Public Media 2007

I spoke on a panel Friday morning at Public Media 2007, the Interactive Media Association’s annual conference.  The conference brings together the folks from the public broadcasting (radio and TV) communities who are focused on interactive (read: online) communications.  While the public broadcasting community has been an innovator in many ways online, the conference was appropriately focused on figuring out how NPR, PBS, and all their member stations and partner groups could make the leap from being public broadcasters who have operations online to being leaders in the broader public media space, and leveraging technology to do that.

Here is a quick excerpt from the conference overview on what was driving this discussion:

For one thing, all media is taking a digital form and “public service publishing” has expanded dramatically–if you extend the definition of public media to any individual or organization creating and distributing media “in the public interest.”  Technical advances and innovations have eliminated barriers to entry. The cost of audio and video production has spiraled downward. Podcasting and media aggregation sites, where you don’t need a license to distribute audio and video, now reach millions of desktops and iPods.  With ubiquitous blogging software, everybody can be a journalist, a critic, a pundit at a cost of no more than $20 a month. 

The speed of this change has been nothing short of revolutionary.

I sat on a panel entitled “Leveraging Social Networks” which promised to answer the burning question: “How can public broadcasting stations can leverage social networks to increase engagement and build audience?”  The panel was moderated by Vinay Bhagat, the Founder and Chief Strategist of Convio and featured Dick McPherson, a consultant to the public broadcasting community, Heather Holdridge from Care2 and David Woodrow from Gather.com.

I was generally disappointed with how the conversation was framed.  The easy way to think about social networks is to look at the existing technologies in the field and figure out how to use them.  In other words, since MySpace has more than 50 million users, they must be a place we can go looking to engage our audience.  Or, since more than 65,000 videos are uploaded to YouTube every day, we should be uploading our shows because that’s where the marketplace is headed.  There is not enough consideration about why these properties may or may not be valuable and not enough thought about what makes online social networking function successfully.

I kicked things off with a presentation (here is my iMA Presentation) that framed social networking and new media in a broader format.  My point was simply that social interaction online, and social networking more specifically, has been happening for a long time in many different formats — and innovations in technology will only expand on that.  Successful communities are built and fostered online not because of the technology that facilitates the interaction, but rather its the content and experience that people create and share that drives interest.   Public media organizations need to think strategically and creatively about what they produce, how if they want to truly engage their target audience.  I think I resonated with the audience, but honestly am not sure.

Dick McPherson followed me and challenging the audience to focus on specific goals they wanted to achieve online (i.e. build community and membership, not raise money) and broadly about how to creatively execute on those efforts.  Heather and David offered case studies about what works within their networks. 

Now, I do not mean to disrespect either Care2 or Gather.com, both of which I think are terrific organizations and both of whom were well represented by my fellow panelists, but they are only two of the dozens of options currently available to consider.  I am not a big fan of presenting personal case studies on panels because it should be obvious that I would biased towards the things that I have done.  That was the case with both Gather.com and Care2, who have been working with public broadcasting groups to build out social networking efforts.  It just seemed to me that the message of the panel was too much about how public media groups could use those two platforms and succeed.  Maybe they are the best two networks for public media.  Or, maybe the public radio community should be looking at more examples, and more opportunities.  I don’t know, but most people probably left that room thinking about launching Gather.com groups or launching petitions through Care2 and not enough of them were considering all the other venues available to them.

I did make one point at the end that was good, and I think resonated.  A woman in the audience asked for our opinions on how many social networks should a station target and what kinds of resources should they put into the effort.  A good question.  However, in asking the question, she referenced ‘us’ (meaning the station) and ‘them’ (referring to the audience members who would be part of the community).  After everyone else had offered specific answers to her questions, I jumped in, adding something to the effect of: Its very important for you as an organization, for your staff, your talent, whoever, to see themselves as a part of these communities.  You are not separate.  It cannot be us vs. them.  Most likely, the reason that your audience might be intererested in joining and contributing to a community that you organiz is the same reason that you, as a staff person at one of those stations, work so hard to make it successful.  Its about the content, its about the experience, its about your contribution to our society.  If you see yourself as separate from that community instead of as a part of it, you are missing the boat.

I got a lot of nods, and a pat on the back from one of my fellow panelists for making the point.  I probably sounded a little righteous, but maybe that helped get the point across more effectively.  I enjoyed being on the panel and would love to help the public media conversation move forward to where it desperately needs to be, but I am not sure I was able to broaden the perspectives of anyone in attendance with respect to the framing of a conversation about social networking.

