Xark!

Paid content and free content at George's Restaurant

While eating my breakfast at George's Restaurant in Oak Park this morning, I noticed that just about every other customer, upon entering and saying hello to George, stopped at the counter and browsed through a stack of newspapers: The Sun Times, the Tribune, the local Oak Park paper. They'd pick out one or more and carry the papers to their booths to read over breakfast.

On their way out, the diners would pay their bills and return the free (to them, anyway) newspaper to the stack for the next patron. And so on.

I've noticed similar systems elsewhere, including coffeehouses that provide free copies of The New York Times despite selling The NYT out of a rack by the cash register.

So yes, somebody paid for the content in those newspapers, but certainly not everybody who consumed it paid.

Which raises the question: Why aren't newspaper companies cracking down on the sharing of their products in restaurants, diners, bars, coffeehouses and other public gathering places? Why should newspapers sell copies to libraries, which are just going to share them with the public, at the same rate that they sell subscriptions to individuals?

And if newspapers aren't all whacked out about this blatant theft of their intellectual property at George's Restaurant, then why do so many otherwise rational newspaper employees wax certifiably insane whilst lecturing the rest of us about the evils of "giving away content on the Web?" 

And the answer is: Because they're in the business of giving away content in order to sell ads. The only difference between "stealing" a read in a print copy versus the same free read online is that print ads are expensive enough that newspaper companies never had to care about all this rampant diner piracy. If online advertising were nearly as valuable, newspaper companies wouldn't be bitching. 

Got it? Any questions?

The Imagination Gap

As is often the case, things tend to come at me in ironic pairs. This week it was a video of Jeff Jarvis' introduction to the New Business Models for News conference at CUNY, followed a few hours later by a link to a December 2007 TED Talk by Kevin Kelly about the next 5,000 days (give or take 700) of the Web. And as is so typically the case, I found myself angling away from what appears to be the most reasonable and likely future.

For those of you not inclined to watch such videos, here's my short synopsis:

Jarvis: The Knight Foundation funded this exploration of what might happen if a major metropolitan newspaper vacated its monopoly and was replaced by a new media ecosystem (an eventuality I've discussed here and here). The study found evidence for a lively and profitable ecosystem including a healthy local-news blogosphere and a new-style news organization. In the spirit of this new enterprise, they've provided a freely downloadable spreadsheet for anyone who wants to tweak the numbers.

Kelly: Two years ago, when the Web was about 5,000 days old, Kelly wondered what the next 5,000 days would look like in retrospect (one of my favorite ways of exploring futurism, btw). 5,700 days ago, most futurists thought the Web was going to be "like TV, only better." He suggests that no one then would have taken seriously the development of the Web-based culture we enjoy today, with free and/or low-cost tools that would have seemed like foolish Utopianism had anyone suggested them in the early 1990s. As for the future, he sees a unifying trend toward a cloud-based "one machine," plus a number of developments that will be familiar to people steeped in quality science fiction.

Even shorter? Jarvis is pointing toward a new media economy that looks an awful lot like a steady-state extension of the old media economy, only better. Kelly is suggesting that we need to get better at imagining things that seem impossible.

The limits of social

Today's post by Marc Danzinger (hat tip to Ad Ingle) isn't exactly wrong in its major assertions, but I feel the need to attack it if only because I find its abundant reasonableness so misleading.

To wit: Danzinger contends that the future of media is conversation, bringing up some very correct points about the value of curation, etc., along the way. In a related post, he makes the right observation about why mainstream mass media isn't equipped survive this transition from the old media economy to the new one. In a word: monopoly.

Danzinger makes some predictions, and since I'm crazy that way too, I'll join him. After the coming collapse of the "paywalls will save us!" suicide pact (which was supposed to take place this summmer -- a conclusion that has been delayed only by the industry's inherent slowness), the next big-media bandwagon will be "new" ideas about networked media. As in: Let's get other people to make content for free, and then we'll sell ads on it.

The problem with such ideas -- and my general critique of Danzinger's post -- is that they simply connect observations about the way people communicate now to observations about how news companies are failing in revenue and relevance and then postulates that adopting one will fix the other. Again, it seems reasonable. A relationship between the two exists, but is it causal, corrective... or merely symptomatic?

