The first: a rumination on progress in front of the estate Ditchley near Oxford:

Another from the Ditchley estate about the haha (bald attempt to find a useful metaphor about openness and collaboration):

I was inspired to put up these videos because this reader wanted more videos here. Blame him.

I want to try the Droid but I am already in indentured servitude to AT&T for my iPhone (and have no particular desire to lose it). As much of a gadget geek as I am (I’m no Leo Laporte – my wife would’t let me be – but I do love the darned things), it’s still just not worth the $2,600 commitment to get another phone, even if Michael Arrington is having orgasms over it.

I’ve been arguing on This Week in Google that what I want is a Gadget (or Phone) of the Month Club. Let me try it. It’s worth it for the phone and device companies because they just might seduce me into buying. They’d get more press from the folks who matter – early adopters. They’d sell more gadgets and service plans. They could even use it to try out new gadgets (who wouldn’t pay to be a beta tester for the coolest gadgets?).

I wish someone (are you listening, Best Buy? is there an entrepreneur out there looking for something new to do?) would start a club that would rotate gadgets among freaks every month (or two). Obviously, it won’t work if we all expect to get the Droid as soon as it’s out without paying full freight. So charge more for that privilege. Every month, the one-month fee for a particular device goes down. I’m willing to pay a premium to try the Droid the first month or a Chrome-powered netbook. But I’ll wait three or four months to get my hands on a Nokia N900. The market will determine the demand: let us bid up the premium for the first-month Droid. Mind you, I’ll also pay an entrance fee to be a member of the club (maybe a dozen of us can do it on our own).

If I fall in love with a gadget I try, I can buy it. If I don’t, Netflix-like, I send it back and then get the next one. If I break it, I pay for it. Whoever runs this club doesn’t have to put up all the capital to get the hardware; our fees and deposits will create good cash flow.

What’s not to love?

: LATER: Surely Dave Winer would join the club. He just bought two new gadgets and already stopped using one.

Jeff Jarvis: “Google is not an enemy, Google is a model” from Carta on Vimeo.

Twitter is temporary. Streams are fleeting. If the future of the web after the page and the site and SEO is streams – and I believe at least part of it will be – then we risk losing information, ideas, and the permanent points – the permalinks – around which we used to coalesce. In this regard, Twitter is to web pages what web pages are to old media. Our experience of information is once again about to become fragmented and dispersed.

I talked about this shift on a recent Rebooting the News with Dave Winer and Jay Rosen (audio here; shownotes here).

My own worry is that I’m twittering more and blogging less. Twitter satisfies my desire to share. That’s mostly why I blog – and that’s what makes the best blog posts, I’ve learned. I also want to store information like nuts underground; once it’s on the blog, I can find it. But when I share links on Twitter, they’ll soon disappear. I also use my blog to think through ideas and get reaction; Twitter’s flawed at that – well, I guess Einstein could have tweeted his theory of relativity but many ideas and discussions are too big for the form – yet I now use Twitter to do that now more than this blog.

It’s not as if I couldn’t and shouldn’t also blog about what I talk about on Twitter; tweets can become the trial out of town, the blog Broadway (a book Hollywood). But Twitter competes for my time and attention. It is so much faster and easier. It’s good enough for most of my purposes. So the blog suffers. And I suffer. I discuss less here; I’ll lose some of you as a result and you are the value I get from blogging. I lose memory. And I lose the maypole around which we can gather.

On Rebooting the News, we also talked about what it takes to get an idea, a meme to critical mass. Blogs, I said, are better at that because they can gather attention over time. On Twitter, an idea can, of course, be spread but its half-life is that of a gnat. I’m proud of this post – The future of news is entrepreneurial – and it got retweeted for almost 24 hours, which is forever in Twitter time. Most things come and go in matters of minutes. So Dave and I were talking about getting new conventions used on Twitter but Twitter turns out not to be a great way to make that happen because ideas and conversations disappear in smoke.

Paul Gillin just asked whether soon, everything you’ve learned about SEO will be worthless. That’s because search is turning social and our search results are becoming personalized, thus we don’t all share the same search results and it becomes tougher to manage them through SEO. Put these factors together – the social stream – and relationships matter more than pages (but then, they always have).

It means nothing that I fret or worry about any of this. Change is inexorable, even – especially – in the agent of change. But it’s always important to stand back and see the implications in change and I think we’re going to need to find new ways to hold onto memories and make memes happen. That or I have to hold true to my vow to blog more.

