Category Archives: Media 2.0

05.29.08
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Fruitful Seminars: Making Social Tools Ubiquitous

Lloyd Davis, Leisa Reichelt and I have been spending a lot of time plotting just lately, and the result of our machinations was the creation, at midnight in a semi-derelict Gothic mansion and with the help of a bolt of lightening, of Fruitful Seminars. The three of us will be putting on a number of day-long seminars on various Web 2.0 subjects over the next few months, starting on 27 June with my session, Making Social Tools Ubiquitous:

Many companies have heard that social tools, such as wikis and blogs, can help them improve communications, increase collaboration and nurture innovation. As the best of breed tools are often open source, it is easy and cheap to experiment with pilot projects. But what do you do if you don’t get the level of engagement you’d like? And how do you progress from a small-scale pilot to widespread adoption?

This seminar, run by social media expert Suw Charman-Anderson, will take a practical look at the adoption of social tools within enterprise. During the day you will be lead through each stage of Suw’s renowned social media adoption strategy and will have the opportunity to discuss your own specific issues with the group. You will have access to one of the UK’s best known social media consultants in an intimate setting – with no more than 9 people attending – that will allow you to get the very most out of the day. By the end of the seminar you will have a clear set of next steps to take apply to your own blogs or wikis.

Perfect for CXO executives, managers, and social media practitioners who want to know how to foster widespread adoption of social tools in the enterprise. Perhaps you have already installed some blogs or wikis for internal communications and collaboration, but aren’t getting the take-up you had hoped for; or have successfully completed a pilot and want to roll-out to the rest of the company.

We’re keeping the sessions very small, with a maximum of nine people attending each one, so that everyone has the opportunity to fully take part in discussions. Sessions will be quite practical and participants will be able to really get into the nitty gritty. I think that’s something that’s really missing from conferences and the bigger workshops – you don’t get the chance to really get down and dirty with what’s relevant to you. I want people to come away from my seminar with a really clear idea of what they are going to do next, and how they are going to do it.

Registration is already open – it’s very easy to sign up and payment can be made by PayPal or cheque/bank transfer. The fee includes lunch, tea and coffee.

Any questions? Just ask!

UPDATE: We’ve also now got a Google Group mailing list for news, announcements and discussion of Fruitful Seminars topics and events. The group is open to everyone, so do join up if you’re curious or interested.

05.23.08
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Great Journalism: Nina’s to blame for the global credit crisis

I meant to post this yesterday after listening to This American Life’s episode dissecting the global credit crisis: The Giant Pool of Money, and now with Jeff Jarvis’ praise, I know I’m not the only one who thinks that this was a stellar example of good journalism.

Last week in Princeton, we talked about what makes good journalism, what is the difference between information and journalism. Listen to this episode, and I think it’s clear. They tracked major events over the last seven years that brought us to this point and made sense of global capital markets in a way that I just haven’t seen or heard done. They also brought human voices to the story that showed a great deal of nuance and some of the choices that were made by bankers, mortgage brokers and home owners. They also told the story in an engaging, compelling way that held my attention for the entire hour. If you want to know how we got to where we are now, listen to this. It’s an hour well spent.

Oh, who’s Nina? No income, no asset mortgages or what one of the interviewees called ‘a liar’s loan’. The programme explains how Nina was born, the messages from the market that encouraged these loans. It’s a complex story but told so lucidly that you might just understand global finance after it’s done.

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05.15.08
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Future of News: The Medium’s New Message

  • Markus Prior, assistant professor of politics and public affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School and the Department of Politics at Princeton University
  • JD Lasica, writer and consultant, co-founder and editorial director of Ourmedia.com, president of the social media group.
  • Ed Tenner, historian and author

Again, this is a rush transcript. I will correct as time allows.

Markus Prior will be talking about the changes in information technology and the implications for news and democracy. The audience for network news in the US has dropped in share from 75 to 38 in 2004, and the Nielsen ratings has fallen from 38 to 18 from 1980 to 2005. There was a decline beginning in the mid-80s to the present of about 50%. Pundits and academics look at this slide and draw two conclusions.

  1. Television news consumption is down.
  2. Americans are worse off. They are less engaged.

Both conclusions are wrong but oft repeated. They say that Americans are not interested in the news and cynical about news and the political process. There was this golden age and the ‘greatest generation’ and that is over.

However, political interest has not trended down. People are not necessarily more cynical. Trust has declined a little bit. These individual level explanations have relatively to do with this decline. In the first part of the decline, we lived in a very different world. The more convincing explanation of this decline have to do with changes in the environment.

At the beginning of this decline, the network news had a captive audience. There were fewer options in media than there are today. The big explanation in this decline is that there is so much else there. The surprise is how high the network news audience was. It was because it was the only show in town. They came home to relax. Turned on the TV, and news was all that was on.

Markus then looked at consumption level of television news. Sunday show watching and evening network news have declined a little bit, but cable news has increased in weekly hours per household in television viewing. Television news is still alive. It just looks different than in the past. It is hard to get a sense of what the news audience is. Print circulation is down but online news reading is up. We don’t quite know the trends that are relevant.

There is something that we do know. Fewer Americans are contributing to the total than in the past. For some, news consumption has gone up. How do what understand the difference that this would make in politics. Let’s forget about measuring news exposure and instead ask people what they like. In the low choice environment, preferences don’t matter, but today, preferences are very important. News junkies are more intelligent than those who prefer entertainment but only if they have access to new media. He explains that in this Washington Post article:

Greater access to media, ironically, has reduced the share of Americans who are politically informed. The most significant effect of more media choice is not the wider dissemination of political news but mounting inequality in political involvement. Some people follow news more closely than in the past, but many others avoid it altogether.

There is increasing inequality in political involvement. Americans are using the access to greater access to information in different ways. News consumption, political knowledge and turnout can vary even in the absence of preference change.

Is this good or bad? You could argue that most people are better off. But are they using these new opportunities that hurt their personal interest? The answer depends.

Let me conclude, the good news is that there is a chunk of people – maybe 15-20% you can call news junkies – can become more knowledgeable and use that information. To the extent that more and more people play a role in keeping elected officials to account, that is good. This might actually work. The pessimistic scenario is that the news junkies, those who do the monitoring may, in fact, not be very representative of the rest of the population. News junkies look demographically like the people who prefer entertainment. News junkies tend to be slightly older. There are no gender, racial or ethnic or income difference. There is one difference. News junkies tend to be more partisan.

