Xark!

Hyperlocal isn't the issue, scale is

So today is supposedly the day of reckonning for thousands of digital journaists who work for Patch, the horribly named AOL entry in the corporate arms race to "monetize the hyperlocal space." Big layoffs (nobody knows yet exactly how big), plummeting morale, disintegrating trust and blamethrowing between local outfits and corporate towers. 

It's the same story, over and over and over. TBD in Washington. Backfence in ... well, lots of places. There are other examples, but who really cares? If you're reading the coverage of this extremely predictable failure, you'd think that the culprit is "the model."

In the case of Patch, media analyst Ken Doctor of Outsell thinks part of the problem is that the network grew too large too quickly. The downsizing, he says, "is basically an acknowledgment of failure, but in part a noble failure," adding that in 2011-12 Patch hired more journalists than anyone else in the country.

As for hyperlocal generally, Doctor says, "The economic model still doesn't work after 15 years."

Well, allow me to retort! Doesn't work for whom?

Because here's the thing, Ken (and it's not just Doctor I'm speaking to -- he's simply saying what all the media executives say). You can make that claim all day, but it doesn't explain the fact that you can still go to Baristanet.com and read more than you ever wanted to know about Montclair, N.J. They've been doing hyperlocal journalism since 2004. Still going strong. And it's not alone. 

So let me Mansplain this to all you corporate media experts out there. Hyperlocal doesn't work for you. And it doesn't work for you because you're not out in the field trying to satisfy people's desire for information about their communities. The Tim Armstrongs of the world don't give a flying fuck about your community. They're chasing the hyperlocal fairy through the forest because they know that local businesses need local media in which to advertise to local customers. It's a huge market -- if you could simply organize it, aggregate it, commoditize it, and drag it back to those plush old-media economies of scale. Who wouldn't want to control that market?

Well, I wouldn't. 

After years of splashing around the edges of the hyperlocal pond, I finally dove in this year and built CHSSoccer.net, a hyperlocal web site devoted to soccer in and around Charleston, SC. And while it's not like I didn't think long and hard about the value of that market before committing to it, in the end I concluded that the way to understand its value was to take a risk and get to know it first. As a reporter, the way I get to know things is by covering them. Intensely. Personally. Maybe even obsessively.

So CHSSoccer.net isn't based on the "most efficient unit-cost model," but the Seth Godin Otaku model. To wit: Making average products for average people (think standard "news judgment," or what I've come to call "the Great Averaging Machine") is the 21st century recipe for failure. To succeed in this new world, we have to make things that are remarkable, and one way to do that is to design for people who have a profound passion for that thing -- whether it's ramen noodles in Tokyo or well-made camp tools or an awesome minor-league soccer team that gets only carefully averaged attention from mainstream local media. 

Of course, Godin's ideas on this subject -- like Chris Anderson's Long Tail and Dave Winer's visionary but half-formed dream of a new kind of DIY media culture -- have all, in a sense, failed. Because while Godin's now-dated books and blogs and TED talks are brilliant, they haven't really been predictive. American companies continue to chug along making average products for average people. Investors have largely given up on the Long Tail and returned to the herd-safety at the head of the curve. And all the potential media outcomes I outlined in 2009 have largely succumbed to the lowest common-denominator, with metro newspapers "lurch(ing) along zombie-style as scaled-back copies of the original."

We had chaos and hope between 2004 and 2009. Everything since has been a bloodbath. Kinda reminds me of Tiananmen Square in June 1989, except instead of Chinese security forces we got paywalls, reality TV, DRM, auto-tuned pop ... and Patch. 

So yes, Patch hired journalists. But Patch was always a sweat shop, designed from the top down to prove the validity of the corporate desire to view "content" as simply a cost-factor. It was hometown news as a Beta test for a corporate-scaled platform of clone sites. And you simply can't run an enterprise at that scale, with that reliance on low-overhead -- without uniform policies, uniform productivity, uniform... everything. 

How the fuck is that local?

So let me tell you what local is (and frankly, if you disagree, I don't care -- start your own local site and prove me wrong). Local is relationships. Local is trust. Local is caring about the same things your readers care about, and helping local business people make money. 

