BuzzMachine

The media pundit's pundit. Written by NYC insider Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine covers news, media, journalism, and politics.

Month: April 2009

  • Defining the new economy

    8 comments on Defining the new economy
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    I’m collecting links to thinking that tries to identify the essence of the new economy. In a stream-of-consciousness flow about just this, Brian Frank argues that we’re moving from an industrial to a venture-capital economy where supposed scientific precision gives way to the imperfection that is inherent in innovation:

    [Paul] Graham compares this to the Industrial Revolution, which is a fair comparison in terms of scale, but I think we should recognize that these current changes are a kind of reversal, or inversion, or undoing of the Industrial Revolution.

    Through the Industrial Revolution the economy itself gradually became like one big machine — or at least that’s how most economists tended to see it. Everything could supposedly be quantified, reduced, and rigorously predicted.

    Silicon Valley represents something else entirely. . . .

    Rather than expanding control and diminishing variations, the emerging attitude will be about expanding variety and accommodating the unknown. It inverts all of our intuitions and assumptions about doing business and managing the economy… Know your ecology and complexity science.

    (My favourite books on this are The New Pioneers by Tom Petzinger, Surfing on the Edge of Chaos by Richard Pascale et al, and Bob Sutton’s Weird Ideas That Work… I haven’t read Jeff Jarvis’s What Would Google Do? yet — I have it on-reserve — but I think it might make my list too. Orbiting the Giant Hairball has been on my reading list for a long time as well.)

    So far Silicon Valley is the best model we have for going forward. It addresses the two big defects of industrialism: the one pointed out by Roger Martin, that employees and customers are turned off by rigorous efficiency, and the one pointed out by Nassim Taleb, that the unexpected is inevitable.

  • On object lesson in walls

    30 comments on On object lesson in walls
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    I wanted to read about the news that former online publisher Steven Brill, former Wall Street Journal online exc Gordon Crovitz, and former cable exec Leo Hindery had teamed up to to create a company to enable news companies to huddle behind a wall and charge for their content.

    I went to the Wall Street Journal site to read about it. But the damned site keeps forgetting who I am. So I got just a few lines and yet another pitch to subscribe, nevermind that I already had. Even though I have paid for the Journal – the only site I pay for (for now) – it wasn’t worth the effort even to remember my username and so I went to the New York Times and then to Reuters and then to Paid Content to read the story (PaidContent, a blog, did the best job). I knew they call covered the news thanks to GoogleNews.

    The irony is painfully obvious: A pay wall stopped me from reading about putting up pay walls and I had no problem detouring around it to read free (and better) accounts.

    Therein lies the challenge to this effort to put together content cartels. It takes just one guy to ruin the party. Best of luck to them but I predict it won’t work. Once again, this will not only reduce traffic and thus advertising opportunities and revenue but it will reduce Googlejuice (even if Google can search the paid content, it will get fewer links and clicks and thus less juice) and it will bolster competitors. I blogged recently that a wag at a meeting I attended wished newspapers would do just this because it would put them out of business sooner and open up opportunities to replace them.

    I don’t intend to pay – nor do I intend to charge. And, by the way, I have decided not to renew the Journal. I get more and better media coverage elsewhere. Today is just a case in point.

    : The press release just went up. It sounds eerily reminiscent of the doomed New Century Network.

    It also sounds eerily threatening. After saying that the company will “will be to negotiate wholesale licensing and royalty fees with intermediaries such as search engines and other websites that currently base much of their business models on referrals of readers to the original content on newspaper, magazine and online news websites” it adds that its hired guns include attorneys David Boies and Theodore B. Olson.

    I’d also turn that sentence around: It’s the online news istes that base much of their business models on referrals of readers from search engines and other web sites.

    (Disclosure: I remind you that I work in the link economy with Daylife and Publish2. In the New Business Models for News Project at CUNY, we will also flesh out pay models. My stand on that is obvious but let’s get real numbers – assumptions and ranges and experience – and have the debate in specifics.)

  • The newswire of the future

    5 comments on The newswire of the future
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    Jackie Hai has a nice way to describe what follows the AP (my emphasis):

    The AP syndication model works in an economy of information scarcity, whereas the web represents an economy of abundance.

    Second, what the AP has failed to grasp is that the evolution of the participatory web has blurred the line between content producers, distributors and consumers to the point where everybody can be any and all of the three. The news wire of the future will not be centralized and top-down, but rather distributed and bottom-up.

  • Biz Air

    7 comments on Biz Air
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    I’m late to discovering Richard Branson’s plans to have entrepreneurs make video pitches, which he’ll then show to his captive audience: passengers. One wonders whether the ticket conditions should include giving Virgin a carry.

    But seriously, it’s a way in which an airline can become a content publisher (one of the ideas in What Would Google Do?, which came from here). It’s a way to give his passengers extra value (hey, I discovered the next Google on my last London flight). It establishes a unique relationship with a valued demographic.

    The next step should be putting cameras on the backs of seats so the VCs on board can give their critiques back to the entrepreneurs: round-trip content.

  • Media’s change-haters

    29 comments on Media’s change-haters

    I wanted to get out of my growly phase this week, really, I did, but this just adds the cherry: The Atlantic and the National Journal poll an infinitesimal sample of mostly old-media farts (Kos and Josh Marshall aside) and the majority concludes that the internet hurts journalism. Restrain me. Quotes:

    “The Internet trains readers to consume news in ever-smaller bites. This is a disaster for newspapers and magazines,” says one small bite. Did it ever occur that maybe people never read your overlong stories; you just didn’t know it?

    “The Internet has some plusses,” says another, giving a caveat that you know will be followed by a few buts, “It has widened the circle of those participating in the national debate. But it has mortally wounded the financial structure of the news business so that the cost of doing challenging, independent reporting has become all but prohibitive all over the world. It has blurred the line between opinion and fact and created a dynamic in which extreme thought flourishes while balanced judgment is imperiled.” No, it has presented new journalistic and media opportunities to gather and share news in new ways and fine new efficiencies and reach new audiences. It has also brought new openness and demands of transparency regarding the opinions of those who long called themselves just bearers of fact. Judgment is ours, say the people, and that’s where the balance lies.

    “News consumption depends on news production, and I don’t see anything on the Internet that produces news—that is, detailed responsible empirical journalism—the way newspapers do (or did). It is typical of Americans to get more excited about consumption than about production.” Boy does that encapsulate the snottiness of old media.

    Thank goodness for the minority:

    “Sure there’s sludge, and I can feel overwhelmed by quantity–but the range and quality of what’s at my fingertips every morning is astonishing.”

    “You abandon the conceit that ‘newspapers’ equals ‘news,’ you realize that people have far more information available to them about current events than ever before, and that’s a great thing for both journalism (the gathering of news) and the public.”

    [via Gawker in Twitter, that nasty bite-sized new medium]