I don’t know if we’re closer to optimistic or pessimistic view, but the easy answers are too easy.

JD Lasica

The thrust of my talk is how the news media need to re-invent themselves for the digital age. He used to work at the Sacramento Bee and then went to work for Microsoft. I can’t tell you the difference between working in newspapers and working in the tech industry could not be more extreme. There has been more change in the past five years in media than in the past 50 years. He showed his five-year-old, and he said that they relate to media in totally different ways. I wrote in my book Darknet, you have to look at the people who are coming of age now and you are looking at the future.

He uses his son as a lab rat as to how he relates to the media. It’s totally different in terms of game play and how he uses TiVo.

News is everywhere and on demand. Before people got their news from a few sources: Network news and newspapers. Now, the news media has become more fragmented. If you’re a web publisher, you don’t only have to worry about website but RSS, networked digital TV, traditional cable and electronic newspapers.

He played a video about alternative media sources that did a rapid fire example of all of the media that is happening online. And he said that we don’t see this on newspaper websites.

We are seeing a mass movement of niche media. Blogging, amateur video (YouTube is three years old, and 85m people are watching 4.3bn YouTube videos a month), citizen journalism. In video world, people are creating webisodes, screencasts, stop motion photography and mash-ups.

He suggested going out into the internet archive and Creative Commons licenced video to create videos. He suggested that people could do this in your community. He gave a list of media tools.

There is a new model of peer-produced news. He showed Live in Baghdad, but they are about to close because they don’t have funding. They capture first person stories. (I was just wondering if this isn’t a model of new digital free lancing.) You can now form these new ad-hoc collaborative groups to create video that is really amazing and compelling.

Where is all this heading?

  • Continued trivilisation of news by traditional media. I’ve been increasingly upset by trivialisation during this election cycle. I think there will continue to be a race to the bottom.
  • I am going to predict that half of all daily newspapers will disappear in 15 years. What’s going to take the place of this journalism?
  • We’re seeing increased fragmentation of media sphere.
  • I think social media will be a big part of how traditional media can play a part to re-engage with their audiences.
  • We’re going to see more opinion journalism, niche and hyper-local news
  • There is a more of a threat to legacy business models.
  • Journalism as a career path is more challenging.

On the flight over here, I was reading time magazine. Joe Klein said:

The media tend to look into the rear-view mirror and see the future.

We need to take media executives to Silicon Valley and immerse them in start-up culture. We need to create innovation labs and skunkworks. We need to collect that work and put it under public domain licence. We need to look at geo-tagging, map mash-ups. Your readers live in their communities. There are ways that people intersect in their communities. There are interesting ways to use those social graphs. Dare to fail. Everybody fails but all they do is start over again. They are more willing to experiment. News is a process and a service, not a finished product. We’re going to have to re-examine “professional journalism” precepts especially objectivity and exclusivity. Smaller and more nimble news operations will be necessary.

Note: JD Lasica has done an interview with Ed Felten, one of the hosts of the conference and also a security expert who has done a lot of work to reform electronic voting.

Ed Tenner

We just heard about rear view mirrors, and I’m afraid as an historian, that’s what I’m about. I’d like to look at the attempts in the 1990s of attempts to view future on the web.

In 1995, I spoke at a meeting for Annenberg Washington programme. The opening speech was given by Edwin Diamond, and he gave the internet boom to the space reporting he once did. The boom in space reporting was down to the ample advertising from the aerospace industry. The current boom in the 1990s was also driven by hope that there would of advertising revenue of reporting on it. The real question of newspapers and news magazines. How did they get it so wrong? They were very optimistic at the time. If you look at circulation and advertising in the late 90s, they seemed to be right. What happened to the profits?

I’m not a specialist in web advertising. I’d like to give a few reflections on what might have happened to that. In field I work, book publishing, the web hasn’t had an impact. There have been fewer innovations than people expected.

I view this as a revelation not a revolution. The crisis of middle class magazines preceded the crisis in newspapers.

One trend I see is the de-centralisation of authority. I see growing economic inequality, but there has been a softening in respect for many professions and including the profession of journalism. There once were personalities in the media who had respect and awe and were common bases of discussion. Today’s commentators have fan bases but not the kind of broad cultural authority that network news anchors once had. The legacy of the question authority bumper stickers in the 1960s. It even has happened in the medical profession. Doctors used to be the gold standard of respect, but now people are taking medicine into their own hands such as alternative medicine and homeopathy. He talked about the fall of Arthur Andersen. Many great authoritative institutions have weakened themselves.

Journalism was late the movement towards professionalism. Missouri School of Journalism was founded in 1908. Medill School founded in 1921. It’s not just the erosion of respect for authority but also people taking things into their own hands. Professional standards do sometimes give people the impetus to live up to those standards. We do lose something with that.

In the middle of the century, there was less of an effort to make a distinction between high and low culture. There was an irreverent mixture of things. Later in the century, people in the city made an effort to elevate high school (my words, not Mr Tenner’s). In the post-war affluence, there has been inversion in the cultural norms and even age. The young drive ad campaigns in an effort to reach young consumers.

What can we draw from these trends? A lot of changes are needed. But let’s look at comparative advantage. Newspaper and other print media have to focus on those services that they can do better than other information sources: On the audiences they can server and the advertisers to reach them. The other approach could be described as the outside-in. Sometimes the best ideas come from people outside of the traditional background.

One great hope for the press is that online revenue could rise to offset decline in print revenues. A hundred years ago, you could open up newspapers and magazines and find fears of excessive reading. Book and newspaper reading was corrupting society. It was distracting young people from productive careers. It was harming eyesight. But what goes go can also come up again.

Q: There was a question about political polarisation.

A: Markus Prior: News junkies are more partisan, but you are losing the moderating influence of those who don’t participate. However, I believe that the red/blue divide is overblown. The people who care less are tuning out.

News consuming is done by fewer Americans. Fewer Americans are consuming more news.

Q: One of the symptoms of our discussion is tied to delivery platform of TV. He gave the example of video being consumed on other platforms such as YouTube. But the news and information might be consumed on other platforms.

A: Difficult to answer that question. Basically, he had to narrow things down to find a relevant question to answer. (That is a brutal paraphrase.)

Q: Is this just re-purposing content on new platform? Is it really about blowing up your website?

A: Most of interesting experiments coming outside of traditional media world. Digg. TechCrunch.