Local is about speaking in your own voice, all the time, even when that's hard. Local is about feeling supported... and intensely vulnerable. You're local when someone writes you an email that criticizes something about your coverage (I got one of these emails yesterday) and you answer that person honestly, in a way that's true to yourself and your values. You're local when people recognize you as a personal resource.

Local isn't about being universally popular. But if you're accountable and serious and reliable, and you deliver a product that people want and respect, you have a shot at becoming a viable business. Oh, and it also helps if you're not a dick.

Because in the end, if local isn't human-scaled, it isn't actually local.

I knew when I started CHSSoccer.net that I was going to face unexpected problems, and I was right. I knew I was going to make mistakes, and I did. Every day is an iteration. Every idea I had at the beginning is provisional. 

And the only money I've made off it so far has been by accident. I got a sponsor in April -- long before I felt ready to "sell" the site. I'm still not convinced it's ready. Is the audience large enough? Can I deliver real value to a mom-and-pop sponsor? And so on. Yet in one trip to a local bar to cover the Battery's most recent away match, two business people approached me to ask about sponsoring the site somehow. 

I don't expect to make money off CHSSoccer.net  this year, and I know that building a product without even proposing a firm business model for it would never fly in most boardrooms. But this is the way people used to do work, dammit. You built a good thing, and then you sold it. If the effort and the reward were commensurate, you kept on doing it. You learned from your customers, adapted, and rose according to the value you provided.

I can do this because I don't have to sit at a conference table while a bunch of self-interested pricks play clever political fuck-games with my ideas. I can do this because I earn my living as a freelance writer/editor/consultant/geek/mobile-bicycle-repair-service, and work on the site in my spare time. I can do this because I'll be happy with the outcome if CHSSoccer.net becomes a nice part-time job that cuts regular little checks to a few talented local writers and photographers, while improving soccer in my community. I'm a fan.

So when "experts" tell you that hyperlocal doesn't work, please understand what they're really saying. Hyperlocal doesn't work as a massive platform to extract the maximum amount of cash for the the minimal amount of overhead from every identifiable community in America. Local can't be commoditized. Local can't be lead-shielded to obscure their greed and bullshit from their customers. 

If some tech-centric entrepreneur out there really wants to make money in "the hyperlocal space," I've got a suggestion for them: Build a shared, scalable infrastructure that start-up sites like mine can use to make the business side of hyperlocal journalism as painless and easy as Wordpress makes the publishing. Add value instead of extracting it.

And if you treat me like a human being, I'd be proud to be your first customer. 

Why Fact Checkers fail

My interest in fact-checking grew out of years of running political coverage in the Carolinas, in places where facts were often far less important than the nameless angers that animate our Southern culture. Doing that job is, in fact, a political act, though not a partisan one.

A political editor walks the line between trying to find the truth and trying to publish the truth, and must constantly compromise the latter in the service of the former. That's because when the balance of truth favors one party over the other, presenting it that way destroys the journalistic fiction that Jay Rosen dubbed "The View From Nowhere." Media companies like that view because, in theory at least, it allows them to sell their newspapers (or TV programs) to the entire electorate. 

In other words, if the Republican Party produces 10 fact-mangling whoppers to every arcane Democratic stat-fudger, you've got a serious problem as a journalist. You simply can't present that ratio as-is without looking like a liberal hack. 

So here's what we did -- what I did -- and what others have certainly done as well: I downplayed Republican dishonesty while judging Democratic failings with an unfairly harsh bias. I applied this to assignments, to the tone and presentation of stories, and to the various gimmicks we invented to try to evaluate claims. The results didn't reflect the true scale of the dishonesty gap, but they at least demonstrated that a gap existed. At least, they had the potential to demonstrate the gap, but only to very careful readers with a knack for drawing subtle inference. Because we could never come out and tell you what we all knew in the newsroom: Yes, "all politicians lie" (a cynical dodge if ever there was one), but the modern Republican Party is based on a set of counter-factual and faith-based beliefs, and has been for years. Not only has that foundation consistently put the party on the wrong side of fact-checkers, it has led us to where we stand today, with Mitt Romney running a campaign that has abandoned even the pretense of fact.

