Posts about journalism

A danger to journalism

December 23, 2008 by Jeff Jarvis
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The more I think about it, the angrier I get at Gatehouse for its dangerous and hypocritical crusade against links.

Links are the bloodstream of the web, carrying its oxygen. Links are how original journalism will get audience, traffic, branding, attention, credit, and monetization. Links are a gift and a courtesy. Links are the means to better-informed communities. Links tie people together with each other and the information they need. Links are necessary. Links are good.

But Gatehouse (like the AP before it and the French often) is fighting links from Boston.com. That’s a case of cutting off its nose to spite its face: Gatehouse is turning away traffic and audience. Suicide. But it’s also attempted murder: If on the very slight chance that an equally clueless judge lets this suit proceed, it could put a chill on linking just when we need it most. That’s what’s dangerous. That is irresponsible on Gatehouse’s part.

Indeed, we need more links to more journalism at its source, as I proposed to the Associated Press in the midst of its aborted antilink crusade. Links are also the key to specialization and efficiency; they will allow a local publication to do local well and link to other stories rather than rewriting them: Do what you do best, link to the rest.

In the comments on my post yesterday, Brian Cubbison (of Syracuse.com) pointed out the irony – make that hypocrisy – of Gatehouse’s link policy, as – just like Boston.com – it started a hyperlocal blog in Batavia – where, unlike the Globe, it has no paper – and it links to papers owned by other companies. See this post on the blog’s very first day. I’d say what it does is far worse for both readers and the competition: It summarizes stories (arguably making it unnecessary to click through; Boston.com instead quotes ledes that should entice readers to read more) and it links only to the home page and not directly to the stories (which is downright rude and inconvenient to readers who then would have go do digging for the content). This is closer to stealing content and journalistic value than what Boston.com does. See also this Batavia post today, which summarizes and quotes a competitor’s story – more than Boston.com has done – and links to it. And look at this post from a blog at Gatehouse’s Wicked Local – the alleged victim of Boston.com’s linking – which quotes news from Boston.com and doesn’t link to it. I’d say that is theft.

So what should happen here? Should Gannett sue Gatehouse? Should we all just sue each other for lnking to each other – for doing what the web is all about? As Mark Potts says:

This sort of nonsense really has to stop. Companies like GateHouse need to understand the medium they’re playing in, and how best to play in it, rather than trying to turn back the clock to some sort of imaginary time when they could keep their garden walls tall and stout.

If you can’t stand the links, Gatehouse, get off the web.

Gatehouse’s market cap is a measly $2.1 million. Why don’t we put together a fund to buy it and put it out of its misery and get rid of this ridiculous suit. Or let’s all appeal to Michael E. Reed, CEO of the embattled Gatehouse: Stop this dangerous and destructive suit.

: MORE: Henry Blodget mocks Gatehouse: “We hereby give the New York Times permission to aggregate any or all of our headlines and ledes anytime they feel like it. We’ll even give GateHouse Media the same permission. We can’t wait to welcome their readers to our sites.”

Journalistopia says:

If GateHouse were to have its way with its deep link argument, it would create a legal precedent that makes the act of linking to a copyrighted article illegal. It could mean a crippling of sites such as Romenesko and the Drudge Report, which can bring in enormous amounts of readers while being primarily built upon links to someone else’s expensive-to-create content. But, if enforced, it would also cut off the voluminous flow of readers who arrive to news sites via search engines and aggregators. That, too, has an effect on the bottom line.

In the end, we could see a long list of media companies flinging short-sighted lawsuits at each other, while suicidally pushing their content into black holes guarded by copyright law.

[Disclosures: I have an interest in the link economy as a partner at Daylife and a board member at Publish2 and an advisor to Outside.in. I am involved with those companies because I believe links are the foundation of news in the future.]

: LATER: Matthew Ingram has a v good response to the dustup:

With David Carr’s argument that newspapers should ignore the Web only a few days old — not to mention Joel Brinkley’s suggestion that anti-trust violations are a viable business model — I thought the market for stupid newspaper-related activity was pretty well saturated. But apparently I was wrong….

GateHouse apparently doesn’t like the way the Internet works. That puts the company in the same category as the World Newspaper Association and forward-thinking types like Chicago Tribune owner Sam Zell, who have repeatedly criticized Google for linking to news stories from its Google News search engine, or the Belgian newspapers that sued Google over similar tactics. All of these groups are trying to turn back time, to play King Canute with the rolling wave that is the Web, instead of trying to find ways of using that wave to their mutual advantage….

