The Web will ALWAYS win at breaking news

April 20, 2013 By Leave a Comment

This past week has been an interesting one for the news business, a.k.a. the practice of professional journalism. For an observer like me, it was a treasure trove of brilliant signage, beaming billboards pointing this way and that on the highway to tomorrow.

The public — what Jay Rosen once brilliantly coined “the people formerly known as the audience” — will have their cake and eat it too, thank you very much. The Web has won. Long live the Web!

You see, one-to-many, “mass” media lacks the sideways corrective nature of the 3-way Web. The path to truth is just as it always has been — with weeds scattered among the facts — but that’s assumed today by increasingly savvy participants. This assumptive acceptance exists everywhere, it seems, except with the legacy producers, who, if they jump into the same weeds, find the rug pulled out from underneath them over and over and over again. The result is a foolish attempt to summarize based on rumor, scanner traffic, tweets and attempts to deceive. Denizens of the Web know that there are countless disenfranchised Nigerian princes who need help with their fortunes, but legacy news people must “vet” everything. CBS anchor Scott Pulley tried the high road approach Friday night and seemed boring and uninformed as a result. NBC rolled in high gear and seemed much less constrained and more current, but even they couldn’t keep up.

The Web won, and who is the Web? As Kevin Kelly once brilliantly noted, “We Are The Web.

Many years ago, I wrote “The Evolving User Paradigm,” which I believe continues to be the greatest disruptor of all of the Web’s disruptions. I’m making these numbers up, so you’ll get the point: By its nature, mass media must always assume an average audience IQ of, oh, about 80. The Web doesn’t have to do that, because its ability to correct sideways and the resultant ability to cater differently to different tribes (while wannabes can listen in) makes it unique in the history of communications. Every time somebody participates in any form, they get better at it. I’m serious when I say that we’re going to have to teach basic journalism to everybody, because everybody is a journalist, or perhaps better, capable of performing an act of journalism. My vote is for elementary school.

One other thing of note. All this corrective and other participation will continue to put pressure on Washington with regards to an infrastructure that can handle it. In The Shame of Boston’s Wireless Woes, Anthony Townsend wrote: “Almost immediately after Monday’s tragic bombings at the Boston Marathon, the city’s cellular networks collapsed.”

We shouldn’t be surprised by the collapse of Boston’s cellular networks. The same thing happens every time there is a crisis in a large city. On an average day, Americans make nearly 400,000 emergency 911 calls on their mobile phones. Yet during large-scale crises this vital lifeline is all-too-frequently cut off.

To the extent that archaic broadcasting “competes” with wireless companies for bandwidth, who do we really think will win that battle?

Yes, folks, journalism — like every other institution of the modern era — has changed (or is changing) forever. I’m excited to see how we work all of this out, and I’m not afraid of it one bit. Why? You can argue all you want about the selfish nature of humanity, but events like what happened in Boston this week prove that we’re also in it for each other. That simply cannot be said of corporate America or any cultural institution that results in power to the few.

Filed Under: Media

Scrambling in Boston: Welcome to the 21st Century

April 19, 2013 By Leave a Comment

I’ve been struck by many things in observing the professional observers deal with the amateurs in the new world of networked journalism today in Boston. I’ve got to say that none of this surprises me, neither the positive — next door neighbors live-tweeting events — nor the negative — bad information virtually everywhere.

The always astute Dave Winer tweeted this a little while ago:

 

As I first wrote long ago, we’ve entered the age of postmodernism, the working infrastructure and hierarchies of which are still be woven in the womb of time.

Premodernism: “I believe, therefore I understand.”

Modernism: “I think, therefore I understand.”

Postmodernism: “I participate, therefore I understand.”

I couldn’t have said it better than Dave. And here’s the thing we all have to understand. Those people who wish — no, must — participate or involve themselves, really aren’t as dumb as the curmudgeons would have us or themselves believe. Newsgathering has never been neat or precise. It’s chaotic, but there is a sense of order to it, as journalists execute their search for truth. Think of casting an enormous net around information and cinching it tighter and tighter, as we get closer to our goal. In my 28-year career in news management, I witnessed some real whoppers of mistakes that never made it to air, because we had the luxury of a downstream production deadline. In a crisis, Twitter becomes a listening post for media instead of a broadcast tool, and listening is a new skill that media must acquire.

