Posts from December 2007

Wishful thinking

December 18, 2007 by Jeff Jarvis
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I was shocked by the willful naivete of yesterday’s New York Times editorial decrying media deregulation. Engrave this line on their tombstone:

The strategic challenge for newspapers is not cutting costs, but how to attract a larger share of online advertising and make money off the millions of people who read them free online.

They wish.

That has long been the cry of editors of papers including the Times: preserving their newsrooms as they operate now, protecting their ways. But they keep ignoring the obvious fact that most newspapers operated as uniquely profitable media monopolies but those days are clearly over. The internet is a highly competitive market where prices and margins simply will not match print — though audience size is greater. They also keep ignoring the obvious opportunities presented by the networked internet to operate more efficiently and also more broadly (start here and here as well as here). Finally, they keep ignoring the opportunities of crossing media, which leads to the next red herring from the Times as it argues against merging local newspapers and broadcasters:

For all the technological advances that have shaken American media over the last 30 years, remarkably little has changed about who produces the local news. Internet outlets repurpose and comment on the news. A few cable channels provide national news. But in many small and even medium-sized cities there are only two entities that put money into local news-gathering: the local newspapers and the TV stations.

Oh, come on. Local TV stations may put money into local news — and pull money out of it — but they don’t put real reporting into it. Newspapers like the Times used to sniff at local TV news the way they sniff today at blogs: They have long been repurposers, recyclers; they’re not even commenters. Imagine the possibilities of a print newsroom that follows the Rosenblum method of empowering every reporter to shoot video stories — and shoot them in new ways. What if that became the basis of the local TV news? What if instead of four crews on the ground in with expensive satellite trucks you had the hundred reporters of a formerly print newsroom all gathering news across media with small and inexpensive cameras? What if you had real reporting, real stories, not just reading out loud on cold streetcorners (‘police this morning are….’)? I’d start watching local TV news again (oh, it’s on in my house, but that doesn’t mean there’s anything to watch). There’s a benefit of combining, of finding new ways to do things, a benefit for the newspaper, the broadcaster, and the public. Oh, yes, and they can do all these things on the internet, too, proving that it is more than a place to repurpose and comment.

Here’s another herring in this barrel:

But you don’t get one healthy media company by combining two sick ones.

Really? Mergers are, of course, a way to create stronger companies out of weaker ones, otherwise no one would merge or acquire; old companies would just die. Certainly adding a healthy P&L to a struggling one is one way to help the struggling company. Why else did the Times buy About.com, which is just about the only bright spot in its P&L. (Disclosure: I used to consult at About.) But I guess the Times knows what it’s talking about here: It’ learned from the company’s purchase of the ever-sicklier Boston Globe. Not all acquisitions need to be so dumb, though.

One more bullet, one more fish:

Mr. Martin’s plan, moreover, could dangerously reduce media diversity. Not only would the mergers allowed under the rule change eliminate independent voices, but they also might crowd rivals out of the news business. A study of F.C.C. data by consumer groups indicated that less news is broadcast in cities where companies have been granted waivers to the rules to allow them to own both newspapers and broadcasters.

Diversity of voices? What, happy talk voices? There’s no perspective from the community on the 5 p.m. news; the people reading it all came from elsewhere on their way to elsewhere. I could well imagine how that show could have more voices — start with giving some of those cheap cameras out to people in that community. But today, there’s no media diversity because media are homogenized, purposely bland, cherishing sameness, dreading change. You want diversity? Go to that dreaded internet thing, there you’ll find more diversity than the Times can bear.

Oh, and by the way, does New York have less news because it has cross-ownership (and doesn’t the Times Company have a dog in that fight, one it doesn’t mention in the editorial: The NY Post and its WYNY, not to mention the Times’ WQXR)? Does Chicago? Did San Francisco?

Now I happen to agree with the Times about the point of its editorial: FCC Chairman Kevin Martin’s plans for media consolidation are half-assed. We just disagree about what should be done about it. I say he should open up the media marketplace. But, of course, the Times doesn’t want that. It wants protection. It wants sameness. It wants to preserve its ways.

Remember that the editorial page at the Times reports not to the newsroom but to the publisher’s office and then consider this a window onto its strategy or lack thereof. If I owned Times stock and if I hadn’t sold ages ago, I’d be selling now.

LATER: I’ve thought better of that last night. It was wrong and unproductive — to much the old us-v-them mindset. So I retract and apologize for it. Journalism and Times journalism are worth investment. I hope the investment is spent wisely. We need that.

Post-text?

December 17, 2007 by Jeff Jarvis
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I wouldn’t go so far as to say that we’re headed for a post-text era, but here are some indications that — according to some — text will decline as we are able to talk instead: to cameras, to each other, and to machines.

I’ve been listening to Jeff Gomez’ Print is Dead (the fact that I’m listening instead of reading is not, itself, intended to be a commentary… but maybe it is…). When faced with fears that we are becoming a post-literate society of nonreaders (see below), Gomez makes the arguments I do: That we still do read, more than ever, it may just not be so much in the forms we used to; that is, reading online is still reading. But now I see two predictions that reading online will also decline.

Robert Feinman says in this comment that video is taking over:

I think this was the year where video replaced words as the most popular way for people to express themselves online. This fits with my feeling that we are entering the post-literate age. Youngsters have little interest in reading or writing, but understand all the nuances of the visual language used in TV and film. YouTube may be the next place to be.

Now add this prediction from today’s Times about the impact of much faster processing on our communication with machines:

Microsoft executives argue that such an advance would herald the advent of a class of consumer and office-oriented programs that could end the keyboard-and-mouse computing era by allowing even hand-held devices to see, listen, speak and make complex real-world decisions — in the process, transforming computers from tools into companions.

I’m not ready to declare text dead or our intelligence ruined because of it. I don’t see one medium as inherently inferior to another — that is, a movie can be a great way to tell a story and a book is not, our snobbishness about print aside, necessarily better. Still, I take the point that these changes do move us past text and that will have many reverberations, some good, some not.

The year

December 17, 2007 by Jeff Jarvis

Here’s my year-in-review piece for Media Guardian. The lede: “Never mind websites. Forget page views. They’re so 2006. This was the year of Facebook.” The kicker: “This may have been Facebook’s year. But so far, it is still Google’s century.”

Oops

December 16, 2007 by Jeff Jarvis

If you saw a post about the YouTube campaign flash by on this page or your RSS, it was a mistake I too often make: I meant to post to Prezvid, where it now is. Just letting you know that you’re not going crazy, I am.

Extreme storytelling

December 16, 2007 by Jeff Jarvis
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Go right now to see Jonathan Harris’ experiment in storytelling: an Alaskan whale hunt. Jonathan took photos at least every 5 minutes for the week of the tale, which itself is a unique means of using the camera to capture the story, freeze-drying moments instead of memories. Then he returned and created a stunning interface to display his 3,214 photos — many of them stunning — enabling you to explore by time, by image, by adrenalin (how many photos he took in a given scene, mimicking his heartbeat), by characters, and by concept tags (for example, blood). I dabbled at first, poking my head into the story here and there, randomly or by tags. But then I had to watch the whole thing. So I recommend heartily that you go over and explore yourself.

The Whale Hunt

I haven’t decided yet what I think about the form. There’s no question that it is compelling, engrossing, informative, entertaining, beautiful. It’s an unqualified success. What I don’t know is how this translates — or should translate — into other stories. Newspaper online sites tend to use slideshows too much, just because the internet lets them. I have no doubt that Jonathan’s work will spread around that world and photo editors and online producers everywhere will trip over themselves to mimic it. My son Jake suggests that Jonathan open this up as a platform.

But this was a special story, an extreme story; that’s one reason why Jonathan picked it. He says in his statement that he wanted an “epic personal experience” to translate onto the internet. He also wanted to mimic the cadence of computers gathering and displaying data, since he forces them to do that with his online work. “I was interested in reaching some degree of empathy with the computer, a constant thankless helper in my work,” he says, which may be going an inch too far, but I think what he means is that this will give him an even better understanding of how machines can help tell stories.

What I’m trying to say, I guess, is that what others should learn and copy from this is not the form but the motive: the effort to innovate, to find stories that demand experimentation. Please don’t give us 3,214 photos from the frozen north of New Hampshire during the primary. Please don’t. But do think about what new ways stories can be told now that we no longer are forced to choose one medium or another.

An everyday view:

So far, video is being used online mostly to tell a complete story: here’s the story in text, there’s the story in video (or there’s a slideshow or a podcast or a Flash thingie). The video is almost always a packaged piece, self-standing. It wants to be television. In some cases, that’s fine. But there is no reason that video could not be used, as photos are in print, as part of the narrative, as moving pictures. I began to learn that on Prezvid, where the videos are very much the heart of the story and our text is merely commentary or context. So you could start with a paragraph of text and then comes video to illustrate or report a point and that video need not be a produced piece but could merely be a snippet that demonstrates a point better than words can (rather than saying the candidate was angry, you can show her anger and let her be heard). And then comes more text, then a photo, then a graphic, then text, with links and updates and corrections and tags throughout. Ideally, each element can have a permalink so others may link and add to the story; each element can also expose links and commentary from others if you want. You get the idea: a story need not be a galley of type or a packaged sequence of images. It can be an appropriate mix of both now.

This, in turn, has an impact on the story gathering, which I see as the real the point of Jonathan’s exercise. At a more mundane level, this is why I want to see reporters take video cameras with them as notebooks (as my friend Michael Rosenblum says) so they can capture and share that moment of the angry candidate. That is different from them setting out to tell a story in video; then the appropriate use of the tool is more focused, more about gathering the story selectively. It depends on the story and how you want to tell it and how your public can best use and interact with it.

This is why I shake my head when I hear journalists complain that making them take video or photos or audio is forcing them to do extra work, to tell the story more than once. No, it is about gathering the means to tell the story in any appropriate medium, mixing those media in one narrative, because we finally can. That is why, at CUNY, we insist on teaching all these tools to everyone.

And that’s why I admire Jonathan’s spirit of experimentation. I was lucky to work with him at the start of Daylife, where I marveled at his genius for mixing news gathering, data, analysis, media, presentation, interface, and programming. He could do it all and do it all brilliantly. His other experiments include 10×10, We Feel Fine, and Universe.

The online news business thinks it needs more Adrian Holovatys, and well it does, for he understands how data and news can become one. It also needs more Jonathan Harrises, who understand how newsgathering and narrative can change. It needs to find ways to support their talents and learn from it. (Hint: The Knight Foundation gave Holovaty a grant to start a new data-news company. I’d give Harris commissions to find new ways to find and tell stories.) But first, go watch the hunt.

Denton goes to the bench

December 14, 2007 by Jeff Jarvis
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Back in history, my children, when Nick Denton hired Elizabeth Spiers to be the first Gawker, he declared, to me anyway, that he didn’t want journalists, tainted as they were by their old ways. Well, note now his hiring notice at Gawker. Now he’s seeing someone with “at least two years of experience as a reporter at a daily or weekly newspaper, covering either crime news, business, or media and culture (yes, a print background is an advantage).” But he adds another requirement: “A reporter who appreciates the discipline of newspaper traditions, but chafes under them.”

There’s a sea change in that. Gawker and all blogs could make a go of it at first just commenting, but as Nick points out in his posting, there is a value in original reporting: “But the web–other blogs, search engines and social network sites–increasingly rewards original items.” So the two worlds do converge.

But that doesn’t mean Nick is doing things the classical way, or only that way; there’ll be no 5,000-word takeouts and weeks-long task force projects, he says. Here he’s putting out his formula for what we’ve called half-baked items, which he explained at the Murdoch newspaper confab we both attended as a blogging reporter saying to his audience, “Here’s what I know. Here’s what I don’t know. What do you know?”

At its most elevated, the new Gawker hire may experiment with a new form of reporting, unique to online, in which ideas are floated, appeals made to the readers, and the story assembled over the course of several items, from speculation, and tips from users.

I’ll take all the fun out of that, as perfessors do, and label that networked journalism.

(via Adrian Monck. Disclosure: I’m a friend of Nick’s and was on the board of his last company, Moreover.)

Blogger is journalist of the year

December 14, 2007 by Jeff Jarvis
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Medium, a media magazine in Germany, just named a blogger, Stefan Niggemeier, as journalist — yes, journalist — of the year because of BildBlog, which follows, criticizes, and dogs the huge tabloid newspaper in Germany, Bild. Just to give you a flavor that translates easily, here’s a post about a picture that ran in Bild, supposedly of a Turkish prison cell, when readers noticed the similarity to a picture of a cell at Alcatraz — note that moment of networked media criticism. I don’t know enough about the German media society, but I suspect this award could be as much about antipathy toward Bild as admiration of BildBlog. And I suppose this could only fuel the fires of blogs-v-MSM (which I keep trying to douse). Still, I think it’s a positive sign that a blogger is recognized not only as a journalist but as the journalist of the year. (via Martin Stabe)

As lost on TV

December 13, 2007 by Jeff Jarvis
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Two and a half years ago, I wrote a post using the shrinkage of TV Guide (a slow fall from 17 to 3 million circulation, from more than 100 editions to one or two) as a cautionary tale. Beware the cash cow in the coal mine, I said — the money machine that blinds you to the strategic imperative for change.

Well, that cow’s come home. As Paid Content summarizes a Wall Street Journal calculation, News Corp. lost about $7 billion on the quaint old relic, now being sold to Macrovision. Most of that was lost at the hands of John Malone (not uncommon in dealing with him). The Journal concludes:

But in gross terms, Mr. Murdoch looks to have paid $1.6 billion — after selling the magazines in 1991 and receiving cash from Mr. Malone in 2000 — for the first half of his Gemstar stake. He paid $6 billion in News Corp. stock for the other half. That is nearly $8 billion for an investment valued at $1 billion today.

Now, of course, that doesn’t calculate all the profits — the cash — that News Corp. and its partners were able to milk from ol’ Bessie before sending her to the dog-food factory. But then, that’s also the point: it was that cash that was blinding.

I repeat: There is a lesson here for every media company. Oh, yes, the cash may still be coming in. But what’s happening to the true value of your asset? What are you doing to make the bridge to the future? How much of that cash are you investing in innovation? Should you get rid of it now? Is it better to hold onto the old asset and its cash or cash out and invest in something new?

(Disclosure: I was TV critic at TV Guide in the ’90s.)