: OH, AND… I got distracted by reading Twitter (really) and so I forgot to mention the other Twitter issue: distraction. I’m finding it much harder to stay focused on doing one thing because I now can do so many. That doesn’t mean I’ll end up thinking less for a blog post (or book), only that the stream interrupts the thing (the post, the page) in more ways.

This month’s MediaTalkUSA for the Guardian is up with guests Jay Rosen of NYU and Michael Tomasky of the Guardian. We talk about Politico’s rear-guard action against the Washington Post with its new local service; the election; the White House and Fox; and government support of journalism.

Here’s the latest This Week in Google with Leo Laporte and Gina Trapani (in which she announces her new book about Wave)

But that’s not all… I was also privileged to be a guest on last week’s Rebooting the News with Jay and Dave Winer.

And if you’re not sick of hearing me, see the post below for two more audios.

The week I couldn’t shut up…

There’s a lot in that statement. It says: The future of news is not institutional… The news of tomorrow has yet to be built…. The structure – the ecosystem – of news will not be dominated by a few corporations but likely will be made up of networks of many startups performing specialized functions based on the opportunities they see in the market…. Who does journalism, why and how will change…. The skills of journalists will change (to include business)…. We don’t yet know what the market will demand and support from journalism…. News will look disordered and messy…. There will be more failures than successes in the immediate future of news….

That statement also holds many implications for sectors of the economy and society: investment (put money into the new, not the old)… public policy (don’t protect and preserve the incumbents but nurture the startups by creating a fertile and level playing field)… education (how do we train journalists when everyone can do journalism? – how do we train everyone?)… marketing (advertising won’t be one-stop shopping anymore and that means it may support news less)… PR (influence will be no longer be concentrated)… technology (there are opportunities here)…

Finally, that statement does not say some things. It does not say that the incumbents’ institutions will necessarily die, only that they have proven not to be the source of innovation and growth in news.

One more point: The statement is essentially optimistic. It says there is a future to be built.

This is not the discussion we hear about the fate of news journalism. That discussion defaults too often to current models and old realities, to protection over creation, to fear over opportunity.

Columbia’s Reconstruction of Journalism report, in my view, gives up on the business prospects for news and resorts to what I believe are desperate measures – namely: the public option for news. The Washington Post has run two op-eds lately endorsing tax-supported journalism (pardon me for asking, but are things that bad there?). Alan Mutter reported on a Harvard confab last week that “gravitated to the predictable yadda-yadda: foundation funding, federal subsidies, subscription schemes and a smattering of random ruminations about revenue.” That’s hardly uncommon; it’s all we hear.

Bit by bit, I’ve separated myself from that worldview, first by teaching a course in entrepreneurial journalism at CUNY, then by directing the New Business models for News Project to research and propose sustainable futures for news. But I didn’t boil down my essential worldview to this – the future of news is entrepreneurial – until now.

If you buy this view – and, I know, many won’t want to – then it affects so much, as I’m learning myself. Last week at CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism, I presented to my colleagues our New Business Models for (Local) News (the segment of the project funded by the Knight Foundation, which we’re also presenting at a Nov. 11 event here that will be streamed) and the discussion turned afterward to one aspect of what we do: what we offer students in career services. No longer is that just about getting job interviews at big publications – though, of course, it still will include that as long as it can! – but it now should expand to giving students who are starting businesses the services of an incubator (which we are doing for my entrepreneurial students who are now launching businesses) and perhaps to giving them the training they need to be proprietors of journalistic businesses: We’re teaching them in our January intersession how to build their own brands online. Should we give them a workshop to help them with billing and business? I’ve asked the heretical question about teaching hyperlocal blogging: How will they learn to sell ads? These are questions raised by the entrepreneurial worldview.

The public policy implications of this view for government are many. Last week, I gave a Skype talk [I'm still not traveling, post-surgery] to a session assembled in London by MP Sion Simon looking at government’s possible role in the future of news – what it should and should not do (see posts here, here, and here). Here in the U.S., the Federal Trade Commission is holding sessions starting in December (where I’ll appear on a panel with folks who don’t agree with me about all this) and the FCC appointed Steven Waldman to continue the work of the Knight Commission looking at the information needs of communities.

As my Guardian column this week makes clear, I get hives at the notion of government interference in news – in speech of any sort. I especially fear government taking a role as a nonmarket player competing with not only the weak incumbents but also with the tender sprouts of entrepreneurial ventures. I also fear talk of governments – in the U.S. and Germany – extending copyright just to protect incumbents. What should government do? Broadband for all. I’d start – and stop – there.