Some of the stuff that the pros deem violations of the sacred canons when dealing with networked news gathering may, in fact, be necessary evils of the new world. While we sort all that out, it would be incredibly useful (and refreshing) if we stopped taking for granted what’s become the new eyes and ears of information gathering just because they don’t play by the rules that govern the behavior of the few.

As Dave said, “People want to be involved.” Like it or not, they already are.

Filed Under: Journalism, Twitter Tagged With: , ,

TV, meet Gilmore’s Law

April 10, 2013 By Leave a Comment

NAB 2013 Show AdThe NAB is underway in Las Vegas in the wake of an all-time revenue record for the broadcast industry last year. The networks are about to launch the annual sale of their inventory known as the upfronts, and all is well. Well, not exactly. There’s declining viewership, the not-so-little disruption known as Aereo, the increasingly viable civil defense, weather warning and Amber alert efforts of the Telcos, the love affair that all media companies have with online banner ads, and mostly, the way broadcasters make all of their online strategic decisions as if the Web wasn’t a horizontally-connected network.

If you strip away the HTML that displays what, for example, a local television station offers online — also known as “the content” — what’s left is the network and how that web document fits within the whole. This document must follow certain realities about life in the network that contradict the view associated with simply watching or reading the content, especially in the area of mass media. In certain instances, we have to go many years back and visit the minds of those who created the network, and here’s a noteworthy truth: they had nothing to do with media.

These were engineers of the highest level, including John Gilmore, who, according to Wikipedia, is one of the founders (the fifth employee) of Sun Microsystems, one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Cypherpunks mailing list, and Cygnus Solutions. He created the alt.* hierarchy in Usenet and is a major contributor to the GNU project. I’ll spare you all the link following by saying that John isn’t likely the kind of guy who’d be running ANY of the companies on display at the NAB this week.

In addition to all his “foundings,” Mr. Gilmore is also the author of the often-cited axiom, Gilmore’s Law:

“The net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

Why is this so important for broadcasters especially? Because the parameter that the FCC uses to issue licenses to broadcast companies is geography, and online, geography represents a form of “damage.” Geography is an artificial inefficiency that even China is beginning to see doesn’t work in terms of guarding certain kinds of information from the eyeballs of its citizens. In other words, when Aereo wins its legal battle with broadcasters (it will), the just-announced News Corps’ response to take its stations off-the-air will backfire, because anything that attempts to give station owners a piece of the pie through Internet streaming will eventually have to bend its knee to Gilmore’s Law.

News Corp. Chief Operating Officer Chase Carey told Fox News Entertainment:

“This is not an ideal path we look to pursue, but we can’t sit idly by and let an entity steal our signal,” Carey said at the annual gathering of broadcasters, called NAB Show, in Las Vegas. “If we can’t do a fair deal, we could take the whole network to a subscription model.”

News Corp plans to use GPS to determine how its stream will be divvied up via geography, but this is entirely to satisfy the revenue wants and needs of local affiliates. That may seem fair to the stations, but consumers will get doubly hosed — by cable companies, whose fees aren’t about to go down, and by Fox (and others later), via its own subscriber fees. Something will have to give, and consumers will demand one OR the other but not both. And Gilmore’s Law says that if it ends up that streaming is preferred, the owners of the content will ultimately win.

jetplaneWhereas terrestrial broadcasting used to be the most efficient way to distribute video content by dividing the airwaves into geographically-defined markets, that is no longer absolute. What we have here is the railroads, who at one time owned shipping across-the-land, believing they deserve a fee for each jet that races across-the-sky, crossing over their land-based tracks in the process.

There are ways that local media companies can make money and even thrive downstream, but riding the coattails of their network big brothers is going to become a net liability sooner rather than later. The ones who will “win” the most will be those who own the programming that people watch, and this needs to be a part of everybody’s long-term strategic plan.