Q: Impact of new media on candidates.

A: JD Lasica: Barack Obama has social networking ability on his site. If you remember his speech after the Rev Wright blow up on religious tolerance, the reporters who followed this speech asked where are the sound bites. Obama decided to treat the audience like grown-ups. More than three or four million people watched this on YouTube instead of having to rely on traditional filter of media. Postive development, and it will be interesting to see where this goes.

Ed Tenner: Aspect of campaign that has fascinated me, unintentional soundbite. People run these sound bites as a loop. I wonder if people will be focused on not giving opposition sound bites that can be used this way. Obama’s famous ‘bitter’ remark was leaked by blogger favourable to him in a meeting that was supposed to be off the record.

Q: They say that politics is theatre for ugly people. Writers strike in Hollywood so people wanted to be entertained.

A: Markus Prior: Most important fact why so many more young people care and why debates attracted more audiences is why so exciting, for the first time in primary election two candidates so evenly matched that this can go on for so long.

Q: How do writers get paid?

Panelists said that paid writing is not going away.

JD Lasica: Anyone in your 20s considering going into journalism, I say: We need you. You also have to realise that you won’t be at same news organisation for 20 years. You’ll have to be nimble. You might want to start a niche blog. I make some money with my blog, but I make more money in speaking and consulting.

Mark Davis from the San Diego Union-Tribune said that journalists need to learn how to do video in some form and be able to tell a story in some way.

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05.15.08
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Future of News: Data Mining, Visualization and Interactivity

I felt that it would be inconsiderate to the other panelists to live blog my own panel, but here is my presentation. And here are some links that I used in creating the presentation.

I’ll add some more after the panel is done including some links to Matt Hurst of Microsoft Live Labs and David Blei with the Department of Computer Science at Princeton.

Matt showed some excellent visualisations of the connections between bloggers as well as some very fascinating graphs showing the blog buzz about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and the clear inflection point in January after his win in the Iowa caucuses. Fascinating stuff.
David showed some excellent examples of the automated analysis of of text such as a magazine’s archive, the Huffington Post and the political blogs Daily Kos and RedState. I think there is an opportunity here for news organisations to use these techniques to do some data-mining of their own archives, both for their readers and themselves.
It was a great panel, and we had a great discussion with the audience. Thanks to everyone involved.

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05.15.08
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Future of News: Attention, Distraction and Information Glut

It’s the second day of the Future of News conference in Princeton, and David Robinson kicked things off with a talk on Attention, Distraction and Information Glut. As of yesterday, this is a rush transcript. I’ll tidy it up as best as I can during the day.

He talked about what he thinks is important on the future of news: Attention. In 1971, the John Hopkins University Press published remarks by Herb Simon posed the problem:

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

I want to argue that the future of news requires structures that require something to cope with information glut.

The real product that newspapers sell is audiences. Alan Rushbridger, Editor of the Guardian, said that demand for advertising allowed press freedom from political organisations. The supply of audience attention has become finer grained. You can cherry pick people you want to reach. The forces that have made it easier to slice and dice the attention of audiences is part of the just in time demand supply chain. An increasing fraction of our economic activity has become people who want to sell to increasingly specific niche audiences. The high cost of attention getting has to compete with the Drudge blog, weather sites, etc.

The gravitas of newspapers isn’t the cheapest way to assemble an audience. It’s also not the least expensive way to build a trusted or high-brow brand to sell advertising. Competition for eyeballs is stiffer than ever. As Eric Alterman said, people increasingly live in ‘time poverty’. Sherry Turkel of MIT talked about e-mail bankruptcy.

Some products are designed that more information is always better. Think of it as more frequent, more rapid than e-mail. He pointed out the Twitter curve:

The Twitter curve from Creating Passionate Users

From Creating Passionate Users.

He also talked about the increase of attention-enhancing drugs and other drugs to enhance their cognitive performance. (Are we just addicted to e-mail? I wonder) David said that the pressure of academic life have led to increasing numbers of researchers to taking these drugs – possibly as one in five researchers he said.

What are the bright spots in this deluge? He pointed out a site called AideRSS. It can combine all of your feeds, although that might be more overwhelming than your e-mail inbox. This looks at items that people are paying the most attention to. It will take things like most commented on and bring them to the top of your list. It can make sure that you’re never entirely out of the loop, whatever loop you might be into. But some people want to venture in to the unfamiliar.

Or he pointed out what might be called ‘the thinking man’s Drudge Report’, a link blog called Arts & Letters Daily. It’s done by a professor in New Zealand from a ‘startlingly broad group of sources’. The idea of attention as an economic asset gives you an idea of business models for news. If you take the attention given to you and invest it wisely, then trusted guides become increasingly important.

Arts & Letters Daily began as a hobby, but operating funds came from Lingua Franca until that magazine went over. Then the writers paid for it for a while until it was bought by the Chronicle of Higher Education. Some might call it free-loading, they highlight content but don’t create it. But aggregators are misleadingly connotated. Sometimes aggregation is about pulling together threads that only a very few people are interested in. It might not make sense to build something from scratch, but you can see these custom tailored solutions emerge. Getting rid of the extraneous signals or noise is extremely valuable.

Another idea entirely is that technology might help us learn to tolerate disorder. He pointed to tags. It might seem chaotic, but by displaying tags, it creates an order by suggestion. (Del.icio.us shows common tags for each item added.) It is a folksonomy as opposed to a taxonomy.

David Weinberger has written an intriguing book called Everything is Miscellaneous. In the book, he says:

For example, the digital order ignores the paper order’s requirement that labels be smaller than the things they’re labeling. An online “catalog card” listing a book for sale can contain–or link to–as much information as the seller wants, including user ratings, the author’s biography, and the full text of reviews. You can even let users search for a book by typing in any phrase they remember from it–“What’s the title of that detective novel where someone was described as having a face like a fist?”–which is like using the entire contents of the book as a label. That makes no sense when all that information has to be stored as atoms in the physical world but perfect sense when it’s available as bits and bytes in the digital realm.

From Weblogsky.

You can see a talk by David Weinberger here on those issues.

Q: Are there good aggregators for children and young people?

A: There are a few, but a lot of what works on the web are idiosyncrasy, such as BoingBoing. The idiosyncratic taste that an individual brings to that is part of the selling point.

There was another question about reliance on algorithms, and there was a mention about the Google News algorithm. David Robinson mentioned a book by Neil Postman pondering what would have happened if Nazi propagandist Adolf Eichmann had been a computer programmer.

