Is The Article Like The Song Or The Album? Deconstructing The News #futureofnews #wjchat June 9, 2011
Posted by bernardlunn in Journalism.add a comment
Painters create paintings, musicians create songs, authors write books, developers create systems, entrepreneurs create companies and…journalists write articles. Well, maybe not. Some people are questioning this assumption.
When a disruptive technology comes along it always changes the legacy medium. For example, the invention of the camera forced painters to rethink how they could add value and that led to impressionism, abstract art and other wonderful forms of creative experimentation.
When digital music arrived, it destroyed the concept of an album which started with the 33rpm vinyl format and carried on into CD.
But digital music did not deconstruct further, the song remains the unit that is produced & consumed.
In the news business, the album is the newspaper or the TV/Radio channel. Apart from a few loyalists among the older crowd, online news consumers are not brand loyal, they click around to get what they want. But the article is still the dominant unit.
Blogging did not change that. Bloggers may write shorter articles, because they have to churn out 4 posts per day. Bloggers may call them posts rather than articles. Bloggers may have found the Publish key a huge liberation from the Publisher’s rejection letter. But, call it what you like, Bloggers still produce articles.
But Twitter may have changed things. Twitter is so fundamentally new as a medium that it challenges older assumptions. A Tweet is emphatically not an article. You can derisively dismiss Tweets as “brain farts” and a lot of them fit that bill. But in the news business, Tweets are one type of “news fragment”. I don’t know what else to call them. Some of these news fragments can become the constituent pieces of an article. That is what all the curation tools are trying to do, assemble Tweets into stories (which are built into the article form factor).
Compare this to other media that deliver creative work:
- the fragments in a song are things like the bass line, vocals etc.
- the fragments in a painting are things like paint and canvas
- the fragments in a book are things like paragraphs and chapters
In those media, would you be interested in consuming the fragments on their own? If you are a creator, maybe. If you play the bass, you might want to isolate Jacob Pastorious’s bass lines from Weather Report to learn from them.
That is the problem we have in the news business. Millions of people love writing. That is what made blogging such a phenomenon. I get it, I love writing. The act of creation is a pleasure. The act of consumption is OK, but not as much fun as creation. So when we see those news fragments, we become fascinated.
When people who are not involved in media and technology ask me why I am fascinated by Twitter, I usually talk about following the early days of a massive story. I was totally glued to Twitter #jan25 when the revolution was happening in Egypt. I have always been fascinated by revolutions, I have lived in the Lebanon and I am fascinated by the news business. So this was exciting to me on many levels.
But as soon as Nick Kristof got to Cairo, I was happy to just read his articles as well as anything by other journalists who really understand the Middle East like Thomas Friedman.
I can also envisage that somebody who is obsessively interested in all things Apple related, they want to drill down to the fragment/source. But how many subjects can we be obsessive about? How many subjects do we want to be “news prosumers” in?
I think the article will remain, like the song and the painting, the primary unit of production and consumption. Journalists, bloggers and what we might call “news prosumers” or “news fanatics” might want to delve deeper into the individual fragments, to go direct to the sources.
That use case, the news prosumer, needs to be catered to. It is really a filter/check box indicated whether you consider yourself an expert on that subject. The expert will get all the latest stuff in reverse chronological order, getting the fragments direct from sources (using their own insights and knowledge to filter out the junk). But methinks that is a minor use case. Those of us in the news business might think it is a big use case as we fall into that use case category, but that is a classic mistake. Also, I think that most mainstream media attempts at doing this will be rejected by the news prosumer fanatics, who will always want to delve direct into the fragments direct from the sources.
In conclusion:
The article like the song remains the same, even while the container (newspaper/channel/CD) is threatened.
Groupon IPO: Can Andrew Mason Skate To Where The Puck Is Headed? June 5, 2011
Posted by bernardlunn in IPO, Online Advertising, Uncategorized.add a comment
Most commentary is negative. The current financials look pretty awful. Even worse, the current value proposition to merchants does not look sustainable. They are basically pitching a loss leader. Every merchant understands a loss leader. But if the loss leader does not lead to profitable clients it is just a loss. As the old saying goes ‘it is easy to sell a dollar for 99 cents”.
