Buzzmachine

Press as Facebook & Foursquare

Buzzmachine - Wed, 09/01/2010 - 16:19

As research for Public Parts, I’ve been reading Jay Rosen’s doctoral dissertation about the creation of publics and the press. As in other research, I’m finding so many wonderful parallels between the changes in society caused by technology today and that which came earlier. Jay writes that “in 1784 William Bradford, a Philadelphia printer and the proprietor of the Merchants’ Coffee-House, announced that his establishment would provide a new service”:
To prevent the many disappointments that daily happen to returned citizens, or others, enquiriing for friends, connections, or those that tehy may have business with; the subscriber has opened a book, as A City Register, alphabetically arranged, at the bar of the Coffee-house, where any gentleman now resident in the City, either as a housekeeper or a lodger, or those who may hereafter arrive may insert their names and place of residence.

Jay says Bradford “was offering a form of news — word of who was in town and where they could be reached…. The need for a written register arises when there are too many connections, too many strangers, too many arrivals and departures for the community to maintain through speech and memory a record of its inhabitants.”

What does that describe? Facebook, of course, and Foursquare next.

I was among those who scoffed when Mark Zuckerberg dubbed his algorithmic aggregation of personal updates a “news feed.” I was wrong. It’s news just as Mr. Bradford’s bar-top register was. Others scoff at the idea of Foursquare: “Why would you want to tell people where you are? We didn’t do that before.” Oh, yes, we did.

Categories: Buzzmachine

Want to join my entrepreneurial journalism class?

Buzzmachine - Tue, 08/31/2010 - 23:40

I have a little room in my entrepreneurial journalism class at CUNY.

I’d especially like a few under- or unemployed journalists looking to start businesses in the class to add to the mix of experience among the students. I’ve also had students from other schools in the past. Tuition is about $1k (sorry; I’m looking for scholarship money for various categories — such as unemployed, career-shifting, journalists and ethnic and community journalists — but don’t have it yet).

In the class, you will create and present a business plan for a sustainable (read: profitable) journalistic enterprise. We will work through:
* Your elevator pitch; the essential description of your business.
* Product plan.
* Needs statement — why does the world need this thing?
* Market research and analysis — who are your customers and what do you know from them?
* Competitive analysis.
* Revenue plan.
* Distribution/marketing plan.
* Operations plan.
* Technology plan.
* Launch plan.
* Investment ask.

At the end of the class in December, you present your plan to a jury of investors, entrepreneurs, journalists, publishers, and technologists (it’s great fun, that day).

The class meets Monday afternoons, 130-430p at CUNY.

If you’re interested, I have just a few spots. Email me at the school: jeff.jarvis at journalism dot cuny dot edu. Tell me what you want to build — an entirely new business or a hyperlocal site. Tell me about you and your experience. I’ll select a few based on the mix of the class and how complementary you, your business, and your experience are with the other students and their projects. If it doesn’t work out this time, fret not. We’re going to launch a larger entrepreneurial journalism program soon. If accepted, you’d need to be in class starting Sept. 6 (we’ve held one class so far).

Categories: Buzzmachine

Wiki life

Buzzmachine - Tue, 08/31/2010 - 20:02

“Everyone brings their crumbs of knowledge to the task and if they don’t, we’re the lesser for it.” I love that line about encouraging more people to bring more knowledge to Wikipedia, from a conversation yesterday with Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Gardner had just presented the results of a gargantuan, one-year-long strategy project made with about 1k Wikipedians in a few dozen languages producing 26k pages and a lot of good ideas, including expert review of articles; offline, distributed use of Wikipedia; and the wiki-based university, where research and knowledge aren’t lost.

Gardner says they started the project with the knowledge that there would be “a high likelihood of failure.” It was possible, though unlikely, that no one would have come to the party. It was more likely, I’d say, that it would be taken over by fringe interests and nutty ideas. The foundation had to invest in success, hiring a facilitator who understood the dangers and a consultant who gave the project “a bedrock of information.”

There’s a lesson there — a lesson in all of this — for companies and government agencies learning how to do their business in public. It’s possible to collaborate at scale even on strategy. It’s risky. It needs care and feeding. But it can and should be done if you want to work in public, collaboratively, with your constituents, as they will expect.

Among the priorities that came out of the project are expanding and deepening Wikipedia in its developing markets and bringing diversity to its developed markets. Gardner quoted Clay Shirky — it’s a law, you know; we social media people are required to do it once a day — separating “let it happen” from “make it happen” projects; the English-language Wikipedia is the former, Hindi the latter. Again, there’s a lesson there for other enterprises: When you can create a platform that lets it happen, do; but also invest in what’s needed and make that happen.

Wikimedia then has to understand the motives of people who will help in either kind of task. They’ve found that people share their effort on Wikipedia in high-minded support of making the world a better place and they’re more likely to do so because Wikipedia is independent of other interests. They also want to show off their mastery. If you’re a news organization, allowing comments on your articles reaches neither of these motives. Helping people improve their own communities would.

The result for Wikipedia is astounding. All the work of these volunteers in nonmonetary exchanges of effort have created an asset worth an estimated $5 billion with impact on the industry that is probably greater than that. The foundation calculated the value of the effort that goes into just editing of Wikipedia – not research or writing – and after ascribing a low per-hour labor value to the work, they were amazed that it added up to $700 million a year. There’s the economic premise Clay Shirky’s (now I’ve met my quota) Cognitive Surplus: Given the time, opportunity, tools, support, and desire, we can create countless Wikipedias of incalculable worth.

So how does one apply these lessons to government and companies? I asked Gardner whether the Wikimedia Foundation would consult or build platforms for others. She said it’s tempting but it’s not their job. I’d like to do research via CUNY on the lessons that Wikipedia and other such collaborative enterprises can teach journalism. Other sectors would be wise to watch and rethink how they operate — and strategize.

The first reflex of open-government folks, I think, would be to bring this experience to policy-setting. That’s OK, but difficult. I see opportunity to create the means for citizens to take over some tasks of government. Recently — for my book, Public Parts — I interviewed Beth Noveck, head of Obama’s open-government initiative, and she raised another example I liked: The Social Security web site needs to present content in other languages. If users could translate Facebook collaboratively, couldn’t citizens translate the site and its information? For that matter, couldn’t they also translate the English into English, making bureaucratese understandable from a nonofficial distance? Of course, we could. We need someone like the Wikimedia Foundation to invest the effort to help us make it happen.

Companies, too, could use this thinking to, for example, get input into product design. Look at Dell: Customers have, since the start of the web, helped each other with service. Since the start of Dell Idea Storm, they’ve given Dell ideas. There’s a huge middle ground in design and manufacturing that could be helped by customers if they had the platform to do it. No, I’m not expecting to see computers designed by democratically run committee or looking like Wikipedia (now that would be Dell Hell) but I do think that customers could help improve any product if companies have the structure and investment, like Wikimedia, to listen. I also interviewed Local Motors‘ Jay Rogers for the book and he will describe just such a process.

The point, in the end, is that Wikimedia by its DNA operates in public and benefits accrue — not just as product and engagement and promotion and distribution but also as strategy. That’s the next step in creating the truly public company or organization.

One more observation: Among the top 50 web entities, Wikipedia stands alone as a the only public service enterprise there. It has gathered not just content but also people, the Wikipedians who create that content and now worked together on their shared strategy. As we discuss issues that matter to us as a new society, there are lessons in the Wikimedia Foundation’s work an structure. What can more of us do together to protect the high-minded purpose and possibility of our internet?

Categories: Buzzmachine

Publicness at SXSW

Buzzmachine - Wed, 08/25/2010 - 13:04

Please vote for my session at South by Southwest; I’d be most honored if you do. Here’s the description:

In our current cultural obsession with privacy, we risk losing the benefits of publicness—of the connections the internet enables.

So, in a discussion, we will consider the value of publicness in our lives and communities, in transparent government, and in truly public companies. We will ask what privacy really means and examine its brief history (it was born out of fear of new technologies, especially the dastardly Kodak camera).

We will discuss the ethics of privacy and publicness that should inform our decisions in social and business interactions: what we reveal, what we keep private, and why.