For investors, the entrepreneurial worldview says not only that it’s time to get their money out of old media companies – that, given their market caps and bankruptcies, has already happened – but also that it is time to invest in new and innovative ventures. That requires investors to believe, as I do, that there is a robust and growing market demand for news and that there are new opportunities to meet it efficiently and profitably. But until we start proving that, investors will be shy. This is why I wish that the capital that has gone into not-for-profit news ventures in cities across the country had gone instead into creating for-profit enterprises: so we can prove the market, so we can learn how to make news sustainable. That is god’s work.

For other industries that work with news – advertising – I would have scouts, laboratories, and pilot projects staying on the forefront of entrepreneurial developments in news and even encouraging it with marketing dollars. Ad agencies and sponsors have tremendous opportunities to build relationships with customers in new, more targeted, more effective, and more efficient ways but they must shift spending to online to learn what works and create it; their old habits of one-stop-shopping with big media only leave them behind.

As for technology, there is much development of news already occurring in startups (I’m a partner in one such effort, Daylife, and I advise others; we are seeing some sprout already alongside our New Business Models for News Project). But the technology giants can also play a role. I’ll write more about this another time, but I believe Google should be packaging what it already has to help create a framework for anyone – anyone – to build news enterprises (and it should stop wasting time trying to make friends with the dinosaurs who only want to find enemies to blame for their problems). I also want to see it help support labs to develop its tools – especially Wave and Marissa Mayer’s notion of the hyperpersonal stream – for news; this, I believe, will force us to rethink our fundamental assumptions about what news is and that, in turn, will lead to new opportunities.

Where does this leave the incumbent institutions when I say the future is not theirs? I’m no longer the only one holding them accountable for their lack of innovation in the last 15 years – even Ken Auletta is. But what’s done is done and looking back, I now see it was probably my mistake to think they could have reinvented themselves. I talked with someone recently at an old, large media company who said he believes it is impossible for them to remake themselves for this new, much smaller entrepreneurial world. There’s just too much shutdown cost and pain involved and the people inside these towers don’t think like people in garages. Still, I see opportunity for them. That’s why, on this blog and at the Aspen Institute this summer, I pushed the idea that when journalists leave those towers, their companies should invest in their futures as entrepreneurs: Set them up with blogs, sell their ads, promote them, and continue to reap the value of their experience and brands (without the cost). The Washington Post should fund the next Politico in town, not see its talent walk out the door to start it elsewhere.

And what of these journalists? Well, that’s why I’m writing this. That’s why I teach what I teach. I believe journalists must become entrepreneurs. They don’t all need to be sole proprietors of hypersomething blogs. But they need to make smart business decisions when they decide where to put their effort. They need to sense and serve the market. They need to work with innovators. They need to see a future for journalism that looks different – better, even – than its past.

The future of news is entrepreneurial.

Most people use their blogs as the laboratory to try out ideas. Lately, I’ve been using appearances and columns to test notions, leading up to this blog post. Here are a few instances lately when I’ve talked about news’ entrepreneurial future.

I gave a talk via Skype-video to Medientage München (my talk, in English, starts at 22 minutes in) in which I tried to be tough and tell the audience of 500 German media machers that the old models won’t work in the new world and that it is time to face this reality bluntly, leaving politeness behind. (The talk lasts about 25 minutes; I’d listen to the last 10 when I’m questioned by the editor of Spiegel.de and the audience surprised me with its reaction to tough love.)

I also talked about this last week in Coventry University’s session that asked whether journalism is in crisis:

And here is a link to my Media Guardian column today, in which I used this line and it was, I’m glad to see, promptly tweeted. In it, I said:

The future of news – and there is a future – is being built by entrepreneurs who in change see opportunity, not crisis. . . . Instead of declaring surrender to changing market forces, we should embrace them. Crisis? I see no crisis, only inexorable change.

Based on all this, you’d think I’d disagree with a post headlined Why I Don’t Think Journalists Need Business Skills. But I don’t. In it, Philip John argues the need for networks and services to perform business services for journalist entrepreneurs. I agree. That’s why we projected such a framework in our New Business Models for News Project. That’s what Mark Potts plans to build with his startup, Growthspur (or actually, Growthspur will train the sales organization John imagines). And I think John proved my point by writing a post that’s very business-savvy.

: LATER: Robert Picard argues for journalists to be responsive to their markets.

To my New Jersey friends, I urge you to take the pledge, vote for Daggett, and declare independence from the corrupt and incompetent party politics of this state.

I’m a life-long Democrat but this time, in the race for governor of New Jersey, I’m voting independent.

