AUGUST 11, 2009

Ever since I was a teenage kid with snobby taste in music, I’ve loved the Canadian indie rock band Metric. (OK, “rock” is a bit of a strong word for the group, but “emo” reflects poorly on me, so that’s what I’m going with). After a two-year layoff, the group recently came out with a new album called Fantasies, which is pretty good but nothing to write home about. Much more interesting, though, is how they funded the album - rather than putting themselves through another onerous major label deal, one that dictates creative direction and only nominally compensates artists for record sales, Metric decided to start their own label and build their own studio with the help of grant funding from the Canadian government.

To me, this speaks volumes about where, exactly, paid media is heading. As I’ve written before, plummeting-to-nonexistent distribution and publication costs have ended major media companies’ role of “gatekeeper” - one that they held solely due to the scarcity of space on record store shelves, or column inches in a newspaper.

But even more notably, I think the Metric experience points one viable way forward for media outlets struggling with the competition of the web - government and/or nonprofit funding. Canada, for instance, has decided that to a certain degree, cultural protectionism is preferable to a completely free market. They’re fine with having a somewhat distinct Canadian culture that exists with government protection and subsidy - a goal that’s accomplished in a number of ways, including “Canadian content” laws that require 35% of content broadcast by radio stations be of Canadian origin, as well as the grant system. Of course, this priority is made a bit more urgent by the presence of a culturally and linguistically similar behemoth on the southern border, but many western countries have similar laws.

Like the Canadians, who have decided that it’s worth sacrificing free market efficiency for a little diversity in culture, I think it’s worth exploring a similar model for journalism. We’re quickly finding that in an age of cutthroat competition for journalists, bloggers like Perez Hilton (who commands $72,000 for a full-day sponsorship) are rising to the top. Far be it from me to criticize a guy making money, but I think we can agree that celebrity gossip won’t fill the void left by the increasing unprofitability of investigative journalism. This is a place that I think a well-targeted government grant program, or an equivalent non-profit organization, might be able to step in and cover the significant costs of hard-hitting journalism - recognizing that a vibrant but protected press is superior to the alternative of no press at all.

Enough seriousness - let’s rock (kind of). Here’s “Gimme Sympathy” from Metric’s Fantasies.

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MAY 14, 2009

One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack.  Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life.  When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head that only I can hear.

- Maurice Jarre, French Composer & Conductor

The quote above was attributed to composer Maurice Jarre on his Wikipedia page and was cited by a number of news sources when they reported his passing in March.  However, the composer never uttered such words; the posting of his quote was an experiment conducted by a student, Shane Fitzgerald, about “how our globalized, increasingly internet-dependent media was upholding accuracy and accountability in an age of instant news.”

The [student’s] obituary-friendly quote…flew straight on to dozens of U.S. blogs and newspaper web sites in Britain, Australia and India. They used the fabricated material…even though administrators at the [Wikipedia] twice caught the quote’s lack of attribution and removed it.  A full month went by and nobody noticed the editorial fraud.  So Fitzgerald told several media outlets they’d swallowed his baloney whole.

Some journalists have gone as far as calling the student a “jerk” or tried to shame him for taking a month before notifying the papers that they cited a false Wikipedia entry when they reported on Mr. Jarre’s passing.

I’d like to take this opportunity to applaud Mr. Fitzgerald for reminding us that some of the “old media” rules, such as sourcing, should still apply in the new media age.  It’s true that the decline in old media (staff reductions or newspaper closings) as well as the rise in new media (e.g., Twitter breaking the news of the Hudson River plane crash) creates an undeniable pressure for reporters to find and report information faster than ever before. However, accountability in reporting is still an expectation – regardless of the forum.

Mr. Fitzgerald’s tale serves as yet another reminder that technology is rapidly changing how, where, and when we receive our information.  It often occurs at a pace much faster than many of us are comfortable with.  Finding the right partner to help your business will ensure success as it navigates through the daily minefields that new technologies create.  Cheers, Mr. Fitzgerald.

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MAY 5, 2009

The economics of the shift away from traditional media aren’t too complicated. Column inches in a widely-distributed newspaper (or space on a record store shelf) are a scarce resource, necessitating large organizations to manage that resource (i.e. media companies, and their legions of reporters, editors and publishers). Since the internet has made publishing a nearly-free exercise, media companies have lost their leverage over what was formerly a finite resource.