The positive spin is “the numbers looked awful for Amazon as well, look at Amazon now”. Its a bit like saying Google had no idea of how to make money when they launched but look at Google now.
So is Andrew Mason as smart as Jeff Bezos?
Amazon’s ability to invent the future is extraordinary. They did it first for e-commerce. Even more remarkably they did it again with Amazon Web Services (AWS) when the reinvented the hosting business and created the Infrastructure As A Service category.
The answer of course is, we don’t know. Investing in Groupon is investing in a massive market that is in the process of fundamental change AND investing in a great entrepreneur. I have no idea if Andrew Mason is a great entrepreneur, only time will tell. But I can see the massive market that is in the process of fundamental change. So can Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, eBay, Craigslist, Apple, Microsoft as well as legions of Groupon clone startups.
The market opportunity is so massive that Groupon is totally right to choose a “go big or go home” strategy. This is a network effects game and the winner will be a huge winner.
At stake is the $150 billion local advertising market.
Actually, at stake is the whole evolution of the online advertising business. That is why Google was willing to pay $6 billion. That is why the Google acquisition fell apart on fears that the deal would fall prey to Anti Trust action. (Don’t fall for the “brave entrepreneur walks from $6 billion offer” fairy tale).
Here is why:
At stake is the whole evolution of the online advertising business.
Advertising has evolved to address the famous line “half of my advertising is wasted, I just don’t know which half” through 4 different versions:
* Version 1, pre Web, “we cannot tell you who is looking at the ad”
* Version 2, CPM, we can tell you who is looking, but we have no idea if they are interested
* Versions 3, CPC, we can tell you how many showed interest by clicking, but we have no idea if they will buy anything”
* Version 4, Groupon aka CPA aka Cost Per Action or Cost Per Revenue. In Groupon’s current iteration, the loss leader 75% off list price deal (50% off to the consumer), the vendor is telling the advertiser/merchant “we can tell you how many people will buy the loss leader, we cannot tell you how many will return as full paying customers later”.
Of course, a loss leader proposition is unsustainable. If that is all Groupon can offer, run, don’t walk from this IPO opportunity. But if you think that their loss leader proposition is their foot in the door to the next iteration of commerce/advertising, they could be an Amazon scale company. And you never got a chance to buy Amazon stock on the cheap and you probably never will.
The losers in this next iteration of commerce/advertising are obviously the yellow pages print advertising books that land on my porch and get taken straight to the recycling bin. But they are already dead, the funeral notice just did not get posted. And like the AOL dial-up subscribers, inertia is a wonderful thing!
But the other losers are all those invested in CPM and CPC. They won’t go away but they will be impacted by a proposition that is fundamentally more attractive.
So where is the puck headed? Actually I indulged in some science fiction speculation about what Twitter could do with Twitter Annotations (they dropped that ball). This is about a future of ecommerce that is real time, mobile and social. Foursquare and Loopt are also in this game from another direction.
In the future we are likely to see consumer agents negotiating with multiple vendors via exchanges that get a cut of the action. No, that will not be a 50% cut of the action. Think more like the less than 5% vigorish that payment vendors take. Merchants are incredibly margin aware, they will fight tooth and nail with Amex over 1%. But at the scale we are talking about, 1% is a really, really good business – that Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, eBay, Craigslist, Apple, Microsoft all lust after. All the Groupon clones are simply acquisition bait for those behemoths. The question is does Groupon have a shot at getting into the behemoth class. That comes down to “is Andrew Mason like Jeff Bezos in 1996?”. He looks the part but only time will tell.
A Million ProPublicas Now! We Need A Moore’s Law Of Investigative Journalism #futureofnews #wjchat May 31, 2011
Posted by bernardlunn in Uncategorized.add a comment
ProPublica seems to be getting traction with their model. Not everybody loves ProPublica; because they are funded by George Soros people assume that they tend to lean left (and maybe they do, and if they do, I don’t care I tend to lean left as well – there, my bias is disclosed). But the point is we don’t want to rely on ProPublica. Maybe you want the Koch brothers to fund the right wing version. Or maybe you think ProPublica is too western oriented, or not left wing enough.