Narrative is dead! Long live Narrative!

A long-form narrative essay about long-form narrative, making the case for a non-narrative future for journalism and arguing with The Washington Post's Joel Achenbach, who needs to go sit in the car and think about things before he writes any more articles. In keeping with this theme, I've added a three-page, home-printer-optimized PDF for those of you who prefer to read long-form essays on paper, plus a shorter, semi-structured online summary.

I was sitting in a downtown Charleston coffee shop with Ken Hawkins last week when in walked Sally and Gary Smith. For those of you who don't know them, Ken is the guy behind TheDigitel, which just made news by announcing some new investment and out-of-town expansion plans, and Gary is the celebrated Sports Illustrated writer who on Thursday became the Washington Post's poster child for long-form narrative.

It struck me as symbolic.

On the one hand, there's Ken and his product, relentlessly chewing through newsfeeds and Twitterstreams and hashtags looking for anything of relevance and interest to local readers, summarizing and linking and enhancing it, and then grinding on. TheDigitel is as good a local news aggregator site as you'll find, but it's a restless, twitchy beast that cycles through more content than it can display, each item neatly summarized and updated in chunks that rarely exceed 300 words before being blown off the front by the next one..

On the other, Gary. He earns a sweet living south of Calhoun Street producing four beautifully written magazine stories a year. 

New Charleston

Defensive ornamentation, East Bay Street, Charleston (Dan Conover photo)

Because Charleston was founded in the 17th century at the southern tip of a north-south peninsula, power and class here have always run on something of a north-south axis. So in the 1970s, when the area around the navy base incorporated as North Charleston, the name spoke as much about the new city's blue-collar identity as it did about its relative location.

Well, I think it's time we imposed a new axis on Charleston. Not North and South, but Old and New. 

Charleston, for all its considerable charms, remains a backward-looking city. Not "backwards," as in unsophisticated or unintelligent, but more enamored of its past than its present. So while the city officially recognizes the value of its "creative cluster," its "tech sector" and its "knowledge-based industries," Charleston's institutions, typically dominated by the same old families and traditions, remain wary -- if not openly hostile -- toward new ideas and new people.

Since that anti-outsider bias tends to limit opportunity, Charleston has developed a reputation as a place where who you know is more important than what you know. It's why so many talented people here seem to direct their energies toward celebrity instead of substance.

Once upon a time I wanted to change that. Now I believe we should let eccentric, odd Old Charleston be whatever it wants to be. I thank Old Charleston for preserving this beautiful city, and aren't we stronger when we value and preserve indigenous cultures?

Instead, I want to encourage Charleston's outsiders to start appreciating their own significance. The prosperity of the Lowcountry depends on the energy, creativity and spirit of people who moved here "from off," and once we start acting on that knowledge it simply won't matter whether Old Charleston recognizes this truth.

New Charleston doesn't have to beat Old Charleston. It simply has to stop looking to Old Charleston for permission.

What are we waiting for?

Go to a New Charleston event -- Kulture Klash, Pecha Kucha, BarCampCHS, a TweetUp or an SMCCHS happy hour -- and look around. Hundreds, thousands of musicians, writers, artists, designers, art directors, photographers, programmers, Web-heads, researchers, engineers, architects, entrepreneurs, chefs, dancers, filmmakers, actors and big-thinkers live here. How many are "from off?" Most.

Yet I still meet people who tell me different versions of the same story. Instead of being encouraged in their new ventures, they are visited by members of the local establishment who always deliver the same message. Get back in line. There's some kind of old-boy system here, and it wants to pick the winners of every contest in advance. I don't understand it, but there it is.

My question is, so what? Yes, these people have some money. Yes the city has various programs and perks it can dole out to the favored few. Yes, the local paper acts an unofficial enforcer of Old Charleston orthodoxy. Again: So what?

We don't need mass media to spread the word. We don't need membership in exclusive social clubs to meet interesting people. And the sophisticated tool users here can do more with less money in less time and with less formal organization than Old Charleston can even imagine.