We will look at different cultures’ views of privacy (how the Germans, who get naked in saunas and public parks, care deeply about the privacy of everything … except their private parts).

We will ask what Facebook, Foursquare, Google, Twitter, government, and companies should do about privacy.

We will claim ownership of the public sphere–what’s public is owned by us, the public.

And we will forge a bill of rights in cyberspace to protect the openness of the internet that is our tool of making publics.

Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do? and the upcoming Public Parts, will present his findings and views about publicness—and his own experience revealing his prostate cancer–and then lead a discussion with the entire room—Oprah-like—about the nature of privacy and why it worries us.

The format tells us to list five questions the session will answer. Mine:
What does privacy really mean?
What are the benefits of sharing (and oversharing)?
How can we achieve open government and business?
How can we protect the openness of the internet?
What’s wrong with Jeff Jarvis’ penis?

Categories: Buzzmachine

The German paradox, continued

Buzzmachine - Wed, 08/25/2010 - 03:31

The hard-on Germany has for Street View gets more ironic and amusing by the day. @larsan sent me a link to German newspaper story that points to all the others who open up even more data than Google. As best as I can translate, that includes:

* Deutsche Telekom’s online phone book let you search on someone and find an aerial view of the house from four angles and a view of the backyard — with, note well, personally identifiable information attached: name and phone number.

* The site Sightwalk has street-level tours of seven German cities, including parks. Knowing Germany, one could probably find naked people there.

* State governments not only take but sell detailed images of property, including monitoring for heat loss.

At the same time, the German government is rolling out mandatory ID cards with RFID tags embedded in them. ID cards sent Brits over the edge; they’d do the same here in the U.S, I’m sure.

But at least I’m starting to see some debate over Street View and privacy nuttiness; saner voices are, if not prevailing at least speaking. Mario Sixtus writes a wonderful column (in German) recounting the inane conversations he has with German friends about Street View. This column says the argument is typically German, that the fight against Street View has no real basis, and that this fight is bringing out the cultural divide between online and offline. This photographer is going to replace pixelated buildings in Street View with real pictures linked to the addresses (take that, fool!). This story points out that Street View has been around in other forms since 1948. And this column asks why Germany is irrational about Google.

That’s really the question: What is it that makes Germans go bonkers about Google? Is it media trying to gain an advantage against their competitor? Is is anti-Americanism? Is it some inner anti-capitalism? I’m serious. I can’t figure them out and I think they should sit down and try to figure themselves out. The Green Party of Germany invited me to come next month to talk about publicness and privacy and I can’t wait to hear their explanations.

In the meantime, the insanity continues. Church leaders are opposed to Street View, saying, “The world belongs to God, not Google.” Oy.

Categories: Buzzmachine

Transparent inventory & the rebirth/death of retail

Buzzmachine - Tue, 08/24/2010 - 18:49

The Times reports this morning on smart retailer Nordstrom making its inventory in warehouses and in stores transparent so a buyer who’s dying for a purse can find it nearby (for immediate gratification), or from the warehouse (for convenience), or at the last store that has it (which will ship to her).

The earlier rendition of this was BestBuy or B&N making it possible for customers to find whether an individual store had an individual item via their web sites; that’s not quite as easy as saying, “wherever it is, just get it to me,” but it was an important step in this direction.

The next rendition of this will be, I think, enabling the customer to search across multiple retailers and order. That will give us what Dave Winer tweeted this morning that he wants: “I wish there was an Amazon store in midtown Manhattan, where I could buy anything that is available for same-day delivery. I’d go there now.”

Well, if Amazon did that, it would be gigantic, expensive, capital-intensive, inventory-filled Wal-Marts peppered all across the country; it would be expensive to build and it wold lose the efficiency and profitabliy that Amazon enables.

But the virtual version of what Dave wants is possible with transparent — and open — inventory, enabling customers to ask, “Who has this item nearest me at the best price? Then I’ll go get it or get it delivered to me today.”

Ah, price. There’s the rub, of course. Such a network would make pricing transparent. It pretty much already is. We can search across individual retailers or use the likes of Froogle and get the lowest prices. There lies the downfall of retail’s margins, taking out the ability to arbitrage opacity in pricing. Now add transparent inventory and the ability to get the item at the lowest price now and the value of retail brands sinks as does its profitability — in an already tough-margin business.

I could imagine a new service — from Amazon or an entrepreneur — that says: Tell me what you want, Dave, and I will tell you where you can find it or I’ll get it to you. That’s the new value-add for those who want to touch an item or get it immediately. The other value-add is support and service (see: Best Buy’s Geek Squad). Putting boxes and shelves and waiting for people to buy them while carrying the cost? That no longer adds value; it only increases risk.

Retail is going to get ever-more efficient. Independent bookstores were killed by the more-efficient box stores. Box stores were wounded by Amazon and the internet. Amazon could be injured by a local value-added retail search-and-delivery service. All this is fine for the customer: more choice more quickly at lower prices.

But I think retail could be headed the way of newspapers: into a pool of endless pain. All over America, I see empty retail shells: the former Circuit City, the closed book box, the folded mom-and-pop. I think there’s much more of that to come.

This is what transparency — in price and inventory — can do to a market.

Categories: Buzzmachine

Internet, schminternet

Buzzmachine - Tue, 08/10/2010 - 14:59

I am baffled by the Google-Verizon agreement on nonnet-nonneutrality. I’m mostly baffled by why Google would put its name to this. What does it gain?

As I see it, the agreement makes two huge carve-outs to neutrality and regulation of the internet: mobile and anything new.

So ol, grandpa internet may chug along giving us YouTube videos of flaming cats, but you want to get that while you’re out of your house? Well, that’s the nonnet. I can hear the customer “service” rep explaining this to us:

“Oh, no, sir. That’s not offered on the internet. That’s on the schminternet.”

You want something new? Anything created after 2010?

“Schminternet, sir.”

And transparency in essence creates a third carve-out: So long as the phone company tells you it’s screwing your bits, it’s ok.

But wait. Mobile is the internet. Mobile will very soon become a meaningless word when — well, if telcos allow it, that is — we are connected everywhere all the time. Then who cares where you are? Mobile? doesn’t matter. You’re just connected. In your car, in your office, in your bedroom, on the street. You’re connected. To what? To the internet, damnit.

“No, sir, I told you, the schminternet.”

Besides, Google itself proposed using the broadcast white spaces to create “wi-fi on steroids,” enabling us to do anything we could imagine and creating the competition that is the only real solution to net neutrality, competition that would force telcos to provide open, fast, reliable service at a decent price or we go elsewhere, competition that could even — oh, if only — put a few telcos and even cable companies out of business. Good, old, American competition. That was where Google’s interests were supposed to lie: the more we use the internet, they say, the more money they make. White-space steroid wi-fi would get us to use the internet more. But that would be new.

“Schminternet.”.

Grrrr.

“Sir, sir, if I could interrupt you. We do offer the things you want. Let me connect you to a sales representative for our schminternet department. She will be glad to explain the fees, limitations, and regulations to you. I’ll be putting you on hold now….”

: LATER: In my tweet, I called this a Munich Pact. Netizens are now citizens of the Sudentenland.

Just as Czechoslovakia was not invited to its cutting apart, so were we not invited to Google and Verizon’s parlays.

But the internet is ours, not yours, Verizon and Google. This is why we need our Bill of Rights in Cyberspace.

As the Google-China drama played out, I said that Google was acting, against its own desire, as our ambassador to China and other nations. I said that’s not good for us, as Google has its own interests and they don’t necessarily align with ours. Google is a corporation. (And I’ve just scored a point for Siva in the debate we hope to have at SXSW about whether companies have to be evil or can be good.)

So as after China, I will argue that it is up to us to create our own principles so we can point corporations and government at them. Otherwise, they will take over our land without us at the table.

Pass the sauerkraut, Herr Chamberlain.

: AND: I now own Schminternet.net. What should I do with it? Something new, of course.

: QUESTIONS: So If I take an iPhone or iPad away from my home and its wi-fi and start using cellular spectrum, is that the internet or the schminternet?