Thank you to Teri Lamitie of WGBH in Boston for the invitation.  I very much enjoyed the conversation and I hope that I was able to contribute some interesting thoughts to the discussion.  Please invite me back to do it again.

Citizen Media’s Breakthrough Moment(s)

When we look back and try to identify the breakthrough moment(s) when citizen generated media found its way into the American consciousness, the credentialing of bloggers to cover the perjury trial of Scooter Libby, and the subsequent recognition by traditional media of their efforts, should be right near the top of the list. 

The New York Times profiled the bloggers at firedoglake, the liberal collective that has been providing online coverage of the trial since it began in today’s paper.  There is actually nothing new about bloggers covering trials – there was terrific newspaper blogging of the Enron trials by the Houston Chronicle for example – but the independence of these bloggers has made it very different.  The firedoglake bloggers, and their conservative counterparts, are introducing a whole new perspective and new energy to otherwise traditional coverage. From the article:

Even as they exploit the newest technologies, the Libby trial bloggers are a throwback to a journalistic style of decades ago, when many reporters made no pretense of political neutrality. Compared with the sober, neutral drudges of the establishment press, the bloggers are class clowns and crusaders, satirists and scolds.

“They’re putting in a lot more opinion and a lot more color than the traditional reporters,” said Mr. Cox, adding that the bloggers were challenging “the theory of objective journalism.”

While I think that including independent bloggers in the coverage of federal trials is a tremendous step forward — and a necessary one — for both the legal and news industries, I worry that critics will seize on the fact that the bloggers are partisan (or worse, in the case of firedoglake, liberal) to diminish their contribution.   I also worry that all citizen media will be framed by this one, high-profile situation and that the non-traditional conventions of the contributors to firedoglake (such as nicknaming Vice President Cheney “Shooter”) will give other organization pause when considering granting bloggers full access to cover events in the future.  Everyone, most importantly the traditional media folks (newspapers, TV, radio, and established online journalism sites) should fight these stereotypes with all their energy.

There is such tremendous opportunity for citizen media practitioners (read: people) to provide perspective and color to the coverage of all sorts of events that furthers the cause of journalism and helps to inform society.  The work that firedoglake and others are doing at the Libby trial is just one example of how this can work, but its a great model and a huge step forward for the cause of citizen media.

Presidential Announcements v2.0

I had this really long, eloquent post written about how all the candidates are using the web to launch their political campaigns.  I hit the wrong button and the whole thing was lost.  I won’t try to reconstruct the entire thing, but let me try and summarize a couple of the key points.

John Edwards announced his campaign for the Presidency with a web video.  Barack Obama used a web video a few weeks later to do the same.  And now Hillary Clinton, who announced her intention to run for President on Saturday, has used a video on her Website to break the news.  It seems you can’t be a candidate for President - at least not a Democratic candidate - without launching your campaign on the web.  (Memo to Joe Biden and Bill Richardson, who announced their candidacy’s on the Sunday Morning Talk Shows — you might want to check to make sure your announcement registered at all, or consider posting the video of your appearance on YouTube to make sure people take it seriously).

Both the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post used Senator Clinton’s announcement to analyze the role that the web will play in the upcoming campaign.  The LA Times offers a brief history of the highs and lows of internet campaigns over the past decade, writing:

The Internet’s power both to make and break politicians has been vividly demonstrated in recent years.

In 2004, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean jumped from political obscurity to grab the front-runner’s position in the initial stages of the Democratic race largely on the strength of the interest and fundraising he generated online.

Last year, Sen. George Allen (R-Va.) watched his reelection campaign — and his hopes of emerging as a prime contender for the GOP presidential nomination — go down in flames after a video clip of him addressing a young man of Indian descent as “macaca” made the rounds on the Web.

Barely a factor in campaigning 11 years ago when Clinton’s husband won reelection as president, the Internet has become an integral part of the political landscape, with every major candidate fielding a website and seeking to create a virtual community around his — or her — campaign.

But with the recent advent of YouTube and other video-sharing sites, analysts said the most intriguing aspect of the evolving use of the Web may be as part of an immense game of political “gotcha,” in which campaigns seek to catch opposing candidates off-guard and off-message, as happened to Allen.

