantic tools could develop a standards-based certification program for journalism. Certification would be by non-governmental bodies similar to the ISO, and would focus on information processing and coding standards rather than on matters of ethics. The effect of such a standard would enable interoperability between semantic directories, which would allow for the creation of software that compares facts and checks the accuracy of statements.It is the second in a series of essays about semantic media. Since some readers had difficulty imagining the system, I've added an FAQ for these ideas, and added descriptions to the links listed at the end.

There's nothing exciting or romantic about standards. Personally, I find them tedious.

There, I've said it.

But there's no happy and profitable future for journalism without professional standards, and for that future we should be willing to sweat a little tedium. If my conclusions are correct, then our emerging information-based global economy will require interchangeable, robust data in the same way that our current economy requires that every finely threaded quarter-inch screw must have 28 threads per inch, machined to precisely the same height and pitch and thread-axis angle, regardless of whether the screw is manufactured in the People's Republic of China or Alpharetta, Ga.

Manufacturers of products that require screws need to know not only that the fasteners they buy are machined to precise dimensions and specifications, but that the tolerance of the machining and the durability of the materials fall within known quality standards. This generic uniformity makes it possible for manufacturers around the world to compete primarily on cost, and it works because manufacturers voluntarily abide by standards that were published and certified by international bodies.

If we are to benefit from a global semantic economy, then the information that fuels its industries and drives its markets must be structured, coded, stored, published and quality-certified to international standards. This is a foreseeable future (one among many), because we now possess the tools and techniques required to build the first platform that would make semantic markup of narrative documents a profitable, persistent revenue stream across the publishing industry. So long as the value of these resources continues to expand, we can expect to see voluntary participation in these activities, with resulting increases in productivity and organization.