If you launch, say, a new video university, because it’s new, is that internet or schminternet?

And if it’s schminternet, do I have to negotiate with each carrier to carry it? Who gets to say it’s new? Me or them? Who gets to say what the limit is of the service I would get on the old, plain internet, forcing me to us and pay for the schminternet?

Oh, and I really still do not get Google’s interest in playing this role. OK, folks now it’s time for your conspiracy theories.

: REACTION: Josh Marshall says the Munich Pact analogy is “a bit inflammatory but unfortunately pretty much captures it.”

: Kara Swisher says I was making a joke on “Schmidt.” I honestly, densely didn’t even think of that until someone tweeted it after I wrote the post. It’s a Yiddish gag: Kara, Schmara. Jarvis, Schmarvis. Verizon, Verklempt. You get the idea.

: AND: Finally, a good piece explaining Google’s possible motives by Wired.com’s Ryan Singel: “Verizon and the nation’s telecoms have yet again won; Google officially became a net neutrality surrender monkey; and you, as an American, have lost.”

Categories: Buzzmachine

Bad things could happen

Buzzmachine - Sat, 08/07/2010 - 16:42

Farhad Manjoo New York Times review of Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus relies on the argument I hear a lot in privacy circles: Bad things could happen.

Shirky imagines what good things people could do if they watched less TV and created more stuff together (2,000 Wikipedias bloom). Manjoo yes-buts him:
Nearly every one of his examples of online collectivism is positive; everyone here seems to be using the Internet to do such good things.

Yet it seems obvious that not everything — and perhaps not even most things — that we produce together online will be as heartwarming as a charity or as valuable as Wikipedia. Other examples of Internet-abetted collaborative endeavors include the “birthers,” Chinese hacker collectives and the worldwide jihadi movement. In this way a “cognitive surplus” is much like a budgetary surplus — having one doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll spend it well. You could give up your time at the TV to do good things or bad; most likely you’ll do both.

Well, yes, Shirky’s examples are of good things because he’s trying to persuade people to consider new behaviors and thus he is arguing their benefits. Buy the punch line, buy the joke. In Manjoo’s school, Jim Fixx should have written running books leading off by arguing that it could give you skin cancer to be outside that much and it will wreck your knees and cars could hit you and dogs could bite you and you look silly in shorts and, oh, yes, you could drop dead of a heart attack. Feel like a run? C’mon! Get up off that couch! Turn off that TV, now!

As he tries to find his critical yes-but, Manjoo is betraying more about his thinking than Shirky’s. His is a case of classical (if you’ll forgive me that but it’s become a cliché if not classical) internet skepticism, which is really anti-populist fear of a loss of centralized control. Manjoo doesn’t trust people — “perhaps even most” people — to use their time wisely. That’s the snobbery I hear against the internet and publicness and what the public does with the internet.

So the next necessary question to such a critic needs to be: Yeah, and…? What is it you expect we should do then? The only logical answer in this context is that Manjoo wants people to keep watching TV in case they would otherwise do bad things (and he gets to define bad). So whether he knows it or not, he becomes Big Brother and TV is the opiate of his masses. Put down that remote control, now. Back away from the mouse. Just sit and watch media. That’s what it’s there for. Hush now.

Categories: Buzzmachine

Welcome, TBD.com

Buzzmachine - Fri, 08/06/2010 - 21:54

Listening in to most of TBD.com’s press preview today, I was kvelling like a proud uncle. I’m so delighted to see Jim Brady and company create so many of the things I’ve wishing for in journalism. Ken Doctor beat me to a great list of many of those things.

What makes me happiest is that it recognizes that it’s part of an ecosystem and a network and it benefits the more it helps the members of that cloud succeed.

It is for-profit. If journalism isn’t profitable, it’s sunk. So that is God’s work, not the devil’s.

It recognizes the value and ethic of the link. It will do what it does best and link to there rest, damnit. DWYDBALTTR (in Twitter, @greglinch pronounces that “dwid-ball-ter-ing”).

It’s small and efficient and can be right-sized for the new efficient and targeted media landscape.

It’s collaborative in so many ways. It recognizes that the people formerly known as the audience are their best distributors. It recognizes that no story is perfect and the public often can help complete a story and make it better and more correct and complete.

When he testified before the FTC (or was it the FCC? so many hearings; they all sound alike) a few months ago, TBD founder Jim Brady said he recalled standing in a conference room at CUNY a bit more than a year ago whiteboarding what the new newsroom would look like, little imagining that he’d be building that very newsroom. He is.

I’m rooting for him. We all must. Yes, even the Washington Post should, for TBD will show the way to new means, methods, and efficiencies. They will succeed and fail and show us all new ways to make journalism sustainable and to build a new and much stronger collaborative relationship with the communities we serve.

Godspeed, TBD.

Categories: Buzzmachine

The price of privacy

Buzzmachine - Thu, 08/05/2010 - 16:43

I love it when economists and their ilk reduce a complicated issue in life to a simple line and chart (that’s what makes Freakonomics so popular). At the latest New York Tech Meetup, Drop.io founder Sam Lessin did just that with my favorite topic: privacy and publicness. In a rebuttal to Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus he said:

“Privacy was once free. Publicity was once ridiculously expensive.

“Now the opposite is true: You have to pay in a mix of cash, time, social capital, etc. if you want privacy.”

Right. It takes effort to create privacy — or to build a private image, as Laurent Haug argues. If you decide not to bother, if you opt out of using Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, et al, then there’s now an opportunity cost: you miss making connections that have personal or economic value. That’s why people quite willingly give up what we used to think of as privacy: because it’s worth it to them. These are the new economics of privacy.

So maybe I can start to understand what Fred Wilson was talking about when he said there was money to be made in privacy, in premium privacy (because there’s now a premium on it). I’m still looking for concrete examples of how, but I’ll just bet Fred will invest in one soon.

Now let me make a caveat: privacy and publicness are neither mutually exclusive nor binary; they aren’t competitors at all times. So this is an oversimplification, which I’ll oversimplify even more:

Once-abundant privacy is now scarce. Once-scarce publicness is now abundant.

It’s the second half of that that interests me most since I’m writing a book about that.

So if we’ve seen Lessin’s Law on Privacy, then Jarvis’ Corollary on Publicness (which is my synonym for publicity because publicity as a word is so freighted with marketing meaning now) is this:

Now publicness is free.

So the old controllers of publicness — media and entertainment companies — can’t make money on it anymore.

The economics of abundant publicness mean that the old gatekeepers — editors, agents, producers, publishers, broadcasters, the entire media industry — overnight lost their power. That’s why they’re so upset. That’s why they keep complaining about all these amateurs taking over their sacred turf — because they are. What they thought was valuable — their control — now had no value. They can’t sell their casting couches and presses on craigslist for nothin’. They are being beat by those who break up their control and hand it out for free (Google, craigslist, Facebook, YouTube, etc.).

Abundant publicness also creates new value. Google search is made up of that value. Twitter movie chatter predicting box-office success is that value. Annotations on maps, restaurant reviews, health trends, customer desires — and on and on — all find value in our publicness and so new companies are being built on that value. That is why it is in the interests of both companies and customers to be public and why privacy — when it does compete, when it discourages publicness — becomes a nuisance for them.

Abundant publicness leads to the confusing economics of free: If everyone can create stuff, then stuff is no longer valuable. But your stuff can gain value for you if it’s spread around and remixed and is more public than the next guy’s. The way to make it more public is to make it free. That’s OK because it doesn’t have value anyway. So you have to find value now not from owning and controlling the stuff but from making it more public and extracting value through a side door: advertising, performances, reputation…. (If I were good, I’d turn this into George Carlin 2.0: you no longer want a place for your stuff, you want your stuff to be in every place).

Abundant publicness raises all sorts of issues around ownership. Who owns the wisdom of the crowed? The crowd? Or the company that adds value to it? See also the questions above about making free stuff public to gain value. You can’t make it public with DRM and ownership controls, or at least not the old ones built for a scarcity economy. Being public is about giving up control, which is the exact opposite of how media used to make their businesses.