By contrast, the Washington Post took more of an editorial stance on what makes for good web video in politics, offering this comparison Clinton, Obama, and Edwards:

Unlike other candidates (coughBarack Obamacough), whose videos might have been produced by a guy with a cellphone camera, Clinton’s announcement was a veritable showpiece of Hollywood-style set design, lighting and cinematography. While Clinton, looking radiant in a red jacket and flattering makeup, affected the demeanor of a kaffe-klatching neighbor while speaking about the Iraq war, energy, Social Security and health care, the camera swung with pen dular subtlety between a background tableaux of framed family pictures and a fabulous table lamp exuding a warm glow. In fact, the background is so eye-catching, so crowded with totemic details, so bursting with semiotic potential, that I missed whole passages of Clinton’s statement the first time around. (And yes, I do want that lamp.)

The effect was one of breathtaking political shrewdness and brilliant staging, like a mash-up between “The West Wing” and Diane Keaton’s latest holiday heartwarmer. And for all its studied spontaneity, its air of having been pre-tested, choreographed, and managed to within a microfiber of Clinton’s mascara, it worked, if only to provide a little eye candy within a grainy sea of canned speeches and awkward iChats. The aesthetic sophistication suited Clinton, who, as a former first lady and a U.S. senator, would look hopelessly out of place in most other contexts (rocking the mom jeans in the Ninth Ward? Uh-uh. Maybe an ornate Senate office, but where’s the zazz in yet another wall of law books?), and the look and the script warmed up a woman portrayed as either an amoral ice queen or control-freaky dragon lady by her political opponents.

Three quick points: First, the novelty of launching a campaign on the web should have worn off a long time ago.  The web is not even close to being the most dynamic vehicle for delivering information anymore, politics has just been slow to embrace what virtually every major consumer brand and entertainment company in the world has been doing for the past five years.  A really nice website, a blog, or even a web video announcement is not enough.  Its time you ran a fully funded, fully supported effort online to promote your campaign - and to engage the audience that chooses to get its information there instead of through traditional news or campaign events (which are still important as well).  Second, announcing your campaign online sets all of our expectations very high that you, as a candidate, will remain committed to using the web.  John Edwards, you have already created behind-the-scenes web videos about yourself, recorded podcast conversations about issues, and similar.  Are you going to keep doing that when you are visiting four states a day - so we can see what really happens to a person when they don’t sleep enough, eat healthy, or have complete control over their message?  Hillary Clinton, you are taking your web efforts to the next level already, inviting the audience to create the first guest blog post to be published on your site and hosting a series of live video chats with the web audience over the coming week.  Are you going to host live web-chats every week, about any topic?  Are you going to take on the large and vocal segment of the online audience who questions your policies, challenges your positions, and even insults you personally — or will your web campaign, like your offline efforts, be so highly managed and controlled that it fails to really engage people?  Finally, the media needs to find a better way to cover and express the value the web plays in this upcoming cycle than how they are currently doing it.  We have all read, time and time again, what a big impact the web is playing and will continue to play in politics.  Its time to assign a full time, daily reporter to cover each campaign’s online efforts.  It is time to hold the campaigns accountable for what they say will be an online, grassroots fueled effort and put the same scrutiny on their web efforts as you do on their fundraising, their television ads, their speeches, and — even in some cases, their clothing.  Just as you have pushed increasing resources into covering traditional news through the online medium, now its time to recognize that the online efforts of a presidential campaign are also news and cover them accordingly.

It should be an exciting couple of years for those of us who live, work, and love the online medium.  I will definitely be watching to see what happens.  I hope the political world realizes the potential that it has to reach and engage the audience before and lives up to its end of the bargain.

Update: I wasn’t totally fair to Bill Richardson.  He has a very nice website (here) and has posted his announcement video to YouTube and other places.  He has a MySpace page, a Facebook profile, etc.  He’s following the new media playbook pretty much to all the way.  We will have to wait and see how that works for him.

Newsiness?

Stephen Colbert appeared on the O’Reilly Factor.  Bill O’Reilly made an appearance on the Colbert Report.  Both happened last night, a few hours apart, in what was billed as a ‘Smackdown’ — the ultimate television news commentator (O’Reilly) finally meeting face to face with the ultimate fictional news commentator (O’Reilly again, just kidding - Colbert), each a caricature of the other.

I didn’t watch.  I was late getting home from work and missed O’Reilly’s show and chose not to stay up late enough to watch Colbert.  I suppose I could have Tivo’d it, but it didn’t seem all that important to me.  Truth be told, while I will watch both Fox and Comedy Central pretty regularly (I am a media junkie, remember, the more information I can consume the better), I get most of my news from the other news networks and I align myself more with the Jon Stewart/Daily Show gang when it comes to that kind of entertainment. 

