BuzzMachine

My server crashed and so the blog was down all day and — damn! — I lost all posts since the 16th. I just restored some of them but links and comments were lost. Sorry!

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I’m sparing you drafts of my book as I write it and instead discussing the ideas here and getting smarter for it. But I thought I’d share just a few graphs from the next-to-last chapter, this one on the book industry asking What Would Google Do?

I confess: I’m a hypocrite. If I had followed my own rules – if I had eaten my own dogfood – you wouldn’t be reading this book right now, at least not as a book. You’d be reading it online, for free. You’d have discovered it via links and search. You’d be entering into a conversation around any point in the book. You’d be able to correct me and I’d be able to update the book with the latest amazing stats from Google. This would be even more of a collaboration than it already is. We might form a society of Googlethinkers on Facebook and you’d offer better advice and newer ways to look at the world than I have been able to. I might make money from speaking and consulting instead of a publisher’s advance.

But instead, I made money from a publisher’s advance. That is why you are reading this as a book. Sorry. Dog’s gotta eat.

And the truth is, I already do most everything I describe above – on my blog. I believe the two forms may come together eventually. But in the meantime, I’m no fool; I couldn’t pass up a nice check from Collins, my publisher, and all sorts of services from Harper-Collins, its parent, including editing, design, publicity, sales, a speaker’s bureau, and online help. That’s why publishing is still publishing. The question is, how long can it stay that way?

My Guardian column this week reprises the discussion from my post about Google as the new pressroom and then adds some thoughts about news organizations sharing open-source platforms. Snippet:

The Guardian is spending a few years building its own platform, but can every news organisation afford this? No. And will technology ultimately differentiate one news provider from another? I doubt it. So why not share a platform with many sites, sources and voices? In the UK, I have suggested - naively, I know - that the BBC should provide that platform for all news efforts (professional and amateur). Isn’t that a proper definition of public-service publishing?

A shared platform for news organisations wouldn’t be anticompetitive: it would be pro-efficiency. If any paper, station or site could pluck software from the cloud and freely use and adapt it to perform essential functions then it could concentrate its resources on what matters - journalism.

At the Guardian’s seminar, I asked what the paper is if not a manufacturer, distributor or technology company. “Fundamentally, it’s courageous, independent, liberal journalism,” was one editor’s reply. “That’s the essence of the Guardian, or should be.”

Exactly right. But this also treats the Guardian as a product and I asked - in the spirit of Roussel’s effort to reimagine a paper - whether online it should be something else, with a different relationship to its public: a platform, a network, a community, a collaboration. Should the Guardian strive to be the world’s leading liberal voice - or voices?

Thanks again to Edward Roussel and Bob Wyman for inspiring the discussion.

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Yesterday, I was on a panel with Terry Heaton at the Public Radio News Directors’ annual confab in Washington. Topic: blogging. Terry and I were almost through with opening tap dances when a hotheaded curmudgeon in the third row interrupted — which is fine; we like conversation — to go on the attack and save the world from these horrible blog people. He spat out all the usual lines, including how terribly busy he is being a news director (his italics) and how this is such a nonsense and a bother. My favorite sputtering: “I have a job. Do you have jobs?”

To which the proper response should have been, “Go fug yourself.” But I didn’t say that. Nor did I complain about how rude it was of him to attack us when we took two days out of our lives and came to Washington — for free — to talk about this topic at their invitation. I’m tough. I can take it. This is hardly the first time I’ve heard everything he had to say (but he seemed so proud, as if he’d just thought it up himself; the only thing he didn’t say was that he didn’t want a citizen surgeon, either).

However, I also did not patiently respond to all his cliches. I have decided I’m not going to waste my time anymore with lazy, rude, self-important, self-delusional, intellectually dishonest, closed-minded curmudgeons who bark against the full moon of change. It has all been said before. I see no reason to waste my time, nor that of everyone else in the room. My new policy has been that I’m going to fight curmudgeonliness with curmudgeonliness. I told this fool that f he didn’t want to see the opportunities to do things in new ways, fine.