That dynamic is why, when I saw the rise of new media in the mid-2000s, one of my first thoughts was that journalists might be able to use technology to improve the way we cover and evaluate political issues. I studied it. I experimented with it. And eventually I came to an unhappy conclusion: 

All attempts at systematic fact-checking of political statements will ultimately fail until the organization conducting them embraces an indepedent and verifiable claim to authority. Anything less is just rearranging deck chairs.

Knight proposal: Fund Step No. 1

If you've read this blog more than once, you probably know that I've been talking about ways to integrate data collection and storage into journalism for years now. Along the way I've learned things about data and standards and business and finance and start-ups and non-profits. 

But in the end, it really just boils down to "Do you have the money to do it?" Because while there are various ways you can get money for your idea, most of them (beyond my favorite, "Be born with it") come with a variety of "On the other hand" caveats, many of which have nothing to do with the idea itself. 

That's why I've taken my idea for a networked semantic word-processor (the first step toward an integrated product we generically call a semantic content management system) to the Knight Foundation. My grant request is small by Knight standards: Just enough to fund development of an open-source version of the tool, screw up in a major way at least once, and run some user tests.

Once we've got a working version of the tool, it will either attract investors and collaborators or it won't. I'll be satisfied either way. If it's a valuable tool that people want to use, we can build a business that gets the concept off my desk and into the hands of a professional team. If it works but nobody wants it, then I can walk away knowing that I fulfilled my responsibility to the idea. And if it doesn't work, then the technical experts I've consulted will be really surprised.

So here's the drill: If you're interested in the various semantic journalism ideas that I've presented here over the years, or if you're just tired of me obsessing over something so geeky and want me to get back to more important things, like zombie movies and ugly dogs and Santa sex and video transcripts and snarky graphics, you need to visit my proposal on the Knight Foundation website. 

See that grayed-out "Heart" icon? Click it (register through Tumblr if you have to, but just click on it). Have something supportive to say? Leave a comment at the bottom of the page. I don't think a small amount of buzz equates to a big advantage in a grant competition, but I suspect that the Knight people are like most of us, and pay a bit more attention to ideas that generate interest. If you wonder about this, stop on the sidewalk and stare up at a fixed point in the sky.Then count the number of passersby who stop and look into the sky with you. 

Really. I'll wait. 

Now go here: http://newschallenge.tumblr.com/post/25948560655/connect-every-fact-in-a-new-news-archive 

Sustainable quality

To recap Sunday's New York Times story about metro newspaper companies that are now cutting back from a daily publishing schedule, some companies are doing it because it no longer adds up for them to put out a daily paper, and some people at other companies are saying that's a bad idea, because it breaks a daily reading habit and leads to cheap, lousy journalism.

Here's the important takeaway, and it's something I've been writing about for years and will keep touting until it happens: There is no bright future for journalism on the cheap. The answer to our current glut of junk info cannot be more junk info, and the reason that more companies should be moving toward a sustainable model of less frequent, higher-quality print publication paired with efficient digital-first journalism is because (for some of them) it's the only practical option available today that includes the words "quality" and "sustainable."

To recap the important points via links...

1. Print advertising revenues continue to decline
2. Print circulation continues to decline
3. Web advertising revenues don't make up the difference
4. Neither do paywalls
5. Fixed costs don't go down 
6. To keep profits up, news companies keep laying off journalists
7. The result is what I called "the Zombie model" in 2009 - familiar brands staffed by skeleton crews, cranking out just enough rickety junk to keep words and pictures around the remaining ads.

So when NYT reporter Christine Haughney quotes newspaper veterans who say things like this... 

“They want them to produce more blog posts a day and not even worry about putting things together in a more thoughtful package,” Mr. (Brian) Thevenot (a St. Louis Post-Dispatch business editor who left The Times-Picayune in 2009) said. “The Times-Picayune has a sterling tradition of enterprising journalism. That’s why people are so mad. That tradition is being thrown under the bus.”

.. I alternate between varying flavors of despair and annoyance. 

Despair, because short-sighted policies like those described by Thevenot are the industry standard, not the exception, regardless of the technology. The digitial tools at our disposal today could have been used to increase quality, build new relationships and increase credibility. Instead, media companies routinely view new technologies as nothing more than new ways to cut staff costs. That's because they're clear-cutting their last forest, not planting new trees for the future. Instead of growing a business that can support quality journalism, they're scaling back quality to match their expected earnings.