Fortunately, the news and entertainment media did the watching for me.  A quick Google News search this morning revealed 158 articles about the two swapping appearances.  In truth, there were far fewer unique articles written, but the Google News search shows up all the AP placements and similar (lots of reprinting of this one).  No matter, the coverage is pretty much what you would expect.  The two shows, it sounds like, didn’t quite live up to the billing (though I am sure that super-fans of either O’Reilly or Colbert would say differently).  The funniest moment, as I read it, came during O’Reilly’s appearance on Colbert’s show, described here by Alessandra Stanley in the New York Times.

On Comedy Central, Mr. Colbert suggested that Mr. O’Reilly was a bit of a brawler. Mr. O’Reilly demurred with a joke. “I’m effete,” he protested. “This is all an act.”

Mr. Colbert leaned forward and said in a deep, dramatic voice, “If you’re an act, then what am I?”

My question is this: Is this news, or is it entertainment?  In my print edition of the New York Times, Ms. Stanley’s TV Watch Column appeared on page A16 - in the National News section along side articles about breaking up gang violence in Los Angeles, a nasty and very public row between justices on the Michigan Supreme Court and a host of other serious issues.  In the online version of the Times, the article appears in the Arts section.  It is not uncommmon for the TV Watch column to appear in the main news section — when Ms. Stanley writes about how the State of the Union or some similar political announcement comes across on the tube it gets lumped in with the other national news coverage.  Is the same as coverage of the State of the Union?  After all, nearly all of the non-New York Times coverage seems to have come from entertainment writers like Ms. Stanley — Jake Coyle, the AP’s entertainment reporter, Peter Johnson, who writes the Media Mix column of USA Today, etc.  I haven’t seen where any of those columns appear in the print versions of their respective papers.There is one article by the staff of Editor & Publisher, a group that covers the news media exclusively, but only one so far. 

Two thoughts:  First, the reason this is getting so much coverage, I think, is because the media wants to shed some of its guilt about how much of an entertainment enterprise it has become and how far away from true journalism it has stayed.  They have decided to place the blame on the over-sized ego of Bill O’Reilly and the over-sized fictional ego of Stephen Colbert.  Think about it — both Colbert and O’Reilly are public figures who report on happenings from around the world on their respective shows, and what they say impacts how the rest of the world views those issues.  That makes them part of the news industry. Still, while many people argue that O’Reilly presents hard news and Colbert presents a fictional version of it, in reality, both O’Reilly and Colbert do the same thing – deliver the news to their audience with an extra dose of their own personality added for effect.  Some would argue that the only reason Colbert’s audience gets the news is because of how he presents it - and the same argument could be made about O’Reilly.  That makes them entertainers.  Entertainers aren’t bad, but can they present the news?  Journalists aren’t evil either, but are they entertaining?

Second, I actually believe that the New York Times’ coverage of this event – and more to the point, where they placed it in the print edition – says a lot about the future of media, in a good way.   Alessandra Stanley is a journalist and did in fact report on the meeting of these two television personalities as a news event.  Just because this particular news event is born out of an entertainment focus doesn’t make it any less news — or at least that is no longer for someone like the New York Times to decide.  Her contribution to the Times is just as important as that of Adam Nagourney, and in many ways equally influential when it comes to how the public reads and responds to it.  The placing of the TV Watch column in the main section of the paper is an acknowledgement by the Times that the lines between different types of news  content are now permanently blurred — the audience doesn’t see a difference, so the paper shouldn’t either.  I only wish the New York Times had put the article in the national news section online as well.

The Future of Newspapers

I have been thinking a lot about the future of newspapers lately. 

The topic is not a new one - the various threats to print newspapers have been debated publicly in media and technology circles for several years now (and probably for quite some time out of the public’s view).  Despite numerous articles, conventions, discussions and predictions, I don’t think that much has been decided or even made more clear in that time.  I certainly have more questions than answers.  I don’t think anybody really knows what is going to happen.

A full discussion of the future of newspapers would take up more than one post, and would need to include people with far greater knowledge and perspective on the subject than I have to offer.  That never stops me from offering my opinion though.  And while I will try to organize my thoughts more clearly in the future, and invite friends and colleagues who work in the newspaper business to weigh in, for now I just I wanted to share a couple of recent articles about this debate that I thought were really interesting.

First, The Week magazine, writes about The Decline of the American Newspaper.  The article is a well organized summary of the current state of newspapers - with a little bit of editorial perspective to round things out.  For someone who is new to this debate, or just needs a refresher, the article is organized around seven key questions about the newspaper industry.  The questions include:

1. Why are newspapers in deep trouble? 
2. Where did the readers go? 
3. What’s the problem? 
4. What is the newspaper doing about all this? 
5. Is that strategy succeeding? 
6. So are newspapers going broke? 
7. Can anything be done?