And then we proceeded with a very nice discussion of practical questions about blogging in news organizations, a discussion that continued later in the day. Everyone else I heard wanted to explore these new opportunities and had plenty of questions and doubts to deal with — as well they should — as well as experience to share; they welcomed change or at least know they couldn’t scare it away.

Meanwhile, the curmudgeon acted like a child sent to the corner and refused to look forward at the panel for the rest of the event. My goal was to get us past the growling as soon as possible and onto a substantive discussion. That is, I think, how to deal with curmudgeons. You can always find reasons not to do things. Then fine, don’t do them. Far more interesting and useful is to explore what might happen if you do them.

I did the same thing a week ago when I was called by a couple of consultants and one of them issued the usual yes-buts, such as, “Well, have you looked at the home page of YouTube, huh?” I said he was wasting my time — especially since I was, again, talking for free.

You see, the problem with curmudgeons and complainers is that its so easy for them hijack any discussion. For not to deal with their very grave concerns is to make you look careless. That’s the rhetorical trick: “You could be wrong, it could go wrong, answer me that!” And if you don’t? “Aha!”

Well, the hour is far too late and the state of the industry far, far too desperate to waste time with these sideshows. They had their time and the objections needed to be addressed in that time. But I haven’t heard fresh objections in a few years. What I want to hear instead is fresh ideas; we must have more of those.

So my advice is to set the ground rules for events and conversations such as these and stick to them. It might have helped the recent Australian-American Future of Media Summit that apparently descended into curmudgeonliness and “endless bloody whinging. Whinging about how journalism has standards and bloggers are all ‘just’ writing whatever they think.” Stilgherrian complains and then journalist Jonathan Este complains about the complaining. And then here’s one more. [links via a Jay Rosen tweet].

What a waste of time, of which there is so little to waste.

: LATER: Jay Rosen declared the war over in 2005 but he tweets: “I’ve since realized that they are each other’s ideal ‘other.’”

: MORE: I’m bringing this exchange with Jay Rosen out from the comments. He wrote:

Personally, I think the campaign to discredit and marginalize the curmudgeons is going just fine; and I do not intend to stop writing about them. As I’ve said before, the curmudgeon is a newsroom type, and the newsroom’s romance with this type has been a disaster. It is within the power of any living breathing thinking journalist not to conform to this type, not to “be” a curmudgeon. But when people do step into that role and go high curmudgeon on you, the performance should be discredited in any way that works. Could be smiling politely and reciting facts, or arguing back, or ignoring the provocation and moving on.

You have to persist, not only through the encounters like the one you write about here, but also through all the mini-lectures from all the well-meaning and usually quite intelligent, informed people who do the he said she said can’t we all get along the truth must be somewhere in the middle what extremists on both sides overlook we need to be more civil can’t we get beyond this now what a tired debate thing at you.

And I responded:

But, Jay, I’m not sure I do have to persist.

In campaign terms, Obama stopped arguing with Clinton when he knew she was vanquished. The question is: are the curmudgeon’s vanquished? Well, not while they’re in charge, perhaps. But they’re in charge of sinking ships and they’re helping sink them.

I suppose what you’re saying is that we should — we even have a duty to — grab their hands off the wheel and save the boat. What I’m saying is that I’m not at all sure that is worth the time and effort (and frustration) anymore.

Personally, this is why I left the corporation and went to teach and why I started a class in entrepreneurial journalism — to effect change outside these curmudgeon-run organizations. I also talk with and help organizations that are past the rule of the curmudgeons (starting with the Guardian). I find that more productive and ultimately helpful to the cause we’re both trying to serve than still taking the time to deal with the curmudgeons.

No, I think the time has come to abandon them to die. I’ll turn the hose and its precious water away from them to plants, new or old, that have a chance to survive. It’s triage time. Curmudgeons get tags on their toes.