Annoyance, because it absolutely doesn't have to be this way. 

So if you're a news executive (or some 22nd century digital archaeologist, searching for answers as to why and how journalism failed in America), and you stumble across this post, let me offer you a simple set of instructions for creating a sustainable system for quality journalism given the tools available today (while I work on trying to build new ones).

1. If you've cut back your staff to the point where there's not enough quality content to fill a newspaper seven days a week, stop publishing bad daily papers. Bad newspapers with junk content don't "build a daily reading habit," they kill your brand by pissing off your customers.
2. If you're not going to be a print metro daily any more, cancel your wire service subscriptions. You no longer need them.
3. Unbundle the idea of a metro paper. How many communities of interest and geography comprise your coverage area (in Charleston, for instance, I believe the answer is five or six)? Figure out a way to use your existing printing, distribution and editing resources to support that many non-daily papers, and then assign your existing reporting staff accordingly. Hire stringers if necessary.
4. Use digital journalism -- whether delivered via website or mobile or app, it doesn't matter -- to keep your users current with the routine churn of the news cycle. There's a river of information out there to report, sort and pass along, but remember that you're creating distinct content based on the strengths and weaknesses of different media. If you think you can just repurpose web content as print content, then please stop talking. The lowest-common-denominator has to go.
5. Don't let your less-than-daily newspaper become like the wasteland you've created in your daily editions. If you only publish once or twice a week in print, and if print is where you can give people context and understanding, then by God make it count. Forget breaking routine news in print. That's what digital is for. Use print and the power of design to present journalism that means something again.
6. Let the web supplement that.
7. Should you charge for your print editions or distribute them TMC-style? That's up to you. But whether you do or you don't, understand that your web and your print editions will not be hastily assembled mirror images of each other. 
8. If you can't produce the quality that this model demands with a staff that can be sustained by your new revenues, then get creative. Become a news service for all things local. Hire out your reporters and web producers to local TV stations, other websites, local sports franchises. Sell basic coverage to your competition. Use your excess daily print capacity to print and distribute The New York Times or some other national paper. Work out a deal with that national paper to include a page or two of local news and advertising in the locally printed edition. Or hell -- try creating some niche coverage sites that people will actually pay to read online. You've got assets. Get paid for them.
9. If you have to cut staff, hire it back -- as freelancers. No, that's not great for anyone, but it's better than relying on a staff of overworked employees that you're burning out and using up. Study how your local alt-weekly works, and learn a few lessons. 
10. And finally, you know that brown-nosing guy at the conference table who loves to say there's nothing wrong with shorting quality and upping people's workload until they collapse into bitter hackery? He's the devil, and he's also a lousy businessman. So when you finally get this thing working and he tells you that, Hey, you can be MORE profitable by cutting overhead until the quality standard slips, again, just fire him. On the spot. In public.

I never said it would be easy, because quality is never easy. But quality is the only way through what lies ahead.

What if we give it away? (w/apologies to REM)

Today's news about the Media General/Berkshire Hathaway deal reveals just how dire things have become for our newspaper princes. Unable to turn its newspapers around, Media General has traded its print properties and a big chunk of its future value for $142 million in cash and enough financing to refocus its business on its television stations.

With 63 papers (along with their websites) selling for an average price of $2.25 million, its hard to believe that the valuation even comes close to covering the assessed value of the real estate involved. This is a company declaring "Take them! We don't know what to do with them!" (Here's what I like about the deal)

But what I want to talk about is actually this one graph from the NYT story linked above. This is Berkshire Hathaway boss Warren Buffett, talking to shareholders at their last meeting about the need for paywalls at their previously acquired newspaper properties:

“I don’t know of any business plan that has sustained itself that charges in one version and offers the same version free to people,” he said.

Buffett's idea is worth discussing not because it's necessarily wrong, but because it assumes the wrong answer. 