Abundant publicness makes filters more valuable. See again Prof. Shirky.

Abundant publicness increases the value of reputation. See aplusk.

At the same time, abundant publicness makes fame a devalued commodity. See Lindsay Lohan.

I’m exploring these ideas for my book so please help me tease them out. What are the implications of abundant publicness and scarce privacy?

: Here’s Lessin’s talk:

nytechmeetup on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free

Speaking of Fred Wilson, I came across Lessin’s talk because Fred recommended watching Twilio’s superb presentation at the Tech Meetup. It is, indeed, a model for such talks and here it is.

: MORE: Seth Godin just emailed alerting me to a typo I’ll leave above: “the wisdom of the crowed.” A spooner insight, he calls it: “But who are the ‘crowed’? They are the newly attended to, the newly famous. We crow about them, thus they are crowed. Does the insight of someone with a lot of twitter followers deserve more attention? Are they more wise? The wisdom of the crowed.”

He’s right. I was starting to dance with that question but let it go: When everybody’s heard, no one’s heard. So who *should* be heard? Or is that an old-media worldview speaking? There’s no longer the media structure to decide should’s. Do people rise on merit of what they say? On tricking Google and Twitter? On outrageousness? On authority?

Categories: Buzzmachine

Evil?

Buzzmachine - Thu, 08/05/2010 - 14:57

UPDATE: It’s looking more and more to me as if the New York Times report that provoked the first half of this post went too far. See the footnote below with denials of a deal from Verizon and Google, though those statements leave much to be asked: namely, what are the discussions; what is the compromise over net neutrality? But I just read this from a CNBC interview with Eric Schmidt that spoke more clearly: “Schmidt clarified that the net neutrality he advocates is not a neutrality between different types of content, but between the same type of content. He wants to make sure that there’s no discrimination between one video download over another.” So under that rubric, a YouTube video would not get discriminatory treatment over my video.

Update on the update: The Times stands by its story. What we need here is a good dose of transparency. It is, again, our internet they’re talking about.

The original post:

* * *

The report that Google is making a devil’s pact with Verizon for tiered internet service is disturbing because I wonder whether people inside Google are still asking that vital question: “Is this evil?” I wonder whether Google is still Google.

I don’t mean to come off like a high priest of the net neutrality church. But if ISPs like Verizon can charge tiered pricing for quality (vs. unquality?) service, then it’s the consumers who’ll get screwed because costs will be passed onto us. ISPs (like newspapers) want added revenue streams but those streams always end up at our feet. But we know that.

What also concerns me is that creators will get screwed, too. Only the big guys will be able to afford to pay ISPs for top-tier service and so we return to the media oligarchy that — O, irony — YouTube and Google broke apart. Google, I fear, is gravitating back to the big-media side because it wants those brands on YouTube so it can get their advertisers on YouTube because those advertisers are still too stupid to see where the customers really are. And then we’re back to a world of big-media control over what we get to see. It was the millions of little guys — people who made their own videos, people who embedded videos — who made YouTube YouTube.

But that’s short-sighted strategizing, I think — I hope — because fragmentation is infinite; blockbusters will get ever-harder and ever-more-expensive to create; advertising will catch up with reality, the real world, and customers and (unless the Wall Street Journal ruins it) become far more targeted and relevant; advertising will also start to fade away; the mass market will shrink.

But this is a last-gasp attempt to hold onto mass-market economics (vs. open-market scale). [Craig Roth in the comments makes the critical point that the story I linked to is supposition rather than announcement, a caveat I certainly should have delivered. As I said in response to him, I thought this was worth discussing before it was fait accompli in the hopes that it won't be.]

It’s an uncomfortable moment for a Google fan boy. This report comes at the same time that Google killed Wave. Now Wave has had its detractors who are now cackling, but it’s not the specific platform that concerns me. It’s that Google can’t figure out how to launch new platforms. Wave was a bust. Buzz was a bust. Knol was a bust. Orkut was mostly a bust. Brilliant people like Gina Trapani hung their hats on these platforms; she wrote the book on Wave and others started developing it and now the rug’s pulled out from under them because Google didn’t support their development, which is what would have made Wave a success. Evil or merely rude?

The reason these efforts were busts is because Google didn’t think them through, didn’t have the corporate discipline to find and execute on clear-eyed strategy. I’m all for beta — I learned that lesson from Google — but you can’t just spend your life throwing shit against the wall to see what sticks. Eventually, you’re knee-deep in shit. But you can do that for a long time — if you have lots of money. A poor startup uses betas to learn precious lessons because they can’t afford to fail. This rich company is using betas, I fear, rather than making hard decisions up front — because it can afford to. So Wave may have ended up dead anyway but if it were run by entrepreneurs it would have struggled long and hard before taking its last breath.

I worry that Google isn’t an entrepreneurial company anymore. It didn’t start those platforms under the hard economics of entrepreneurship. And it hasn’t nurtured some outside entrepreneurs well. If it did, Dodgeball would be Foursquare today.

My real fear then is that Google is too big. I certainly don’t mean that in the way that EU regulators do: “so big we have to rule it.” Uh-uh. No, I mean it may be too big for its own good. Too big for the right hand to find the left hand and have coherent strategies for operating systems (Android v. Chrome) and applications (Docs v. Wave). So big that it starts to identify with other big guys (ISPs and Hollywood entertainment conglomerates). Big is a fine thing when it brings critical mass and the freedom to innovate. As Eric Schmidt himself says, lack of innovation can kill a tech company. So can bad innovation — fat innovation.

I’ve never bought the arguments that Google is a one-trick pony. Honda is a one-trick pony; it makes cars. That’s not Google’s problem. Its problem is that everything it faces is new and it can’t ever afford the luxury of leaning back on old lessons and old relationships. So what does it hold onto on that rapids ride? It has to hold onto its mission — organize the world’s information, etc. — and its evolving definition of evil so it doesn’t stray. It also needs to find the organizational structure — the firm-jawed management — to force different teams with different agendas to work to shared goals and to hold them to entrepreneurial discipline.

All of these are just early warning signs — every early. It’s good — for Google and also for a fan boy like me — to see these cracks because, used properly, they are lessons that help a company get back on its track and shade its eyes from the bright glare of hubris. But only if they ask the really hard questions. Like, is that evil?

: MORE: On a different thread, I also want to note that I think the way this devils’ deal works out is that it will give the FCC and possibly even the FTC and Congress the rope they need to hang ISPs on net neutrality. Is that Google’s really evil plan? It doesn’t like regulation but wants it in this case and so it’s creating the invitation for it? Naw. As I said, I’m not a conspiracy theorist. In any case, I do think that such a deal will invite regulation.

: I won’t cry for ISPs. I was at a meeting of cable ISPs some years ago when they were all cackling about their margins on broadband exceeding 40%. They ain’t hurting. The solution to all this remains competition. Remember that Google’s founders entered the big spectrum auction a few years ago to force neutrality and they want broadcast white spaces opened up to become “wi-fi on steroids” and thus competition for broadband providers.

: ALSO: I want credit for not making a WWGD? gag. I leave that to Twitter. But it may, indeed soon be time for a sequel (or update).

: LATER: Verizon put a statement on its public policy blog that says the Times report linked above is “mistaken.” It doesn’t say whether there’s any agreement but talks about its “purpose” — a “policy framework that ensures openness and accountability, and incorporates specific FCC authority, while maintaining investment and innovation. To suggest this is a business arrangement between our companies is entirely incorrect.” I’m not sure what that means. The more transparency about these dealings from all parties — including the FCC — the better.

Google said on its public policy Twitter feed: “@NYTimes is wrong. We’ve not had any convos with VZN about paying for carriage of our traffic. We remain committed to an open internet.”

The AP quotes the FCC saying that Google and Verizon are involved in stakeholder talks and Verizon is quoted saying that it is talking with Google about a “compromise on net neutrality” in the AP’s phrasing. The question remains: What are they talking about?

Categories: Buzzmachine

Whither magazines?