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Jay Rosen has been worrying about curmudgeons. I’ve developed a different attitude. I try to just ignore them and if I can’t, I yell at them. The other day, I was on the phone with a few consultants who were getting free advice, gladly given, but when I heard the fourth curmudgeons’ cry — this one: “Well, look at what’s on the home page of YouTube” — I finally had it and replied: You’re wasting my time. If you use that as your excuse to ignore the power and potential of YouTube and video then that’s your fault. Grrr. I do believe that the day of the curmudgeons is over. Their stewardship of the future has failed. Get out of the way.

But curmudgeons still do damage, of course. Vickey Williams at Medill’s Readership Institute says the force out young people, who take their new ways and innovations with them.

My work on changing culture in newsrooms shows that young journalists intend to leave because the pace of change is too slow. (Report here). They are turned off by the tendency of veteran journalists to argue down new ideas, cling to old ways, and avoid risks. As Readership Institute research has shown, those are outcomes of newspaper people’s tendencies to be oppositional, perfectionist and conventional.

I’ve seen the generational friction play out dozens of times as younger voices get shut down by veterans who fall back on ingrained behaviors. In one case, younger staff worked for weeks to develop and launch a blog on the paper’s Web site with a youthful perspective on the local scene. At the next staff meeting, most veterans said they hadn’t noticed and a few admitted never having looked at the paper’s Web site at all.

I’ll quibble on one point: It’s not about age. I’ve also seen plenty of young people who, having arrived in the castle, want to pull up the draw bridge behind them. I know lots of fellow graybeards who are eager bomb-throwers. I will also disagree with some of her advice, telling the veterans to help young people: “Offer cues on things like the importance of appropriate dress and that one well-considered memo can be more valuable than numerous emails.” You wouldn’t say that at Google.

I agree heartily with Williams that these institutions should teach innovators — I’ll call them that instead of young people — business “so they can make the business case for their ideas.” That’s why I teach entrepreneurial journalism. But I shuddered at this: “Engage them in meaningful ways — in problem-solving sessions, cross-departmental task forces, high-profile projects, post-mortems.” Those are the places where ideas go to die. Maybe instead they should be given the rope and resources to start new businesses.

Williams’ overall point is right and important: Curmudgeons do damage by killing change and those who bring it.

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In a comment on Ryan Sholin’s blog, Howard Owens said that when the economy comes back (God, Fannie Mae, and OPEC willing) so will newspaper revenue. I agree. But I was just thinking that I fear this may lull some companies into thinking they don’t have to change. (And for the record, Howard and Ryan’s company Gatehouse, whose stock is suffering right now, is nonetheless making lots of changes thanks to the efforts of those two guys.) So I decided to challenge Howard and all of you to a wager, which I just put up on Hubdub. Do you think a daily American newspaper (circulation 50K+) will fold this year?

what is this?

Will a daily American newspaper (circulation 50+) fold this year?

% chance over time

Get this widget

Hubdub - The News Prediction Game

(For those seeing this as it starts, the line starts at 75 percent likelihood because that’s what I said. I’m now eager to see the predictive wisdom of the crowd: you.)

[Full disclosure: I am an adviser to Hubdub and I work with companies that do business with Gatehouse.]

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The other day (and again in my upcoming Guardian column) I quoted Telegraph digital head Edward Roussel speculating about shifting his paper’s platforms — business, sales, distribution — to Google.

Now here’s Paul Cheesbrough, the CIO of the Telegraph Media Group, making a first step in that direction. He tells CIO that he’s not updating Microsoft Office licenses and has opened up Google Apps for the entire newsroom.

“[As a pilot] we put 10 per cent of our 1400 user seat estate and allowed them to use Google Apps alongside their Office and Exchange infrastructure. Overwhelmingly, the feedback was positive and there would have been uproar if we had said we were turning it off. We were faced with the decision of whether we pursued the same [Microsoft] path and paid the price for that or put more and more internal solutions in the cloud.

