Posts about Media

No thanks

June 18, 2009 by Jeff Jarvis

I’m getting email pitches – filled with legalese – to contribute to Dan Abrams’ awkwardly named Mediaite (guess all the good URLs were taken). This is the same Dan Abrams – lawyer, thus the legalese, and failed MSNBC host and executive – who is starting a PR company – oh, excuse me, media strategy firm – to advise companies on media while promising access to media people – the same media people, one imagines, he is getting to write about media for his media site. Gawd, it’s positive hermaphroditic: A bunch of worms who can’t figure out who’s fucking whom how. I think I’ll stay away. Don’t want any of that on me. To quote the wonderful Jemima Kiss of the Guardian as she tweeted today about somebody switching the mouse on her desk: “hand cheese.”

When I write for HuffingtonPost or the Guardian’s Comment is Free or Silicon Alley Insider or Seeking Alpha, I just write and say what I think. Not for lawyer Abrams’ Mediaite. The email from fellow lawyer turned media person Rachel Sklar says they’re going to have “a number of great, regular paid columns and intend to have a number of paid contributors” but adds that payment is still being “hammered out.” I’d suggest bringing the hammer out when ready. “What does this mean for you?” she can’t help adding. ” Well, our goal is to develop these ideas, and eventually to pay certain top contributors a revenue share and/or stipend.” Eventually.

Then we get a 14-point list of rules. Including:

…3. Feel free to express any opinion, however unpopular; however, you must be able to support your arguments with linkable facts and/or original, verifiable reporting. We need to give the reader enough information to intelligently disagree with you; you need to be able to demonstrate to your critics why you are totally right and they are idiots…

9. NB: #3 effectively precludes racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic or otherwise unsupportable/repugnant views. Provable arguments mean rational, sane thought. Since you are all sane, rational people we’re not that worried, but it must be said….

11. We are happy to cross-post material from your website or another source, provided you have the rights to do so. If you wish to respond to reader comments, you may submit one “Update” to the post. Two is pushing it, especially since you adhered so strictly to #3. We’d rather you just attack the person on Twitter….

13. You retain all the rights to your work. In the event that we enter into a revenue-share or some other financial deal, we reserve the right to negotiate the terms on a case-by-case basis….

So we’re told to argue our points and not be repugnant and though we own our nonrepugnant thoughts, they reserve the right to negotiate with us for them. Should they have quit their day jobs?

I want to hug my blog. I don’t need any lawyers-turned-flacks-turned-media-commentators-turned-publishers. I can publish on my own. Right here. And I can be as repugnant as I want.

Let me make clear: If he had just started a blog or a group blog about media, cool. But announcing that he’s also starting a PR company offering access to media people makes it stink. And then trying to throw on the cloak of legalese does nothing to relieve the stench. I’m sorry but this smells.

: As I read Abrams Research’s site, it only gets worse: The media people sometimes won’t even know whom they’re advising.

Here’s an example of what they do:

# A Fortune 500 business believes the financial media has focused unfairly on a small change in accounting practices rather than significant increases in revenues.

* Abrams Research can bring together top financial journalists to advise that business on how to best convey its message.

My emphasis. Journalists?

: LATER: Here is Rachel Sklar’s response to me. And I still say craigslist is lower case.

TV’s next

February 16, 2009 by Jeff Jarvis
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Young Broadcasting, once – but no longer – a forward-thinking TV company, just filed for bankruptcy under the crushing $13 $1-billion debt load. This follows the bankruptcy of cable company Charter and, of course, TV-station-owner Tribune company. And let’s not forget radio giant Clear Channel, with $19 billion in borrowing, tapping its last-resort debt and Sirius-XM (whose stock I own) nearing bankruptcy while even Muzak crosses the line.

We’ve been wringing hands over newspapers and magazines but TV and radio aren’t far behind. Broadcast is next.

It’s a failure of distribution as a business model. Distribution is a scarcity business: ‘I control the tower/press/wire and you don’t and that’s what makes my business.’ Not long ago, they said that owning these channels was tantamount to owning a mint. No more. The same was said of content. But it’s relationships (read: links) that create value today.

Young tried to build relationships, once upon a time. At WKRN in Nashville, Mike Sechrist did amazing work starting blogs, buildilng relationships with bloggers, training the community in the skills of the TV priesthood. But he left and all that disappeared. Been there, done that, I can imagine executives saying as they try to stuff the hole in the dike with borrowed dollars. Didn’t work.

The local TV and radio business, once a privilege to be part of, is next to fall. Timber.

Magazines don’t look so slick now

January 15, 2009 by Jeff Jarvis
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First, the grim reaper came for newspapers….

Now magazines are looking bad and worse by the day. The latest: A major distributor is adding a surcharge, according to Keith Kelly in the NY Post.

Anderson News earlier this week informed publishers that it would impose a 7-cent charge for each copy of a magazine that it delivers to stores, and warned that any publisher that refuses to pay the fee could no longer count on Anderson to distribute its magazines….