The diversity of hundreds of investigative journalism teams was an underpinning of our freedom in the west in the 20th Century. There is a reason George Soros funded ProPublica; he escaped from the Nazi regime, so he understands how important it is to have a free, open society and that a free press is vital to that.
For a while we worried about the concentration of power in a few media barons. The idea that somebody like Rupert Murdoch could tell an editor what story to run was unsettling. Frankly I thought those fears were exaggerated. Murdoch is a businessman. If he lets his newspapers and TV channels simply parrot his opinions he will lose a lot of money. The bigger risk was always that Murdoch simply served us what we wanted and that tended to be sports and entertainment. The ROI on investigative journalism was weak.
And then…..
The already weak ROI got decimated, literally, when a $1 in a print/TV ad returned as $0.10 online.
The problem was always economics. But pre-Web, it was a case of a frog in a slowly burning pot of water. Now we have reached the boiling point.
Ain’t it great. Anybody can be a journalist. Just press Publish in WordPress and voila, instant-media-baron
Oops, no, we just replaced Murdoch with Zuckerberg. You need the traffic from Facebook and Facebook set the ad rates for the rest of us, so we need to cater to mass-market interests like sports and entertainment. Try funding a 3 month in-depth investigation on today’s CPM rates. Actually, don’t try it, save yourself the hassle, the experiment is not worth it.
Its. OK, paywalls will work, we will all pay subscriptions like we used to in print
Err, yes, and you still believe in Santa Claus? Subscriptions work for business subjects, the FT is OK, in the business world, time is money. Yes we “should” be happy paying for the journalists in Iraq, but we don’t in practice.
Ok, so for all believers in magic and fairies, here is another one:
Unpaid “citizen journalists” will fill the gap as they don’t have to worry about making a living and they will only present verified facts and declare their interests and biases.
Business 101 says that if revenue is coming down, you need to cut costs. The answer today is simply to cut out investigative journalism. Anybody who thinks that is a problem has to be thinking about how we decimate the costs of investigative journalism. I am using the literal meaning of decimate – cut costs from 100% to 10%. That is what has happened to ad revenue.
That needs something like a Moore’s Law, where costs halve every year. That will enable thousands, maybe even millions, of small investigative journalists to operate in a sustainable way. See a story that you think is big? Investigate it, write it, sell it to one or multiple news outlets, keep the copyright and then, Pulitzer in hand, write the book and go on the speaking circuit. Look at Matt Taibbi as a recent success story. OK, that maybe a fairy story as well, few will actually make this happen. But, if Moore’s Law can decimate the costs of investigative journalism, its not out of reach. .
Actually, I think that this is possible. Technology, which is causing the economic problem, is also capable of creating the solution. Methinks it will look something like this pyramid:
The top of the pyramid remains the trained and paid journalist. Those skills matter. Experience matters. Focus matters. But they need to be able to leverage the rest of the pyramid.
The old stringer deal was a retainer. That is probably dead. “Stringer 2.0″ is likely to be more on a per piece basis. The best stringers may make more money this way, if they happen to be where some big news is breaking and they have that all-important “nose for a story” (as well as guts and determination, real journalism is dangerous). But lets not confuse Stringers with the next layer. Stringers want cash. They must be able to sell copyright on commercial terms.
Citizen Journalist is a term that is past its sell by date. I don’t have a better word than “citizen” for now. But lets at least replace Journalist with Reporter. They report facts that they observe. These “facts” maybe untrue – that is the journalist’s job to uncover. What the Citizen Reporter wants is for the facts to be published. It matters more to them that a dictator is toppled than who makes money from the news. They may want their name published or they may want to remain anonymous and they should be able to make that clear in their report.
The bottom layer is the automation of all the context and background. This is where the semantic web and aggregation tools come into play. We should be able to spend money on the new and the original, the background stuff should be free and automated.
