BuzzMachine

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

Tag: Book

  • Milking the old cash cow

    17 comments on Milking the old cash cow
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    I’ve been thinking about TV Guide and why its drastic overhaul didn’t/couldn’t happen when it should have, 10 years ago — and why similar drastic strategic changes are not happening at other publishing companies today.

    It’s because they are cash cows.

    TV Guide brought in a helluva lot of cash; it was No. 1 in ad pages, and each page was golden. When I was there, I developed a new magazine, the Parents’ Guide to Children’s Entertainment, because I believed the company had to expand its guide franchise and diversify and because I thought it was a helluva good idea and was needed (it was). We sold 400,000 copies in only two weeks on the newsstand with no promotion but the project was killed. Why? It wasn’t worth the time of TV Guide ad reps to sell $8k pages when they could be selling $80k pages in the main mag. Now the answer to that, of course, would have been to invest in the new products with new staff. But when you work on a cash cow, executives don’t want to spend time raising calves; things need to be big to compete for attention and pay for the big infrastructure. And new = risk. So new things don’t start.

    And the answer to the creeping shrinking of the main mag would have been to make radical changes in the product: gutsy changes like the ones TV Guide just made to not only update the product but also cut costs. Some argued in favor of making those changes when I was there, me among them. But inertia and fear and politics and cash won. Strategy didn’t.

    Having a cash cow distracts companies from the future. It makes them complacent: ‘Look at all the money (still) rolling in.’ It makes them think that if they just tweak this and that — if they can still get away with raising their rates even as their audience and value are shrinking — they will continue to keep milking cash from that old cow. It makes them overly cautious: ‘Nobody hurt Bessie!’

    And politically, the guys in charge of the cow don’t want anybody inside the company competing with them: no new products, no new power centers, no one else to set strategy, no one else to use resources. They win because, of course, they’re the ones bringing in the cash. Nevermind that they’re the ones stopping the company from building for the future. They’ll tell you that’s not their job. They’re there to protect the cow.

    Jay Rosen argued in his post about laying newspapers down to die that it is also about draining the value of a company as it declines. In some cases, that’s true. But in some, there isn’t such a sinister or cynical motive; it’s more about blindness, wilfull blindness.

    As in the case of TV Guide, change will finally come, but only when it is inevitable, and perhaps when it is too late.

    : And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a picture of what life is like in many other big media companies today. That is what is happening on shrinking newspapers, and in shrinking broadcast and even cable networks, and in many a shrinking magazines.

    The cash cowherds run the farm, change is resisted, strategic bravery is rarely seen. Why? They still make a lot of money. Yes, but they aren’t growing, not in real terms.

    And, worse, the world has changed in this decade in profound ways. There is an entirely new medium competing for attention and dollars. This new medium has devalued what you thought was your core asset — your stranglehold on distribution, your size — and made them into burdens rather than advantages. Your customers, once just a mass, can now talk back and complain. And, most important, in a world where small is the new big, a million small competitors are now enabled to chomp away at your audience, your franchise, your brand, your business, your cash.

    Other media companies should look at TV Guide’s saga as instructive and predictive: What happened to the magazine that once sold more copies every year than any other magazine can happen to you.

    TV Guide is the cow in the coal mine.

  • Life is customer service

    7 comments on Life is customer service
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    In Technology Review, Craig Newmark writes about his list and his view of customer service. As I think I’ve said here before, I’ve heard Craig introduce himself at more than one event as the guy who does customer service and that always gets a laugh but it is no joke. Customer service is the highest ethic of his venture. It is the highest ethic of open source. It is the highest ethic of a true community. If newspapers… and Dell… and AOL… and government remembered that customer service is their job, they’d be a lot more successful than they are.

    My title at craigslist is “customer service rep and founder,” and my customer service role is at least a full-time gig. A CEO runs the actual organization now. I’ve always had difficulty articulating why I have this obsession. I work anywhere from two to ten hours a day, seven days a week, doing stuff like deleting “bait and switch” posts from New York apartment brokers, moderating discussion boards, and sharing community suggestions with the team. If you e-mail me about the site, I’ll probably write back–quickly, too….

    I figure that reasonably good customer service is part of the social contract between producer and consumer. In general, if you’re going to do something, you should follow through and not screw around. As a nerd, I have the tendency to take things pretty seriously, so if I commit to something, I try really hard to stay committed.

    This isn’t altruism or social activism; it’s just giving people a break….

    Also, I’ve learned from the open-source movement that people want to contribute to endeavors of mutual benefit. So at craigslist, we’ve turned over a lot of control over the site to the people who use it. We seriously listen to suggestions and actually change the site in response to them….

    I feel that all this is a deep expression of democratic values. From a business point of view, of course, it makes good sense, too: it lowers our costs and improves the quality of what’s on our site. Finally, it helps keep management in touch with what’s real–or at least that’s what we hope.

    Unfortunately, in contemporary corporate culture, customer service is often an afterthought, given lip service only. This seems to be part of the general dysfunction of large organizations. As a company accumulates power and money, the people who are skilled at corporate politics take control of it. Customer service never seems to be highly prized by people with those skills. Maybe it’s because they lack empathy.