It’s as if I got three votes in one:

I’m voting for Daggett because I am confident he is the best candidate for the office. Daggett happens to be a neighbor of mine and I’ve gotten to know him better as I’ve helped the campaign in very small ways in recent days, shooting Flip videos and sitting in on strategy sessions. This is the first time I’ve ever done that; as a professional journalist I bought the doctrines of separation and objectivity and so actual involvement in my community was verboten. But online, I’ve been preaching the new gospel of transparency and interaction and after telling you that I voted for Clinton and then Obama, I’m now telling you that I’m voting for and actively supporting Daggett (I also contributed to the campaign).

Daggett is the one candidate making the tough decisions about the budget and taxation. He has a plan to reduce property taxes while also holding down local spending, which will force municipalities to find new efficiencies through collaboration. He holds a doctorate in education and I trust him to work to improve the schools. Daggett is an experienced manager and a good man. So he has my vote.

At the same time, I’m also voting against the two parties – and there are my other two ballots. Chris Christie is aggressively unimpressive and, worse, a cynic who tried to foist a platform without a plan on the state; I wouldn’t trust him any more than the worst Jersey pol – and that’s saying a lot in this place. John Corzine is a smart and decent man and has made tough decisions, I think, but he has not proven to be a good manager (I wish he’d stayed in the Senate). But as the Star-Ledger said in its endorsement of Daggett, it is time to repudiate the parties. They deserve it. We deserve better.

Daggett has had incredible momentum in the polls, passing the 20 percent mark more than a week ago while both of his opponents fall into a dead heat. All Daggett needs to win is 33.1 percent. But his biggest challenge is that people who want to vote for him fear that he can’t win or that they’ll be helping the person they don’t want get into office. Daggett’s answer: “It’s never wrong to vote for the right person.” He really can win.

It has been frustrating watching a campaign with little money fight the guys with too much money. I had no magic digital buttons to push. On my Guardian podcast (out next week), I said that I fear Joe Trippi is wrong: The revolution won’t be televised because campaigns will still be televised and that’s why there’ll be no revolution.

Oh, me of little faith. I’ve learned a big lesson about politics and revolutions in the last few days, thanks to Micah Sifry, who wrote a post suggesting that the Daggett campaign should overcome the I’d-vote-for-him-if-he-could-win threshhold by starting a vote-pledge site: If 100,000 people sign up with me to vote for Daggett, then I’ll vote for him. The Star-Ledger’s Tom Moran said on Radio Times Friday that if people thought Daggett could win, he would win. That is, the state wants to vote for Daggett. So this was Micah’s idea to demonstrate that to the voters.

Before the campaign could do a thing, a supporter, Alex Higgins, put up his own pledge site at DaggettPledge.com. Isn’t this precisely how politics is supposed to work today: rising from the people. The voters are organizing voters for Daggett. They are using the internet, not huge war chests of party dollars. They are connecting online, without the interference of media. New Jersey voters are rallying behind Daggett and declaring their independence. It is inspiring to watch.

[* See update below.]

Go watch it. Really. The counter is ticking off more voters for Daggett every few seconds. Their names and towns are scrolling across the top of the screen. You’re watching the new democracy in action. Of the people. By the people. Thanks to the internet.

So if you’re in New Jersey, please go take the pledge. I know you’re not enthusiastic about Christie or Corzine. No one is. I know you’re not loyal to either state party organization. How could anyone be? We threw around the word “change” a lot in the presidential campaign. Well, this is real change, change you can count on, changing the party structure in our broken state. This will send a message not only to Trenton but to Washington. This will be a blow for independence.

Take the pledge.

: MORE: I asked Micah for more of his views on this and he sent this.

I’ve long believed that we need more competition in politics–in 2002, I wrote a whole book about third parties in American politics called Spoiling for a Fight, which argued that independent candidates and third parties can play a healthy role in putting new ideas into circulation, shaking up the system and opening up new political coalitions for change. Unfortunately our current system is rigged in favor of the two major parties. It shouldn’t be that the only way to get rid of one of the major party’s incumbents is to vote for the other major party. That just leads to a cycle where no one really has to take responsibility for anything, they just have to blame the other guy. Sometimes you want to vote for a third choice and say no to the other two! It’s long past time that we figure out a system that enables you to vote positively for what you want, instead of worrying that you might “waste” your vote. But that’s how winner-take-all systems work.