For me, the future of newspapers has to include some localization of content and expertise.  I am an avid newspaper reader and nothing bothers me more than the AP-ification of the world’s information, when all the articles pull from the same sources and not a single bit of additional perspective is added.  Don’t get me wrong, the AP provides a valuable service and I use it regularly to keep track of events happening around the globe.  But I don’t consider that to be the true value that newspapers can provide.  According to The Week, I’m not alone in thinking this:

Publishers are experimenting with generating several versions of the paper to target various market segments, such as young people. Some may start giving away their papers free, relying entirely on advertising revenue. One school of thought is that newspapers should become “hyper-local,” focusing intensely on community news not available on the Web or TV. But most industry experts believe that the era of print newspapers is nearing its end. Newspapers, says media analyst Ken Marlin, “have to either adapt to the new economics, or die.”

Next up is “A modest proposal for reinventing newspapers for the digital age” by Michael Hirschorn in The Atlantic Monthly.  The article begins with an overview of, EPIC 2014 (now apparently updated to EPIC 2015) an online movie that predicts the future of the media that results from technological innovation (or assimilation as the case may be) and continues through a discussion of the various models that newspapers might try to integrate to become profitable.  Hirschorn settles on this recommendation/thought:

The current Web-publishing model that newspapers are using isn’t likely to become financially viable anytime soon. With few exceptions, the media businesses thriving on the Web either are low-cost blog-like efforts or follow a many-to-many model, in which communities create, share, and consume content. Publishing an article on the Web gets you one click; getting your users to write the article for you gets you a thousand clicks, and costs less to boot. In other words, turning your users into contributors increases their engagement with your site—each click is, after all, also an “ad impression”—while simultaneously generating more content that you in turn can sell to advertisers.

Now we’re talking!

Last on the article list for this post is Michael Wolff’s Billionaires and Broasheets in this month’s Vanity Fair, a look at the recent push by various moguls to buy into the print newspaper business.  Wolff alludes to most of the reasons I can imagine a billionaire would want to buy a newspaper - boredom (as might be the case with Jack Welch who is rumored to be interested in buying the Globe), frustration with the perspectives of the editorial board on an issue that is close to them personally (as is the case with Hank Greenberg, who is rumored to be interested in buying the New York Times), or maybe even ego (as is the case with Ron Burkle and Eli Broad, who are rumored to be interested in the LA Times and who probably think their investment and management savvy might be able to reshape the media biz).  For what its worth, Wolff’s contribution to the debate is summarized at the end of his article as follows:

Of course, the Internet is a bitch. On the other hand, the Internet is an inefficient way for a big man to throw his weight around. A newspaper really is the much more effective bully pulpit.

What’s more, given a host of new papers—The Daily Geffen, The Welch Globe, The Greenberg Times, The Broad Journal, The Burkle Shopper—freed from the deadening template of the people who theoretically know how to run newspapers, maybe the people who know nothing at all about newspapers will stumble onto something that makes them shout and sing (Eli Broad recently offered that it might be a good idea if the L.A. Times had more pictures of donors at charity events … well … maybe).

Anyway, now is not the time to worry about the unknown. The unknown is the only hope. Make the deal.

I don’t know yet what the future of media looks like - I’m working on figuring that out right now.  I don’t believe that the demise of newspapers will come any time soon, and I don’t see that takeover of journalism by faceless and emotionless technology (as is suggested by EPIC) will be realized any sooner.  I know that profitability is the chief concern of any business, and as long as journalism is considered a business (instead of say an art, or a public service) then groups like the New York Times and the Tribune Company will look for ways to monetize their coverage of world events.  My hope is that someone in the middle of this debate will realize that one of, if not the primary value, that newspapers have always offered to the public is editorial perspective and journalistic excellence — a way to help all of us who consume news on a mass scale to understand what is relevant, important, and why.  That seems to have gotten lost in this debate, and in our news industry today as a whole, and needs to return to both.