That leverage includes deciding what, exactly, makes it into published form. The power of media companies to decide which content gets published is declining.  When that power did exist, it was mostly very annoying. If your band couldn’t get a record deal, you had no recourse but to keep playing the dive bars in your town - there was no way to bring your music to a wider audience. If your pet issue wasn’t “important” enough to be covered by the local paper, it would remain in obscurity. All that, of course, is different now.

But there are a few instances where the media’s “gatekeeping” role is, in fact, quite valuable. I don’t need a newspaper to tell me what issues are important, nor do I need a record company to tell me what kind of music I like.  But in emergency situations, especially ones I don’t understand, I need someone to differentiate between the truth and the hype, between expert opinion and BS. Reporters and editors are generally educated enough to do that.

Are Twitter users? Well, uh, no. This piece from Foreign Policy’s Evgeny Morozov makes that clear- in the case of the ongoing influenza emergency, most users of the service are either making wildly unsubstantiated claims or idly chitchatting, all the while using the #swineflu hashtag dedicated to actual news about the emergency. For instance, here were the last five Tweets on the #swineflu tag as of 10:07 pm, April 29th:

For the record, that’s four information-free tweets, with one person actually sharing a piece of valuable knowledge.

A glance at my personal Twitter account confirms this anecdotally - one or two people I follow are sharing links and actual information about the crisis, while others are simply using the hashtag while not contributing anything to an ongoing understanding of the issue. The signal-to-noise ratio is very, very low.  This not only makes Twitter almost useless for following this story, but also an excellent channel for misinformation and a potential source of networked panic. And it’s not the first time this has happened - almost every global crisis since Twitter became popular has suffered from an inordinate amount of chatter on the service. If this is what’s going to replace professional reporting, we’re in trouble.

I’m a forward-thinking guy, and I think that the shift of publishing power to individuals is largely a positive thing. I am, after all, writing all this in a blog post. But in a crisis situation, I need to know that what I’m reading is accurate and reliable, and as of yet, the traditional media’s replacement hasn’t come up with a model to avoid misinformation and networked panic.

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APRIL 15, 2009

If you’ve been anywhere near the blogosphere in the past few months, you’ve noticed that one of the dominant themes of conversation has been the apparent demise of “traditional media” - i.e. newspapers and, to a lesser extent, the publishing industry as a whole. The list of major dailies that have either shut their doors or moved to online-only distribution is quite startling and probably familiar territory for anyone reading this blog.  Indeed, on our social media team, it’s become kind of a predictable cliche when someone e-mails us a story about yet another newspaper folding.

The blogosphere is all about commentators, and there are a few that have buttered their intellectual bread by loudly and apocalyptically predicting the demise of the newspaper industry’s business model. Clay Shirky is my personal favorite, with Jeff Jarvis coming a close second. These folks are feted all over the web for saying out loud what everyone intrinsically knows - that there’s little future in a business model that requires consumers to pay for creative intellectual property. I can make a copy of a band’s best song in five seconds and send it to everyone I know in about a minute, without that group ever seeing a dime. I can re-post a newspaper article on this blog or my own, even challenging it or refuting it in the process, destroying not only the article’s credibility but also the protection the newspaper has over its own created content. We know this. Bottom line: people are no longer willing to pay for media or information except in very specific circumstances.

What’s disappointing, though, is that none of these thinkers seem to be considering the social ramifications at play here. Shirky, for instance, punts in his latest blog post. But if anything is clear, it’s that the development of a commercial model for news and information distribution pre-figured modern democracy, and continues to uphold it. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, the pamphlet that laid much of the intellectual groundwork for the American Revolution, was not only a work of philosophy and political activism - it was a cash cow for its author and publishers, going through 25 printings in the first year alone. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the book often credited with galvanizing the abolitionist movement and providing the spark for the Civil War, was the best-selling novel of the 19th century. I’m most familiar with American history, but every social movement of the modern era - from civil rights to feminism to gay rights (as well as other movements we might consider less savory) - has had, at its heart, one or more works of for-profit journalism or advocacy.

