Posts about innovation

Honoring Neil deGrasse Tyson for his journalism

tyson photo croppedWhen Neil deGrasse Tyson interviewed Edward Snowden (via electronic avatar) for his podcast, the good doctor said a few times that he is not a journalist.

Yet the Knight Foundation and we at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism are giving Tyson the third Knight Innovation Award for journalism on Oct. 14. When I told him this, I anticipated his objection: “I’m a scientist, not a journalist.” That is just the point. In the larger information ecosystem in which news now works, Tyson provides an example to experts in any field for how to inject desperately needed facts and reasoning into a public discussion that too often lacks either. At a time when I argue that explanation itself becomes a journalistic specialty, Tyson again provides a model for how to bring complex subjects down to earth and relevance. As a media innovator, he has learned and exploited every new medium — from Twitter to podcasts — to use his celebrity to enlighten.

In any medium, Tyson uses clear explanation, humor, and blunt delivery of the facts to explain concepts and refute anti-intellectual arguments. On politicians debating global warming, he has said: “Now we have a time where people are cherry-picking science. The science is not political. That’s like repealing gravity because you gained 10 pounds last week.” In a two-minute YouTube video, he can explain the science behind climate change. In any lecture — like this one at ASU — Tyson demonstrates a journalist’s ability to impart knowledge through storytelling and to argue the case for art’s as well as newspapers’ impact on science.

I had the privilege of joining an episode of Tyson’s Star Talk show and podcast to talk about journalism. I know he cares about the future of the field.

So we are honoring Neil deGrasse Tyson at CUNY. At that ceremony, he will receive a $25,000 award from Knight and — here’s the cool part — he will have another $25,000 to give forward to a media innovator of his choice.

But wait, there’s more: We will begin the afternoon at 4 p.m. with a panel on podcasting led by Alex Blumberg, founder of Gimlet Media, and including Heben Nigutu of BuzzFeed’s Another Round podcast, Manoush Zomorodi of WNYC’s Note to Self, and Greg Young of the Bowery Boys podcast.

There will be a limited number of seats open. If you, like me, are a fan of Neil deGrasse Tyson and podcasts and journalism, then this will be a slice of conversational heaven. The details and sign-up are here.

Mapping new opportunities in technology and news

At CUNY’s Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism, we believe technology provides many still-untapped opportunities for news. So we commissioned Dr. Nicholas Diakopoulos to research and map that territory. He came back with a very good and readable paper and with an exercise/game to help media folks find that opportunity. We’re offering that game to journalism schools and media companies.

Here is Andrew Phelps’ report on the research at Niemanlab. See my longer post about the effort here; see Nick’s paper here as PDF, here on Scribd.

Online News Association members: Nick and my CUNY colleague Jeremy Caplan have volunteered to run brainstorming sessions at this year’s conference. So please vote for their session here. We’ll bring lots of games to give to participants. You can also email us to ask for them here (but — as with anything free — supplies are limited!).

Says Phelps: “The paper is high-concept but short, and everyone who wants to reinvent journalism should read it…. Breaking down the problems makes solutions a lot more attainable.” That’s the idea.

When innovation yields efficiency

Much of the innovation we’ve seen lately hasn’t led to growth but instead to efficiency – that is, shrinkage.

I’ve been mulling over Mike Mandel’s cover story in last week’s BusinessWeek, in which he tried to puncture another bubble: the belief that we’ve had a rich decade of American innovation. He argues that there’s actually an “innovation shortfall” and he uses economic stagnation to plead his case. Now I’m not economist (that’s a straight line) and so I won’t argue about the impact of other events on growth – starting with the so-called financial crisis.