Buzzmachine - Thu, 08/05/2010 - 02:38

Three people I respect a great deal now lead the big magazine companies: David Carey (ex Condé) at Hearst, Bob Sauerberg at Condé, and now Jack Griffin at Time Inc. — and I’ll add Justin Smith at Atlantic.

It’s a big challenge to head a magazine company these days (witness the sales of Newsweek and TV Guide for a buck each). Circulation is plummeting; costs are soaring; advertising competition is killing.

But I still say that magazines have unique value in media as the centers of communities of information and interest. They just have to act like it. My advice to my friends at the top:

1. Ignore print. Enable community. Yes, print is where the revenue is today. But it’s only going to shrink. Preserving print — and the past — is no strategy for the future. The physical costs of production and distribution are killing. The marketing cost of subscriber acquisition and churn is hellish. The editorial costs of maintaining gloss are wasteful if not sinful. So concentrate instead on your relationships with your like-minded souls among the people formerly known as your audience. In a social (post-brand, post-search) market, these magazines still have tremendous if very perishable value if you know how to unlock it because their people care about the same stuff. Enable communities to build and meet and create value around their interests, especially those that are specialized — SI and EW will be worth more than Time, Jack. EW may look like a bad business today (it pains me to say that, as its Dad) and it may be way too late to the web party, but I still think there’s one last chance to enable fans to congregate and create. Enable them to do what they want to do and follow along. Before you follow the money, follow the passion.

2. Avoid Steve Jobs’ siren call. The iPad is not, not your salvation. Oh, it’s nice and elegant but your editors are leading you over the lemmings’ cliff because they think the public wants the world packaged just as they used to package it. The link robbed them of that control forever. And that’s great news to you because you can now listen to your customers, your readers, instead of your editors. You can escape the cost and tyranny of editorial ego and determine what the community wants most. Fine, have apps. But the winner in your war, friends, will be the one who breaks out of the old models and scales to enable a huge community instead of a small audience.

3. Build new brands. Don’t just preserve the old brands. Enable a thousand entrepreneurs to build a thousand new brands. Curate them. Train them. Equip them (Flips for all!). Promote them. Sell them. That’s the key to scale.

4. Build new networks. Oh, I know, magazine people make fun of Glam because it’s not as controlled as magazine brands but they’re blind to do so. Glam grew to four times iVillage’s size by enabling a network of many independently owned sites and brands. That’s the way you can grow and scale even as your old, print brands shrink. So imagine a huge, scalable network of like-minded sites and brands you don’t have to build and pay for that you can sell.

5. Commerce. I don’t think you’ll succeed at charging readers for content. As Google taught media and government, we now operate in an economy of abundance, not scarcity. So trying to convince readers to pay premium prices for content when content is anybody’s game is a fool’s paradise. But I do think you can sell merchandise to the people formerly known as readers as long as you take on the skills of merchandiser. And that ain’t editors.

6. Cut costs. Yes, I know, Felix Dennis made his career on that call and look where it got him. But there’s no doubt that growth will not come from fancy offices and car services and wardrobe allowances. So cut the hell out of your costs. Move to Jersey.

7. Be any-media. Glossy paper is expensive. Pixels are cheap.

8. Get local. This is the hard one but it’s a goldmine if you can figure out where the entrance is. Look at how ESPN is going local. Every one of your magazine brands (well, except Time) can find local audiences, local advertisers, local efficiency if you can scale advertising sales with new partners.

I used to love magazines. I bought piles of them every week. I don’t buy them anymore. I don’t need them anymore. I don’t miss them. Sorry but it’s true. Be honest and imagine life without any of your magazine brands. It’s not hard. It’s easy. So imagine instead what would matter: relationships. That’s the key to your future.

What makes me hope that these four people might be able to pull this off is that they aren’t just advertising snake-oil salesmen. They understand value. Now they have to find it and enable it and I think the key to that is people, not content or paper or apps.

Categories: Buzzmachine

Privacy paranoia dramatized

Buzzmachine - Wed, 08/04/2010 - 14:48

The German Consumers’ Union—funded by the German government—has put out a video warning internet users about their privacy under a campaign called Surfers Have Rights. You don’t need to speak a word of German to get the gist:

(At the end, the text says: “You do this every day … on the internet.” And the shopper is asking simply, “Excuse me, where do I find…? The store clerk needs no translation.)

The German blog Netzpolitik thinks it’s a nice video. But Martin Weigert at Netzwertig has real concerns. The video “does but than spread distrust,” he says, arguing that even the most trivial data that “has the value of a dropped sack of rice in China” (must be an idiom) is made to seem drastically overvalued. The clip presents consumers as helpless, persecuted by their cohort. “What message does this convey? Mistrust everyone and everything.”

Hmmm. One would think that the German government would be somewhat sensitive to some irony there since, in earlier form, it was quite effective at making everyone mistrust everyone.

But the metaphor is hardly just German. Last week in Congress, Sen. Jay Rockefeller pulled out the overused trope that navigating the internet is like shopping in a mall, being watched in every move by “a machine” (very Orwell, that). The Byron Dorgen revealed a bit too much, I think, when he extended the metaphor to wonder whether, when going to the ladies’ lingerie department, onlookers would wonder whether you were really buying some for your wife or…. “That’s a really good analogy, I think, to what is going on on the Internet today,” said Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz.

No, it’s not. You are already being watched in the store. Stores have cameras watching you. They track what you buy via your credit card and frequent-shopper cards. They have floorwalkers and clerks who see what you buy. Fellow shoppers can see what you buy. So the hell what? So you like bananas. It’s a sickness in the mind of the beholder to imagine you doing something bad with the fruit.

The German clip and the Congressional “debate” reveal that the essential argument about privacy is too often purely emotional. You may — and do — go about your shopping every day feeling quite fine about it but here are government officials who want to creep you out. Government officials who have the power to creep us out in plenty of other ways. And now The Wall Street Journal is continuing the creep-out (odd, since they’d usually be the ones for business freedom against government regulation… hmmm).

In neither exposition is there any discussion of actual damage and actual danger, just nonspecific creepiness. Thus Netzwertig worries about the public’s attitude toward the internet and technology itself. I do, too. I will argue in my book that we need strong protection for privacy especially against bad actors — but I’ll go the extra step and try to define privacy and define the danger for unless we do that, all we’re doing is summoning boogeymen with warnings of nonspecific creepiness. And then I’ll argue that what we should be spending time understanding how this new world works and finding the opportunities in it because its progress is inexorable.

: LATER: Here’s an equivalent EFF video (in English):

I ask, what’s the great harm of giving me couch ads when I’m looking for a couch? Would I rather have bra ads when I can’t use them? Where’s the harm?

Categories: Buzzmachine

Cookie Madness!

Buzzmachine - Sun, 08/01/2010 - 00:03

I just don’t understand Julia Angwin’s scare story about cookies and ad targeting in the Wall Street Journal. That is, I don’t understand how the Journal could be so breathlessly naive, unsophisticated, and anachronistic about the basics of the modern media business. It is the Reefer Madness of the digital age: Oh my God, Mabel, they’re watching us!

If I were a conspiracy theorist — and I’m not, because I’ve found the world is rarely organized enough to conspire (and I found this to be especially true of News Corp. when I worked there, at TV Guide) — I’d imagine that the Journal ginned up this alleged exposé as a way to attack everyone else’s advertising business just as its parent company skulks behind its pay wall and surrenders its own ad business. But I’m not a conspiracy theorist. That’s why I’m confused.

The story uses the ominous passive voice of newspaper scare stories: “…a Wall Street Journal investigation has found…” As if this knowledge were hiding. Cookies have been around as long as the commercial browser, since October 1994. Or was that 1984?

The piece uses lots of scare words: “surveillance technology” … “tracking technology” … “intrusive” … “no warning” … “surreptitiously re-spawn” … “rich databases” … “so powerful and ubiquitous” … and my favorite: “targeted ads can get personal” (well, yeah, that’s the damned point).

The Journal acts as if it has discovered a conspiracy of its own: “Marketers are spying on Internet users — observing and remembering people’s clicks, and building and selling detailed dossiers of their activities and interests.” Gasp! Mabel, hide the kids, the Romans Huns Krauts Commies Marketers are coming!