I'm on the record in numerous places with my argument that newspaper companies were giving away content long before the web came along. Newspapers are in the advertising business, not the content business. It they could get you to look at their advertisements without having to pay to put content around them, that's exactly what they'd do. The problem with newspaper websites isn't that the content is available for free, it's that the advertising value of that content is so low that it doesn't make up for declining print profits. 

Print subscription charges cover some portion of the cost of paper, printing and delivery, not content costs, but the paywall advocates have a point when it comes to the consumer's perspective. Subscribers think they're paying for content, even though all they're really doing is defraying overhead. So the strength of the paywall argument is a consumer-mentality argument, not an "our content has tangible value absent advertising" argument.

From that perspective, Buffett's statement has some limited validity. It argues that it's worth hobbling your web products to protect the value of your print product, an idea that's sometimes referred to as The Arkansas Model.

Here's the problem with that, and Charlestonians have been learning this lesson first-hand ever since The Post and Courier launched its paywall on May 1: Most newspaper content just isn't that unique or valuable. In addition to the websites maintained by its television news stations (who will never charge for online content), the city now benefits from a variety of local online news sources. There may be no competition for the title of "local metro daily newspaper," but there's now tremendous competition for news.

As an example, of the 18 promoted content links this hour at The Digitel (a local news and information aggregator), only one of them contained a link to a Post and Courier story, and that link was from a May 2nd update on story that was just updated today ... with a link to a story by The State, South Carolina's top newspaper.

Having done work for The Digitel, I can promise you that this is a significant change. The Post and Courier has articles about some of the same 18 subjects, and in the past The Digitel likely would have chosen to link to those pieces. But nobody links to content that's behind a harsh paywall.

So the P&C is following Buffett's advice, but who are the winners in this competition? Well, basically, everyone who used to be in competition with The Post and Courier for web traffic, particularly The Charleston City Paper, The Charleston Regional Business Journal and a variety of niche sites. 

But here's the part that's most interesting: The Charleston City Paper and the Charleston Regional Business Journal are weeklies. And if you think about their approach to online content in light of Buffett's statement, that fact alone may be more important than the differences in their business models.

Think about it. As a free alt-weekly, The City Paper gives away all its content, both online and in print, which conforms to Buffett's observation even while flipping its conclusions. Meanwhile, the CRBJ charges for print subscriptions and maintains an reguarly updated, locally reported, free website. Again, the CRBJ conforms to Buffett's idea, because nobody conflates a live website and a weekly publication as being different versions of the exact same same thing.

So why aren't these companies pushing for paid content like so many metro dailies?

Because they've worked out a more competitive, more sustainable business model.

The City Paper print edition is valuable. It makes enough revenue to support a small full-time staff and pay for the original content it publishes (much of it written by freelancers). And because you can't break news very often in a weekly in the middle of a competitive media market, the journalists there never really confuse their web product with their print product. They use the web to keep people current if they've got breaking info, and they use their weekly print edition for features and content that's interesting regardless of whether or not it's published in-cycle. 

The CRBJ, which has a nice print-subscription business, used to use the web to compete for timeliness with the daily paper. Now that The Post and Courier has opted to charge for its business content, local business people will have to decide whether online access to the P&C's version of local business stories is $9.99 a month better than getting the same news for free from the CRBJ.

If you take Buffett's statement in a more informed context, it really argues either for giving away everything, or making a clear distinction between your web product and your print product. 

The City Paper -- and other successful, sustainable alt-weeklies around the country -- are proof that you can survive with an all-free journalism model. The CRBJ demonstrates that there's a natural partnership between branded web coverage and a less-than-daily print product. And by staying viable online, both are posititioning themselves to succeed with the next generation of news consumers. In the fight for future readers, paywalled metros have unilaterally disarmed. 

Metro management teams could change their one-bundle-fits-all philosophy -- and their publication schedule -- and find success in similar ways. But as we've seen over the past few years, fundamentally changing what they do isn't typically much of an option for those guys.

My question is, how long will it take for the "Oracle of Omaha" to figure this out?

(Transparency: I worked for The Post and Courier from 1994-2008 and have done freelance work for The Digitel and the company that owns the Charleston Regional Business Journal. I write freelance articles for The Charleston City Paper. dc)

"Recapturing the fun and excitement of journalism"

There's a nice little exchange going on between my friend Steve Buttry and Emily Olson, managing editor of the Register Citizen in Torrington, Conn., about a powerfully evocative question: How can we recapture the joy and excitement that was once part of the group experience of committing journalism?