“We made a conscious decision not to refresh any of [the Microsoft infrastructure]. We’re not going to remove it but we won’t upgrade it. . . . Google Apps is good enough and rich enough for us to do what we need to do. Collaboration has been very powerful [in Google Apps] and as people use Google Mail and Calendar they’ll naturally stray to use Google Docs. . . .

I think it might be time to sell my Microsoft stock.

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Alan Mutter runs the numbers to see which newspaper companies could be taken private and Mark Potts fears they could be taken private by private-equity blood/cash-suckers. A few examples: Mutter says the Times Company would need to borrow $2 billion to go private, Gannett $4.5 billion, and McClatchy a K-Mart flashing blue-light special of only $467 million.

But what are you buying when you buy a newspaper? And in a buy-or-build debate, which is the better bet? And if you just wait, will some of the giants just topple, leaving holes in the ground that’d be easier to fill from scratch?

Well, to start with, you’re buying cash flow, but that is only going to diminish and as too many private buyers of newspapers are finding, it’s getting tougher and tougher to cover debt expenses. You’re buying physical plants but — unlike, say, retail or fast food — they tend not to be in desirable areas. You’re buying union agreements; whoopie. You’re buying huge physical costs: presses, trucks, and other fast-depreciating assets. You’re buying shut-down costs galore.

Oh, but why be so gloomy? You’re also buying advertiser relationships, but those tend to be with the diminishing arenas of retail, jobs, auto, and homes — while Google is grabbing the growth by finally serving the mass of underserved small advertisers… and you’re not buying any expertise in how to compete. You’re buying reader relationships, but that, too, is shrinking and after witnessing the shrug that has met the killing of newspaper sections, one wonders how firm that relationship is. You’re buying a newsroom and though it has expertise in the locale, it is generally not prepared for the future and getting it retrained is a cost and a risk (lots of buyout expense there). And you’re buying a brand, but I fear that most of the equity there is in familiarity over affection (or, in some markets, trust). (I’d say the Times brand is worth proportionately more than a local brand.)

So I wonder whether even at bargain prices it’s any bargain to buy a newspaper.

Or would it be better to build? We’d need to look at a business plan to see what it would take to create a meaningful local news-and-advertising network (note that I said network, not product).

Or would it be better to find a perch and wait for the roadkill? I think that’s what HuffingtonPost is doing by installing an editor in Chicago. As we said the other day, one can also use Google and other technical, sales, and distribution platforms to build with little cost or risk.

I’d take those bets in reverse order. Knowing that carnage is inevitable, I’d figure out how to position myself to swoop into these markets. Then I’d start at least one strong local network so I had a proven template to take to other markets. And I wouldn’t invest a dime in an old newspaper company, no matter how cheap. That, of course, is why they’re getting cheaper and cheaper.

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I’ve been having fun playing with Wordle. This is a visualization of Buzzmachine as of yesterday, when I had a fair amount about NPR and radio. One answer to my API question below is that I’d like to see a Wordle visualization of every day’s Times or Guardian as another way to see hot topics and another path to them.

Here’s a Wordle of NYTimes.com and below that is one for Guardian.co.uk. Note that they are necessarily unsatisfying because they are just the home pages; I’d find it more interesting to look at the corpus of content today with weighting for the prioritization given that content by editors or readers. Anyway, you still get to see the top topics in each place and publication:

Top topics: Barack (very big), withdrawl, slowdown, Dow, prices, scrimping.

Top topics: Washington (very big), church/Episcopal/African (on the denomination’s meeting and schism), Madeleine/Murat (on a big libel settlement).

So NPR, CrunchBase, and soon the New York Times will all have APIs. What if all news orgs soon have APIs? I wonder what you could build on that.

You see a glimpse of what that could look like with Daylife (where — disclosure — I am a partner); its founder, Upendra Shardanand, has been arguing for sometime that APIs are the next way content will be distributed; indeed, Daylife can create an API for a publication. APIs give you the chance to get at more data fields more reliably and to get archival access for deeper analysis and they give you rights and the ability to mashup and redistribute.