There is absolutely nothing new — thus nothing newsworthy — in what the Journal promises threatens to be a series.

The Journal does measure its own cookies, finding its site moderate (I count 34 Journal cookies on my new Mac and I don’t use the site often) in what it ominously calls an “exposure index.” Mabel: Bring the Geiger counter!

Well, except the Journal is unique because unlike the other sites the story writes about, the Journal has my personally identifiable information! It has my friggin’ credit card number and name and address and phone number as well as my web behavior and it allows me to be tracked by third parties. The Journal has more information about me than ANY of the sites it warns about. And the Journal is owned by a company some people don’t trust. Hmmm.

It’s a fine thing that the Journal also tells readers how to “avoid prying eyes.” And if enough people do that, then the value of the advertising-supported web falls. Without cookies, the effectiveness and price of advertising would plummet as ads everywhere turn into remnant junk (smack the money), reducing revenue for media sites and reducing their content to junk. Hmmmm….

A story like this might also affect policy as the FTC is looking at regulating online advertising and marketing; its chairman, Jon Leibowitz testified before Congress on the topic this very week. Hmmm.

I think the Journal should have told exactly how it places and uses every one of its cookies and beacons and ominous tracking surveillance spying technology. It doesn’t. The story doesn’t even link to the paper’s privacy policy, which says that cookies and beacons and all that scary surveillance/tracking/spying technologies are used at WSJ.com and its affiliates and also by third parties over which the Journal has no control. Opportunity lost.

If I were an advertising-supported site, I’d be aggressively transparent. I’d tell you exactly what we track and what impact that has on what we serve in advertising and content. I’d create an app to read the cookies placed just for you and explain them. I’d give you the chance to correct information. I’d give you the chance to select your own advertising (now that would be valuable). I’d treat this with radical openness.

Otherwise the scare mongers like those regulation-loving, anticapitalist commies at News Corp. will win the day.

: Oh, and I neglected to point out that it was the very same Journal that had the wingnutty story about privacy and RFID tags on our pants, quoting as an expert a woman who thinks that RFIDs are — and I exaggerate not — the work of the devil. What the hell is happening there? Are they going out for drinks too often with their new neighbors at the Post?

: Oh and here’s more scaremongering from the commie Telegraph in London, which equates Wikileaks’ Julian Assange with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. Man, we are in silly season.

: MONDAY: The Journal campaign against digital advertising continues today with a shocking exposé revealing that Microsoft is a business-friendly business that chose not to release its browser with a default that would have killed ad tracking and targeting. Horrors!

Now if the Journal were really a business newspaper still, there’d be no news there. The news would be if Microsoft did not do what was good for revenue.

Here’s a too-metered Microsoft response to the weekend’s follies from the browser team.

Categories: Buzzmachine

Crowdsource government work

Buzzmachine - Thu, 07/29/2010 - 15:59

One way to reset the relationship of government and the public — from constant complaint — is to make it collaborative — thus constructive.

In my pollyanna way, I imagine a day when citizens could take over some tasks of government to save money and do them better. How about this as a small pilot:

Politico reports today that Rupert Murdoch wants to charge the White House $600,000 a year for access to news clips. The White House now pays $100,000 a year to a clipping service and News Corp. want to charge them for access to WSJ news in an apparent bid to make the White House deal directly with its own Factiva.

Well, to hell with that.

I have no doubt that we, the people, could do a spectacular job of curating clips — links and excerpts — for the White House (and us all). Imagine Wikiclips. Start with news data bases like Daylife (full disclosure: I’m a partner there) or GoogleNews as well as key RSS feeds (original sources and curated collections like RealClearPolitics) and canned searches and then create a very simple tool atop that to enable volunteer citizen-curators to find and highlight the important stuff. The Washington Post or New York Times or Techmeme could create the platform for the benefit of all.

There’s no reason for this task to be done at taxpayer expense. There’s no reason for the results of this work to be private; we all should see it. How could conservative Murdoch argue with saving tax dollars?

Categories: Buzzmachine

Value-added journalism

Buzzmachine - Tue, 07/27/2010 - 14:53

I asked Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of the Guardian, whether his paper should have started Wikileaks. I wondered whether the Guardian was looking at WIkileaks the way it looked at HuffPo when it started (that is, ‘darn, we should have thought of that, so we will’ … and it started CommentIsFree). Is Wikileaks a tool for investigative journalism? Or is it better for Wikileaks to be separate? Would being associated with a news organization subject it to different standards of verification and transparency?

“I think it’s better separate,” Rusbridger responded. Wikileaks does things the paper wouldn’t want to do or couldn’t do. And a paper is easier to attack by governments and companies; it has greater liability than a stateless news organization, as Jay Rosen calls them. “I think the Afghan leaks make the case for journalism,” Rusbridger said. “We had the people and expertise to make sense of it.”

Right. The Afghan war logs story is a case study in what Rusbridger would call the mutualization of journalism. I’d call it collaboration. The leakers and their medium — that is, their mediator, Wikileaks — did what they did and the paper’s journalists added value: digging through the data, giving it perspective, editing out dangerous pieces, getting reaction, and then giving it audience and attention.

That is the role journalists will continuously perform in the future: adding value. Wikileaks and the leaker didn’t need the Guardian, The Times, and Der Spiegel; as Wikileaks has proven many times, it can publish its information to the world without help. But they chose to work through those publications because of the value they would add.

Thanks to the internet, the marginal cost of sharing information today is zero. So the value of the journalist in merely distributing information is nearing zero. Distribution was just the stranglehold the journalists’ companies had on the market that enabled them to be supported by monopoly economics. They can no longer build their businesses on that barrier to entry. This change in market reality forces us to examine journalists’ true value to the public in the market.

In the war logs story, journalists added value. In the story of a town board meeting, journalists also need to add value, not merely acting as stenographers — a task most anyone could perform — but adding perspective (which might — horrors! — mean having an opinion), standards of behavior (you shouldn’t call the mayor an idiot without the links to back it up), and audience (which doesn’t mean distribution in the old sense of a stranglehold; it means the ability to get people to pay attention because you bring them value and they’ll click on your links).

If you don’t add value, then you’re not needed. And that’s not necessarily bad. When you don’t add value and someone else can perform the task as stenographer or leaker or reporter — and you can link to it — then that means you save resources and money. This means journalists need to look at where they add maximum value.

Categories: Buzzmachine

What if there are no secrets?

Buzzmachine - Mon, 07/26/2010 - 15:18

Is no secret safe?

That’s the moral to the Wikileaks war log story: you never know what might be leaked. Of course, that itself is nothing new: Whenever we reveal information to even one person, we risk it being spread. The ethic of confidentiality (and privacy) rests with the recipient of that information.

So what’s new now? There are more means to get information since it is pooled and digital. There are more means to share information; Daniel Ellsberg had to go through media to spread his Pentagon Papers while Wikileak chose to go through media so they could add value (perspective and attention) but didn’t have to. And there are new means to stay anonymous in the process.

I’m writing a book arguing that we are becoming more public and that’s good — and that institutions (government, companies) have no choice but to live up to our new standards of transparency and openness. But I am also examining when transparency goes too far.

Is the Wikileaks story an example of crossing a line? First, we have to ask where the line should be. I think it has to move so that our default, especially in government, is transparency. Rather than asking what should be made public we should ask why something should be kept private. Imagine if all government information and actions were public except matters of security and personal and private identification. There will be pressure to head there.

I make the mistake of thinking that we’ll navigate toward openness via rational and critical discussion. But we’ll more likely move the line because of purposeful subversion of the line like Wikileaks’. The line will be moved by force.

Now that they’ve made the war log public, it makes us examine the impact.

We need to ask whether the knowledge that anything written down could be made public will cause less to be written — and we lose information in the long run. That is my concern about efforts to make *all* government communication, including person-to-person email, permanent and public. I imagine that people will stop saying important things in email and instead pick up the phone and we lose the record.

We need to ask whether an ethic of transparency can be expected when leakers can be anonymous and their leaks swift.