LA Times followup

December 22, 2008 by Jeff Jarvis
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Russ Stanton, editor of the LA Times, sent email following up on questions I had confirming the much-discussed report below that its web revenue is now sufficient to meet its entire editorial payroll. “Given where we were five years ago,” he email, “I don’t think anyone thought that would ever happen. But that day is here.”

Can I hear an amen?

Stanton does some bragging about the Times’ web life and given this milestone, let’s grant him the moment as Neilsen Net Ratings says it passed USA Today and the Washington Post in uniques with, according to internal numbers, 138 million page views in November, up more than 70% in a year, and 24 million uniques, up 125%.

Secret sauce?

There are two primary reasons for these sharp increases: We have added some outstanding web talent over the past two years, including latimes.com editor Meredith Artley, blogging guru Tony Pierce and database specialist Ben Welsh, who is part of a new 10-person team of interactive and data experts supplementing our print report with terrific online material (more on that in a minute). And our printside reporting and editing staffs have embraced the future like never before.

Nice to see a shoutout for longtime blogging comrade Pierce and for blogging itself:

One of the most visible measures of our success is our blog network. When I became innovation editor in January 2007, only four of our 49 blogs were produced by our staff, and those blogs accounted for only 2% of our site’s total monthly traffic. Today, we have more than 40 blogs, all but six of which are produced by our staff, led by Top of the Ticket, our presidential campaign/politics effort started by Andrew Malcolm and Don Frederick. Technorati now ranks Ticket in the top 60 blogs on the internet. At last count, about half our newsgathering staff — more than 300 professionals — are contributing to our blogs. In several of our traditional print sections (California, Sports, Books, Health, Travel), the entire staff is participating in that section’s main blog. That, in turn, has been acknowledged and valued by our readers. Today, our blogs account for 16% of our total monthly page views.

The paper set up a AM copy desk to start putting content online at 7am (those folks used to waltz in after lunch); many papers have such continuous news desks. Like other papers, the Times is also training lensemen in video.

And here’s my favorite part: education.

With some help from our HR folks, we’ve set up a 40-class curriculum on how to expand the skills our staff needs in these key areas. The most popular classes so far are learning the software program for posting to the web, headline writing to improve SEO, how to shoot and edit video, and 360-degree storytelling, taught by Aaron Curtiss, our innovation editor.

An ecology of accuracy

December 21, 2008 by Jeff Jarvis
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John Naughton’s Observer column this morning recounts the shitstorm the Wall Street Journal brought on itself with its innacurate and ignorant story on Google and content cashing (v. net neutrality) and concludes:

You might think this is all a storm in an online teacup, but in fact it’s a revealing case study of how our media ecosystem has changed. What happened is that reporters on a major newspaper got something wrong. Nothing unusual about that – and the concept of “network neutrality” is a slippery one if you’re not a geek or a communications regulator. But within minutes of the article’s publication, it was being picked up and critically dissected by bloggers all over the world. And much of the dissection was done soberly and intelligently, with commentators painstakingly explaining why Google’s move into content-caching did not automatically signal a shift in the company’s attitude to network neutrality. Lessig was able instantly to rebut the views attributed to him in the article.

Watching the discussion unfold online was like eavesdropping on a civilised and enlightening conversation. Browsing through it I thought: this is what the internet is like at its best – a powerful extension of what Jürgen Habermas once called “the public sphere”.

He continues on his blog:

This was about as far as you can get from the LiveJournal-OMG-my-cat-has-just-been-sick media stereotyping of blogging. It was an illustration of something that has always been true — that the world is full of clever, thoughtful, well-informed people. What has changed is that we now have a medium in which they can talk to one another — and to newspaper reporters, of only the latter are prepared to participate in the conversation….

My complaint about the WSJ’s reaction to the blogosphere’s reaction is that it evinced a refusal to participate. The errors made by its reporters were serious but for the most part understandable; journalism is the rushed first draft of history and we all make mistakes. The tragedy was that the Journal saw the blogosphere’s criticism as a problem, when it fact it was an opportunity.

The newsroom as classroom opens

December 16, 2008 by Jeff Jarvis
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Bravo to the Oakland Press, which just announced that it is opening a classroom for citizen journalists. Named, with admirable hauteur, The Oakland Press Institute for Citizen Journalism, it is built under the believe that “there are ways for readers to help tell stories better, quicker and more completely.”