So if I were in a lab somewhere — like the one we hope to start at CUNY — I wonder what products, services, and companies could be cooked atop these APIs. I started to speculate but I wasn’t thinking big enough. So I’ll ask you: What data should be made available as APIs and if it were available, what could you do with it? How would this change news?

The always witless World Association of Newspapers really does it this time. In their desire to defend print — over updating and preserving journalism — they came out with a new ad campaign that says:

Which says: We will continue to give you a one-way product that doesn’t listen to you and lets you do just one thing: turn the damned page.

Another ad makes fun of dumb things people say and adds this quote from the Economist: “Newspapers are an endangered species.” Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Yes, that’s a good one. Newspaper companies? Health as can be.

Twits.

I’ll be speaking to the Public Radio News Directors this Saturday in Washington and I’ll want to bang all the heads together and make them repeat after me: “We are not radio. We are not radio. We are not radio.” Just as newspapers are not paper, or must figure out what they are after, so NPR must decide what it is after broadcast. I said this to them a few years ago when I spoke to the group in St. Louis and then again when I joined others to talk about new media at NPR’s headquarters. My prescription then:

NPR is not radio. If I tell newspapers they have to stop thinking on paper, so I’ll argue that NPR must throw off the limits of its medium. And I don’t just mean that the can go multimedia, adding photos or videos to their sound. I mean changing the culture, not thinking like a radio network anymore so thewy can see the options the internet opens up to work in every appropriate medium with entirely new kinds of content, from TV to data bases.

I’m seeing the notion of thinking past radio discussed now thanks to the death of one of public radio’s attempts to modernize, Bryant Park Project. It was, as far as I’m concerned, the better of the attempts; the other, The Takeaway, is floundering, earnestly but uncomfortably. NPR apparently doesn’t know what it means to modernize. They seem to think it means losing their legendary polish and releasing their inner “uh’s” and “y’know’s.”

The problem, I think, is that they didn’t understand what the essence of NPR is. They thought it was radio, so they tried to come up with new formats and formulae for radio. But that’s not what NPR is.

Rob Paterson, the very smart consultant who advises NPR, says of the BPP folding:

I think a couple of things are becoming more clear to me. The show was seen as a Radio show with a strong social web element. This is I think the key error that drove the costs and the expectations. If you want to do the new today - you have to break away from the costs of the machine - if a paper, no press and no paper!

I would have launched BPP as a web show with a bit of radio. No small distinction.

He talked about the cost of it, as did John Proffitt. Radio’s also not cheap. And then Rob comes to the bottom line for National Public (Radio):

Just as the presses and the paper is a cost that is killing the Newspapers, so the transmitters are killing TV and Radio. All that can remain for a while are the established shows such as ME and ATC. But if you want some thing new that will scale and make you money - it’s the web all the way.

But again, what is it that moves to the web? And how? What’s that essence of NPR? That’s what I asked the Guardian. It’s what every media organization trying to reinvent itself must ask. What are you saving? What is your appeal? What is your value? What are you?

This afternoon, I happened to be talking with Adam Davidson, part of the team that created that incredible This American Life/NPR News show explaining the credit crunch. On Twitter, Jay Rosen said this was the best explanatory journalism he’d heard. I responded that it was the best I’d heard or read. If The Times had explained the story this well, it would have made it as radio so in their voices we could hear — as someone said in another tweet — their incredulity. So it was great radio but that was merely a choice of media. It wasn’t the essence of it.

So I asked Davidson how he defined that essence. He thought about it and answered that it’s about shows that, at the end of the week, make you say, “Oh, that’s what it’s all about. Now I get it.”

I like that and that essence can be communicated in audio, video, text, graphics, apps, discussion. The intelligence of NPR can now be freed from mere radio to use any and all appropriate media. That’s what we try to teach our students at CUNY: making media choices with every story. So should NPR.

What do you think the essence of NPR is?