The thing about the internet is that it’s really good at solving the dilemma of collective action. That is, lots of us often hesitate to get involved because we think our individual vote can’t make a difference; our $25 or hour of volunteering can’t, by itself, change anything. It’s only when all those votes or dollars or actions get aggregated that we can see their impact. Deciding to risk your vote for a longshot candidate is a classic collective action dilemma. You want your vote to count, and you don’t want it to do harm. So very often we get candidates who try to run outside the two-party framework, and they sometimes get a flurry of attention, but when push comes to shove they fade because most voters rationally worry that the candidate they really want “can’t win,” and that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But New Jersey voters don’t have to wait til next Tuesday to signal to each other what they’re thinking. When I heard that Daggett was polling at or near 20%, it occurred to me that if his numbers went up another 5% of the vote–roughly 100,000 people–that would put him into full contention. And 100,000 isn’t that large a number for the internet. You can get 100,000 views on YouTube or 100,000 hits on a blog post pretty quickly. If enough people talk to each other in New Jersey over the next few days, they could convince each other that there are enough switchers out there and the whole race could swing pretty fast.

That said, I have no idea if the Daggett Pledge will work. I think it’s great that Alexander Higgins just took the initiative and got it going without asking anyone for permission; it’s probably better that way. But people are probably going to have to do more than just sign their name on a website; I’m sure the major party campaigns will try to spread as much FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) among the public about how authentic this is, and it is the internet–people should ask for more proof that this trend is real. But the net can make that easier too. If voters want this badly enough, they can make it happen.

* UPDATE: I don’t know what’s happening with it, but the pledge growth seems a bit too linear, even overnight. I sense a clever geek at work. So I don’t know what the numbers are. Doesn’t much matter; the only numbers that do matter come Tuesday. Pledge or no pledge, I’ve cast my lot and vote.

Now he has a blog. And a store. I’d heard about his blog for sometime but it wasn’t seen outside the walls of his office. Now it has gone public. He says he’ll do it for 100 days. I predict he’ll be addicted.

There’s a 360-degree tour of his office, starring him. Click on his possessions and learn more – about, for example, a piece of the Berlin Wall signed by Helmut Kohl, Mikhail Gorbachev, and George Bush (41). He has a bio and lots of photos. Diekmann interviews himself (Why are you writing a blog, he asks. “I’m just incurably vain,” he answers). He posts video he shoots himself – “ich bin Videoblogger-in-Chief für Bild.de” – including one in Baghdad and another of him getting a shot. He brags about the commercials for Bild made by Bild’s readers, who understand its brand well. He links gleefully to an interview with a competitive publisher and scion of a German publishing family (founders of Der Spiegel) who says the esteemed Süddeutsche Zeitung won’t be around on paper in 20 years – but Bild will. He tweaks the liberal competition, the taz. On his “fan club” page, he shows his critics (and I thought I was brave exposing underendowment). In his store, he sells books (starting with his own) and hoodies, buttons, totebags, and mugs with his own mug (as Che Diekmann) and Bild branding as “the red-hot chili paper.”

The guy has balls. And he’s getting attention, which surely is the goal.

I can’t imagine Bill Keller or Marcus Brauchlidoing this, can you? Not even Alan Rusbridger or Will Lewis. Not even the editor of the New York Post (who’s he?). Piers Morgan is the closest thing I can imagine to Kai in the anglophone world, but he had to leave editing to become a star. In Germany, Kai is a brand. In the staid world of anglophone journalism, that’ll probably be sniffed at. But on the social web, I see little choice but to be open and human and even – gasp – have a sense of humor.

I have some personal history here to disclose. See my own story about introducing Diekmann to the Flip video camera here. I later went to speak to editors and executives of Bild’s parent company, Axel Springer, at their retreat in Italy. There, Diekmann was constantly recording every event with his own version of the Flip camera, to his colleagues’ grudging acquiescence. Does he do this all the time? I asked. Yes, they moaned. Sorry, I said. At that meeting, I pushed them all to blog and I’m not suggesting that has anything to do with Diekmann’s effort. But I’m glad to see lots of blogs emerging from Axel Springer. On a very different level, see the blog by the editor of Die Welt. The form knows no limits.

Diekmann took the Flip and surprised me by not just equipping his journalists – other editors’ reflex – but instead equipping his readers. He took interactivity and didn’t just allow readers to comment on what his paper does – as other editors do – but instead had them define his brand. He now has taken the blog and surprised me again, making a comment on the form and his paper and his industry and himself. And it’s fun to watch.

: Later: I left a comment on Diekmann’s blog and in no time, I got email from him. He’s reading what his public is writing.