It isn't as if they're offering us an alternative. You're never going to be accepted into the Old Charleston clubs, so why bother conforming to their rules? What have you got to lose by ignoring them?

When we stop fighting and cajoling Old Charleston, we can invest all that energy into building a healthy New Charleston. A separate culture that reflects the values of the people who came here by choice. A culture that's more egalitarian, educated, productive and open.

This change doesn't require government loans or angel investors. Just start small. Cooperate. Do business with each other -- and with the thousands of like-minded Lowcountry natives who are our good friends and collaborators. Support each other. Work together.

Opposing an existing power structure gets us nowhere. Building our own power structure, with our own open networks and values, is progress.

In conclusion...

You don't undo an old habit. You have to create new habits, and to make them stick you have to reinforce those new patterns until the old ones silt over.

That's how we're going to make progress. And the funny thing is, Old Charleston won't even notice it.

It will simply benefit from it, along with the rest of us. Now go forth, join ranks, and start inventing a new city.

(BarCampCHS photo via Ken Hawkins on Flickr)

The Big Pool of Money experiment

At last night's meeting of the Columbia chapter of Social Media Club, I mentioned something I heard suggested in an off-hand way at the Infovalet Conference in May. What if every American paid a fee as part of his or her monthly ISP bill, and then that money were divided up among content creators?

Of course, what I found ironic about this back in May was that the people suggesting it weren't suggesting that ANYONE be able to share in this revenue. The idea was that only content creators who happened to also own printing presses and/or FCC licenses would be eligible. That's absurd on its face, which is probably why that idea hasn't gone anywhere. Try selling that politically.

But as I drove home to Charleston, I reconsidered the idea. Which is why I want you to play along in a thought experiment with me.

What if we all paid into a fund that could be distributed among EVERYONE who creates content, of any kind, that can distributed online? Bloggers, filmmakers, musicians, reporters, pornographers, comedians, ANYONE.

How would it work? How could it be administered? 

New media virtual interview No. 2

I'm going up the road to talk with the folks at Social Media Club Columbia on Oct. 8, and in preparation for the event the organizers posted short bios of the panelists, along with a series of possible questions. There's no way we'll have time to get around to each, but I thought these questions were so excellent that each was worthy of yet another Virtual Interview.

This time the questions come from Chip Oglesby.

What’s the best way for media companies to move from a print first to a web first mentality?

The tricky part is that what you're really talking about here is swapping out engines on an airplane in flight, and I think we should acknowledge the difficulty of that maneuver, plus the fact that doing something like this is never going to be as efficient as starting from scratch with a dedicated staff and a blank tablet.

But when it comes to the print-first vs. web-first shift, it's actually not rocket surgery. You have to take some of your staff and give it the mission of doing incremental, breaking news on the Web. And then you have to get your key newsroom people, and I'm talking managing editors, city editors, sports editors, and you've got to make the success of the website part of their mission. If you do those two things, you're going to wind up producing news in a different workflow and it's going to work.

Most places want to treat this as a training issue and a systems issue, and don't get me wrong. Both are important. But it's really a trust and accountability issue. Unless your top leaders are actually accountable for the success of your Web efforts, they're going to be sabotaging or at least undermining them. It's just too easy for them to give the Web lip service, and then stick to doing the same old thing. And employees aren't stupid. They see that, and they just wait out most “web-first” initiatives.

There are plenty of people who can walk into your newsroom and set up the workflows and training sessions that can make a web-first system work (like, say, me for instance). But unless your top management is accountable for its success, and by that I mean that their salaries and bonuses are tied to it, it's not going to change. This is a cultural challenge masquerading as a technical problem.

How will mobile computing pay into the future of journalism?

The word here could be “pay” or it could be “play” and in either case it's an interesting question.

So let's assume two things: 1. The early adapters of mobile computing are both the high-end tech users and another demographic of users who will invest in smart phones but not desktop or even laptop computing. You're going to have lots of people who won't invest in computer technology who will invest in a snappy phone that is basically a handheld computer, and I think we have to understand that divide and what it means. I think one laboratory for that is Twitter, which is divided into the pre-Oprah group and the post-Oprah group, and they're both using the same service with basically zero overlap.