    The key to customer service is not treating people like customers but like people. I’ve said this here before, too: When I worked for small papers in places like Burlington, Iowa, I talked with people who read what I wrote. When I went to work for big papers, I lost that connection and saw readers as people who wrote letters with crayons and tongues stuck out. That separation ruined me as a customer service representative in journalism until I got back into the conversation at eye level via blogs, where we’re each others’ customers.

  • No more AO-Hell

    44 comments on No more AO-Hell
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    I canceled my AOL subscription last night. And they were a pain in the ass to the very end, keeping me on hold; delivering wordy, touchy-feely, insincere phone scripts; trying to rope/fool me into a continuing $9.95/month subscription.

    No, cancel me. Just cancel me. Let go. I mean it.

    After 12 years, I’m history. And so is what we used to call “online,” the era of closed subscription services, the world of walls.

    Before AOL, I used CompuServe and also tried The Source and tried to avoid Prodigy. And I worked at Delphi very briefly 11 years ago. They were all part of a world that is over but is taking as long to die as TV Guide.

    Gather ’round, young’uns, and I’ll tell you about them olden days:

    Way back in 1974, I started working on my first newsroom computer (because I was bored on the midnight shift on the Chicago Tribune, waiting for someone to die a horrible death so I could call cops and their relatives and then write about it; that’s what we called journalism back then). I was the only guy who dared touch the computers sitting there, waiting to be used, and so I became the guy in the newsroom who wasn’t scared of the damned things.

    I was newsgeek. Computers changed the way I wrote and I was soon silicon-dependent; I was an obnoxious evangelist for that strange thing called “the cursor” (a concept that wasn’t easy to explain to grumpy editors who always hate change). When I headed out of town for stories, I still had to haul along a portable typewriter (this was our laptop, I told my kids) and a mojo wire (as Hunter Thompson dubbed the early fax machines, which took something like six minutes a page to transmit onto smelly, chemicaly, unreadable paper around a fussy and noisy rotating drum using a 300 baud acoustic coupler). I was so relieved when I got to take a TRS-80 Model 100 and transmit directly with that. I was so addicted to portability that I spent a fortune of my own to buy the first full portable computer, the precursor to the Kaypro and the Compaq, my beloved Osborne 1. But it wasn’t portable enough, so I bought the first battery-operated fully functional (kind of) PC, the Morrow Pivot.

    But what really changed my life was not the machines but what I got to do with them when I moved to New York and went online for the first time with that damned accoustic coupler. It was slow, ugly, all-text, geeky. I could ^h in my sleep.

    But I quickly saw that I wasn’t just communicating. I wasn’t just reading. I was joining something.

    Back then, you had to pay to join and the companies that enabled us to do this made all the same mistakes big companies still make today: They thought it was about content. They thought it was about communication. They thought it was about owning the consumer. They thought it was about walls. They didn’t really understand that it was just about people.

    And, of course, the internet replaced them all. When I went to work for Delphi Internet Services as editor in chief in 1994, Murdoch had just bought them (I worked for his TV Guide then) because they were the first service to take consumers to this future-shocky thing called the internet (I heard a sleezy stockbroker on a train one night tell a chump that he should buy News Corp. stock because, “You’ve heard of this internet thing? Well, Murdoch just bought it”). They were text-only and were trying to invent their graphical user interface to compete with Prodigy et al, but I was one of the guys who said nevermind that, try this Mosaic thing. I left Delphi (passing that IQ test) before it essentially imploded under millions of Murdoch’s misspent dollars and came to Advance, where they were debating between AOL and Prodigy for their newspapers. Try this browser thing, I said, and we went onto the internet and never looked back.

    I got AOL then and kept it this long only because (a) I needed to keep tabs on them for work — and work paid and (b) I used them rarely for dial-up from bad hotels. But now I’m unself-employed and paying the bills. And I have my Verizon EVDO card, which works even from the wilds of the Poconos.

    So I have no earthly need for AOL. I certainly have no need for its content. I don’t need it to communicate. I don’t need it to make a community for me; I can find my own here.

    At long last, I canceled AOL. And it feels so good.

    So spammers: I now hand jeffjarvis@aol.com over to you. It’s all yours. It has been for the last five years. You made that address utterly useless. You didn’t even know I wasn’t there. But I’m gone now. Just thought I’d let you know.

  • Waaa Waaa Waaa

    17 comments on Waaa Waaa Waaa
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    Michael Kinsley is whining that the internet doesn’t operate the way he wants it to operate and so he’s taking his marbles and going home. Or something like that.

    He’s just acting like the old-media guy he is, wanting to control the medium as they all do. But, of course, that misses the essential point of the internet. It can’t be controled.

    The New York Times reports today that Kinsley is going to take some other, unnamed job at the LA Times, this coming only two days after he wrote a column whining about the web and after Dan Gillmor issued him a proper lashing for that. Waaaa:

    The nasty parts of the Web are where people are doing what the Founding Surfers intended: expressing themselves and forming communities. Why is the tone of conversation on the Internet, especially about politics, so much lower than in the material world?