There was a question about digital collections and libraries. After talking about the role in libraries in digital society, he then finally came around to people who we wouldn’t consider journalists doing journalism. Is it necessary for those people now doing journalism to support the institutions of journalism? (That’s a really rough paraphrase of some complex thoughts.)

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05.14.08
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Future of News: Economics of News

  • Gordon Crovitz, recently retired publisher, Wall Street Journal
  • Mark Davis, vice president of strategy, San Diego Union-Tribune
  • Eric Alterman, distinguished professor of English, Brooklyn College, City University of New York, professor of journalism, CUNY Graduate School of Journalism

Caveat as before. This is a rush transcript.

Gordon Crovitz. When David told me that this panel was the economics of news, I wondered if this was a yes/no question. We’re 10 years into the digital revolution, and in a deadline driven business, we’re just asking this question.

He told a story. His young son threw sand into the waves for 20 minutes, hoping that that waves would change. They didn’t. Reminds him of news executives. Three things affecting news, not in good ways.

  • Technology changing news consumption.
  • Technology driving new business models but not address high fixed costs of old model such as paying journalists to create content.
  • Changes moving at rapid but unpredictable pace.

The newspaper had a business model that hadn’t changed for three generations. In Silicon Valley, the first law of technology is that we over-estimate change in the short term but under-estimate it in the long term. He pointed to web 1.0 and said that after the crash, many executives breathed a sigh a relief that they had dodged the change. They didn’t realise that the web continued to evolve and consumer behaviour continue to change even after the crash.

He talked about the laying of an undersea cable. It allowed Queen Victoria to send a message instaneously to President Buchanan of the United States. It caused riots in New York.

The Wall Street Journal’s mission wanted to get information of markets to people information about the markets with a level of professionalism.

Why are newspapers in trouble?

Twenty years ago, if you lived in Chicago and you wanted information, you could read Chicago Tribune or the Sun Times. They were great bundles of news. It was delivered to you once a day. Now, you can get better information.

If I were half my age, I wonder if I would read my newspaper on a daily basis. My local newspaper focuses on information from the day before, when we’ve all seen that news on the web or through our Blackberry. Newspaper editors are still stuck telling us news from the day before. We have seen 30-40% decline in readership, and the advertising revenue is even worse reading. There are now people paying to read the Wall Street Journal online than pay to read the paper version of the New York Times.

The advertising is the big problem. Targetable media like online has made non-targetable media like newspapers and magazines very uneconomic. That does not favour mass media like newspapers and magazines. That is married to the fact that technology drives consumer choice and consumer behaviour. Most news companies are totally unprepared to think of new forms of distribution when they have grown up in an analogue world. Circulation revenues do not cover much of the news costs.

I am optimistic that a business that has been so slow in adapting will find a way. We’re in about third or four inning (about half way through) marketers finding the most efficient ways to market. Online revenues are pennies or quarters on the dollar of what we got in print. We’re not at a low point in terms of print advertising, but we’re no where near a high point in online ad growth.

There will be a lot of experimentation. In the end, the business model starts with the high fixed costs of journalism that creates the content that creates the brand. News publishers one way or another will have to figure this out.

Mark Davis

Once a quarter at the San Diego Tribune, we have a meeting of managers. CEO says times are tough, but we’ll make it through. CFO says that times are really tough, you can’t buy anymore pencils.

Statistics of daily readership, in the last five days have you looked at a newspaper?) 1964, 81%, 2007, 48%.

Daily Circulation: 1964, 60m, 2006, 52m.

Population in 1964, 192m, now 400m. Advertising, 49bn, total advertising, down 13%.

Mice in the front door, elephants out the back. Or pennies on the dollar. Monthly uniques, 10 times our print circulation, but revenue one-tenth of print. Online advertising growth has slowed. We upselled advertising from print to online, but we never sold online only. We can sell to smaller advertisers but are losing market share as others such as Google sell to small guys. They don’t want to talk to sales rep. Google is all self-servce. Newspapers need to be self-serve.

In recessions in the past, newspaper advertising bounce back after three years, but it hasn’t since the 2001 slow down. We’re in a sectoral downturn not a cyclical downturn. I want to debunk a myth about margins. The question in 2008, isn’t whether our margins will be 20% but whether they will be positive or negative.

I want to be the glass is half full, five areas of strategic focus:

  1. Revenue – online ad networks such as Yahoo Newspaper consortium. The next generation will have geo-targeting and behavioural targeting.
  2. Organisation – newsrooms are re-organising, integration, bringing together online and offline newsrooms. Re-organised by market segments.
  3. Relevance – quite honestly most of this workshop is about relevance. When you start to look at local news organisations, local becomes really important. You have to begin – difficult for traditional newsrooms – you have to think about what the audience wants. You have to think about utility. Do they want to find a movie? Do they want to find out about local government?
  4. Community – We cannot create community but we can enable it. In San Diego, communities around Padres (baseball team), Chargers (American football team) and surfing.
  5. Distribution – Mobile. Not just WAP site. What do people want to do? TV, radio, RSS feeds. Devices we look at, mobile, computers and other devices. We don’t have to compete with TV.

Eric Alterman

He wrote about Bush administration’s war on the press. He wrote articles in The Nation. He couldn’t get them to pay notice because they were struggling with digital revolution. He saw that they had fat margins, and if they had this beneficence, they had a public responsibility. Even when they were pulling in these margins, their stocks were in free fall.

When Knight-Ridder put up for sale, McClatchy was the only bidder. They paid several billions dollars, and now McClatchy has lost 82% of its stock value.

Why with these incredible margins, why were these newspapers being punished. He wrote a New Yorker article to look at this. Advertising numbers are troubling, but trust numbers are even more troubling. He teaches young people, and they don’t read newspapers.

Average age of newspaper reader in US is 56 and growing. If it was a television programme, it would only have hemorrhoid commercials. These are not people that advertisers want to reach. This has many implications.

Newspapers are losing online because they are not the best vehicles to reach people. I care about the future of the news business because I care about the news upon which our democracy depends. It is hard to see in this world where the support for that kind of journalism. It’s hard to see an obvious market.

Until 35, my career didn’t make any sense. I went back and forth between academia and magazine journalism. I didn’t really fit. He got a doctorate in history. Then the internet was rising. He had this talent to reach a small number of people in a number of ways. He has two professorships. He writes a media column in The Nation. He writes a daily weblog for Media Matters. It was originally begun on MSNBC. He has written a bunch of books. He has about seven jobs, and he thinks he’s speaking to roughly about the same people in all seven jobs.