The Times They Are A Changin’

Monday is the day when the media covers the media.  And yesterday did not disappoint.  What was making news?  Here is just a sampling:

- Time Magazine was delivered to newsstands on Friday and by Monday the industry was in a full fledged twitter.  The magazine is much thinner and puts a heavier emphasis than ever before on hard-core reporting and high-profile authors.  Gone are the days when Time tries to be everything to all people it seems.  As Richard Stengel, the managing editor explained it to readers in a letter that appeared in the latest issue, the new publication date “reflects the way the Internet is affecting pretty much everything about the news business.”  He notes:

The most immediate change is right in front of you. The issue you are holding in your hands — or perhaps you’re reading this online — is the first issue of TIME with our new on-sale day, Friday. In fact, it’s the first copy of TIME magazine to go on sale on Friday in more than 50 years. We’ve moved our publication schedule because the news environment has shifted and because we’ve been listening to you. Over and over, we’ve heard from subscribers that they get the magazine early in the week and then put it aside to read on the weekend. The solution was pretty simple: let’s get you the magazine on the weekend when you want it.

At the same time, I believe that getting the magazine on newsstands on Friday helps us set the news agenda, not just mirror it. The traditional newsmagazine was retrospective, looking back at what happened the previous week. But today’s TIME is much more forward-looking, offering you guidance on what’s essential to know going forward. Many news sources give you information; we provide knowledge and meaning.

You can read more here, here, and here.

- Kit Seelye writes in the New York Times about how Washington Bureaus for major print news organizations are shrinking.  She writes “Faced with declining advertising revenues and competition from the Web, midsize, regional dailies across the country have been retrenching in recent years to focus on local news. That has scaled back their Washington coverage, and their national ambitions.”

- In another story by Kit Seelye, the curtain is pulled back at The Politico, the new hard-core political news organization led by former Washington Post writers Jim VanderHei and John Harris (more recently a contributor to Time) and graced with the talents of columnists like Roger Simon.  According to Seelye, “The Politico is planning its own regular half-hour program on Allbritton’s 24-hour cable news service, Channel 8, which reaches 1.1 million viewers in the region. Its reporters are to appear on CBS News programs. And The Politico is planning a five-minute daily segment in the late afternoon on WTOP, Washington’s all-news radio station.”  Does this signal some kind of major change in political news coverage - or the media industy all together?  The article suggests it might, though it gives the doubters their due as well:

If The Politico succeeds, it could signal that the Web has become a more plausible alternative for mainstream journalists. (Most bloggers offer their Web logs free, and rare is the site that pays reporters to create original content.) But there are skeptics who say that the focus of The Politico is too narrow and that the marketplace too crowded with sources of political news, from sites like RealClearPolitics.com to scores of other publications, including newspapers and their Web sites. Partisans, especially, feast on sites that affirm their views; The Politico says it will be nonpartisan.

What I find most interesting is that this whole discussion about the shift in the media, political or otherwise, is coming the same week that the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is taking place out in Las Vegas.  CES is the glitzy, crazy party of the year for gadget junkies as well as the platform that every major technology company in the world uses to launch their new initiatives.  What are people talking about at CES this week?  Based on the coverage I have read, 2007 will be the year of the networked consumer — in other words, it is the year that the industry will finally figure out that different people have different preferences when it comes to getting, sharing, and experiencing information and deliver the technologies and services to satisfy the demand.  Rather than try to force one format on people, technology folks are promoting devices, and services, that do it all.  The consumer will have their choice of content and method of delivery (they always have really), but more importantly, the variety and the quality of the experience will finally begin to rise to meet expectations. 

The changes at Time Magazine and the launch of The Politico reflect a recognition by those in journalism that people don’t get their news one way anymore.  Its not a run and hide strategy that suggests people aren’t interested in the news, or aren’t satisfied with the quality of the content (though that may come in time) - its a evolution of both the delivery method and the content strategy to adapt to changing times.  By contrast, the shrinking of the Washington Bureaus does the opposite - it will further limit the choices that consumers have when it comes to news and will serve only to increase frustration.  As distribution methods become more micro-focused and consumers are able to pick what information they want to receive, when, and how, the media companies that pulled their reporters should be doing the opposite — hiring more, training better, and assigning differently so that more things are covered, more thoughtful insights are provided, and more options exist for people to consume the news they find most interesting or relevant.

Puzzles vs. Mysteries

Malcolm Gladwell has an interesting piece in this week’s New Yorker magazine about the difference between puzzles and mysteries.  To solve a puzzle, Gladwell says, the challenge is to figure out what information is missing so that you can determine the answer.  To solve a mystery, by contrast, you generally have all the information available to you, so the challenge becomes to understand what the information actually means.  He writes:

If things go wrong with a puzzle, identifying the culprit is easy: it’s the person who withheld information. Mysteries, though, are a lot murkier: sometimes the information we’ve been given is inadequate, and sometimes we aren’t very smart about making sense of what we’ve been given, and sometimes the question itself cannot be answered. Puzzles come to satisfying conclusions. Mysteries often don’t.