It's an important question, because what outsiders don't really know about the old world of newspapering is that once upon a time, it was a lot of fun. People (myself included) routinely worked an extra 10 to 15 hours a week without filing for overtime simply because the job could be such a rush.

I'm not suggesting that unpaid overtime is a good thing. I'm saying that a rewarding workplace is a tangible company asset. Neither am I suggesting that everything that made newspapering fun is worth conserving. Many of our Mad Men-era attitudes were ethically irresponsible, intellectually lazy and infuriatingly arrogant. But newsroom morale isn't a touchy-feely issue. It's a quality and productivity issue. 

Steve offers Olson six pieces of advice, then gives news executives four additional suggestions. They're all good, but I'd like to add six items to that list of executive advice, just to get it to an even 10.

1. Stand for something: The best people in the news business are people who came in with a sense of public service and preserved it. That didn't make them all crusaders, but they did their jobs with a sense of commitment to a higher calling, and the industry encouraged those high-minded ideals until its profit margins dropped.

Standing for something today -- to the extent that you demand quality and integrity of yourself and others -- will either burn you out or put you on the next layoff list.

In other words, if you want your people to work with inspiration, try inspiring them instead of disrepecting them. Attitude reflects leadership.

2. Fire all those assholes you promoted: Come on, you know you did it, and you did it on purpose. You promoted the yes-men, the bullies, the vengeful hacks. You gave authority to the sycophants who made you feel good about yourself despite your confusion. You replaced experienced leaders with the wisdom to recognize bad ieas and the integrity to oppose them with sociopaths who would aggressively repeat utter nonsense so long as the job came with a corner office and a small raise. You created a Reign of Terror and you promoted people who would do the dirty work so you could keep your hands clean. "The beatings will continue until morale improves" is a funny joke, but it's not a business plan.

3. Cut back on your publication schedule: You cut your news staff by a third while increasing its workload. Then you mandated "aspirational" weekly story quotas. Plus, once you gave up on trying to kill social media, you raced toward it like a binge drinker who spies an open bar at his nephew's wedding. You enforce senseless policies that encourage smart people to Tweet inanities. You think nattering about your paper on Facebook is somehow going to make money for someone not named Mark Zuckerberg. Meanwhile, you're forcing your overextended staff to churn out depressingly threadbare blogs, unread live-web updates, awkward podcasts, and astoundingly awful video. 

Responding to the problem of the cheap-information glut by trying to produce more cheap information is, to say the least, counterproductive.

What you really ought to be doing is cutting back on the number of print products you publish each week. Put all your breaking news online and do a better job with your websites. Then raise the quality standard for the articles in your one-to-three-times-a-week print products. You don't produce enough interesting, shallow copy to fill seven metro papers a week. But if you had fewer editions, you could write stories that people couldn't find elsewhere, and you might accidentally make yourself relevant again.

As an added bonus, you could drop your Associated Press subscription. Think of the savings!

4. Stop doing stupid stuff: Here's an ugly little secret about your company. You think that a few old men (and a few old women who've joined the old-men club) in your outfit should enjoy a monopoly on all the relevant information and insight into business practices. On the flip side, you have this quasi-religious belief that nobody above the age of 26 understands digital media. So you run around shoving outdated business ideas down people's throats, while promoting callow cleverness with an astounding lack of review.

Treating everyone in between as if their only useful roles are silent-worker-drone or sadistic-plantation-overseer isn't exactly a recipe for fun-time creativity.

You know what really kills journalists' morale? Coming to work and finding out that you're about to make them do something obviously stupid. Again. Or reading a quote from their boss that makes them want to slam their heads against the wall just to make the pain go away.

5. Listen to your insightful peers: I'm awfully hard on the industry as a whole, not because I'm particularly mean or bitter, but because the industry as a whole has earned the nation's disdain.That's not to say there aren't enlightened, courageous, visionary executives out there. I've met a few. But they're outnumbered, outgunned in industry groups, and generally disrespected. Many have given up and cashed out, but a few are hanging on, hoping to make their communities better. They may not be right about everything, but they deserve to be heard, not mocked.