    This from a guy who spent years on Crossfire — the very show that did to political discourse what Jerry Springer did to daylight? Here’s a man who knows about lowering the tone of conversation about politics; he was an accomplice in the crime!

    Then he whines about getting too much email that disagrees with him and thinks it’s something about email and not about him. Waaa:

    Or maybe cyberspace just has more than its share of undersocialized geeks, sitting in front of their computers and sharing their bitterness with the world.

    Sounds like many a press bar I’ve sat in.

    Waaa:

    Cyberspace communities — and the cyberspace community at large — often seem to be more energized by rejecting heathens than by embracing soulmates. They love staging inquisitions and anathemas. Having spent a decade working at the devil Microsoft and then at a big “old media” institution, the Los Angeles Times, I am amazed by the hostility that greets any effort to stroll into the clubroom and buy the boys a round of drinks.

    But you weren’t trying to do that, Michael. You were trying to get people to talk about what you wanted them to talk about. You were trying to control the conversation. Oh, I know you were trying to do something new; it was just that you didn’t understand and still don’t.

    Recently at the Times we tried using a Web innovation called “wiki” — a shared-editing process very much in the cyberian spirit. For two days, thousands of people seemed to be enjoying it. But our e-mail boxes oozed unwelcoming contempt from cyberoids (except for the real innovators of wiki — the founders of the amazing wikipedia.com — who were helpful and sympathetic). Then a guerrilla attack in the middle of the night flooded the site with pornography and we had to take it down.

    I went into detail about why this was a well-intentioned but doomed misuse of a tool here. If they’d asked the community for help beforehand — if they’d acknowledged that those undersocialized geeks might know more than those editors about this — they could have succeeded. And rather than trying to get people to talk about what Kinsley wanted to talk about — ‘gather round my editorial, people’ — how much better it would have been just to listen. But that’s not the newspaper way. And that’s why Kinsley’s whining about the club is so ironic. Just try to be a blogger getting past the press club door. Waaaa:

    It’s not surprising that cyberians make lousy communitarians, but the ugliest aspects of libertarianism — the me-me-me, the stay-out-of-my-space — have dominated.

    Newspaper folks don’t make great communitarians either. But they can learn. Or go home.

    I do think Kinsley heart was in the right place. But he couldn’t stop himself from complaining that things didn’t go his way. Welcome to the internet.

    : I just opened a press release announcing the Batten Awards and what do I find but Kinsley and Wikipedia’s Jimbo Wales speaking together:

    Highlighting the symposium will be a keynote dialogue on participatory news with Michael Kinsley, Editorial and Opinion Editor of the Los Angeles Times, and Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia, a collaboratively written online encyclopedia, and President of the Wikimedia Foundation, which recently launched WikiNews, collaboratively written online news reports.

  • Konfeedulator: Feedthink meets widgethink

    12 comments on Konfeedulator: Feedthink meets widgethink
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    Yahoo is buying Konfabulator, the neat program that lets you place all kinds of constantly updated widgets on your computer and lets all kinds of creative and generous people write those widgets. Apple — the great copycat — snarfed up the idea for its OSX dashboard. In the old days, we would have said that Yahoo is fighting Microsoft and Apple to take over the operating system or the desktop.

    Now, I think it’s part of feedthink. The difference is that widgets are dynamic; they get current information; they gets feeds.

    In my feedthink post, I wrote about Twest, a Munich company that was creating similar widgets before their time, about eight years ago, and they had two additional insights:

    Widgets should be available anywhere, anytime, on any device. I should be able to see my widgets on my phone — and, in fact, that’s supposed to be a benefit of the new version of Windows, Vista (nee Longhorn). Auxiliary displays will let you see your email or other current information on a small screen when your laptop is closed or on your phone screen. See how Make is creating these displays now using Konfabulator.

    Widgets should also be collaborative. I should be able to share a current widget with you. Say I have a shopping list widget. My family should be able to update it from any device and we should all be able to see it on any device. Content is functionality, functionality is content, content is communication.

    It’s all part of feedthink.

    : Yahoo taking this over means that it could do both those things to widgets. We’ll see.

    : Also, if you have an online service of any sort, you’d better start widgethink. I don’t mean taking your content and putting it into a widget (there are plenty of stupid widgets already). I don’t mean turning out ad widgets (unless you’re Bud Lite and you make me laugh). I mean think feeds, think portability, think collaboration, don’t think platform.

    Southwest Airlines created its own desktop ap to give you bargain airfares. I wouldn’t go to the effort of downloading that and putting it on my desktop. But I might widget it. Weatherbug was, in a sense, the original widget and now weather is on widgets everywhere (note that because anyone can write widgets from many feeds, it’s hard to hold onto terroritory and branding in widgetville).

    News headline widgets are obvious. But what else can you do with them? Can you action-enable the headlines: let me email or save or Del.icio.us or blog the headlines from the widget, perhaps.

    If I were Weight Watchers, I’d create a personalized diet widget you could call on from the laptop or the phone.

    If I were P&G, I’d create that shopping-list widget.

    If I were Nike, I’d sponsor the fitness widgets that already exist.

    What else?