Disclosure: that is the focus of ReportingLiveFrom and this has not been launched yet. For more background, see these earlier posts:
Investigative journalism needs more than curation tools
Reporter, Journalist, Editor, Publisher: The Blurring Of Roles #futureofnews May 28, 2011
Posted by bernardlunn in Uncategorized.add a comment
Reporter used to be synonymous with journalist. Recently, people have started to refer to reporter as a “citizen journalist”. The implication is that journalists are not “on the ground” reporting on what they see and hear at first hand, they are sitting at a desk curating flows from reporters who are unpaid. Calling unpaid reporters citizen journalists makes little sense, the term is overdue for retirement.
But the implication is that the journalist has actually become an editor, deciding what to publish from a team of reporters. Actually the journalist is also the publisher. When I am finished writing I simply hit my WordPress Publish button. It is free and I can have advertising networks sell some ads. I don’t need to manage a sales team and the accounting is simply checking into Paypal. I am oversimplifying a tad to make a point. But all the “media companies formerly known as bloggers” started a single individual who was journalist, editor and publisher at the same time.
This empowerment is the wonderful legacy of the social media age.
But something has been lost. We have lost the reporter. Maybe it is simply a budget issue. Unless it is a massive global story, like a revolution or Tsunami, nobody is paying for the reporter to fly to the spot. So our typical image of a blogger is somebody sitting in their home office on a laptop, reading news feeds and press releases. There are more PR people than journalists. Everybody is recycling the same old stuff. The tech blogosphere is canary in the coal mine. Any news release from a tech bigco has 10 or more news stories that are almost all the same, competing only on speed of release and link bait cleverness of the headline.
The only exceptions in the tech blogosphere are Arrington and Scoble. The Arrington story is not repeatable. He basically creates news by starting a controversy. He is so wired in the Valley that he can do this. This is either horribly conflicted or the return of Gonzo journalist; Arrington as a reincarnation of Hunter S. Thompson is a pretty funny thought. But that idea won’t scale as the VCs say.
But what Scoble does, travel the world interviewing entrepreneurs, is scalable. This is original content, proprietary, the essence of what we used to call reporting. He can do this because Rackspace pays his salary and expenses. That is a scary thought for media organizations; the future of journalism is coming from a company that is byepassing media companies to establish their own direct access to the market.
But whether the future creators of original content are media companies or “the companies formerly known as advertisers and now called content marketers”, the Scoble-like reporter needs better tools for the whole lifecycle from original reporting to publishing and monetization.
Disclosure: that is the focus of ReportingLiveFrom and this has not been launched yet. For more background, see these earlier posts:
Investigative Journalism Needs More Than Curation Tools
Twitter Is Not Enough: 6 Needs Of Investigative Journalism
Songs For A Revolution: My Top 10 Soundtrack For Revolutionary Times May 25, 2011
Posted by bernardlunn in Uncategorized.add a comment
We live in revolutionary times, most obviously in the Arab world but maybe soon in other autocratic regimes and in business (creative destruction). I was too young for the 1960s, just got the faded me too backwash of the 1970s, but I was there for the late 1970s London punk scene and loved that energy.
So here goes:
Twitter Is Not Enough: 6 Needs Of Investigative Journalism #futureofnews May 21, 2011
Posted by bernardlunn in Blogging, Journalism.add a comment
See earlier post on Investigative Journalism Needs More Than Curation Tools for context.
1. The reporter must be able to control the URL and the monetization. News that goes to closed social networks that monetize the free contributions cannot be sustainable. Journalism has to be paid for. We can use social media to listen (Twitter Lists are just the old “little black book” of sources) and to promote stories and get incoming links. But journalists who want to make a living cannot simply make the social media founders/investors rich.
2. The reporter must be able to contribute news using the lowest common denominator tools: mobile phones and email. Expensive, proprietary tools will be a barrier. Even a free app that has to be downloaded before one can contribute, will be a barrier. The person who happens to be “on the spot” where the news is breaking must be able to report what is happening.