That is why we will be offering anyone who is interested — from high school students to retirees — instruction in news writing, videography, basics of reporting for news and sports, and still photography.

For those who complete the instruction, we offer the opportunity to get your work published online or in the print edition. This experience would be especially helpful for high school and college students viewing careers in the communications field. In addition, others can work toward becoming members of our freelance stable of journalists.

Beautiful. The best part is that the instruction will be done by members of the paper’s staff. Now I know some bloggers might say, “We don’t need your instruction, press people, you need ours.” And the second half of that is true – everyone in this classroom can learn. But so long as the instruction is offered in the spirit of generosity – “Here’s what we know and how we ply our trade and we will no longer keep it secret as a priesthood but will share it openly” – then everyone wins. The public can learn those tricks of their trade. The journalists build a new relationship of mutual trust with the public. The news organization expands journalism into the community – as the Oakland Press’ announcement eloquenty argues in what amounts to a white paper on the virtues of citizen journalism.

I started arguing for the idea of the newsroom as classroom in 2005 and said this transformation will do more than bring in more news; it will change the very nature of a newspaper:

Once again, Hugh McLeod said it better than I just did: We need to think as “a point on the map where wonderful people cluster together to do wonderful things.” How do we help people gather to share what they know and need to know? How do we turn newspapers into newsplaces?

So the education and the relationship goes well past the classroom, of course. A great editor educates every day. A great reporter learns every day. Educators learn from the students; so journalists will no doubt learn how to shoot better Flip videos or tag Flickr photos from members of the public. And the newsroom necessarily tears down its walls and opens up to the community, becomes part of the community. I mean that figuratively and literally: the newsroom as cafe, the distributed newsroom everywhere in town.

This new relationship, I believe, will be the foundation of a new business model for news. For as the paper can no longer afford the cash and risk to own everything and do everything and is it builds this new relationship of trust with the public, it will have to see the opportunity in helping the public, its partners, build their own value and businesses together. This, I hope, is the first seed of the network.

I also believe that journalism schools must offer to help and must see that they have a role and responsibility to train not just the professionals but anyone. I have been applying for grants to start a program to help newsrooms – closed cultures that they have been – to learn how to teach and to create curricula to help. My argument has been that programs to teach citizens separately don’t scale and don’t reform the relationship between journalists and the public. Among the things that could be taught: your right to access to public documents, meetings, and official information; how to research and verify information; journalistic ethics (a discussion!), corrections (also a discussion!); how to record public meetings as podcasts; how to shoot better photos and video; how to sell ads to support blogs and reporting…. From my grant proposal:

The goal is both to improve the quality of citizen journalism and to establish a new and collaborative relationship of respect between professionals and amateurs, opening up the newsroom and its culture and expanding the reach of journalism in the community. Through this program, these news organizations – and others who will watch their progress – will learn and prove the business case for harnessing citizen effort and knowledge. The project will lead to new work in networked journalism….”

I only wish I could attend the inaugural class of The Oakland Press Institute for Citizen Journalism. (Will you webcast it, teacher?)

[via Jay Rosen]

Guardian column: Ditchley and the market demand for journalism

December 15, 2008 by Jeff Jarvis
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My Guardian column this week recounts the debate at Ditchley on whether there is a market demand – and market failure – for quality journalism and on the idea of government subsidy for newspapers. The column got squeezed by a larger-than-usual ad – a good cause – so I’ll paste the original here:

It was hard not to look for symbolism in the surroundings when publishers, editors, academics, and others gathered on the grounds of Ditchley Park a week ago for discussion about the destiny of journalism and democracy, sponsored by the BBC Trust and the foundation that owns the 1720s estate. Under opulent ceilings—and the cloak of the Chatham House Rule—the representatives of incumbent and beneficent power expressed grave and urgent concern about the fate of newspapers as they debated drastic measures for dire times—even state subsidy for local papers.

As an American, accustomed to being in the national majority in such meetings, I felt like the alien I was. I’m not used to breathing coal smoke and history. And I’m quite allergic to the notion of government support for and regulation of media, especially news. But I was surrounded by Britons—and fellow foreigners—who appreciate the value of public service broadcasting, even as they engage in the national sport of thwacking the BBC. I learned a lot about you, my cousins, at Ditchley.