BONUS LINK: The Verge Nuclear option: would Fox really leave the free airwaves to undercut Aereo?

Filed Under: Broadcasting, Disruptions, Reinventing Local Media

Confidently Facing Chaos

March 29, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Here’s the latest in my ongoing series of essays, Local Media in a Postmodern World.

 CONFIDENTLY FACING CHAOS

One of the most difficult challenges I hear for local media companies is overcoming the appearance of chaos in the reinvention process. More than anything else, this prevents people from navigating the really disruptive waters and choosing instead to stay with what they know. This despite considerable evidence that mass media’s business model is going the way of the video rental store.

To the ordered mind, anything smacking of serious change is chaotic, but it can be foolish to try anything that attempts to go above, around or beneath it. We need the skill and ability to move THROUGH chaos to find our way to lasting prosperity in the new era. That’s what this essay is all about.

Meanwhile, the headline of Brian Stelter’s New York Times report on the 2013 version of the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s “State of the News Media” report says it all: Local TV News Is Following Print’s Path, Study Says.

Those who follow my work will find none of this to be “new.” However, I’m saddened by this year’s report, because I’m afraid we’re getting to the point where even deliberate attempts to steer a different course will only have limited success.

The report illuminates a few important trends:

  • Audiences of local TV news continue to shrink — There is nothing on the horizon, no new concept in local TV news that will bring back those who’ve left. None. So unless there is a major blue sky (and blank slate) reinvention project ahead, local TV — despite an occasional good report, such as advertisers still preferring TV — there is no future.
  • Where programs have changed since 2005, they’ve gone for more weather, traffic, and sports. Live reports have replaced stories, and audiences are beginning to notice. This is accelerating the flight from local TV news.
  • People increasingly get news from their friends and then proceed to learn more.

I strongly encourage you to read the entire PEW report. It’s a terrific benchmark of where we’re at from both revenue and audience perspectives.

Filed Under: Essays

How Brands Can Behave as People (And Why They Should)

March 7, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Here’s the latest in my ongoing series of essays, Local Media in a Postmodern World:

How Brands Can Behave as People (And Why They Should)

This is one of the most important essays in the series, for it reveals a strategic and tactical shift in the way we behave online. Remember that no one is practicing this fully at this time, but I strongly believe this will become best practices for all companies in the not-too-distant future. Media companies, especially, should be practicing this already.

Filed Under: Networked World Tagged With:

The Artist’s Lament

March 4, 2013 By Leave a Comment
The Dreamers are the saviors of the world.

The Dreamers are the saviors of the world.

I believe the early part of the 21st Century will be known for its shift to the arts and the imagination that seems to flow through artistic people. I wrote about a “Right Brain Renaissance” in 2006, and this is a continuation of that. Basically, the left brain people have “managed” us into quite a pickle, and they don’t have a clue on what to do. The West suffers from a failure of imagination like no other time in history, and, as James Allen wrote 100 years ago, “The dreamers are the saviors of the world.”

There’s an artist in everyone, but only some are artists, or Allen’s “dreamers.” These are people who touch Richard Adams’ Unbroken Web of creativity that is available — for free — to anyone and everyone. Consequently, creativity belongs to no one, which means that ideas belong to no one. There is no such thing as “intellectual property” for one who touches the realm of the creatives. The price for the ability to bask within the Unbroken Web is that you’ll probably never be rich, although there are plenty of those who try, based on what some gifted people bring back with them. Artists often suffer in their own lifetime only to have their work reach extraordinary value after their gone. It may seem a steep price to pay, but most of those who touch this realm would give anything to touch it once again.

In today’s explosion of creative thought, however, the undeniable loss for individual dreamers is acknowledgement of what they find in the realm of creativity. Provenance often goes to the one who speaks loudest, is best connected, or already has a significant following, and this is a shame, because those people are rarely in the “starving artist” category. Perhaps this is just another part of the price one pays for living with one’s head in the clouds.

But it doesn’t make it right. Sigh.

Filed Under: LifeSlices
«Older Posts