BuzzMachine

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

  • Local blog and business models event at CUNY

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    I’m putting out a call for local bloggers within traveling distance from New York – and for journalists who’ve left their jobs or are thinking about leaving to start local news blogs – to attend a series of workshops at CUNY on Nov. 11.

    The first half of the day, we’ll be presenting and discussing the New Business Models for News Project projections for the local news ecosystem (earlier presented at a Knight Foundation-sponsored event at the Aspen Institute). In the second half of the day, we will have workshops and discussions aimed at improving local sites’ businesses: setting up; serving ads; selling ads; marketing; managing communities; and more – plus presentations by companies working to help these sites, including Outside.in Growthspur, Prism, Google, Addify, PaperG, Spot.us, and others. We will have a mix of bloggers, editors, publishers, entrepreneurs, investors, and companies working in the new local news ecosystem. Gannett New Jersey and The New York Times are contributing to the effort.

    Space is limited so right now we’re just putting out the call for bloggers and journalists who have or plan to have local sites to give them priority. A preemptive apology to those for whom we don’t have room; we’ll do our best to accommodate everyone we can. Know also that we’ll be streaming the day. If you’d like an invite, please email David Cohn (david@spot.us), who’s kind enough to help organize this, our third CUNY conference on the topic, and who’s a helluva lot better organized than I am. Please make sure to give us a link to your site.

  • Jersey’s Cinderella story

    8 comments on Jersey’s Cinderella story

    My neighbor down the street, Chris Daggett, is running for governor as an independent in New Jersey. Yeah, sure, an independent won’t ever make it in this contentious, party-run state. But tonight his wife called to say that in the morning he’s getting the endorsement of the Star-Ledger, the largest paper in the state – the first time, they say, that the paper has backed an independent. Daggett’s poll numbers have jumped from 8 to 17 percent, the latter taken both before and after the first gubernatorial debate where Daggett did very well. He’s on the way up and now they think they do have a shot.

    So my son and I wandered down the block and watched as Daggett and his wife and daughters and hardy campaign workers strategized media, calling assignment desks, sending out email blasts, updating their site, and making videos:

    (Full disclosure: I worked with the Ledger for many years and lent the Daggett’s my Flip camera for the videos.)

  • News’ Forbidden City

    29 comments on News’ Forbidden City
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    I found this Associated Press story this morning because of a tweet and then I retweeted adding value along the way, a one-word reason to read it: “Fools.” Many retweets ensued leading to many more readers.

    Welcome to the future of content distribution, the new newsstand, if you ask me. Welcome to a den of thieves, if you ask the subjects of the story, Associated Press CEO Tom Curley and News Corp. oligarch Rupert Murdoch.

    They stood near Tiananmen Square – as Alan Mairson retweeted, “Nice touch: They made announcement in Great Hall of the People, shrine to Central Control” – arguing once again that people who aggregate, curate, link to, talk about their stories are stealing their value.

    “Crowd-sourcing Web services such as Wikipedia, YouTube and Facebook have become preferred customer destinations for breaking news, displacing Web sites of traditional news publishers,” Curley said. “We content creators must quickly and decisively act to take back control of our content.”

    He said content aggregators, such as search engines and bloggers, were also directing audiences and revenue away from content creators. . . .

    Murdoch also told the opening session of the World Media Summit in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People that content providers would be demanding to be paid.

    “The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content. But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid content, it will be the content creators — the people in this hall — who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs who triumph,” the News Corp. chief executive said.

    I rolled my eyes and hardly for the first time at their dangerous ignorance of the new realities of the next economy – at this suicidal attempt to protect outmoded models and fight the future – and tweeted my comment and thought that was it. But then I got a call from the AP reporter in Beijing who wrote this story, Alexa Olesen, and pulled off the road on my way to work to talk with her. I said exactly what you’d expect me to say, arguing against their arguments.

    I presented an alternative future that is being built today, the future we see in the New Business Models for News Project with new efficiencies, specialization, targeting, value that comes with the collaboration that the internet and its links enable, with an ecosystem of many smaller but once-again profitable entities providing news we have reason to hope will be better. I got angry at the irresponsible stewardship over journalism that has been exercised by the Politburo of the Press meeting in Beijing, the people who did but no longer control the press and squandered the last 15 years. I said I was angry because they are the ones killing newspapers, not the internet.

    Olesen asked whether I agreed with other talk in Beijing that it’s important for news to be on many platforms. Yes, I said, but that drive is about a decade late. Then I said I was being unfair; there is good work going on and I pointed to three or four things The New York Times is doing by example. But I then said the media world is moving to a next step, after sites and pages to streams.

    And then I used this story as an example. I discovered the story through a tweet. I spread the story through a tweet. Others spread the story through their tweets. I’m spreading it again here. We are not kleptomaniacs. We are the new (free) distribution. We are providing value to news. I explained that Google News causes a billion clicks a month and Twitter causes more (Bit.ly alone causes a billion). But the comrades in Beijing can’t see that because they are ignorant of the imperatives of the link economy.

    Among the many ironies in this tale is that Curley presages his own defeat. If he and Murdoch and the Central Committee put up walls and guards or unbelievably delays the news (as the AP is considering), we will go to the sites he cites – Wikipedia et al – and create better news with or without them. The way they are talking in Beijing, I fear it will be without them sooner than later.