The real question for the weekend turned out to be whether there is a market demand—and a looming market failure—for quality journalism. I was the optimist in the room (the library, to be exact) and set off an impromptu poll on pessimism. The optimists, surprising me, won.

But clouds rolled in when talk turned, inevitably, to the scarcity of business models for news in this post-scarcity media economy. I foresee many new models, though unproven, involving networks, platforms, collaboration, new efficiencies, and new players. Others, however, saw no promising models, and so some considered what is not without precedent in Britain: public funds to support journalism, except now for local papers, at least through their transition—they pray—to digital.

Many forms of subsidy were suggested: A slice of the BBC’s or ITV’s cake is the starting point (which Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger broached in these pages recently). What about a tax on Google? I argue Google is enabling more than exploiting digital media. Then why not a tax on broadband providers? But one might consider San Francisco’s wish to provide broadband for all—eliminating that revenue stream—as a better endowment for media and information. Instead of public service publishing, why not public service connectivity?

At the end of the weekend, talk turned to another form of subsidy, which I suggested—naively, I thought—here in 2006: If the BBC is a public trust, why not have it actively support quality journalism? The idea at the meeting was to rebuild newspapers on BBC technology. I’d go farther: The BBC should link to and promote the best of British journalism. It should open its content to remixing by other media (and the public). It could use its international ad sales force to sell quality British sites’ foreign inventory. It should become a lab for shared innovation: the BBC as an open-source platform.

As was pointed out at Ditchley, journalism already is subsidized: The Guardian has its Scott Trust, the Times its mogul, the Washington Post a profitable education company, the Telegraph its sales of wine, local papers their council ads, and everybody had—had—classified ads. So we return to the question: Is there a true market demand for quality journalism or is it already a charity or public utility?

Is the death of profitable journalism as it was the fault of its stewards, its audience, or market circumstances? Given the setting and the timing—just as Chicago’s Tribune Company readied bankruptcy—it was tempting to look for journalism’s murderer, as if in a game of Clue: the butler, in the parlor, with a knife—or local newspaper stewards, in their privileged and complacent monopolies, with a lack of strategic foresight and a surplus of debt. Or are the culprits citizens everywhere who don’t care enough? American populist and optimist that I am, I don’t think so.

Are papers merely victims of time and technology? I wondered whether newspapers’ masters, like Ditchley’s ennobled land barons, are now out of their age. I don’t believe they will be replaced by the workers in the stable—citizen journalists (who weren’t in the room). But I do think we’ll all end up working closer together, tilling smaller fields.

: LATER: Here‘s Adrian Monck on the conference, with the rapporteur’s report. And Charlie Beckett. And Richard Sambrook. I’ll write more later about this idea of government support for journalism and why I oppose it.

Poor Chicago

December 10, 2008 by Jeff Jarvis
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Maybe it’s me: I’m the jinx. Every paper I ever worked for has now folded or faced mortal danger: the Addison (Ill.) Herald-Register (folded), the Detroit Free Press (came close and might as well fold), Chicago Today (which had no tomorrow), the San Francisco Examiner (no longer a real paper), the New York Daily News (resurrected from death), and the Chicago Tribune (now kneecapped). Three of them were owned by Tribune Company, a company I never did much like working for.

After Sam Zell shocked former news machers at Foursquare in his interview with Joanne Lipman – “he didn’t say the word journalism once,” one huffed – I told them, as I’ve blogged here before, that Zell might not be the disrupter you choose, but he’s the disrupter the industry has. Name three others, I challenged them.

Zell asked the right questions – about cost structure, ego, lazy ad sales, bad business practices. The first problem was that he asked them 13 years too late (see Clay Shirky, below). The second problem is that he had no answers, or the answers he had were uninformed. And the problem for the industry is that Zell is all it had to offer as a savior – and that’s saying a mouthful.

What genius has stepped up to rescue sacred journalism’s business? Philadelphia and Minneapolis are disasters. McClatchy keeps arguing, with ear plugs well stuffed and blinders tight, that the problems in the industry are not fundamental but cyclical (as Dave Morgan said to that at my New Business Models for News Summit, “bullshit”). Hearst has stumbled for two generations. Media News is still trying to make its business by cutting. The New York Times Company, for its vaunted leadership, is in many quarters shockingly incompetent (see: Boston). Gannett is as good as it gets in terms of innovation but it didn’t exactly start with pillars of the craft.