We need to ask whether the government would have been better off making more public so that the leaker’s selective publication does not solely set the agenda and the government is stuck reacting.

In the war logs, we are learning things we should know. It’s the leakers — Wikileaks and its three media outlets — who are deciding what not to make public (with some consultation, post-leak, from government) and what should be open. So government loses the ability to decide secrets. Now leakers do. Which side do we trust to decide?

The sane response to leaks, I think, is to open up as much as possible. Then there’s nothing to leak except the things that shouldn’t be leaked. If we had the faith that we knew more, there’d be fewer leaks, fewer reasons to.

I don’t think this is an inexorable process of opening everything, of making no secret safe. As much as I advocate transparency, I don’t advocate that. But when you don’t know how many secrets there are, when there are too many secrets, then everything can be a leak — in Afghanistan or in the Gulf of Mexico. Unless government and business take on a credible and complete ethic of transparency, they will hand over the job of transparency to leakers and no secret is safe.

ANOTHER THOUGHT: This story is a step to the end of access journalism. (NO, it won’t end. Whenever people like me declare the death of something, disbelieve and discount it; we’re just saying we’re heading away from something).

But Wikileaks didn’t need, doesn’t want, won’t ever get official, journalistic, beat access. The derailing of a general in Rolling Stone didn’t come from a beat reporter who cared about access anymore. ProPublica’s work isn’t built on access.

When I talk about how little is spent on investigative reporting in America — as a proportion of total editorial spending across all media, it’s minuscule … microscopic — editors remind me that my calculation doesn’t include beats and beats are the heart of reporting. True and not true. It’s true to the extent that we want ongoing coverage and want it performed by people who build up experience if not expertise in the subject. It’s not true to the extent that reporters who depend on access from the subjects won’t ruin the relationship by breaking the subject’s secrets or the access (and the reporter’s supposed value) ends. (This is why reporters aren’t supposed to blog their opinions about their beats, according to fresh orthodoxy: They would lose access.)

In access journalism, leaks come from the subject. In unaffiliated journalism, leaks come in spite of the subject. As more reporting is done through mechanisms like Wikileaks and ProPublica and bloggers and advocates, I think we’ll see more breaking of secrets, which reinforces my point above: the best way to fight leaks is transparency (not black-out paint).

The Pentagon learned that lesson just a bit when it realized that giving more access would mean more control. Thus the embedding program in Iraq and Afghanistan. But news organizations can’t afford to have reporters embedded in the war zone. Coverage was too dependent on relationships. That honeymoon is ended.

The coverage of this war revealed much of what we know from the war logs. Alex Thomson says, though, that the logs validated what we know. They added facts we couldn’t get with access.

As news organizations shrink, we’ll be able to afford less access journalism — fewer beat reporters building relationships with their subjects — and more reporting — and subversion — from people who have a viewpoint and an agenda. The tone and means of journalism changes. It becomes more uncomfortable. But then, isn’t journalism supposed to be uncomfortable?

: MORE: Many notes from Jay Rosen here: “I don’t have the answer; I don’t even know if I have framed the right problem.”

Jay talks about stateless journalism. Dave Winer says the blogosphere is that. I don’t think the issue is that journalism is stateless but instead that journalism is becoming independent of organizations (pace Clay Shirky). Journalism lacks affiliation. Anybody can feed WIkileaks; Wikileaks can feed anybody. The organizational — nevermind state — point of control disappears. Journalism is everywhere and its up to the public to decide what news is.

Though from another perspective, stateless does matter as we’re seeing more of it across many sectors of society. Our enemy in this war is stateless. Businesses are stateless. Journalism now becomes stateless. I believe the tools of publicness — that is, the internet’s — enable us to organize new societies around states.

: MORE: Andrew Potter breaks down the discussion into four questions.

Categories: Buzzmachine

Disliking the public

Buzzmachine - Sun, 07/25/2010 - 16:30

There are those in the press and government who don’t like or trust the public they serve. It is an unliberal attitude–which can come from Liberals, by the way–for it doesn’t buy the core belief of liberal democracy that the people properly rule. Two classic examples:

Here we have a German government official saying that it is his job to protect consumers from themselves. In other words, they don’t know best; he does. Nevermind what they do — giving up private data on Facebook or giving Google the highest market penetration anywhere — he says they should do something else. And so he’ll use his regulatory power to change their behavior to his expectation.

And here we have a columnist for the Observer (aka Guardian), Will Hutton, who says in a fit of journalistic hubris that the BBC is “the last bulwark against populist government by the mob.” So the BBC is what protects the public from itself. He further says, “The bile, unfairness and lack of restraint in the blogosphere is infecting the mainstream media and thus American politics.” Which is to say that the press and government were unsullied and free of bile and unfairness until these damned bloggers (read: citizens with tongues) came along to corrupt them.

In both cases, we simply see members of a power structure threatened by the emergence of a public with its own mind and voice. We thus see the conflict that arises out of the rise of publicness. That’s one of the topics I’m thinking through as I write my book.

Categories: Buzzmachine

Advertising is next

Buzzmachine - Sat, 07/24/2010 - 17:32

Condé Nast is a house built on smoke and mirrors — that is, to say, on brand advertising. So it is astonishing to hear its CEO, Chuck Townsend, essentially toss the company’s business model out the window of the Death Star in what The Times frames as “a fundamental overhaul of the advertising-based business model.” This, folks, is surely the real product of the McKinsey studies undertaken at Condé, not a few magazines folded but a new strategy. In a phrase:

Advertising is fucked.

I’ve said that Rupert Murdoch’s paywall is also essentially his surrender of any hope that advertising can be grown or even maintained. He gave up and shrank like George Costanza’s privates. It’s one thing for the dirty digger to give up on car ads. It is quite another for Condé to go off its diet of Madison Avenue and Seventh Avenue in favor of a parking meter.

Photo: Flickr - wallyg

“We have been so overtly dependent on advertising as the turbine that runs this place, and that is a very, very risky model as we emerge from the recession,” Condé CEO Chuck Townsend told The Times. “In a company like ours where 70 percent of our margins are generated on the advertising side, we must develop a much, much more effective financial relationship with the consumer.” That is, get money from the consumer instead of the advertiser.

Good luck.

The company plans — like Murdoch — to try to suddenly get new money from consumers who for years — long, long before the internet — have been accustomed to almost-free content: $1-per-issue luxe magazines that cost probably four times that to produce and distribute (not to mention the tens of dollars it takes in marketing to acquire that subscription with advertising and schwag — a purse for Glamour readers or the fabled sneakerphone up the street at Sports Illustrated).

Condé promoted Bob Sauerberg, former head of consumer marketing (read: circulation) to its presidency. Bob is one of the good guys of Condé Nast (I don’t mean to damn him with faint praise there … sorry, couldn’t resist); he’s smart, mature, experienced. (I worked with him a good deal when I was at Advance’s parent company and he was at Fairchild; I should add that none of what I’m saying here comes from the slightest contemporary knowledge of the company; haven’t been in the cafeteria for many months.) Bob knows management and consumer marketing. The age of the ad sales guy is over because the age of the ad is over.

The problem is going to be that there is only more competition in content and so trying to suddenly charge more flies in the face of basic economics. The absurdity of the strategy struck me yesterday as Amazon tried to sell me a subscription to Time for 28.8 cents an issue while Time is trying to sell its iPad issues for $4.99 and I see no reason to buy either. In what world do these economics make sense? In their dreams.

“I want to collect income from the consumer,” Townsend told The Times earlier. “An annual magazine subscription may be something like anywhere bet[ween] $12 and $24. So I’m currently locked into a model that says I get a buck or two a month. How about I get a buck for a click?”

Dream on.

They’re not wrong that they need to get money from consumers but they’re not going to get it for content. Sorry guys. But as Google schooled the newspaper industry (I’ll substitute appropriate words):
The large profit margins [magazines] enjoyed in the past were built on an artificial scarcity: Limited choice for advertisers as well as readers. With the Internet, that scarcity has been taken away and replaced by abundance. No [dreaming] will be able to restore [magazine] revenues to what they were before the emergence of online [content]. It is not a question of analog dollars versus digital dimes, but rather a realistic assessment of how to make money in a world of abundant competitors and consumer choice.