6. Go out of business: Seriously. You can't change, and you really have no interest in changing. You've had years to figure this out, you waited until you were broke to consider the problem, and yet you still don't invest in R&D. You think innovation is surfing the leading edge of the status quo, and let's be honest: All you really want to do is kill Craigslist, make people pay to read your increasingly crappy content online, and jack-up your display-ad rates.

Since you can't do that, you're following the Harvest Model -- cutting costs while you milk every last penny out of your obsolete business before shutting it down. But that will take years, and the longer you take, the harder it will be for competent start-ups to fill the niche you occupy in your local media ecosystem. Shut down, liquidate your physical assets, retire to Florida. You'll enjoy the sunshine, and we'll enjoy the journalism that follows in your wake.

There's an excellent future out there for the American news media, and I'm optimistic that we'll get there, somehow. But the same systemic flaws that are killing the morale of journalists are also standing in the way of that future. I suspect that making newsrooms better places to work again will also make our companies more viable, but I can't prove that. There's just not enough data from actual experiences.

Yet

Why Newt won SC: Hatred

 

There's been plenty of punditry on the topic of Newt's "surprise" win in the Palmetto State, but I think it's really quite simple. Bill Clinton won because he felt our pain. Newt Gingrich wins because he channels their hate.

My fellow South Carolinians hate a lot of things, including their prevailing belief that expressing one's hatred in public has been unfairly prohibited by political correctness. There are costs in 21st century America for publicly and explicitly hating blacks, gays, atheists, illegal immigrants, intellectuals and liberals, and so Southern conservatives have learned to speak in code: birth certificates, grades, teleprompters, food stamps, welfare, socialism. The code words express the outlines of their complaint, but not the seething anger that animates their politics.

Not only does Newt understand the immense power of repressed hatred, he also grasps that the one group Americans can still hate publicly without fear of reprisal is "The Media." Newt ran in South Carolina as The Guy Who Really Hates The Media, demonstrating to standing-ovation crowds that when it comes to hating, he's the man.

Of course, Newt has this one little problem nationally, but you know. Politics.

Next stop: Florida.

Kindle Fire & "direct-to-consumer" marketing

Martin Langeveld (Neiman/Harvard) came out this morning with a big prediction for the new Amazon Fire tablet:

The advent of the Kindle Fire will impact every business engaged in advertising, from your local weekly newspaper to Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, and Groupon, because it will vastly accelerate the transformation to direct-to-consumer marketing by merchants, manufacturers, and service providers, without the traditional interpolation of advertisements to drive buyers to sellers.

It's a good piece, worth reading.

But there's a logic to commercial information in this Media Interregnum that I need to keep emphasizing, because it's as true now as it was when I began beating this drum six years ago.

1. Advertising (renting the attention of consumers to sellers) puts publishers in the business of representing the interest of the seller;
2. As consumer attention fragments and advertising becomes ubiquitous, basic market principles will continue to drive down the ad rates that publishers receive;
3. Commercial media saturation creates a new problem for buyers.They need help cutting through the low-value sales-pitch clutter to find products (CNET) and services (Angie's List) that actually suit their individual needs;
4. Businesses that recognize this opportunity move from representing the interests of the seller (help me sell the thing I want to sell) to representing the interests of the buyer (help me select the right thing for me).
5. By adding the option of moving directly from research to purchasing ("My Shopping Cart"), businesses generate revenue by adding value for the user (comparing products in useful ways), the seller (providing quality commercial information about the seller's product)  and both buyer and seller (by handling the transaction). The result is a virtual marketplace in which a share of every transaction belongs to the business that brings buyer and seller together;.
6. Internet-era businesses following this logic have created successful digital marketplaces for products that are the same no matter where you buy them (Amazon), products that can be hard to find in your town (HuckNroll), discounted products (O.co), and products that can be shipped cheaply and returned easily (Zappos); 
7. The challenge for publishers who serve specific physical communities (news of interest only to this town or that one) is to organize efficient, tailored virtual marketplaces for brick-and-mortar businesses in those communities. These transactions are often more complex than buying books online, but they are also more valuable because they are more complex;
8. To capture that value, local publishers must shift from publishing and structuring information solely on behalf of sellers and put the user at the center of their business model. Only then can they create marketplaces in which they receive a cut of every transaction;
9. Doing this will not only create a more profitable business model, it will improve the trust that individual users give to the non-commercial information a publisher provides;
10. And, finally, by doing this, they will begin to reap higher advertising rates. Because if you're a car dealer, whose attention do you really want to rent? The person who just wants to watch a ball game, or the person who is -- today, right now -- actively looking to buy a car?