No, Rupert Murdoch is now the great shining hope of journalism. Ain’t that a mouthful of irony? After I left the Tribune and Murdoch bought the Sun-Times, a friend went over to work there and his Tribune colleagues sat shiva for him, as if he’d died. Another colleague who went to the National Enquirer was treated with less disdain. But now Murdoch is the one mogul with brains willing to invest in journalism. But note well that he’s investing in national journalism (and has long acknowledged that the local NY Post is just a bully pulpit).

Such is the stewardship of American journalism. And I won’t spare departments below the executive floor. To my peril, I’ve held journalists responsible for not innovating these last 13 years. Ad sales departments did nothing but take orders and had no courage to reinvent models or cannibalize before being cannibalized. Circulation departments did their best to torpedo the internet. Marketing departments never understood the value of journalism in the communities. Unions milked the cow wiht no-show jobs and waste. Analysts and institutional owners and reporters covered the industry never asked the hard questions.

It’s not as if the incumbents’ predecessors were much better. As Andrew Ross Sorkin pointed out the other day, it was Tribune’s former management that made money making this bad deal with Zell, screwing employees. No, it was the predecessors at all these companies who blew the chance to transform and grow journalism for the digital age.

When the history of newspapers is written – it’s about time to, as they’re about to become history – their golden age will probably be pegged between about 1975 (post Watergate, after TV had killed off multiple papers markets leaving monopolies, when cash was flush and was used to feed Pulitzer ego) to 1995 (when the internet earthquake hit and nobody saw the tsunami). But it was – and the Times pegs this more recently – a bubble, a false economy. If there was a golden age of newspapers, I say it was probably two to four decades before that, when cities had many papers, many voices, many views, and papers still spoke for and with the people.

Sound familiar? That’s where we’re headed again with the internet: many voices, many views, and now it’s the people talking.

I asked someone the other day what drastic step a newspaper could take today to stave off utter disaster and death. He laughed at me. Some are looking at stopping publishing a day or two (which is just stupid: news never happens on Mondays?). They can’t sell any assets when no one values them and even suckers can’t borrow money to buy them. Another round of huge cutbacks with no strategy for transformation only damages the product and brand. No, I fear it’s too late.

What saddens me even more is that we are not seeing investment to step into the vacuum. I know people who’ve worked on businesses to try to create new, online-one local news operations but they can’t get funding. I have no doubt that there is a sustainable business in local news. The problem is that, at least for the present, the current and former owners of local news ruined it. Thanks to them, news has cooties.

Change happens

December 10, 2008 by Jeff Jarvis
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Change is inevitable. Change is hard. Change is good. Change is rarely recognized in time. Change is life. That’s how we should be looking at what is happening to journalism today – not necessariliy as a plight, a conspiracy, a tragedy, a surprise but more as the inevitable change that was not recognized and exploited by some soon enough (for their own good).

That’s what Clay Shirky writes about in a wonderful post inspired by Tribune Company’s bankruptcy. It’s what Virginia Heffernan wrote about in her weekend Times Magazine column (which I had to read a few times to see the simplicity of her message about change). It’s also what I came away thinking about from a conference at near Oxford last week, where I wondered whether press barons, like the ennobled land barons who built Ditchley, are now out of their era. (I’ll post my Guardian column on the thought and the event Monday.)

* * *

Witnessing the biggest fall yet of a newspaper giant – in Tribune Company’s pathetic bankruptcy – Clay was inspired to look back at a post he wrote in 1995, a year after the birth of the commercial browser, called Help, the Price of Information Has Fallen, and It Can’t Get Up. Thirteen years ago – plenty of time to remake the news industry – Clay saw the change coming.

The price of information has not only gone into free fall in the last few years, it is still in free fall now, it will continue to fall long before it hits bottom, and when it does whole categories of currently lucrative businesses will be either transfigured unrecognizably or completely wiped out, and there is nothing anyone can do about it.

That’s what he wrote then. And now:

[A] dozen years ago, a kid who’d only just had his brains blown via TCP/IP nevertheless understood that the newspaper business was screwed, not because this was a sophisticated conclusion, but because it was obvious.

Google, eBay, craigslist, none of those things existed when I wrote that piece; I was extrapolating from Lycos and it was still apparent what was going to happen. It didn’t take much vision to figure out that unlimited perfect copyability, with global reach and at zero marginal cost, was slowly transforming the printing press into a latter-day steam engine.