And that continues today. Without the profits to sustain long-term investigative reporting, do you think we would’ve seen the Abu Ghraib expose in 2004? The story on Walter Reed that surfaced in 2007? More important, would anything have been done about those gross miscarriages of justice had journalists not shined a light on them? On a local level, who covers City Council meetings? Who pesters the city comptroller about missing funds? Who writes a story on the potholes in that dilapidated neighborhood on the other side of town and ultimately gets them fixed?

This isn’t to lionize journalists or authors. There’s been a lot of shoddy work in those fields, to be quite honest. But the for-profit press serves as a vital check on the excesses and inadequacies of government, and there’s one reason that those writers, thinkers, and activists have been able to do the work they’ve done - money. I just think that the sooner we figure out a way to re-monetize creative intellectual property, the better.

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FEBRUARY 10, 2009

Amid the tumult around the traditional news industry  - as seen by reports of weeklies going to monthly-only publications and some news organizations simply going bankrupt - it’s refreshing to read about one news publication making a move that we at TMG believe is crucial for any organization: Deep Listening.

Instead of closing up shop and calling it a day, Newsweek is taking a risk and changing its identity to meet the wants and expectations of its consumers.  According to a piece in The New York Times:

The venerable newsweekly’s ingrained role of obligatory coverage of the week’s big events will be abandoned once and for all.  Executives say, ‘If we don’t have something original to say, we won’t.’  Editorially, they’re headed toward not just analysis and commentary, but an opinionated, prescriptive or offbeat take on events.

Not only is Newsweek changing some of its content from objective to biased, it will also be making adjustments to layout and style, including an “emphasis on photography… and a cleaner, less cluttered layout that has more open space and fewer pages that seem an uninterrupted sea of words.”

Hmm…more targeted, personal, and colorful content, with a focus on graphic content and less dense text? Sounds almost like a published paper blog post to me.  An interesting shift indeed, considering the recent creation of The Printed Blog, a paper publication self-described as “an independent media outlet that aggregates user-generated content from the Internet and publishes it twice daily via print. The result is a revolutionary newspaper that reads and functions like a web feed -yet can still be enjoyed on the train or spread across the breakfast table, for an uninterrupted, pleasurably tactile experience.”

Although Newsweek is taking on a challenge during uncertain times, we agree with Roberta Garfinkle, senior vice president and director for print strategy at TargetCast TCM, who said, “I give anybody credit in this difficult environment for saying, ‘What we’re doing doesn’t work anymore and we have to change our model.’”

We applaud Newsweek for truly listening to its consumers, taking a risk, and being willing to change its behavior in order to reach a similarly changing audience. We can only hope more and more organizations will follow suit.

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JANUARY 28, 2009

We’ve posted quite a bit recently about Twitter - different ways individuals, organizations, and communities are using the service, along with a few reasons why some choose not to use it. Similar to the way I use Delicious and Digg, one of my favorite uses for Twitter is to find great content. Twitter serves as a great tool for helping me keep up with virtually any subject I’m interested in.

My favorite Twitter account to watch over the past few months has been TheMediaIsDying. It is keeping tabs on the ever-changing world of “old media” - sharing the cutbacks, layoffs, consolidations, and closures taking place at outlets around the world. Here’s a snapshot of TheMediaIsDying tweets from this afternoon:

I’m not the only one who is fascinated by watching the media landscape transform before my eyes. TheMediaIsDying passed the 10,000 follower mark today, a phenomenal feat, especially when you consider that it first tweeted on November 19, 2008.

Margie at Flack Rabbit is also addicted.

It’s nothing fancy, mind you. There are no links to blog posts, polls or questions. They don’t talk back or engage their audience. Just Tweeting the facts, ma’am. The profile says they are ‘helping flaks pitch better and update lists.’ No matter what its utility, TheMediaIsDying is fascinating and (so far) accurate.

Although exactly who is behind the Twitter handle is unknown, Blog Herald was able to score an interview with the account’s elusive creators last week. Describing themselves of “a collection of concerned pr professionals who are trying to help in a bad situation,” the 8 or so people behind the TheMediaIsDying gravitated toward the microblogging format over a traditional blog because they’re not looking to offer commentary. Twitter’s 140 character limit suits the “news” well.

And, despite the majority of bad news-laden tweets, TheMediaIsDying is not cheering the death of traditional media:

There is a big misconception out there about us with people saying we like reporting bad news which couldn’t be further from the truth. We welcome all good news and hope one day the service won’t be needed.