3. The reporter must be be able to publish automatically on real time without asking anybody’s permission. This is the gift of the social media age. Yes, this same tool can be used by spammers, scammers and hacks paid directly by special interests. That is the price of openness and the reason why the next point is so important; but the alternative (control by a few media moguls) is worse.
4. The reporter must be able to proactively choose sources and ask them for specific contributions. Relying on curating existing flows on social networks is reactive and not the essence of journalism. This capability must be available to the single individual (the “person formerly known as blogger” and occasionally called citizen journalist) as well as media organizations large and small.
5. The reporter must be able to request payment in various forms. This won’t apply to salaried reporters working for large media organizations. But all forms of free agent reporter are likely to create the majority of news content in the future and they should be able to request payment in whatever means makes sense to them – non-monetary recognition, stringer type retainers, per item fees. For example, the person who records a key moment of history should be able to get paid by the highest bidder, unless they have contracted with another news organization before the event.
6. Text is not enough, we need millions of TV stations. Mobile video is a reality and consumers want the old lean back TV experience with an interactive twist. Everyman can be a TV anchor replaces the earlier blogging dream of everybody can be a published writer.
Investigative Journalism Needs More Than Curation Tools May 19, 2011
Posted by bernardlunn in Blogging, Journalism.2 comments
Investigative journalism is important to society, somebody needs to “speak truth to power”.
Historically the newspaper business was so profitable that it could fund long investigations. They could also take the risk of lawsuits that often resulted when the rich and powerful did not like the truth that was being reported. But today, those budgets are being cut to the bone and newspaper owners are too scared for their own survival to consider investigative projects.
Nor can the pure play online only blog-based businesses pick up the slack. They have to pander to page views and keep costs within the boundaries marked by ever-falling CPM and CTR ad rates. “Reporters” have to create 4 posts per day, usually around 500 words. Their best attempts at adding value to press releases are clearly no substitute for investigative journalism.
For a while, I thought that “citizen journalism” would be the answer. The idea was that any citizen can hit enter on their blog and the truth is revealed, they have no gatekeeper (who might be conflicted by their relationship with a special interest) who can say no.
The problem is that, for every honest citizen trying to do their best, there are way more spammers, scammers and paid hacks of the rich and powerful. So the consumer of news has to filter out the nuggets of truth from the mountains of rubbish. To do that they need well-trained and motivated journalists and editors. So we get back to square one.
Many techies dream of an automated answer, the perfect social curation filtering tool that will automagically assess every source’s credibility and only deliver the good stuff to your personalized online news service. Yep, and the high school student will find the cure for cancer in class and invent something that goes faster than the speed of sound.
I love how Andy Carvin at NPR is curating the news from the Arab revolutions using Twitter lists and other tools. The best tech bloggers, such as Marshall Kirkpatrick, have used these tools for a while, now we are seeing these tools used to report on matters that really matter to humanity. That is all great.
The danger is that we fall back into a naive view that technology will replace the need for people like Andy Carvin. Or that it is easy to get mainstream journalists to work the way he works. It maybe that this is something that is perfect for early adopters but won’t scale.
We need tools that empower trained journalists and editors, that help them to identify more credible sources and to efficiently get those sources to contribute. Those same tools can be used by citizen journalists. The tools must be very simple and very cheap, so that they are accessible to citizen journalists and local news operations. Exposing a $50,000 corruption at your local town hall matters just as much as the $500 million corruption at a national level when that $50,000 determines whether the school budget passes and your kids get art class.
I was initially sceptical about non-profit institutions getting involved. I thought that the answer had to come from the market. But I have been impressed by what ProPublica is doing and their model may be sustainable, as they get revenue from commercial news organizations. But we need more ProPublicas as well as purely commercial versions of ProPublica. For that to happen, we need a revolution in efficiency.
There needs to be something like a Moore’s Law of investigative journalism where the cost drops significantly every year.
Disclosure: this is the focus of ReportingLiveFrom, a new venture that I am co-founding. We are not yet ready to go live with our tools, I am writing about the issues to get our thinking clear and engage with other interested parties.