And once that became obvious, we said so, over and over again, all the time. We said it in public, we said it in private. We said it when newspapers hired us as designers, we said it when we were brought in as consultants, we said it for free. We were some tiresome motherfuckers with all our talk about the end of news on paper. And you know what? The people who made their living from printing the news listened, and then decided not to believe us.

So I’m calling bullshit on the Rosenbaum thesis, because no one has been “caught up in this great upheaval.”

[When anybody attacks me on the playground again, I'm going tell them that Clay's my (blog) brother and he's bigger, tougher, and smarter than them and their brothers.]

Clay sets blame:

By the turn of the century, anyone who didn’t understand that the business model for newspapers was a wasting asset was caught up in nothing other than willful ignorance, so secure in their faith in the permanence of their business that they assumed that those glaciers would politely swerve at the last minute, which minute is looking increasingly like now.

* * *

Virginia is hardly the tiresome motherfucker. In her piece, she genteelly surveys the change in media and then advises her mature, professional colleagues to imagine they are 19 again…

…spending a day on Twitter or following a recipe from a Mark Bittman video played on a refrigerator that automatically senses what ingredients are missing and texts an order to the grocery store (it will soon exist!). Then they should think about what content suits these new modes of distribution and could evolve in tandem with them. For old-media types, mental flexibility could be the No. 1 happiness secret we have been missing.

Change is happy.

* * *

Ditchley struck me as an all-too-apt metaphor for change. Here were editors and publishers – and both breeds turned academics – plus people in and out of government power worrying about democracy in the time of change in media and journalism. They were in an age-old estate that did not or could not keep up with the times but whose value is preserved today and put to good use. Is that what journalism will become: a relic, a museum, a memory? No, only journalism as it was. The journalism that changes will live on, carrying its values and eternal verities into the future.

Change is necessary.

* * *

Virginia is right to celebrate change. Clay is right to blame those who resisted it, because that informs the present and the future. If we act as if change just happens upon us – surprise! – in a sudden upheaval, then we miss its continuing flow and its lessons and the opportunity to keep up with it. That was what I was saying that led to the assassination attempt Clay references: All of us related to journalism must accept responsibility for and learn from the past if we have any hope of being part of the future (or others will see the opportunity, as they are). Then we learn Virginia’s lesson, which is just the lesson we try to teach now in journalism school.

The discussion at Ditchley turned around business models and the question of whether there is a market demand – and a looming market failure – for quality journalism. I believe there is a demand, but then I’m a cockeyed American optimist and obnoxious internet populist.

Market failure? Well, that depends on how one defines the market and its players. Did the public fail journalism? No. (Many would say it’s just the opposite but I’ll leave that to another day.) Is technology killing journalism, making it impossible to practice, what with craigslist and Google and Digg and the other characters in this game of Clue? No. Technology is enabling journalism to grow and improve in countless ways. What’s mortally wounded is old journalism and old models. There’s a market failure now in newspaper companies, not in journalism. They’re not the same thing.

Journalism isn’t dying. Yes, Virginia, it’s changing.

Ditchley

December 10, 2008 by Jeff Jarvis
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I just spent three days at Ditchley, a mansion outside Oxford built in the 1720s, for a series of roundtables (Aspen with accents) about democracy and changing media. I’ll follow this with a series of posts about the discussion, which occurred under the Chatham House Rule (note the singular as there’s only one: I may recount the substance but without attribution). The group included media executives, academics, and government and NGO people. (Disclosure: I paid for my transportation personally; the Ditchley Foundation and the BBC World Service Trust as a sponsor were hosts for accommodation and meals in the mansion.)

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winston2Ditchley is amazing. As an American with short-term cultural memory, I couldn’t help looking at it as if it were a Williamsburg recreation or Disneyworld attraction but, of course, it’s the real thing, handed down in one family until the last century, then bought by another, who donated it to the foundation so that these discussions could occur. It is filled with lush wood, ornate molded and painted ceilings, antlers from the previous house (dated 1608), paintings of lords and ladies, a buzzer board so the servants in the day could serve the score of bedrooms, and pictures of Winston Churchill visiting (he was born next door — which is to say the other mansion about 10 miles away).

Before you get too jealous, the bathroom was down the hall and the wi-fi was in the basement. But the wine was good and the discussion was great.

I’m posting this because Ditchley and what followed inspired a lot of thinking – it was a good meeting – and then I always come away from talking with my London media cousins with new ideas and perspectives. So rather than explaining what the hell a ditchley is each time, here’s that one post.