    : Later: Olesen also said that she wasn’t hearing what I was saying in Beijing. And they call us in blogs an echo chamber, I replied.

    Except one might have heard these things some years ago … from Messrs. Curley and Murdoch themselves. Kevin Anderson does a wonderful job making them eat their earlier words, a dish of Peking crow.

    : The Brisbane Times Sydney Morning Herald says the summit in Beijing really is run by a media politburo.

    The summit has a secretariat based at Xinhua’s Beijing headquarters and is chaired by Xinhua’s president, Li Congjun, previously vice-minister for propaganda. Co-chairmen include Mr Murdoch, Mr Curley and leaders from the BBC, the Japanese news service Kyodo, Russia’s official news agency, ITAR-TASS, and Google.

    Big issues are decided through ”collective consultation” with the world media organisations that comprise the secretariat.

    ”This is beginning to look familiar, don’t you think?” wrote David Bandurski, from the University of Hong Kong’s China media project. ”A self-appointed group of elites making decisions through consultation among themselves … The World Media Summit has a politburo.”

    The irony is just too obvious. At the summit, Chinese leaders tell media leaders to create just ”’true, correct, comprehensive and objective’ news coverage.” As we say online: Heh.

  • Plug? Ad? Opinion? Life?

    18 comments on Plug? Ad? Opinion? Life?
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    Is this a story or an ad? It matters.

    I went to Radio Shack today to buy wires and plugs to hook up my iPhone because the damned car radio has no plug and the damned FM kluges don’t work. I bought the wrong wires, realized it immediately, and returned in minutes to exchange them. Radio Shack, as it its irritating habit, demanded my phone number, name, and address. I refused. It was a cash exchange. The guy hassled me and then, on the fourth attempt, finally told his computer that I’d refused, which he could have done in the first place. I cursed myself for not going to Best Buy, where they don’t take your blood type to make a transaction; one of the reasons I like Best Buy is its no-nonsense return policy. They care about satisfied and returning customers over irritating rules. I tweeted that here. Now I’m blogging about it.

    OK, so I just said something nice about Best Buy and something critical about its competitor. Look on my disclosures page and you’ll see that I had a business relationship with Best Buy. A few weeks ago, because of my book, they paid for me to come speak to various groups over two days (which I quite enjoyed and which taught me a lot about retail, which I’ve been contemplating and want to write about).

    So is what I just said about Best Buy an ad? An endorsement? A testimonial? Or just a story and my opinion? I leave that to you to decide and trust you with that decision. My integrity and relationship with you depends on what you decide. I disclose my relationship for that reason. I believe in transparency and recommend it – in my book – to companies, governments, and journalists. So is this story an ad for my book? That, too, is up to you to decide.

    But now the Federal Trade Commission is getting in the middle of our relationship. It has issued vaguely worded rules – amazing that they’re still vague after 80 pages – that make we wonder and worry whether my disclosure is adequate – should ever tweet carry a caveat? – and whether Best Buy will make my observations accurate (what if they give a customer a hassle on a return and that customer complains I misled him?). Best Buy, in turn, might need to worry about what I say about them.

    Note that if I were writing for The New York Times – if I were, say, David Pogue – the FTC would not regulate my speech in this manner. First Amendment, you know. The press. But as a blogger, I am now a second class citizen in my speech. The government casts its net over all citizens who now use the tools of the internet to publish – no, to speak. This is a corollary to the debate that’s going on right now over who should be covered under a federal shield law. Who should be under the FTC’s net?

    On this blog, that’s my problem and I can handle it. But what about all the huge proportion of the population who are now using the tools of the internet to publish – or what publishers and governments would call publishing when most of them think they’re just using blogs or Twitter or Facebook or YouTube or what comes next so they can talk with their friends – what about them? Now they have to worry about missteps.

    Some of you have argued that the FTC is going after deceptive bad guys and that’s good. But what are the unintended consequences? What if one of those unsuspecting “publishers” falls for PayPerPost as Pied Piper and becomes human spam but the FTC sees her as a flim-flam mom? Some of you are pointing to the FCC saying it won’t be mean and it can’t enforce all its regs anyway so we shouldn’t worry – yes, selective enforcement, that’s comforting. But another FTC guy said absurdly that people who review books should return their review copies or they could be in trouble. Which is it? You could be the one person who was fined huge amounts of money because your kid pirated music in your house; you could be the example. Don’t want to take chances? Figure you’re playing it safe?

    Welcome to the chill. We all have our own FCC now. Broadcast is an exception to the First Amendment’s prohibition on regulating the press. Now bloggers are, too, because we’re not the press. But we are, aren’t we? See, there are bigger things at stake here than just a few fake Viagra ads. (Mind you, I’m not endorsing Viagra. It’s not working … yet. Now how’s that for disclosure?)

  • Media Talk USA talks TV

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    Here’s this month’s edition of the Guardian Media Talk USA podcast with me at the helm and the NY Times’ Brian Stelter and Time’s James Poniewozik on the couch. This month: No newspaper mourning, mewling, and misery! We talk TV – Letterman, talk shows, the fall season – plus the FTC and the Washington Post and Twitter. Enjoy (I hope):