On writing, and other forms of bullshit

Once upon a time, maybe as recently as 2006, I loved writing. I'd always hoped to earn my living by putting words together, and to be a professional writer and editor, in a community of professional writers and editors, thrilled me. Sometimes it thrilled me several times a week.

For instance, in 2000 I helped launch an anonymous newspaper column called Good Morning Lowcountry, which ran half a page, seven days a week, in The (Charleston) Post and Courier. GMLc was the work of no single writer in its early years, so several of us shared the duties, churning through local topics and mild obsessions and odd bits of Lowcountry trivia like a pack of raccoons rooting through trailer park garbage cans. Every now and then we'd even pause between deadlines to talk about the experience and its process, prompting me once to write a GMLc with the self-absorbed subhead "This Writing Life," in which I attempted to share the good-humored, arty, third-person-objective camaraderie of it all.

Now, of course, I just wish everyone would shut up and get on with it.

There is no more thoroughly boring topic than writing, and if you doubt this, listen to a public radio interviewer ask a Famous Author to talk about his or her process, or even worse, his or her deeper thoughts on language or storytelling..

Intent, art and the 21st century

So it was that in April of 1970 an artist named Lawrence Weiner typed up a work of art that appeared in Arts Magazine -- as a work of art -- with no visual experience before or after whatsoever, and to wit:

1. The artist may construct the piece
2. The piece may be fabricated
3. The piece need not be built

Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist the decision as to condition rests with the receiver upon the occasion of receivership

And there, at last, it was! No more realism, no more representational objects, no more lines, colors, forms, and contours, no more pigments, no more brushstrokes, no more evocations, no more frames, walls, galleries, museums, no more gnawing at the tortured face of the god Flatness, no more audience required, just a "receiver" that may or may not be a person or may or may not be there at all, no more ego projected, just "the artist" in the third person, who may be anyone or no one at all, for nothing is demanded fo him, nothing at all, not even existence, for that got lost in the subjunctive mode -- and in that moment of absolutely dispassionate abdication, of insouciant withering away, Art made its final flight, climbed higher and higher in an ever-decreasing tighter-turning spiral until, with one last erg of freedom, one last dendritic synapse, it disappeared up its own fundamental aperture... and came out the other side as Art Theory!... Art Theory pure and simple, words on a page, literature undefiled by vision, flat, flatter, Flattest, a vision inivisible, even ineffable, as ineffable as the Angels and the Universal Souls.

-- Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word, 1975

The tragedy of re-reading Wolfe's short masterpiece today, 29 years after I first encountered it, is its sad failure in predicting the future of artistic taste. Back in the mid-seventies, The Man in the White Suit felt confident that the world would come to its senses by the year 2000, that artists and collectors and writers would look back on the artistic period 1945-1975 with head-shaking wonder. "What happy hours await them all!" he wrote. "With what sniggers, laughter and good-humored amazement will they look back upon the era of the Painted Word!"

Sadly, Old Tom failed to appreciate the gravity of our 20th century intellectual failures, for we remain incapable of escaping their black-hole pull. The Grand Duchy of Art Theory that Wolfe skewered wasn't some post-war aberration: it was an Event Horizon, a point-of-no-return from which a once-cohesive culture doesn't simply recover. From art to literature to political science, the intellectuals of the mid-to-late 20th century pursued abstraction for the sake of theoretical purity, rendered their fields impotent and irrelevant, and then hid the keys to understanding within an arcane codex of self-referential gibberish that only members of their self-selecting academy could hope to understand.

It is this reason more than any other -- more than mass media, more than politics, more than economics, science or religion -- that accounts for the fraying of our current culture. As I wrote in 2005: