Posts from May 2009

The bigger MP scandal story

May 20, 2009 by Jeff Jarvis
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I don’t think the U.K. scandal around MPs skimming tax dollars through their expenses has been getting nearly enough coverage here in the U.S. That’s not just because it is already causing political upheaval over there. It is also because this storm will surely lead to greater transparency and oversight of legislative expenses and actions there — and we will have a lot to learn about how to force the same to happen here.

I believe that in the new ecosystem of news that will replace the old singular, centralized companies and products, government transparency will have to play a big part. We, the people, will demand that the actions and information of government be searchable and linkable. When that happens, there will be millions more watchful eyes on government, finding stories that journalists of many stripes can then report.

The MP scandal in Britain is opening up a crack in the wall around Parliament, a start in an inexorable trend toward transparency, and is causing a profound discussion about changing government. If we – in media and blogs – were paying more attention to it over here, I believe – well, hope – that it would spark more discussion we must have about transparency and remake government.

I think it would also cause a journalistic discussion about how the Telegraph has made a mark with this story and how data is (are) news.

The journalism bubble

May 20, 2009 by Jeff Jarvis
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When I decided to go into the news business, we took a vow of poverty, or at least acknowledged that we’d never be rich. I chose not to go to law school and instead transferred to j-school and did so in the full awareness that I’d never be well-paid.

Wrong. I ended up being very well-paid because I worked in news in the last gasp of its century-longer monopoly bubble, which ironically came to a climax at the same time as the short-lived tech bubble. Before 2001, metro newspapers still made tens of millions of dollars in each of the classifieds categories, plus retail, plus circulation revenue. Magazines were still blockbuster businesses worth risking tens, even hundreds of millions of dollars to launch. TV will still a star medium where so-called talent was worth big money.

Journalists ended up with a severely inflated view of their own value. It was a bubble that has now burst. That is why they are barking so loudly against the wind of change. Change isn’t just taking away jobs, it’s taking away great jobs: visible, self-important, well-paying, once-secure. Damnit, it’s ruining a good thing.

Media economist Robert Picard poked a pin to that bubble – after it was deflated; this is a case of kicking them when they’re down – as he argued in the Christian Science Monitor and in an Oxford speech that journalists deserve low pay because they don’t add sufficient value. Picard says, and he’s right, that journalists spend too much effort churning our commodity value: the stuff we already know, the same stuff others are making:

Well-paying employment requires that workers possess unique skills, abilities, and knowledge. It also requires that the labor must be non-commoditized. Unfortunately, journalistic labor has become commoditized. Most journalists share the same skills sets and the same approaches to stories, seek out the same sources, ask similar questions, and produce relatively similar stories….

Across the news industry, processes and procedures for news gathering are guided by standardized news values, producing standardized stories in standardized formats that are presented in standardized styles. The result is extraordinary sameness and minimal differentiation.

It is clear that journalists do not want to be in the contemporary labor market, much less the highly competitive information market. They prefer to justify the value they create in the moral philosophy terms of instrumental value. Most believe that what they do is so intrinsically good and that they should be compensated to do it even if it doesn’t produce revenue.

So where’s the value? Gawker friend Nick Denton says it’s in reporting. So does Arianna Huffington, who just today hired away the head of investigations from the Washington Post to head her new investigative unit. Arianna has said for sometime that she’s hiring reporters because their stories get more traffic. Denton told Ad Age:

People — particularly if they’re under 40 — have news priorities other than those of the editors of The New York Times or producers of the “NBC Nightly News.” A new tablet from Apple — or last night’s episode of “Gossip Girl” or the adventures of the hipster grifter — is a bigger deal than the latest petty scandal in Albany. You think that’s a damning indictment of modern society and a recipe for idiocracy? Fine. Start a nonprofit to cover all the local-government news you think a healthy society needs. But don’t expect advertisers — or commercially-minded publishers or readers, for that matter — to share your interests. . . .

When Gawker started, there was a surfeit of information and not nearly enough context — so we provided that, in the form of links and occasionally snarky commentary. But now the balance has shifted. There are pointers to articles on the blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Digg. And all these intermediaries are looking for something to link to. If a good exclusive used to provide 10 times the traffic of a standard regurgitated blog post, now it garners a hundred times as much. That should be reassuring to people. The content market is finding its new balance. Original reporting will be rewarded.

So how can journalists create value? They can and should report – but the link economy demands that they specialize, that they stand out above the level playing field by reporting uniquely: Tell us something we don’t know, something we want and need to know, not what we already know.

Picard thinks that local newspapers can specialize and there we agree, but we disagree about the topics; he says they should take on national and international topics – Dallas on energy, Chicago on aircraft, Des Moines on ag – but I think their strength is in being local. And there I disagree, too, with Denton; I think that some advertisers – new advertisers never served by bit and inefficient papers – will care greatly about local and will end up helping to support the work that serves local customers (I spoke with one such advertiser today; more on that later).

Picard says that papers need to learn to collaborate and there, too, I agree; but he says they need to do it “throughout news enterprises” but I say they need to do it outside news enterprises, supporting and enabling networks and distributed ecosystems of news.

Picard says that journalists “need to acquire entrepreneurial and innovation skills that makes it possible for them to lead change rather than merely respond to it.” There we certainly agree; that’s why I’m running a course in entrepreneurial journalism. But I wonder whether, inherent in what he says, is that it’s too late for entrepreneurship from inside legacy institutions; it has to come from without.

But the bottom line is the bottom line: Journalists need to make an honest and harsh accounting of the value they create before they can worry about what they’re being paid and by whom. They can no longer use bubble accounting, when they convinced themselves that they and their high calling were worth their inflated paychecks (and I was among those who got them) without facing the blunt truth of the market. Now they have no choice but to face their market.

: LATER: I meant to add this yesterday: Of course, I’m all in favor of journalists making as much as they can and of as many journalists as possible being sustained by the business. That’s why I run the course in entrepreneurial journalism and why one of our tasks in the New Business Models for News Project is to find ways to maximize revenue and profit for journalists in optimal business plans.

But the standard of success may not be the pay rates that we became accustomed to in the journalism bubble. We may – I hope we don’t, but at first we certainly will – end up back in the early days of my career when we didn’t get rich reporting. Especially starting businesses, we need to recognize that it’s going to be tough and we’ll be subject to what the market will bear.

Already, though, there are hopeful excceptions: Michael Arrington and Rafat Ali built substantial empires on reporting. there is a high-end to aspire to and I hope many reach it. But as in all start-ups and all upheaval, it’s going to be hard work getting there.

FTC to the rescue

May 20, 2009 by Jeff Jarvis
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The Federal Trade Commission announced that it is holding hearings on the future of the news business and that made me scratch my head and so I called the head of the office of policy planning t here, Susan DeSanti, and asked why. She said the FTC is concerned with protecting consumers and competition and newspapers have a role in that and so if they’re in trouble, the FTC is paying attention. The agendas aren’t set but we’ll keep an eye on it.

Happy birthday, Baristanet

May 20, 2009 by Jeff Jarvis
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Baristanet, the queen of hyperlocal blogs, is five years old today.

I remember well the NJ.com Meetup we held back then to try to encourage locals to blog on our site. I learned an important lesson there. Debbie Galant, the original Barista, said starting a town blog was a good idea but she sure as hell wasn’t going to do it for my site. She wanted to own and build her own site and value and brand.

And she did. Bariastanet is a phenomenon. It has not just survived but succeeded. It is profitable. It is expanding, adding another blog to its stable recently. It has developed a strong reputation inside Montclair and outside. Congratulations to Deb and Liz and company for that. They have inspired others to start hyperlocal blogs not only across the country but in their own backyard, as The New York Times creates The Local and AOL president Tim Armstrong funds Patch in the nabe. Five years ago, they knew they were onto something and they’re being proved right.

I think the next frontier will be creating networks across blogs of geography and interest so they can reach critical mass to sell to larger advertisers and to share content and effort and perhaps cost. I believe blogs such as this will be a – not the but a – building block in the new ecosystem of news that will begin to replace in fits and starts failing newspapers. (In that ecosystem, I think there will also be newfangled news organizations that help organize the news in this diverse network.) I also hope that we’ll find many new ways for the Baristanets of the world to serve local businesses and make more money so they can sustain their work.

Great work, Baristas.

A newspaper publisher lies

May 19, 2009 by Jeff Jarvis

Just for the record and what it’s worth, in his speech arguing that newspapers are OK – really, they are – Louisville Courier-Journal publisher Arnold Garson lies about me. He says:

Jeff Jarvis is another consultant who has been very widely quoted about the pending death of newspapers. He has written such articles as “Hitting the coffin nail on the head for newspapers,” and “Why newspapers are . . .” ‚ I can’t say the word in polite company, but it starts with an F. He also is the author of the book, What Would Google Do? a fawning look at a company that has built a business model that is dependent, in part, on content taken from newspapers. But the key thing you need to know about Mr. Jarvis is that he does consulting work for new-media companies that compete directly with newspapers, and, thus has a vested interest in the economic decline of newspapers. The worse we do, the better he does.

In fact, the only companies that have paid me recently to consult or speak are newspaper and magazine companies here, in Germany, and in the U.K. I list all my clients on my disclosures page. I am a partner at Daylife and its largest clients are all mainstream news companies; the better they do, the better Daylife does. I will also work this summer on the New Business Models for News Project at CUNY to try to flesh out more revenue and business models for journalism; that is funded by the Knight, McCormick, and MacArther foundations.

Garson did not bother to research or check his facts and instead chose to libel me just because we disagree and I dare to criticize newspapers’ stewardship of journalism. Who does he think he is – a blogger?

I think Garson is also wrong about Google taking content rather than sending audience to him, but I’ll spare us the lecture on the link economy vs. the content economy.

And I think he’s wrong about newspapers. His first big defense of the state of their business is that they’re better off than car dealers and Realtors. That sure as hell ain’t saying much. And, of course, every time a dealer and an agent goes out of business, newspapers lose more business. But nevermind. The sand down here looks just fine. What newspapers need is not a defense but an offense.

Eric Schmidt teaches the taught

May 18, 2009 by Jeff Jarvis
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Pardon me, first, for a moment of paternal pride but I watched Eric Schmidt’s commencement speech at Carnegie Mellon with extra interest because in a few weeks, my wife and I will be driving our son Jake (my secret weapon and webmaster) there to join a summer program for high-school students.

And so I listen to Schmidt talk about education itself in harmony with what I’ve been screaming, that education is built to prepare us all to give the same answers, not necessarily to invent the next Google. Education was built for the industrial age; indeed, when we visited CMU, we were shown one strange building on a slope that was designed to be converted into a factory in case this university thing didn’t work out for Mr. Carnegie. Now we need to reinvent education for the digital/knowledge/Google/creative age. Said Schmidt:

“To some extent you were penalized for making mistakes historically. Now you have to make them because mistakes allow you to learn and to innovate and to try new things. And that’s a culture of innovation that is going to create the next great opportunities for all of you as you come to run and rule the world and the rest of us retire.”

Schmidt also made many observations about the current Facebook and Google (his order) generation, some transcribed by TechCrunch‘s Robin Wauters, some by me:

“When I grew up, we had Tang, you had Red Bull. We used a programming language called Basic, you had Java…. We got our news from newspapers. You get yours from blogs and tweets…. We just didn’t tell anyone about our most embarrassing moments. You record them and post them to Facebook and YouTube every day. I am so happy that my record of my misachievements is not around for posterity…. We thought ‘friend’ is a noun, you think it’s a verb…. I did some research using my favorite search engine, of course. And the great depression spurred some incredible innovations: Rice Krispies, Twinkies and the beer can. You never would have gotten through college without these things. So good things happen in recessions….

“In our lifetimes… every human being on the plane will have access to every piece of information known on the planet. This is a remarkable achievement. God knows what these people will do….

“Don’t bother to have a plan at all. All that stuff about having a plan, throw that out. It seems to be it’s all about opportunity and make your own luck…. You cannot plan innovation. You cannot plan invention. All you can do is try very hard to be at the right place and be ready….

“How should you behave? Well, do things in a group. Don’t do things by yourself. Groups are stronger, groups are faster. None of us is as smart as all of us…..

“Trust matters in a networked world. Trust is your most important currency….

“In a world where everything is kept and remembered forever – the world you are graduating into – you should live for the future and the things you really care about. Don’t live in the past. Live in the future….

“You’ll find today is the best chance you have to start being unreasonable, to demand excellence, to drive change, to make everything happen.”

The craigslist (read: internet) witchhunt

May 18, 2009 by Jeff Jarvis
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The internet – in the form of the latest kerfuffle over craigslist – is exposing an anachronism of law in society.

I’ve seen reference lately to attorneys general and law-enforcement officials saying that the craigslist community policing itself isn’t enough. Said the Wall Street Journal: “Some large Internet communities are coming to a controversial conclusion: the Web can’t always police itself.” That’s why, they argue, they need to swoop in to save us from sex.

But the truth is that this episode only shows the gap between the law and the community. Craigslist’s community does police itself against the things that matter to it: fraud, spam, trolls. That’s how craigslist’s founder, Craig Newmark, spends his days, in customer service: policing against the things that bother and matter to his community. But sex? Who gives a damn? Clearly, the community doesn’t think it needs to be protected from that. So who are these cops protecting and from what?

That’s a fascinating aspect of the culture of the internet: It shows what really matters to a community and what does not matter and that, in turn, reveals how out of touch laws and those who make and enforce them can be. Craigslist is a society and it has its own laws and means of enforcement.

Can the law, like media, still be one-size-fits-all? Well, of course, to some extent, it must be. We need consistent laws across society that define everything from fraud to murder; tat is the foundation of society. But within a society there are other societies. And so, in the U.K., there have long been religious courts that deal with disputes in the Jewish and Muslim communities. The laws of society still stand over them (thank God) and members of the community retain the right to call on those laws. Online, we also have communities that cut across borders and have their own rules of behavior. Indeed, even games become societies with laws and consequences. As Lawerence Lessig famously said, code is law, for it prescribes behavior exactly. Laws come into conflict with laws.

And so, once again, the internet becomes a threat to the control and power of an elite and they are exploiting craiglist – and the murderer who used it – to reassert their control. But it has the marks of a witchhunt. Craigslist’s blog this weekend writes about the attorney general of South Carolina going after it even though craigslist promotes these supposed sins less than others. The blog says: “And FWIW, telephone yellow pages and other local print media have both companies beat hands down as adult service ad venues for South Carolina. Any interest in targeting them for criminal prosecution? Didn’t think so.” This weekend, I was also glad to hear craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster go on the offensive against the offended on On the Media.

I’ll be writing more about the law after the internet soon. I have lawyers on the brain.

(Disclosure: Craig Newmark is a friend and an investor in Daylife, where I’m a partner.)

When CYA can BYA

May 16, 2009 by Jeff Jarvis
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It’s lawyer day at Buzzmachine….

In this week’s kerfuffling on Twitter and blogs about the Wall Street Journal’s anti-interactive interactivity rules regarding Twitter et al, a New York Times editor took a few of us to task for not recognizing that this was just a case of a CYA – cover your ass – memo from lawyers. I responded that CYA can now BYA – burn your ass – when such memos become public, as they will, and speak for you.

This memo was all about how Journal journalists may – or actually may not – communicate, interact, and collaborate with the public (read: us). So it was a memo about us. The Journal didn’t understand how inherently insulting it was to say that it’s dangerous for journalists to talk with us.

The memo ended up exposing a cultural problem at the Journal. I got a private direct message from an executive there saying, “Be careful where you go on this, Jeff. You’re assuming more than Robert said.” I’ll write off the vaguely threatening tone to the economy of language on Twitter. I’ll also choose to reply here rather than in a direct message because I prefer to have this conversation in public. And I’ll tell that executive that, no, the memo said more than they think it said. It said it’s better not to use these tools to collaborate with the public. It said it’s better to let the product speak for itself than to open up their process. It said that being closed is better than being open. Oh, it said plenty.

[Correction: The direct message turns out to be about a prior critical post I'd made regarding the Journal and micropayments. My mistake.]

Rather than scolding me and other tweeters and bloggers for scolding them, the Journal’s executives should have listened. They got great advice from no less than VC Fred Wilson (Twitter investor, btw) telling them what they’re missing about the value of these new tools for journalism. Rather than trying to protect the way things have always been done in this new world, wouldn’t it be better to look at the new ways these tools enable journalists to do their jobs better, to involve and collaborate with the public in the process of journalism to produce better reporting, to reset the relationship of journalist and reader on a more equal and human level, to promote the good work of the journalists at the paper, and so on?

But this is where the Times editor is probably right: I smell lawyers. Someone likely went to them and said, “Protect us. There’s something new and strange in operation here. How could it harm us? Stop it.” That’s what lawyers do, right? They protect.

But protection, haven’t we learned, is precisely the wrong response to change today. Newspapers protected their past and they’re dead. They should have bravely experimented. What they needed instead of protection was the license to try and fail. Now I have known good lawyers who will try to enable you to do what you want to do. But at the end of the day, if they do that too much, they’re screwed because it’s not their job, really, to empower you. It’s their job, still, to protect you. But in the counterintuitive internet age, protection is no protection.

I also got an email from a Journal staffer about what appears to be a Twitchhunt in the Journal. I won’t reveal details because I don’t want to reveal the identity of the employee – because, clearly, interacting with me about the inner workings and process of the Journal is now against Journal rules. That’s just what the lawyers want to protect them from, right? Wrong. What should happen instead is that the execs at the Journal should be asking staffers such as this one how to take advantage of these new tools. They should have asked the public what it means to use Twitter wisely – what is the new definition of the words a Journal editor threw at me in Twitter: “common sense.” They should instill a culture of asking the public what they know before the story is done.

Is this the lawyers’ fault? No, it’s the fault of the culture at the Journal, a culture that clearly doesn’t understand the benefits of using these tools to open up and do journalism in new ways. But lawyers aid and abet that kind of thinking. They enforce it. They codify it. They make it seem OK. And then they become the voice of the company with the public. And that’s not protection. That’s dangerous. It’ll burn your ass.