Publishers, which have until Feb. 1 to agree to pay the new fee, are balking at Anderson News’ move, which would drive up costs at a time when most magazines are hurting. Indeed, American Media, which is already on the brink of bankruptcy, could be hit with a bill of up to $12 million, one source estimated. Another source said People, which has one of the best sell-through rates in the business, could be hit with up to $15 million in extra charges….

Magazines have a sell-through rate of around 38 percent and the surcharge would apply not to just the copies that are sold but to all unsold copies as well.

And magazine advertising is falling in the dumper – and it’s sure to get worse as the impact of the crash deepens. The Wall Street Journal reports at 17% plunge in ad pages in the fourth quarter against a year ago. For the year, they were off 12%.

TV’s next as auto, retail, and consumer categories suffer.

And they say the business model for the internet is crazy. At least it has no physical costs. Oh, I know, media online is supported by advertising, too, but the real opportunity there is to replace mass ads with a mass of niche ads. That is what Google did. Though Google, too, will feel the impact of the crash, it has room to grow while mass media do not. The crash is only accelerating — as in pouring accelerant on a fire — the fundamental shift in the economics of media. The change is big, fundamental, and permanent.

After the industry association (and the industry)

January 9, 2009 by Jeff Jarvis
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Following my bum’s rush from a industry association meeting yesterday – not a big deal on any scale; just personally aggravating, insulting, and embarrassing – I got to thinking (now there’s the danger) about the future of the industry association … and of industries. I wonder whether there is much of one.

By being ejected yesterday, the group decreed that I was an outsider. By one definition, that’s clear: I’m not a member; I don’t pay dues. But by a more sensible definition – we’re in this together, we people who care about the future of news – I’d say they’re defining insider way too narrowly, dangerously so. As I harrumphed out, I said this is the problem with the industry: It is too closed, still. It is not hearing enough new voices and perspectives and ideas. And this trade association is only exacerbating that insularity. Instead of calling it an echo chamber, perhaps my aural reference should have been to a crypt.

And as I walked out, I started to wonder why the people in that room need a trade association anymore. Isn’t Meetup the new trade association? If people in the industry want to get together to talk about their problems and search for solutions together, can’t they just arrange a meeting at a Starbucks? And wouldn’t it be better to open the tent wider – to expand the definition of inside – and get new people with new ideas to those meetings?

I will volunteer to play host to such meetings here at CUNY. Helping news transform is part of our mission, so we should. I’ll bet other universities would agree. Indeed, as budgets are cut back and trade association dues are lopped off, there’ll be a need for such ad hoc meetings – more need than ever. (Note, by the way, that the outsiders are getting together on their own at News Barcamp and we’re playing host to part of it at CUNY.)

And the wheels kept spinning. If there’s less need for trade associations – if they could even be dangerous because of the very limitations that define them – then doesn’t that indicate a diminution of the role of the trade (or industry or guild or craft or union, for that matter) in the future, when the tools get democratized and anybody can pick them up, when you don’t win through control of scarcity anymore but through supporting abundance? The idea of a closed industry and its closed association controlling a closed segment of media or the economy becomes absurd. In short: Who made you publishers and not you?

: BTW: There was a report that it was the WSJ that had me bounced. I didn’t think that was the case and Jay Rosen tweeted some reporting: It’s not.

: LATER: A rather lengthy addendum, in response to a Jay Rosen comment, here.

Openness

January 8, 2009 by Jeff Jarvis
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I was invited to speak to a media trade organization today – I’ll spare them the specifics – with the assignment of provoking discussion about new models, which I’m happy to do, even if I do often hear the same old lines and take the same old arrows. I also hear new challenges and learn from that. I was also looking forward to spending the rest of the day with the group to hear about their ideas and opportunities and needs were and, at their invitation, to share a drink at the end of it. I was going to get a chance to catch up with people I’ve worked with over many years and meet some new people I was looking forward to getting to know and I would learn a lot. It was an off-the-record session, which may not be ideal – for them – but is pretty standard; I’m used to that and abide by the desire.

But after I finished talking and sat down to hear the next panel, I was ejected from the meeting. It wasn’t anything I said, I don’t think. It was that they now wanted a closed meeting. As I was rather unceremoniously rushed out, still noshing on my cookie, grabbing my coat and hat and trying not to let the door hit me in the ass on the way out, I turned to the room and said, “One last thing: Think open-source, people.” It got a laugh and even a hand.

I was angry – insulted and embarrassed. But the problem is worse for this trade group and its industry. Talk about an echo chamber. What these people need is hear more new voices – newer than old me. What they really need to do is share their challenges and ideas openly and hear new perspectives and new answers from unexpected sources. Hearing the same old stuff from the same old group will get them nowhere. Witness the last 15 years.

If I were such a group, I’d be bringing in people from many different backgrounds and perspectives – from bloggers to technology executives to inventors to investors to customers to kids – and share quite openly my business with them (it’s not as if media’s problems are a secret!) to get new ideas and solutions. But then, that is the reflex I have learned here, online. That, sadly, is still not how media people think. As a group – not to a man – they’re still closed. Too bad. That will hurt them. It already has.

: LATER: A rather lengthy addendum, in response to a Jay Rosen comment, here.