On some platforms, they pay. On some, they don’t. I have an idea of what is different about each platform. I have this little talent about giving my views on things I care about. I have this one little talent. When I started, there were just about three dozen, but now there are a few thousand.

Some break news, but most just give you an intelligent context to understand the world around you. There is a tiny audience for that relative to the cost of producing. Every one of these news producing or information producing entities is under siege and no one knows where the bottom is.

Molly Ivins said that the newspaper industry solution to the problems facing it is to commit suicide.

He pitched this article to the New Yorker, and he was focusing on the Huffington Post. Huff Post is up to 12m unique readers per month. It’s the eighth or ninth most read news site in the US. He found very little value added to content from mainstream publications like the New York Times, Washington Post and the Guardian. He went back to publications that he had criticised about their coverage in the lead up to the war in Iraq, and he found value there despite his criticism.

I found that there just isn’t the support for the kind of journalism. 1200 reporters at the New York Times. 800-900 reporters at the Washington Post. I would be surprised with advertising going the way it is even at 50%. If we don’t have that news, we will be more open to propaganda and manipulation. I think we’ll move to an elite model where people pay a lot for information like The Ecnomist, where the vast majority will be open to manipulation.

Enormously disturbing that not only is there not support this kind of journalism but he worries that this will erode democracy. (This is a very rough paraphrase of what he said.) He believes that all university students should be required to buy a subscription to a newspaper as part of their education.

Q: Writer for tech policy site. He wonders if news won’t be organised geographically but along other ways such as specialist coverage areas.

A: Gordon Corvitz. He believes that a lot of journalism will go this way. There will be specialised, high revenue areas of coverage. But I fear that this will lead to the world that Eric fears. Information will be very valuable to people but in increasingly specialised, narrow niches. That is not the most efficient system.

Mark Davis: To me what you are describing are communities, both geographical communities but also communities of interest. That is potentially where we will succeed.

Eric Alternman: I have problems with that. When you think of New York Times story on Pentagon flacks and domestic wire-tapping and Saudi dating rituals, there is no business model that will support those stories. You need living and tech section to support those stories. If you take this away, there won’t be something to pay for those long form stories.

The 19th Century model of political parties having newspapers, which is like what you have in Europe, then you have no shared community. It creates a consciousness of citizenship. We are these communities of interest much more than we are geographical communities. We’ll have more fissures of understanding.

Q: Events and engagement have captured a small audience. Is that a profit centre for newspapers?

A: Gordon Crovtiz: In person events has been a booming part of the audience. the more time we spend in front of computers, the more we need contact carbon-based life form to carbon-based life form. The question is how many different areas you can do this with.

Mark Davis: Communities, we are feeling our way through this.

Eric Alterman: In world I live in, friends who do celebrity cruises. The Nation sent me on the National Review cruise. I wrote a piece that I am very proud of called The Heart of Whiteness.

Q: A lot of discussion has been about the cost of production but there is very little about the costs of consuming news online. The cost of buying computer very higher.

A: Eric Alterman: That’s not a media problem but a societal problem. Digital divide is much more geographic problem. You can get a computer for $300, which is less than it costs to the subscribe to the New York Times. About 75% consider themselves online now.

Q: What do you do about coverage of the under-privileged?

A: Mark Davis: When you’re in a business that is fighting for its survival, you’re not in a charitable mode. When you raise the issue of a new product, you always raise the chance of selling to that market segment. It’s a societal problem not a business issue.

Q: Several small or medium sized market have come under control of charitable organisation. Likely to spread.

A: Gordon Crovitz: It does allow families to be uneconomic. That structure can protect those papers for a time. I would be happier if there was a business model behind it.

Q: David Robinson: To what extent are people dissatisfied with news.

A: Mark Davis: If the audience really values this, then read it. I’m going to make a statement. Who are we to decide what people will read? If it’s important to me, then it should be important to all of you.

I don’t think that people are disinterested in news. Kids are informed. They know what is going on in the world. He was talking about a world story with his daughter. She was on Digg. She started there. She bounced around and read the story.

Gordon Crovitz: For a time, there is demand from people for professional media. If you believe that people need and value professionally created content from people who produce this with integrity. Most companies just exiting denial phase of this challenge, then there is optimism that people will figure out a business model.

Eric Alterman: The only way to be optimistic is say something like maybe global warming will be all right. Young people are not buying newspapers. Sorenstein Centre published study looked at how deep young people’s knowledge is from all of these stories and it was bad. They are getting very little information from The Daily Show.

You also have this issue of trust. Three times more people believe that 9/11 was an inside job than believe that the media is telling the truth. You add all these trends together, and I don’t see where this magic bullet will come from. Foundations and universities will have to play a much bigger role.

Q: Ethan Zuckerman said that news suffers not from a supply problem but a deman problem.

Eric Alterman: People don’t know what really high quality news is can’t demand it because they don’t know what it is. I think that everyone would live a richer life if they spent a half hour a day with the Guardian and an hour with The Economist. How in the world could you imagine Americans doing that? The problem has evolved into a crisis.

Mark Davis: I don’t know any manager who talks about demand of a product without talking about the product. How do we get this information out in a way that people want to consume it?

Q: I want Gordon Crovitz to respond to metro newspapers need to re-invent themselves. You have two front page stories that are from the Associated Press on Congress voting for a pay increase for military base and Mexican drug wars.

A: As we look online, we look to becoming a news and information portal. We think about the audience and what they want. We have to get over this link to this competitor. If you can become this portal to serve your audience locally.

Eric Alterman: Linking to competitors, traditional way to run newspapers not way to run digital business.

05.14.08
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Future of News: People formerly known as the audience

Dan Gillmor is going to whip through in 15 minutes what he normally takes an hour to do he says. It’s a whirlwind tour of media changes, which is why this is quite a few bullet points and links. Again, a rush transcript.

Media shift. He clicked from slides from cave paintings to a network graph.

The media has become democratised. Not in sense of voting but participation, production and access not just distribution. It is a read-write web. It turns the consumer into creator/collaborator. Collaboration where it really gets exciting. Dan clicked through other slides such as pictures of 7 July 2005 bombings in London, video of south Asian tsunami.

He touched on RSS. Tags. Wikis. Placeblogger. Communities.