Tomorrow I could go on the internet and start my own channel with my own subscribers. You’d be able to click and watch us on TV, watch us in the studio live, streaming. You’d be able to listen to us streaming. You’d be able to get us on your iPhone. You’d be able to do everything right at the click of the internet. I wouldn’t even need to work for a company. I’d be my own company… So true it’s ridiculous.

Sounds like more than idle admiration of technology to me. Stern has a year left on his contract on satellite. He’s so valuable to Sirius, they surely will make him an offer it would be hard to refuse. But I suspect that much of his last reported $500 million contract came in stock and that stock is now worth $0.59 (I know all too well, because I own some), so continuing with satellite would still be a gamble. Besides, he has plenty of money and no divorce settlement to pay off (or so it would certainly appear). This week, he was lambasting Rush Limbaugh for ripping off his listeners selling them T-shirt; in response to a question from Gary Dell’Abate, Stern said even an extra $1 million wasn’t worth that. Could he be rationalizing a cut in pay?

On the internet, Stern would get the complete freedom he has long lusted after. He would share his revenue and value with no one but his staff. Now that we can listen to radio over the internet – on our internet-enabled phones – we can listen to him anywhere (is this why he has refused to allow Sirius to put him on the iPhone? I’m still unhappy about that). He would have direct relationships with his fans. He could charge them (and, yes, I would pay for it; he’s why I subscribe to satellite now … see, I am not a pay bigot). He could sell advertising in new ways. Fans could get him anywhere, anytime. If he’s smart – and he is – he could open up enough tidbits to go viral, letting his audience market him for free.

I wrote about Stern as a pioneer in my book. He rethought radio networks and built his own. He brought satellite radio to critical mass. But satellite radio was always a transitional technology, waiting for ubiquitous connectivity that would enable on-demand programming anywhere. (I tried to warn Sirius’ president, Mel Karmazin, here.) Now our phones can give us radio and soon Stern will be ready for them; they will make him portable.

There’s a larger trend at work here: Entertainers (radio, music, comedy, books, columnists, even filmmakers) will have direct relationships with their audiences. Like Stern, they won’t have to work for companies or go through them for distribution. That’s already happening, of course, on the web for creation, distribution, and monetization. That idea is even extending to funding. Look at Kickstarter – a Spot.US for creativity – where your most loyal fans who most want you to make something can fund or invest in it, maybe for nothing more than the privilege of helping you (this is the Wikipedia ethic). It returns to the age of patronage, only now the kings don’t fund the artists, the public does and less money is wasted on middlemen.

Maybe this is all wishful thinking. I’ve been dreading Stern’s retirement (but I think so is he). So I’m hoping that he makes the leap to the next generation and that others will follow his example. Am I reading too much into his conjecture about the internet? If I am, I’ll bet Karmazin is, too.

: Tim Windsor adds in the comments: “Sounds like Howard needs to make a pilgrimage to Leo Laporte’s TWiT Cottage to see how this can be done professionally for surprisingly little money.”

Right. Leo shows it all: how to do live video with chat and also distribute across many platforms.

I say, thank god science for screening. Those tests gave me information I needed to make a choice. Without the information, I wouldn’t have had the choice.

But there is a growing rumble about curtailing screening, especially for the erogenous-zone cancers of the breast and the prostate. See today’s New York Times report on the debate about the efficacy of screening to save lives.

Note that plural: lives, not a life. This isn’t about me and my cancer. This is about statistics and money. The question they’re asking: Is it worth it to find these cancers and cut them out at considerable cost if we’re not sure those cancers would have killed all those people who had surgery? But who’s to say what’s worth it?

What if I’m the one in a hundred who would die without the screening and surgery? Only one way to find out: keep the cancer in me and wait. Indeed, I had that choice — “watchful waiting,” it’s called. But without the screening, I wouldn’t have had the information to know that was cancer was in me until it spread — until it was too late. I wouldn’t have known I had a choice.

As The Times points out, part of the problem here is that researchers don’t know whether some prostate tumors are more certainly deadly than others and I’ll agree that more research is inevitably a good thing.

But this discussion is really about playing the odds with my life – and who gets to roll those dice. I want to be the one who makes this bet. I want to have the information to make it. But implicit in this debate is the idea that insurance companies want to make the bet and they want to do it for everyone at once: “Let’s curtail the screening and see what happens. OK, so one more person in a hundred dies, but we also saved huge money.” Worth it? Not if you’re that one in a hundred. Not if that one is me.