Shifts in both the way we communicate and the media we use to do it have long been central themes of New Persuasion. My colleague Mike did a great job of addressing the shift in power from institutions to individuals in his post last spring. The traditional channels just don’t hold the same power they once did. If the media isn’t dying, it’s definitely changing- quickly, dramatically, and irreversibly. And I for one feel grateful that TheMediaIsDying is here to help us keep up with it.

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DECEMBER 16, 2008

I love books, but due to some work and general life craziness, I’ve been unable to read much for the past few weeks. Luckily, things have slowed down enough that I was able to finally sit down and finish a book I started a month or two ago - Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children, a novel about an aging liberal patriarch, a veteran of the culture wars of the 60s, and his relationship with the younger generation, comprised of his daughter, his nephew and his daughter’s two friends.

I’m ashamed to say I picked up the book because of its inclusion in several critics’ Best of 2006 awards. I don’t read a lot of fiction and not many of my friends do either, so when it comes to figuring out what I should read next, I generally have to rely on the Pulitzer committee or the New York Times’ Review of Books. I figured The Emperor’s Children was a safe purchase because of its critical acclaim.

Was I ever wrong. Undercurrents isn’t a book review site, but suffice it to say that the critics’ perception of this book didn’t match my own. I thought the dialogue was hackneyed and impossibly witty, that many of the central premises of the book were outlandish,  and the characters unbelievable. The constant refrain running through my head as I read was “People like this do not exist, and if they do, they do not deserve to have a book written about them.”

After finishing the book, I blamed my own upbringing for my lack of appreciation - I’m a hayseed from Richmond, Virginia and a current resident of staid and practical Washington, not the child of Manhattan literary eminences -  but upon reading reviews at Amazon and Metacritic, I quickly discovered that my opinion about The Emperor’s Children wasn’t unique. At Amazon, the most commonly-used tags for the book are “waste of time and money”, “avoid”, and “awful”, the most common rating for the book is one star, and the average rating is a mere two and a half. At Metacritic, the aggregate rating from professional critics is 85 (denoting “universal acclaim”) while the rating from readers is 69. Whichever way you slice it, reader reactions to this book were a far cry from those of elite reviewers of literature.

Reading these reviews, my insecurity over not “getting” The Emperor’s Children quickly melted into triumphalism - I was right, and the professionals were wrong. I mean, it’s not surprising the book was reviewed so well - it’s basically about the same New York literary-journalism class that reviewed the book, and paints it in a very appealing light. But it’s nice to know that that small clique isn’t capable of driving public opinion about books like they once did.

This particular book aside, it’s incredible how much power social media has had in debunking the ideas of “professionals”.  As print media continues to die, the blogosphere has eroded the opinion-setting power of all kinds of pundits, from art and literature critics in New York, to political talking heads in Washington - and one can only hope that the unwashed masses on the internet continue to prove that the emperor has no clothes.

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NOVEMBER 12, 2008

The last time I really picked up a newspaper was in August 2007. That was when I used several bundles of newspapers to wrap my colleague Neal’s cubicle in what stands to be the greatest TMG birthday prank on record. I obviously don’t read the paper. And, based on the latest numbers on newspaper circulation, I’m not alone. I don’t consider myself an uninformed person- I just get my news from television and the internet- the two biggest competitors to newspapers.

However, last Wednesday was different, and not just for me. People all across the country raced to get the daily paper, especially those sporting front page headlines about Barack Obama’s victory.

So does this mean that print is back? Of course not. Joe Strupp over at Editor & Publisher agrees:

…a lot more people will have a lot more newspapers to look back through some day and remember when. Remember not only when voters first elected a black president, but also when the daily paper was still around.

People weren’t buying the paper last week as a source of news- they were grabbing copies as a memento, a keepsake, a piece of history. You can’t frame a website or video story. In this way, papers have seemingly been reduced to the same category as concert ticket stubs or the program from a baseball game. In my opinion, newspapers will continue to serve a purpose, but more as an artifact of time than a physical representation of our current times.

I bought into the frenzy, too: I stopped by the local 7/11 and bought four copies of The Washington Post. I’m going to send the copies to my parents and siblings. History was made on November 4th and I want to hold onto a little piece of it. So for the first time in a long time, I’m thankful for the newspaper.