Instead, I suggest they have to get new revenue through commerce — through selling the things they once advertised now that advertisers are deserting them to sell direct. Problem is, that’s hard, as Condé knows best from its experience with Style.com, which started as an attempt to create a high-end store (I worked there then). They created it in partnership with a retailer and the retailer bagged the effort when times got tough in the first bubble; it then became another ad-supported site. But the strategy wasn’t wrong. Problem is, there is no retail expertise in the company.

More recently, Condé should have bought Net-a-Porter but instead luxury conglomerate Richemont snarfed it up. (Disclosure: I spoke at Richemont’s corporate retreat recently.) Condé should buy Gilt to establish new skills, a new relationship with customers, and new revenue. Its content then becomes just added value: the Cinnabon’s in the mall.

A media company going into retail and selling in areas held by former advertisers has precedent: Media News’ Salt Lake City paper became a real estate broker and undersold the entire business in town. The Telegraph, as I like to point out, sells everything from hangers to wine to betting to its readers.

But if Condé and other media companies are going into retail, they need entirely new skills of merchandising and sales, an entirely new financial structure to cope with inventory costs and tight margins, the ability to cope with entirely new competitors and suppliers (that is, former advertisers — but, worse, Amazon), and an entirely new efficiency (forget the cafeteria; they’d be lucky to have a Wal-Mart lunch room with vending machines as a profit center).

They also have to defeat a calcified, entitled culture. For that, I’d suggest they buy Gawker Media to get the incredibly popular competitor Jezebel and to infuse the company with a new culture. Make Nick Denton editorial director and COO and then watch the fun.

I doubt they heard any of this from KcKinsey because in the few encounters I’ve had with them they remix known models rather than invent new ones, which is what is called for here. I’ll bet they proposed cutting some costs (done) and remixing revenue (started) when what’s really needed is a complete restrategizing.

Or maybe I”m wrong. Maybe 4 Times Square will become the world’s lushest mall, with one helluva food court.

Nevermind my advice. The moral of this story remains that advertising is next to fall into the black hole (as a Time Inc. president once dubbed this damned internet thing). Welcome to Bob Garfield’s Chaos Scenario.

Categories: Buzzmachine

Privacy wingnuts

Buzzmachine - Sat, 07/24/2010 - 02:19

I’ve been looking for a classic example of so-called, self-appointed “privacy advocates” gathered by the press going off the deep-end (if you have any, please send them to me).

And then this dropped in my lap: a reputed outcry by these putative privacy advocates against Wal-Mart putting RFID tags on pants.

What could possibly violate our privacy with tracking pants in a store to make sure there aren’t too many extra-large sizes on the shelves? (That was my experience with Wal-Mart when I tried to buy sweats before my surgery; I wish they’d restocked the mediums.)

Well, say the advocates the Journal found: “While the tags can be removed from clothing and packages, they can’t be turned off, and they are trackable. Some privacy advocates hypothesize that unscrupulous marketers or criminals will be able to drive by consumers’ homes and scan their garbage to discover what they have recently bought.”

Yeah, and then what? So they find out that I bought 33/34 jeans. And with that precious personal data they will do what? Blackmail me because I’m no longer the svelte 32 I once was? Sell me illegal diet aids? Sell me ice cream? Target advertising for medium jockeys to me? Subject me to public ridicule as a pencil-necked geek?

Don’t the reporter and editor at the Journal stand back and laugh at the absurdity of this worry? Don’t they ask the next, obvious question: “Yeah, and…?” Isn’t that their job?

Ah, but they report more and find further cause for worry:

“Some privacy advocates contend that retailers could theoretically scan people with such [encoded] licenses as they make purchases, combine the info with their credit card data, and then know the person’s identity the next time they stepped into the store.”

And that would be worth the trouble and risk for the store how? That would give them more data than they already have from credit cards and other means?

So often, articles calling on “privacy advocates” leave them unnamed — anonymous and private, you understand. The Journal digs up one Katherine Albrecht, “founder of a group called Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering and author of a book called ‘ ">Spychips‘ that argues against RFID technology.” Group? Just how many people go to her meetings? And does the book come with tin-foil underwear? The “group” was founded to oppose grocery-store loyalty cards. Yes, we see the damage they have done to countless lives.

Her own site says that she has “earned her accolades from Advertising Age and Business Week and caused pundits to label her a PR genius.” I dare say. She next got the Journal to swallow her silliness.

Listen, I’m all for privacy. I’m working hard to define it in my book on publicness. I will vigorously defend the need and right to control one’s information. There are plenty of serious and difficult issues to discuss. But this kind of idiocy does not serve the cause. It only finds a spy under every leisure suit. In the long run, it turns the cause of privacy into an object of ridicule. And that’s wrong.

But this is often the case with technology and privacy. Technology spawns fears — and worries these advocates — because it introduces change and it’s really change that they fear. Here’s a tidbit from my manuscript illustrating the point:

* * *

Alan F. Westin, in his influential 1967 book Privacy and Freedom … found many devices to fear: LSD “may greatly affect the individual’s daily personal balance between what he keeps private about himself and what he discloses to those around him” and could again be used for government surveillance. Westin worried about radio pills, miniature transmitters, and even about fluorescent powders and dyes—not to mention radioactive substances—that could be applied to “hands, shoes, clothing, hair, umbrella, and the like, or can be added to such items as soap, after-shave lotion, and hair tonic” to track the unsuspecting person.

Secret, miniature cameras, infrared film, microminiature microphones the size of match-heads, battery-operated tape-recorders, hidden “television-eye” monitoring, telephone tapping, “truth measurement” by polygraph tests, personality testing, brain-wave analysis, dossiers of personal data, and the means to steam open envelopes and measure TV audiences—these all concerned him. He speculated about “invisible magnetic-ink tattoos [that] might be applied (for example, to babies at birth)” and transmitters that could be implanted and “wireless, battery-operated television ‘eyes’ the size of buttons,” not to mention U-2 spy cameras from above as well as the ability to read brain signals.

Westin warned of the dangers of computers. In 1966, he wrote, there were 30,000 computers used in the U.S., 2,600 of them in the federal government. What happens, he asked, when we come to the day when “computers in the field of health will eventually establish total medical profiles on everyone in the country ‘from the hour of birth’ and updated through life. Each record will be almost instantly accessible to medical personnel.” Oh, if only.

Westin listed his fears of technology’s impact on privacy 45 years before you read this. How many of his dreads came to life? Few if any, I’d say. That is not to mock him nor even to diminish his warnings, only to put the fears technology fosters into context as we grapple with the concerns attached to our more-modern sciences.

* * *

LATER: I looked at all the coverage I could find on Google News and I found but one piece that, like me, dared to question the “Cassandras of the privacy movement.” CNBC’s Dennis Kneale wrote:
One day RFID tags will permeate the U.S. and global economies, cutting costs for manufacturers and retailers and letting them better respond to consumer tastes. A whole new stock-sector boom could loom as well, in companies that cash in on this inevitable tech trend.

That is, unless the Privacy Police gets in the way. . . .

Um, so what is it I should fear that Wal-Mart will do with this new data horde showing that I just bought a pair of boxers? (Alright let’s stipulate: We’d be less keen on Wal-Mart’s knowing we just bought Spanx.)

The privacy guys always do this—raise well-intended but fear-provoking possibilities at the advent of most any new, promising technology. It is part of what the 1990s Internet sage, Nicholas Negroponte, called the “demonization of bits.” If a salesperson follows us around a store watching our purchases, fine; but use technology to do it and suddenly it’s Orwellian.

Playing the privacy card seems a bit antiquated in this exhibitionistic era of gleefully revealing your inner-most foibles and fetishes to potentially millions of other equally indiscreet folks on Facebook.

: LATER: RFID Journal blasts “privacy nonsense” around chips.

: UPDATE: The WSJ’s RFID expert believes that the chips are a fulfillment of an end-time biblical prophesy. Did I say wingnuts?

Categories: Buzzmachine