The second thing is, you don't use a handheld device the way you use a desktop. You relate to things differently, for various reasons.

So how does mobile computing "play" into the future of journalism? Well, I think the first thing you have to recognize is that the news you deliver on a smart phone is going to cross the line into annoyance very quickly if your method of determining what to deliver and at what level of intrusion isn't extremely sensitive. And the way to do that is that you have to have apps that learn from the users' actions.

We like to think you can ask people some questions and then use that to determine their preferences. But we communicate much more honestly by what we do than what we say. So if I were in the news business today I'd be working with an iPhone app developer to create an app that tracks a user's actions while interacting with news. And I would be creating formulas that match your expressed interests AND your unexpressed preferences to determine what priorities to give certain types of stories and headlines. Because if it's just editors picking stories for you, you're not going to use it. It's going to become an annoyance, not a tool.

How does mobile computing “pay” into journalism? I think the answer there is that I probably won't be able to sell you content, but I might be able to sell you an intelligent application that keeps you satisfied and informed about things that actually concern or excite you. I think we should be trying to create mobile devices that act as extensions of each user's interests and personality. And I think you could sell that both as an application and as a subscription-based service.

Should media companies focus on developing the semantic web on their sites?

Semantic Web in the capital letter, W3C, perfectly validating code sense? No. That becomes a question of abstract correctness rather than utility.

Semantic in the sense that the structure conveys meaning? In the sense that the structure adds, captures, enhances and expands meaning? Yes, yes, yes. I'm usually with the geeks on most subjects, but the discussion of semantic structure has degraded into a snarky pissing contest about using the tables tag, and it's just bullshit. The semantic web is not about web design. It's about building an information economy.

The big lesson that analog thinkers have to grasp before they pass Go is that a fact without a context is simply noise. Its value approaches zero. Facts that exist in “stories” have analog value to human readers in the moment that they read it, but the cost of extracting those archived facts and putting them into a structure that provides a machine-readable context (and preserves that value over time) will typically be greater than the value of the original facts.

So what news companies should be doing is creating workflows that capture facts within a structure that connects them to their context and stores them with those connections. You don't have to create new jobs and add work – you just have to provide workflows and tools that make digitizing information as much a part of the process as typing your byline. Once you've done that, all sorts of options open up for you. Until you've done that, you're just on the receiving end of a massive historical change.

You have to think ahead, and media companies hate that.

Will the singularity save journalism? :)

Ken McLeod says that The Singularity is “the Rapture for nerds,” and I agree. I think about The Singularity a lot, because in the abstract sense it's inevitable, but in the historical sense it's impossible, because humanity is chaotic and defies mathematical abstraction. In other words, we generate enough friction to keep The Singularity always over the next rise..

I kid around about how we'll wake up on Jan. 1, 2045, look around and we'll be surrounded by flying golden unicorns. But there's a serious side to this question, and it's really about expectations based on the pace of change. You don't have to go over an event horizon for the rate of change to become destabilizing, and I would argue that's what mass media is experiencing now.

When I arrived at The Post and Courier in April 1994, the editor who showed me around the newsroom proudly demonstrated the new 486 computers he'd just purchased. “These are top of the line,” he said. “We won't have to upgrade for another 10 years.”

That sounds absurd now, but you have to understand that from the perspective of a late-20^th century executive, that was a very reasonable assumption about capital amortization. If you invested in a major equipment expense like a newsroom technology upgrade, you just assumed it would be good for 10 years. Industries that depend on computers have adjusted their expectations since then, but most leaders and managers are not comfortable with the idea that the pace of change keeps doubling and doubling and doubling.You can tell them that, but they just can't imagine it, and things that you can't imagine are invisible even if you're staring at them under Klieg lights.

So the singularity won't save journalism, but the acceleration of change should give us clues as to how we're going to have to manage information and make decisions. You could say that our inability to imagine that acceleration is part of what's killing mass media journalism, and the act of imagining adequate responses frees the act of committing journalism from the control of people who simply want to extract 20 percent profits from it, regardless of the effect on society.