Why I Am Returning To My WordPress Blog May 4, 2011
Posted by bernardlunn in B2B Media, Blogging, Journalism.2 comments
I was late to blogging, around 2007, but had written a lot in other media. I started with WordPress, then wrote for Read Write Web, SemanticWeb and SmallBizTrends.
I have no intention of monetizing via advertising, so I don’t care about page views (that is only a vanity stat). Nor do I have any single business objective, so I don’t feel the need to be disciplined about writing every day. I really do write for fun, I enjoy writing. It is a way to organize my thoughts. But it is also, hopefully, a conversation. I want to engage in a dialogue with people who are “thinking along the same lines”, even if they tell me I have got it totally wrong (I love changing my point of view).
So, the question is not whether I should blog. It is whether I should blog here, or on some high traffic site. A few years ago, it was different. Then it was obvious that you should blog as a guest author on a high traffic site. Four things have changed my mind on this:
- Google is indexing my blog posts within less than a minute. Yep, this no-name blog is being indexed almost in real time! I tested this myself. I assume this is because WordPress adopted RSSCloud.
- I tested on a blog network that lets guest authors post freely (SeekingAlpha) and on this blog and the number of page views was almost the same.
- I asked some blogs that have a restricted guest author policy and found that I had to write in a way that fit within their editorial guidelines. If I wanted to be a professional writer, that would have been a useful exercise. But I am determined to remain amateur in my writing and want the freedom to write what I want, when I want.
- New style aggregators such as Hacker News and Techmeme have a way to submit posts, so you can alert a specialized audience on a post by post basis. Hacker News found me about a year ago when my post on “punk manufacturing” was discovered and yesterday I submitted something that got a great conversation going. Methinks Techmeme is more news-driven and that’s not my game, but lets see.
This tells me that it might be possible to get the blogging magic quadrant – freedom on one axis and engaged audience on the other.
Software Architects Need More Respect: Hacker Culture Is Overdone May 3, 2011
Posted by bernardlunn in Uncategorized.2 comments
Some people would say that I am not qualified to write about software development as I have never written a line of code in my life. But I have spent over 30 years working with some great developers on a wide range of projects and I have seen what works and what does not work.
A few years ago the art of architecting systems for scalability and extensibility started to get a bad press. I think Joel Spolsky was the first to coin the phrase “architecture astronauts“, to describe those who were always designing layers of abstraction but forgetting to deliver code that actually did anything. Then we got the lean start up movement, focusing on the constant iteration that the web enables.
This led to the hacker culture, oriented to “just do it” speed. “Hacker” used to be a term of abuse, but like “punk” it was adopted by those accused as a badge of pride.
That is all good stuff, but methinks it has gone too far. We now see too many systems where the original system has to be totally thrown away. That may be OK if you raised $ gazillions and can now compete with Google and Facebook for a big team of really great engineers. But for most startups, it is not possible. So most startups limp along with the original system. The upshot is:
- Hosting bills that really start to bite into cash flow.
- Systems that crash too often; a few of these and your users have clicked away to a rival. Yes, we persevered through Twitter fail whales, but is your service really that addictive?
- New features take way too long. You either release fast or put in some QA and testing process to avoid brand-killing crashes.
It does not need to be like that. The best developers can do both. They create a scalable and extensible architecture AND deliver quick feature iterations. Sometimes you cannot get one person who can do both – it is rare. One team I worked with solved this by having a 4 person team where:
- 1 person hacked demos, in the full knowledge that the code would thrown away. He was awesome at this and in full synch with his colleague who:
- created the architecture AND the working code. 35 years later, the system is still being used.
- 2 people who did the ancilliary stuff like testing, documentation and so on. Great surgeons have a team, same is true with great engineers.
I think the problem may be with the pure architect model. No engineer likes being told “here is a perfect architecture, just code it as per that spec”. Going back to the house analogy, we need more architectural engineers who create designs that they know will work and they prove that they work by writing the code.