Gladwell’s article calls the collapse of Enron a mystery (despite the conviction of former head, Jeffrey Skilling, for withholding information from shareholders) because the company’s routine financial disclosures provided all the evidence necessary to predict that something was not right.  Why didn’t anyone catch them until too late?  Because nobody knew really what they were supposed to be looking for.  He also described the efforts of a small group of American security/intelligence analysts whose job was to listen to the overseas and domestic propaganda broadcasts of Japan and Germany during WWII.  Again, all the information was readily available to them, but their success was in determing what the public pronouncements of the world’s most dangerous cheats and liars meant in terms of military secrets and war strategy.

Its an interesting read, as most Malcolm Gladwell articles are, and challenges anyone trying to figure something out tp question what the real challenge is.  Do you have all the information, or are critical pieces still missing?  If you have all the information, what does it mean?  I will never look at a puzzle, or a mystery, in the same way again.

Update: Joe Nocera has an op-ed in Saturday’s New York Times entitled “Tipping Over a Defense of Enron.”  The piece claims that Gladwell’s argument about the Enron defense “isn’t remotely true.”  (Times Select required)

SRI In the Rockies: The Big Picture

I spent the weekend in Colorado Springs, CO attending SRI in the Rockies, the annual gathering of the socially responsible investment industry in the United States.  I was there to participate in a panel about online marketing and host a topic table at lunch on the same topic.  I also had an opportunity to attend some of the speeches and sessions — and learned some new things about climate change its impact on disease, micro-finance and, perhaps most interestingly, the future of the internet.

Bob Veres, an author, speaker, and one of the most influential people in the financial services industry (socially responsible or otherwise) gave a talk entitled ‘’The Next Society.’  The focus of his talk was how the world of sustainable investments has changed, and continues to evolve, and how the world is now following the lead of SRI - for the better.  He noted that a decade ago, social screens were seen as a depressant on fund performance while today, social screens are the very best way to evaluate corporate character and avoid surprises in your portfolio. 

Then he launched into a commentary on the changing nature of communications and how it relates to the tough work of changing the world.  Here are my (rough) notes:

- The media industry is in crisis.  Stories are covered and then disappear.  Stories are covered by people who don’t know much about the subject and who have a very short attention span.  The future of news will be an environment where you can access a lot more information, a lot better information, from people who know a lot more than reporters.  And it will make everything more focused, more meaningful, and more actionable.

- The web has created a hostile world for advertising.  As we move towards the web as a content delivery vehicle, corporate america will not be able to artificially create demand for their products and services.  It is harder and harder for advertisers to gain interest and traction.  That is why TV advertising is suffering and that is why the future of communications will be information/content-centric, and not marketer driven.

- We are experiencing the death of the consumer economic system.  Why?  It doesn’t relate to the issues that people actually care about most.  That has also given rise to the concept of “Life Planning.”  People are finding they don’t want more stuff.  They want more fulfillment from their lives.  How do they know? 

Ask yourself, if you had one day left to live, what would be your biggest regret?  Write down 30 goals you want to achieve this year (the first ten will be easy, the second ten more difficult, the third ten will make you did deep).  If you had all the money in the world, what would you want to do?   

- How can we change the world?  He offered two directives:

1) Operate in your zone of personal genius.  Imagine a circle, with a circle inside that, and a circle in side that.  At the center of that innermost circle is a  blue dot that represents your greatest energy, focus, and passion.  That is where we must all operate - get rid of the distractions and just work within our blue dot.

2) Hire a coach to help you get there.  They will help you put aside all of the work you do for others and help you focus on just what you need.  The coach will nag you because they will present your own goals back to you in such a compelling way that you will do for them what you can’t seem to find a way to do for yourself.

- The way we work is changing.  You are going to see most of the world’s work being done by ad hoc teams who are experts in their field and who are operating within their blue dot.  You will see corporations (who right now have office buildings filled with generalists and inefficient information flow based in hierarchy not expertise) “melt like sugar cubes in the rain.” The people who own the assets will control them - you won’t need marketers, etc.

- The internet will become the superconductor of human and financial capital.
The speech made me think.  Not sure quite yet what it all means, but rarely does a conference speech make me think like this one did, so that must mean something.

Shut Up & Run the Ads

I wrote a post yesterday discussing the marketing efforts behind Shut Up & Sing, the new documentary about the Dixie Chicks and their criticism of President Bush.  You didn’t see it?  Nobody did.  My computer froze up and I lost the text before I was able to put it up online.  Too bad — when I wrote it yesterday morning, this was a small story and my analysis looked really solid.  Now its a big story and I am late to the conversation.  Alas.