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OCTOBER 30, 2008

Back in April, my colleague Mike wrote a post entitled “The Long Goodbye To Newsprint Begins” in which he detailed the final changeover from print to online format for Madison, Wisconsin’s The Capital Times:

The Capital Times may be among the first to step so emphatically into journalism’s future, but every entity of the Old Media – not just newspapers, but TV, magazines and even newsletters and academic journals – has had to face the fact that the digital age has transformed the rules of mass communications.

And while it’s true that every aspect of traditional media is facing a paradigm shift, it seems that print media is taking the worst beating, at least for the moment.

• Condé Nast, an international publisher with numerous publications (many of them household names like Wired, Vogue, Glamour and GQ) announced major cuts across the board, with each title having to reduce staff and budget costs by 5% over a matter of weeks.

• The Orange County Register is laying off 110 employees by the end of the week.

• The Los Angeles Times is cutting 75 newsroom jobs, which is about 10% of its staff.

• Gannett, the largest newspaper publisher in the U.S., is also cutting 10% of its community newspaper staff, on top of 1,000 jobs it let go in August. (Because of Gannett’s size, this will be a very substantial number of jobs.)

• And next year, the 100-year-old Christian Science Monitor will become the first nationally circulated newspaper to go to an online-only daily edition. (CSM will retain a weekly print edition.)

No doubt the economy plays a role here (particularly when the only printing press seeing an increase in demand seems to be the one at the Treasury Department) but it’s also indicative of the rapid convergence of social and traditional media. As we increasingly exchange information electronically, print newspapers - and to a lesser extent magazines and books - become a seeming anachronism. When content I can find in a print edtion of a newspaper is also available online, I will opt for the electronic version every time.

As exciting as the changes are in the way we consume and distribute information, the loss of jobs is unfortunate and has a tremendous impact on the people in the industry.  The question now is whether the decline of print media continues to accelerate, or holds firm. My guess is that 2009 will bring a number of similar announcements to the one made by the Christian Science Monitor.

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SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

Some interesting news flashed across my Google Reader screen this morning: SpinSpotter, a Firefox add-on that uses a series of algorithms to detect “spin” in news stories, has gone live.

According to the BusinessWeek article, SpinSpotter’s basic features include functionality to detect and flag violations of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics.  In addition to that, the program will rely heavily on input from its users, who can flag specific instances of bias and spin that may not be detectable by the program. Those individual flags will be incorporated back into the program itself, so it has the capability to adapt to new kinds of spin.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to check out the program for myself, but reading the interview with company officials, a few red flags pop out at me. First, there’s an assumption that media bias is a two-sided affair - that if there’s bias, it’s against Republicans or Democrats - when in reality, American political opinion is much more multifaceted than the old left-right continuum would suggest.

My other issue, though, is a little more substantive. I believe strongly in the power of an adversarial press - where people, reporters, and companies with different opinions can contribute their points of view. Certainly there must be ground rules, and if a journalist is merely repeating the talking points of a political party then he or she deserves to be ignored. But part of the marketplace of ideas is a vibrant press, filled with different points of view, that allows readers to decide what’s relevant and what’s not.

An adversarial press relies on diversity of outlets - something that has been in short supply over the past 50 years, when most cities have only one daily paper and three television stations to supply the news. But the internet and social media have changed that by allowing the kind of diversity of opinion in the press that existed before the big media conglomerates. To gut that diversity by using an automated spin remover seems to me to be missing the point of social media entirely - that it’s supposed to be about individual opinions.

Beyond that, there’s very little evidence to suggest that Americans are interested in bias-free news. For instance, a Rasmussen poll shows that 87% of Fox News viewers plan to vote for John McCain in the upcoming elections, while Barack Obama holds smaller majorities of CNN and MSNBC viewers. It’s clear that in this case, we’re selecting the media outlets that we think best fit our views. It’s no different in newspaper-land: conservatives here in DC read the Times, everyone else reads the Post. 

While SpinSpotter’s efforts are certainly noble, ultimately I think it’s a lost cause. Even if we were interested in reading non-biased news, the nature of bias is so complicated that it seems impossible to truly remove it.

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