What are your thoughts on Augmented Reality and data relationships in journalism?

William Gibson's most recent novel features a character who is an augmented reality artist, and he's going around creating these scenes that you'll see only if you're a user. In one instance he's created a holographic recreation of a horrific murder in a hotel lobby or something, but it's visible only to the people who are wearing the proper devices and know how to tune in. So you have the people who aren't tuned in walking through the scene in real life, but users with the right headgear are seeing the present reality and the recreated image, simultaneously. That stuck with me, because if you wanna talk about the ultimate mashup, there you go, and if you want an analogy for what it all means, there it is.

I think in many ways we're already experiencing separate realities, but that makes it graphic.

So the main thing is that because your mobile device is going to locate you within a two-dimensional plane, you're going to have all sorts of information pushed towards you. And the question, again, is how to create systems that manage your interests in a non-complex way.

If I'm walking through Charleston and every time I pass a store I get an unwanted sales pitch on my phone, I'm eventually going to turn that app off. But if my mobile device is essentially an intelligent agent operating on my behalf, and it's finding things that I want, in real time, and picking them out of my physical environment in interesting and entertaining ways, I'm going to be all about it.

The augmented reality that I think about most is restaurants. You can only tell so much by looking at them, which is why I'd want an augmented reality that told me more. And since I want reliable commercial information rather than just sales pitches, I think there's value in a system like that.

The issue with augmented reality, then, isn't the technology. You need a platform that communicates it, a system that structures and creates it, a business model that understands its value and how to communicate it, and user devices and software agents that accurately interpret and negotiate it. The issue is content and how to pay for it.

The problem is that we need a business model that rewards someone for adding value (i.e., meaningful content that people actually want). Until that happens, then every business that approaches augmented reality is going to treat it as just another way of delivering no-cost crap. It's going to be mass-media executives trying to figure out how to use Facebook all over again. Business people tend to look at networked media as a way to make free money off of somebody else's content, but there's not going to be a sustainable business here until we work out the connections and expectations and exchanges..

We're all going to live in a highly augmented world. But the reality is, our brains are tuned to only a certainly degree of awareness, and everything beyond that is not only surplus, it's actually unhealthy. The challenge for humans, and for media companies, is that from here on out, we're going to be managing attention very judiciously. The secret will be to create signal-to-noise ratios that are extremely high, and the only way to do that is to make everything as personal as DNA.

And I don't have to tell you what worries and challenges and nightmares come bundled with that statement. But it's where we have to go.

Content Managment Systems for media companies, cloud-based (Drupal) or client-based (CCI).

I don't know. Great question, but I haven't studied it yet.

Discuss how the general-interest product has become obsolete.

I tell people that the problem with the kind of mass-media news judgment that I learned over 20 years in the business is that it's just this giant averaging machine. It's creating news and information products that are based on the lowest common denominator within large groups , delivering content based on what's the least objectionable compromise versus what people care about.

And my advice has been, base your business on love. Create content for people to love, not for people to encounter in this zipless, bloodless, view-from-nowhere mass-media fantasy world that we created in the 20th century.

You have to leave the mass-media business to talk that kind of craziness, because these executives have, for the most part, spent the past 20 to 40 years learning that system, and it's all they know. You cannot underestimate how threatening these ideas are, in a very personal way, to many top editors and publishers.

You'll hear a lot in the coming years about post-scarcity economics. Well, the first model for that is the information economy, and while post-scarcity sounds great, it's an enormous shift for everyone involved, and it isn't all sunshine and dancing penguins. What it should teach us is, in a world in which there is more than enough of Commodity X, you simply have to stand out. Being average isn't a good strategy anymore.

People feel this way and that way about Seth Godin, but he plowed this ground early and he has plowed it very fine. The Television Industrial Complex is broken, and it's never coming back.

I say thank goodness, but the result is a very lean time for people like me.

'Business model! Business model!'