Who is a journalist? I don’t care.
What is journalism? I care.

Think tank. NGOs. They have a point of view, but may also be like journalism. Corporate blogs are blurring journalism.

Basic principles of journalism:

  • thoroughnes
  • accuracy
  • fairness
  • independence
  • Add to this, transparency.

It’s an And NOT an Or world. It’s all rooted in changing from lecture to conversation, and we must learn to listen.

New York Times has blogs. Database journalism. He showed the Faces of the Fallen project at the Washington Post.

We’re not oracles but guides.

Hyperlinks are god’s gift to getting it right.

He pointed to the Tunisian Prison Map and the Pothole Map from Bakersfield.

Or what about the Tony Blair mash-up about when he would step down as British prime minister.

What will happen when it’s not just the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination but a world where people have high-def cameras and high speed data networks.

Principles for news consumers:

  • scepticism
  • judgement
  • research
  • techniques

Check out NewsTrust.

The Daily Us. We must move from mere popularity to reputation.

Advertising is being systematically de-coupled from journalism and he showed Craig’s List, eBay and Google.

The career ladder that Dan Gillmor got on as a journalist is gone. But it costs very little try things with digital tools. It’s only getting simpler and cheaper all the time. Highly targeted deep niche works, and he pointed out GigaOm. Not everything needs a business model such as Global Voices.

Things he’s thinking about hard. Where 2.0 and beyond. He showed mapping projects. GPS. Mobile.

There are enormous problems but this expanding, diversifying eco-system will change things in a good way, but the interim will be messy. With people formerly known as the audience involved, things will get better.

Steve Boriss, teacher, consultant and blogger

The audience isn’t going anywhere. I think we’re entering a golden age of news. He looked back at history. Back 500 years ago, news was spread by word of mouth. He said that it was like blogging but unplugged. The printing press brought a huge advance in knowledge, but it also gave government an unprecedented ability to control the news. The American Revolution set back the government control of news. Through the 19th Century, newspapers were a marketplace of ideas. But there were four advances that set the news business back, which are documented on his blog: The steam powered printing press, broadcasting, the AP and modern ‘scientific journalism’. His arguments all hinge on increased government control and fewer voices.

The internet undermines all of these ‘advances’ and return a multitude of voices. The internet has expanded the definition of news that has been left behind by the modern, professional definition of news. He said that audiences are going to news that have a direct impact on them such as metro, national and international news.

He doesn’t believe that audiences are switching from observers to participants. He believes that social media is over-sold. He is also sceptical of citizen journalism.

Media is Latin for in the middle. News sources have not been able to reach news audiences directly, but now they can. Journalists will have to prove their value as middle men.

Reihan Salam, sees himself as an audience member who has managed to get a gig in the media, as he puts it. People want deeper engagement with their audience, and he pointed to the lucrative business magazines are doing by having cruises with their writers. At university, he loved reader Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish. He used to send him tips, and Andrew said that he should apply for an internship at the New Republic. He suggested that they start blogs, and initially there was some resistance.

Eric Alterman will be viewed as important. He took the attitude of his audience and not his professional class. He did this from a high level of sophistication. At the Atlantic where he works now, they are all wringing their hands.

He used to read the newspaper daily. He then read it online, and now he doesn’t. Now, he has a collection of RSS feeds that he scours and gets what he wants. You’ll have to offer a deeper immersive experience.

You’ll see a richer media environment but it will be through patronage, not advertising.

From the Q&A, the panel was asked about whether success was based on the number of voices. Dan made a really good point about the vast amount of information available now and that we’re still working on models to highlight the best material.

Q: Governments will want to control that. How do we guard against that?

A: Steve Boriss said that this is one of his pet concerns but he feels alone. His hits go down whenever he goes down on this. He says that he is concerned about net neutrality and government involvement. I want to keep the government out of the internet.

Q: What about aggregators (Drudge, Huffington Post, etc)? They don’t have our overhead. They won’t have anything to point at unless we get paid for it today.

A: Dan Gillmor, I have to jump on that. The problems of the business model is a decoupling of advertising from journalism, not an issue of aggregators pointing at your stuff.

Q: How do we in 10 years pay the huge costs of in-depth, investigation journalism?

A: Dan Gillmor: We might lose that for a while, and I’m not happy about that. There are options for public funding. (Pro Publica has been mentioned.) There are a number of things that are filling a part in that. We haven’t even explored the crowd-sourcing model.

Steve Boriss said that newspapers can become aggregators themselves.

05.14.08
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Future of News Princeton: Paul Starr

I’m at the Future of News workshop at Princeton University. I’ll be speaking about data visualisation tomorrow, but Princeton’s Paul Starr kicked things off. This is a bit of a ‘rush transcript’ as broadcast would say. I’ll go back and refine it over the day.

We are on treachourous ground. Many who have tried to anticipate the future of news, including leaders in the industry have failed. Hasn’t been for lack of effort. Back in 1970s, news industry invested millions of dollars into teletext or video text, electronic ways to supplement existing ways of delivering news. They failed to see the future coming. In 1992, news industry leaders failed to see the internet in the future of news. Network meant to them broadcast networks. They saw overall trends, but they said that the broadcast and print media faced no serious threats.

News media are in the midst of transformation greater than anyone in the history. Many in old media organisations are reeling from the impact. The future of news comes from instability of the present. The future of news is coming not from single change but serial changes. Consider earlier changes: Postal network, telegraph, radio in 20s and TV in 1940s. They all had a compressed period of development with with minor innovations following.

The succession of changes now are different; innovations are piled on top of innovations. Political and legal decisions could upset things as they have developed.

To consider the future of news, we can try to extrapolate trends that are underway. We can analyse changes in major social frameworks. We can brace ourselves for the unexpected.

He looked at trends and how they fit together shift in social frameworks. He looked at the peculiar features US news media. Central institution in news media: general interest newspapers. 1930s, broadcast networks radio and then TV. Both newspapers and broadcast benefitted from government largesse. They became hugely profitable. Leading national news media supported public interest. They used other revenue streams to cross subsidise news: Classified ads for newspapers and entertainment for TV.

It paid for international news gathering. High profits, high standards, high prestige. Up to early 20th, newspaper industry highly competitive. by middle 20th century, most cities had one major newspaper. Warren Buffet, newspaper business used to be an easy way to make huge returns. One great newspaper said, I owe my fortune to monopoly and nepotism.