I am 55 years old and in good health with a wife and two children. Faced with the choice of not knowing whether I had cancer, I chose screening. Then faced with the choice of leaving cancer inside me because it might not kill me (that is, something else could kill me sooner than this slow-growing tumor), I chose – my wife and I chose – to get it out. In my grandfather’s case, no other disease or accident got him first; his prostate cancer killed him.

My insurance company will probably pay $25k for my surgery to take out my cancer. I am now facing some inconveniences. Worth it? I’d say it is. Will the insurance company think it’s worth it? Don’t know. Don’t care. I don’t want them making that decision. I will make it. That is the point of having control of information about my health: my information about my life. That is the point of screening.

If this were a purely economic decision, then some would die. Imagine you’re Frank Purdue and you can spend $100,000 to save a few chickens worth $100 on the market; you won’t do it. But we’re not chickens. At some level, it’s always an economic decision, I know. That is why I support government involvement in health care. Yes, I’m a free marketeer when it comes to other industries, especially the press (because I’m also a First Amendment adherent). And yes, even when government is involved, it can decide not to spend money for expensive treatments or old people (the stories we keep hearing about the U.K.) – but at least then we hold political pressure over the government. Chickens don’t vote. Patients do.

As a matter of statistics and odds, I know screening results in treatment that adds to costs. But it also saves lives – no matter whether we know precisely how many. I believe screening saved my life and I chose not to have been proven right by waiting.

So get your screenings, folks, get ‘em while they last. I’m due for another damned colonoscopy (which I’ll get after my rump feels repaired from the damage of my last surgery) and I’ll get it because they found a polyp in me (benign) last time; I won’t take the risk. You should get your PSA tested, men, and your mammograms, women. And then you can make informed decisions – informed by data and your doctors. It’s the information that gives you the choice. That information is yours.

: MORE: This discussion also leads to the work Doc Searls has been doing with vendor relationship management and personal health records. We not only need the information, we need it in a form that is usable, and we need control of it — because it is, again, our information about our lives.

: Later: Andrew Tyndall of the Tyndall Report (and a friend and fellow prostate guy) reports on TV’s reports on the story.

Just because newspapers put themselves at risk, it does not follow that journalism is at risk. Newspapers no longer own journalism. As too often happens in this discussion, they focus only on the revenue side of the business ledger of news – advertising falling from monopolistic heights – and not on the cost side and the efficiency new technology – and thus collaboration – that technology allows.

As Downie and Schudson themselves point out in their Washington Post op-ed, there is now a flourishing of new outlets and means of gathering and sharing news.

Journalists leaving newspapers have started online local news sites in many cities and towns. Others have started nonprofit local investigative reporting projects and community news services at nearby universities, as well as national and statewide nonprofit investigative reporting organizations. Still others are working with local residents to produce neighborhood news blogs. Newspapers themselves are collaborating with other news media, including some of the startups and bloggers, to supplement their smaller reporting staffs. The ranks of news gatherers now include not only newsroom staffers but also freelancers, university faculty and students, bloggers and citizens armed with smart phones….

That is a basis for a new ecosystem of journalism, one we begin to outline in our Knight Foundation-funded New Business Models for News Project. We believe there is a sustainable and profitable future for news and they only way to confirm that is to try to build it but that will not happen if we declare surrender and defeat in the hope that the market can support the news a community needs.

Downie and Schudson give up on news as a business and, in their consequent desperation, make this drastic proposal:

American society must now take some collective responsibility for supporting news reporting — as society has, at much greater expense, for public education, health care, scientific advancement and cultural preservation, through varying combinations of philanthropy, subsidy and government policy.

Collective responsibility. Socialized journalism. This is the ultimate in broccoli journalism: You are not only forced to read what journalists say is good for you but you are now forced to pay for it through taxation.

They make other suggestions with which I have no complaint: Journalism students should report not just for their professors but for the ecosystem and we see that beginning. If philanthropists want to do more to support news, I’m not going to burn their checks – but they are no white knights riding in to save the day. Public broadcasting can do more local reporting and we see movement in that direction from especially NPR and also public TV – though I would be loath to think that we should have government mandate of that. And we want more transparency; I belong to that religion.

All this comes from that dire assumption that journalism is dying with newspapers. That is not and certainly need not be the case. I disagree with Downie and Schudson’s key assumption: There is no crisis. When you start there, you don’t just reconstruct the past of journalism but see the possibilities to build a new journalism.

: Even The New York Times’ David Carr is somewhat incredulous.

: Mulling over the full report on my train ride in this morning, I realized that my problem with it is this: Downie and Schudson are addressing the business problem of news without doing reporting on the business.