"Business model! Business model! All they care about is business model. I am excited about the way the Web is transforming society and all they care is how to save their jobs! I get it - they should care. The new media ecosystem can support a much smaller number of professional journalists than the old one...  I don't have an interest in that aspect of the media business at all... I am interested in the ways new media channels are changing the world, not the parochial or individual insecurities of those whose world is changing. I am an interested observer of the revolution and saving the inevitable victims is not my job."

- Science blogger Bora Zivkovic, expressing a sentiment that is often near to my heart.

It's a good, short post, with Bora's routinely excellent comment section once again bubbling with interesting ideas.

A virtual new-media interview

So I just finished my first live chat (for the American Society of Newspaper Editors, on the topic of new business models), and one thing I learned is that before a live chat, you're suppose to prepare some canned copy that you can paste in, so the guests don't sit there waiting while you type.

And since I was invited to this chat by the great Steve Buttry, he sent me a list of possible questions in an email earlier this week. I thought they were damn fine questions, too, and since I've already answered them in preparation for the chat (which only got around to a fraction of this material), I figured I'd reconstruct it here, as an interview, for as much of an audience as cares about it.

The Power of Pace

Press zen master Jay Rosen recently took to posing a particularly subtle koan: Why did confidence in the press go down 1975-2005 as the level of education among journalists went up? Most of the people who responded answered with my general feeling that as the press became more professional (and corporate), it lost touch with its roots, values and audience. I think that's still the most likely scenario.

Of course, life teaches that most-likely-scenarios often aren't likely at all, so I went looking for an alternate explanation and came up with this one: What if the problem is that that technological and cultural change in America occurred at a logarithmic pace during that 30-year period, while progress in the press took place at a linear rate?

If you entertain this alternate perspective, then you presume that the theory of the press expanded only a little over three decades. Also, you must provisionally assume that measures of "trust" in the press could include responses from people who are likely commenting on the institution's relative adequacy. Which is interesting because a person's critique of the press is generally correlated to his or her political perspective: Conservatives tend to ding the media for being biased against conservatism, while liberals tend to criticize the media in terms of its quality.

So here's why this this tickles my brain: The left-wing bias critique predates Jay's 1975 time frame. John Birchers, Richard Nixon and William F. Buckley had been making that argument for years by then. Edith Efron's The News Twisters was a best-seller in 1971. Certainly the idea became more mainstream over time, but here's the deal: What if these media-trust surveys have had somewhat less to do with measuring political bias and somewhat more to do with measuring an increasingly sophisticated populace?

As newspaper editor John Robinson put it, "The level of education of citizens went up, too. Media choices increased. Traditional press let them down." I think he's probably right about that.

I don't have any math to back up this pace-of-change argument, of course, and it's really just a metaphor in search of discussion. But the powerful thing about reading Ray Kurzweil's basic idea is that it gives you a radically different scale for contemplating change. And the more I think about Jay's question, the more I think that this alternate view addresses not only our relationship to the press but to other institutions as well.

What if the most sortable personality trait in today's society turns out to be a person's attitude toward novelty? People who welcome it, or who are at least curious about new stuff, enjoy all sorts of advantages. People who fear, resent or live in ideological opposition to newness, however, must feel increasingly besieged. What if change-positive people are just better adapted to modern life?

So here's an alternate way of looking at the political and cultural shifts in America this decade: What if the benefits of a positive attitude toward novelty just keep winning over more converts? Not because people suddenly gain a better understanding of those changes (even "experts" are perpetually perplexed), but because they see that change-positive people tend to have better jobs, better toys and better prospects than people who are change-negative.

Christopher Anderson argues that the "notion of technological progress as logarithmic is the conceit of the technological class," which might or might not be true (although I suspect he's being overly cynical), but even that critique stops short of addressing the pace of cultural change, which is linked to technological change but not married to it. I would contend that the cultural shift required to move from Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 to Obama v. McCain in 2008 is far more surprising than anything produced by the semiconductor industry during the same period.

To be clear, I don't think this alternate view explains everything about press history between 1975-2005. And I'm generally suspicious of reductionist logic, particularly when it plays in the soft-science sandboxes of sociology, political science and communications. But you can mark me down for this one: In general, I think we tend to underestimate the significance of the pace of change and its effect on powerful institutions.