Mr Starr quoted Buffet at length from a letter to Berkshire Hathaway investors:

For most of the 20th Century, newspapers were the primary source of information for the American public. Whether the subject was sports, finance, or politics, newspapers reigned supreme. Just as important, their ads were the easiest way to find job opportunities or to learn the price of groceries at your town’s supermarkets.

The great majority of families therefore felt the need for a paper every day, but understandably most didn’t wish to pay for two. Advertisers preferred the paper with the most circulation, and readers tended to want the paper with the most ads and news pages. This circularity led to a law of the newspaper jungle: Survival of the Fattest.

Thus, when two or more papers existed in a major city (which was almost universally the case a century ago), the one that pulled ahead usually emerged as the stand-alone winner. After competition disappeared, the paper’s pricing power in both advertising and circulation was unleashed. Typically, rates for both advertisers and readers would be raised annually – and the profits rolled in. For owners this was economic heaven. (Interestingly, though papers regularly – and often in a disapproving way – reported on the profitability of, say, the auto or steel industries, they never enlightened readers about their own Midas-like situation. Hmmm . . .)

As long ago as my 1991 letter to shareholders, I nonetheless asserted that this insulated world was changing, writing that “the media businesses . . . will prove considerably less marvelous than I, the industry, or lenders thought would be the case only a few years ago.” Some publishers took umbrage at both this remark and other warnings from me that followed. Newspaper properties, moreover, continued to sell as if they were indestructible slot machines. In fact, many intelligent newspaper executives who regularly chronicled and analyzed important worldwide events were either blind or indifferent to what was going on under their noses.

(The full 2006 letter from Buffett can be found on Berkshire’s site. It’s a PDF.)

Coming off of period of monopoly profits, there is no way that (newspapers and broadcast could duplicate those returns online. In the new environment, they are no longer protected from competition. On the internet, Craigslist and others are cutting into their ads and aggregators cutting into their readers.

Broadcasters also coming out of period of limited competition. Once, a broadcast licence was a licence to print money. Cable and then the internet caused decline. From spectacular height broadcast has fallen, and no one sheds a tear.

not only loss of audience but development more disturbing, long term decline in attention for news. Robert Putnam look at casual role in generational change. Those come of age during WWII and Cold War, high level of engagement. Younger generation, decline in participation in civic society. Also, younger generation decline in news consumption. Despite rising level of education.

How media contribute to these trends, Putnam sees television itself as reason for declining civic engagement. Princeton research found that TV first increased civic engagement that only decreased with multiple channels.

Recent State of the News Media report every sector of news media apart from two decline – online news and ethnic sector. Since 2001, decline in work force 7-10%. Number of American foreign correspondents has dropped 188 to 141. Broadcast networks have shut bureaux around the world. Amount of foreign coverage has declined from 27% of total in 87 and 97 to 24% in 2004. Internet provides access to international news such as BBC. Declining number of foreign correspondents, decrease boots on the ground.

But there has also been a decline also in state and local reporting. Tom Rosenstiel said: More and more reporters are following fewer and fewer events. All news organisations are becoming niche players.

Another trend, ideological. In 19th Century most of press is partisan, and there has been a recent return to partisan for confluence of factors. Until 1980s, partisan tendencies in broadcast held in check by regulation – FCC fairness doctrine. There were a limited channels and for competitive reasons they had to appeal to broad ideological cross-section of the population.

Abandon Fairness Doctrine 1987, rise of Rush and Fox News, a complete media system enveloping its audience. No liberal equivalent to right wing talk shows. Liberals on TV, but no liberal equivalent to Fox and right wing talk show. Part of broader trend.

Next he said:

Newspaper web site can get back into the business of breaking news and broadcast website can provide much more depth. Different rhythms of media are lost when media migrate to the web.

Each news organisation has an identity tied to legacy medium but these fade into the past. Broadcast and print will combine into single hybrid media. Distinctions are breaking down. One of most important distinction breaking down is between media and their audience. Journalists can no longer put themselves between public and public figures and opinion makers.

The future. the underlying financial and competitive pressures will increase.

They are living off aging audiences and obsolete business models. As older audiences die off, all of these news organisations face a mortal threat.

However, bloggers rely on old media. “Just as any parasite doesn’t want to kill off their prey”, but unclear if bloggers and citizen journalists can be profitable enough to support a viable news gathering function. News organisations still remain profitable, and they can eliminate 70% of cost structure, that which they use to support the print publication.

It is not a question of which organisations survive but how new framework affect what they do and how they do it. What are basic features of this emerging framework? One comes from Yochai Benkler: Mass media public sphere and networked public sphere.

Mass-commercial media had industrial model reliant on large audiences and large amounts of capital. The system has constraints on feedback.

The declining price of computation, production and storage has put into hands of up to a billion people around the world means of cultural and information production. Opportunities for feedback increased. Benkler says that internet has evolved systems for information synthesis and analysis.

There is a good interview with Benkler on Kottke that expands on these issues.

Big media has two capacities that might not be replaced: 1) They can mount long term investigation 2) They can stand up to government (see Pentagon Papers). Rather than replacement, networked public sphere may overlap and interact with mass-commercial media. Josh Marshall’s TPM bring down Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, but Josh Marshall depended on main stream media to deliver knock out blow.

Early history of the internet may have spoiled us into ultimate direction it will take. Lessig and Zittrain say that there is an ongoing struggle between open internet and those who want to lock the internet down. In connection of news media, cell phones and handheld devices become more secure platforms for news delivery than desktop computer (I think to myself what about Android or open mobile platforms? I guess it depends on open networks.)

Second set of issues, economics, if MSM no longer able to cross subsidise and Benkler’s collaborative network public sphere can’t produce, there will have to be other business models. In the US, only public radio provides quality radio news. That is one possible replacement.

What must not be lost in transition, values must not be lost. The press must remain independent and committed to a social mission.

Q: Issue of partisanship in news media. One hundred years ago, penny press quite blatantly partisan.

A: Disengenous of me as co-editor of American Prospect to criticise partisan press. Partisan press in 19th century marked an error of high civic participation. Not in itself a bad thing. Unruly aspect of democracy.

Q: Old media, more directly regul-able (easier to regulate). What is your opinion of the BBC?

A: The BBC is a great institution. Model of public service broadcast journalism in Commonwealth countries financed by tax. US has historically opposed to any special taxation for press, TV and radio. We never had support to finance anything like the BBC. Shielded from everyday influence of politics. It has established itself as authoritative source of news. Somewhat surprising, it has expanded its reach beyond the UK.