But as I thought through the major innovations of the last decade, many of them have not led to economic growth; they haven’t added money to the economy but left it in the economy. Thus measuring innovation’s impact in the revenue, growth, productivity, and market cap of large companies may not be valid. Instead, we are seeing innovation take money out of their pockets, leaving it with their customers. What they, in turn, do with that extra money and what impact it has on the economy is an entirely different question – and that impact is likely seen in any case not in large companies but in individual consumers and in small businesses. But I think the proper measure of the changes in the last decade is the innovation dividend. See:

* craigslist is blamed for destroying (that’s from the publishers’ perspective) $10 billion in classified ad value annually**, replacing it with its reported $100 million revenue. Newspapers act as if that was their money – as if they had a God-given right to it – but, of course, it wasn’t. When Craig Newmark spoke with my students at CUNY, and they asked him why he didn’t maximize revenue at craigslist and sell it for billions and then use that money for philanthropy, he told them that he thought he was doing more good for the country and the economy by leaving more money in the pockets of the people who were doing the transactions he now enabled. He cut out a gross inefficiency born of the monopoly that newspapers held over the means of production and distribution. If you try to measure his innovation’s impact on the economy with old methods and metrics – built on the assumptions of the old economy – you can’t see it. He didn’t make companies grow or become more productive. He added efficiency.

* Amazon, eBay, and the internet as a whole are blamed for destroying large swaths of the retail marketplace. But again, they brought efficiency in a number of ways: price transparency, which leads to lower prices for customers; critical-mass efficiency; the reduction of brick-and-mortar and staff costs; and I’d imagine a reduction in distribution and warehousing costs. The net result is fewer jobs, less rent, less waste (that is, books on shelves that get pulped; now they’re made just in time), and lower prices. Again, more money is left in the pockets of the transcators. The impact of innovation on retail is seen in shrinkage and efficiency, not growth.

* Google is blamed for destroying media but, of course, all it did was give advertisers a better deal. It dared to compete. Google did this not just by creating abundance rather than selling scarcity born of control of those means of production and distribution. This created a more efficient – read: less expensive – marketplace for advertising. More important, Google revolutionized advertising by selling performance, proving a return on investment. So the money that didn’t stay in the pockets of people buying and selling cars and homes, thanks to Craig, now stayed in the pockets of retailers and manufacturers thanks to Google. More efficiency. In What Would Google Do”, I argue:

We have shifted from an economy based on scarcity to one based on abundance. The control of products or distribution will no longer guarantee a premium and a profit. . . . We are entering a post-scarcity economy in which Google is teaching us to manage abundance, challenging the bedrock rule of economics, first written in 1767: the law of supply and demand.

Old rules and measures and analyses can’t track that.

* Web 2.0 is credited with making it much faster, easier, and far less expensive to start new companies. That is the other innovation dividend – the innovation that happens on the back of innovation. But this is happening, again, not at a large-company level but at a small-company level. Measuring spending on innovation, then, becomes another unreliable metric. The economics of innovation itself have changed.

The reliability of the standard metrics and analysis matters greatly because profound – and expensive – policy and economic decisions are being made on the basis of them and I’m not at all sure they’re valid anymore, or at least as valid. They miss too much of the change and impact and value and dynamics in this new economy. They lead us to bail out GM and Chrysler. One could argue, as George Will did in yesterday’s Washington Post, that that the bailout violates even old rules:

The administration’s deepening involvement in designing and marketing automobiles through two crippled companies ignores this truth: Capitalism is a profit-and-loss system, and the creative destruction it produces is supposed to clear away failures such as Chrysler, freeing capital for more productive uses.

But that capital, once freed, may not go to building huge new ventures. It may go to building small new ventures. It may stay in the pockets of people doing transactions and now instead of spending it on Toyotas, it may go to banks. You won’t see all the impact – except negatively – on the Dow Jones Average and the Fortune 500; those were the measures of the old economy. We need new measures.

** I had said craigslist and the internet replaced $100 billion in revenue in newspaper classified, which was an attempt to calculate over the life of the web, but that was difficult to calculate, so I changed the figure to $10 billion, the difference between classified revenue at its height in 2000 and in 2008.

Innovate

Newspaper Death Watch has a nice list of change and innovation in news last year. It’s there; you just have to look for it.

VC 2.0

Question for my book and for a conversation I’m going to have about it this week: How do you think venture capital could operate in more of a Googley/web 2.0/networked way? VCs like Fred Wilson have already made the industry far more open than it used to be with their blogs, which have also extended their networks. So what’s next? What are new ways you’d like to see to invest in and start companies? (As always, thanks!)