So what are people talking about?

The documentary tracks the fallout that resulted after lead singer, Natalie Maines, said she was “ashamed” that President Bush was from Texas, the Chicks’ home state.  The comment prompted a boycott of the Chicks’ music by conservatives and opened up a discussion about freedom of speech among scholars and those in the music industry.  Time passed, things died down.  But now, the documentary has brought the controversy back to the fore — and with a new twist.

A handful of media venues have refused to run advertising promoting the movie.  The LA Times covered it yesterday.  There was a story on NPR’s Weekend Edition this morning.  And the Washington Post summed it up this way:

It all started earlier this week when Weinstein submitted ads for its new Barbara Kopple documentary “Shut Up & Sing” to the broadcast networks for review by their standards and practices departments.

NBC said it “cannot accept these spots as they are disparaging to President Bush.”

CW said it “does not have appropriate programming in which to schedule this spot.”

Weinstein said: “Eureka!”

And on Thursday evening, it sent out a news release headlined:

“In an Ironic Twist of Events, NBC and the CW Television Networks Refuse to Air Ads for Documentary Focusing on Freedom of Speech.”

“It’s a sad commentary about the level of fear in our society that a movie about a group of courageous entertainers who were blacklisted for exercising their right of free speech is now itself being blacklisted by corporate America,” bemoaned Weinstein Co. co-chairman Harvey Weinstein.

“The idea that anyone should be penalized for criticizing the president is sad and profoundly un-American,” he added.

As I see it, this hubub was not only anticipated by Harvey Weinstein and his team, it was a key part of their promotional strategy.  How else would you get coverage for a small-budget documentary film in today’s big-budget Hollywood movie promotion craziness?  We have a very tense election cycle coming to an end just two weeks from now, and a national media that is feasting on any criticism of the war, or the President, they can find.  All you had to do was light the fire. 

Of course, now the networks are in a no-win situation now — if they don’t run the ads, the press continues to cover the story (helping the movie gain traction, and the stations look selectively moral), and if they do run the ads, they look like they caved.  I think they should run the ads - networks would benefit greatly by becoming a part of the political dialogue and letting the population decide on its own.  Be fair, show ads promoting and criticizing the movie if that opportunity exists, but don’t limit one perspective from being heard because you are afraid of your audience.

Give credit to Weinstein and Co. for recognizing the opportunity to use the news cycle to promote their movie.  It is not a new strategy — MoveOn got into a similar fight with CBS around the Super Bowl a couple of years ago, and I have had clients whose online ads that venues have refused to run because of an arbitrary content standard.  In both cases press coverage resulted and the message ultimately got to the target audience. I don’t think it will work for any movie or event, but its a strategy that more organizations should understand and pursue.

At the Citizen Media Unconference

I am at the Citizen Media UnConference in Cambridge, MA today.

What does the unconference mean?
We are the panel.  The thought is that the collective intelligence in the room far exceeds what anyone could put onto a panel.  The opportunity is to learn what the audience knows and give us an opportunity to interact with each other.

That said, the agenda (full of moderators) is as follows:

• Lisa Williams, who runs H20Town, a local blog covering Watertown, MA, will organize a conversation about local sites and how they work best.
• Andrew Lih, a major Wikipedian and former Columbia and Honk Kong University new media professor, will organize a conversation about what would be the ideal toolset for citizen journalism and what is missing.
• Steve Garfield, a top videoblogger, on using multimedia tools for better citizen journalism. Here’s his summary of what he plans to cover.
• Tom Stites, whose recent speech on media and democracy has raised such interest, on how (and if) citizen journalists can fill the enormous gaps being left by traditional media organizations.
• Phil Malone, co-director of the Clinical Program in Cyberlaw at Harvard Law School, will lead a conversation about citizen journalists and the law, including seeking to better understand areas in which the activities of citizen journalists are being chilled by legal concerns and ways in which they could benefit most from help in avoiding legal trouble.  

And rounding things out…

• Ethan Zuckerman, co-founder of Global Voices Online, which helps “amplify, curate and aggregate the global conversation online.” Ethan will lead a discussion on how citizen media people can make themselves heard amid all the online noise. AbovetheNoise session description…

In betweeen we’ll have some brainstorming sessions, a ‘role model’ lightning round, etc.

I will post my notes as often as possible.  Doc Searls is live-blogging the event if you want to follow along.