Q: Pentagon Papers quintessial reason for why we need press. But think not good example. If I had them, I could put them and no one could take them down. (Possibly a good example is WikiLeaks.)

A: What you are talking about is putting investigative reporters on story for several months. Can non-market model sustain that type of investigations is a question. Lot of reasons to worry whether that is true.

Q: You seem to say that more is better in terms of number of reporters, number of bureaux. Is there a level?

A: I can’t say what optimal level. But this is a period of time when Americans need to know more about the world given the circumstances we face.

05.07.08
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The Future of Newspapers

Steve Moore invited me to answer the question: What comes next? In my case, I was supposed to talk about the future of newspapers. Jeremy Ettinghausen, Head of Digital Publishing at Penguin, talked about the future of the book. And Matt Locke, of Channel 4, talked about the future of television.

Matt and Jeremy were brilliant. Jeremy is asking fundamental questions about what it means to be a publisher in the 21st Century, and Matt makes one of the best cases in the business to free your content to follow the audience. The day of building a website and expecting everyone to come to you is over.

It was a great morning, if for no other reason, I came up with a short way to explain what I really do. People always ask me how I edit the blogs at the Guardian, sometimes adding that wasn’t the point of blogs not to have an editor. That’s a fair question, and most of the Guardian blogs have desk or section editors who commission most of the content. What is it that I do then?

I use the tools that are disrupting our (the newpaper) business model to do journalism.

It’s really that simple, and that’s what I mean by leading by doing. How can we use these disruptive technologies to do improve journalism and expand our audience? If gains in technology have brought about faster, better and cheaper technology, why not use technology to beat the competition by being faster, use cheaper technology to undercut existing economics in our business and use technology to get stories and tell them in ways that weren’t possible before. These are my goals, and hopefully with a band of merry journalistic pirates we can spread the future more evenly where we work.

It is now clear to almost everyone that the business model that has supported newspapers is under threat and that newspapers must change. Newspapers in the US are facing a perfect storm of declining readership, declining ad sales and a sudden drop, some might say collapse, in real estate advertising tied to the sub-prime crisis. But it’s not just the US, lest people believe the cuts are down to the declining newspaper culture there. Le Monde is on strike over job cuts that could cut the newsroom by a quarter. Newsquest Glasgow is cutting 20 editorial positions due to “poor trading conditions“.

The State of the News Media 2008 report from the US put the situation in stark terms:

But more and more it appears the biggest problem facing traditional media has less to do with where people get information than how to pay for it — the emerging reality that advertising isn’t migrating online with the consumer. The crisis in journalism, in other words, may not strictly be loss of audience. It may, more fundamentally, be the decoupling of news and advertising

And the writers of the report asked how news organisations could develop a new business model while having to make painful cutbacks. The need for change is urgent, and while the last two years have seen major strides by some news organisations, the companies and, let’s be honest, many journalists were slow to adapt to the challenges of a now more than decade-long digital revolution.

What business model are we competing against? The TechCrunches of the world. As of last autumn, they had a full-time staff of eight. They have revenue’s of $240,000 a month, and in February, they had 2.6m ‘absolute unique visitors’, according to Google analytics.

News organisations need to take advantage of the very trends that are disrupting our business model. When I worked for the BBC, they bought a digital video editing system in that had a huge external cabinet, a Mac tower and Avid software. It was about eight years ago, and it cost $80,000, which was reasonable and cheaper than professional systems that came before. Shortly after I left the bureau in 2005, they replaced the system with a Mac laptop, a portable RAID array and Final Cut Pro for about $12,000. It was faster, had more storage and was portable.

1) News, not newspaper, companies

Preparing for the talk gave me an excuse to begin reading Newspaper Next 2.0 report, the second installment in the American Press Institute’s project to help newspapers get out ahead of the changes in the industry. Much of the work is based on Clayton Christensen‘s work and his books The Innovator’s Dilemma and the Innovator’s Solution. The authors conclude:

This raises a big question: Are we newspaper companies? If so – if we define our companies and our mission by our core product – these coming digital solutions look threatening, even catastrophic. A newspaper company will instinctively fight to preserve and defend its product and business model. At most, it will cram a few new offerings in around the edges of the old model, as long as they don’t threaten the core.

This is the typical defensive reaction of legacy organizations and industries in the face of disruptive innovation, described vividly by Clayton Christensen in his best-selling books The Innovator’s Dilemma1 and The Innovator’s Solution2. As his research in more than 60 industries showed, it’s also a formula for failure.

To avoid that outcome, this industry needs a major mindshift: It must stop defining itself by its technology. We are not newspaper companies. Rather, we have always been companies whose mission and business model was meeting the human needs for information, knowledge, solutions, social connection, choice-making, buying and selling that arise in a given locale.

This is obviously a business plan for local or regional newspapers and not national, or increasingly, international newspapers and sites. However, there are lessons here for newspapers regardless of the market.

2) Aggressively undercut your own business model before someone else does

Don’t do video on the web that pretends to be television and costs just as much to produce. Use Skype to do live podcast two-ways, or have journalists record their audio on their laptops and use Gmail to send the files. The Boulder Camera recently shut down its bespoke community software and shifted to Ning. (Amy Gahran quotes Matt Flood of Camera, who said, “the developer that built it is no longer with the company so we couldn’t fix anything or create anything new”. Familiar story? Can I hear an amen from how many people have been stuck in this situation?)

The difference between the late 1990s and now is that cost of editorial experimentation has dropped almost to zero in some cases. Creative use of freely available web tools can achieve most editorial goals, and it can be used as a guide for future development. Out of all of the things you could do, it will help you understand what you must do.

3) Good enough undercuts incumbents

I keep coming back to something that Steve Yelvington said at a citizen media workshop we were at last summer:

We need to think of making things that are good enough and not overshooting. We’re taking too long to create ‘perfect ‘ systems that don’t meet needs. We over-invest, over-plan and then we stick with the bad business plan until it all collapses. Come up with a good idea and field test. Fail forward and fail cheaply. Failure is not a bad thing if we learn from our mistakes and correct. Be patient to scale. Impatient for profits.

As journalists, we can meet this challenge. We can compete. We always have. We have competed against other journalists for exclusive stories. If new technologies are disrupting our business, we just need to use them to do some disrupting of our own.