The report is a cogent, comprehensive, well-documented summary of broadly held conventional thinking on the history and current state of journalism in America, but it is all stated from the journalistic perspective – no surprise coming from two distinguished journalists.

If this were handed in to me as a term paper in my class, I’d give it back for more reporting and rethinking. I’d tell the students that they made huge assumptions about the business state of journalism – both on the revenue and cost sides of the P&L – without giving me reporting on that. I’d advise them to look at the true cost of the accountability journalism they cherish, at the inefficiency of the business today as it produces commodity news, at whether there is sufficient advertising revenue to cover the journalism that matters once news organizations rid themselves of their inefficiency, at verifying the public demand for the kind of journalism they think the public needs, and at the issues journalism has had with trust and quality. Then, if they still came to the same conclusions – which I doubt – I’d urge them to get more balanced reporting on the risks behind each of their recommendations, particularly involving government subsidies, direct funding, and mandates on journalism. I think they did half the story, the half we’ve already heard (and which they quite ably summarize again). They should have given us the business story since that is what they really wanted to address. I wish they had.

: Alan Mutter’s good commentary.

The Financial Times’ John Gapper gave my book a bad review because he refused to go along with its organizing premise and principal: that our economy and society are undergoing fundamental shifts as we move past the industrial age and that Google is a worthy totem to use to understand that change. Gapper instead treated the premise with surprising literalness (for a Brit) and decreed that Google is not a good example for business; Apple is.

I got some insight into Gapper’s worldview in a good piece he wrote last week on the death of Bertelsmann mogul Reinhard Mohn and, with him, the media moguls of his generation. Gapper does acknowledge fundamental change but he still explains it in the old, expired terms of the old economy, in terms of control.

The challenge of the internet is that it blows up the control of distribution, ensuring that all content owners – from Rupert Murdoch to the lowliest blogger – compete on equal terms. Moguls can no longer exploit its scarcity by buying television spectrum or by owning printing presses.

That is why media moguls have been pushed on to the defensive by a new breed of technology moguls such as Steve Jobs of Apple and Sergey Brin and Larry Page, co-founders of Google. Control of distribution has passed to people who make the software through which content passes.

He’s half right. Control of distribution was how the old moguls prevailed. But that is not replaced, one-to-one, with new control of distribution. The internet makes us all distributors. That is why you want to be open and part of the conversation so the people formerly known as the audience distribute you.

Google is not a distributor. Indeed, its greatest misstep to date, the book settlement, came in part because it uncharacteristically was going to control and distribute content (that it didn’t own). Google doesn’t distribute. It organizes. It links. Google is not in the software business. It is in the platform business (advertising being its primary platform). Apple, too, isn’t in the software business. It’s in the hardware business and that is what gives it control of distribution: we, the cult, buy its great products and take Apple’s control as the price. That, I realized, is why Gapper admires it, because it still has control, like the old media moguls. He defines and measures value in their old media terms.

Gapper is hardly alone. I’m using him as a convenient totem for media’s insistence on viewing the world through old media lenses. Both media and the world around it have changed in many more ways that I tried to outline in WWGD? That’s what I wrote in this post the other day about media’s blind spots to the realities of the new-media economy:

…the imperatives of the link economy, the need and benefit of giving up control, the advantages of creating open platforms over closed systems, the value of networks, the post-scarcity economy and the art of exploiting abundance, the need to be searchable to be found, the deflation innovation brings, the value of free, the triumph of process over product….

Now here’s the bigger question: How does this willful worldview affect the business analysis performed by business journalists? Gapper’s boss, FT editor Lionel Barber, predicted that “almost all” news organizations will charge for content within a year. That was in July. The clock’s ticking. I snarked at the time that if this same analysis were applied to GM, Barber would predict that the car company would simply raise its prices just because its cars cost more to make. There are no simple solutions to such fundamental change. Every industry has to remake itself under the new realities of the new economy. That is the story business media should be covering. But if media people refuse to – if, like the moguls Gapper eulogizes, they insist on holding onto their old ways – how good will they be at analyzing and predicting the future?

That speaks to the key recommendation in the good Luke Johnson FT column Gapper quotes in his Mohn piece. Johnson argues that lamenting change in media is futile and that media companies need to hire the digital natives who understand the new age.

The only answer is to hire as many bright young things as you can afford and hope their dynamism will counteract the inevitable conservatism of an existing institution. The media trade could learn from the technology industry, which is subject to wrenching structural upheaval at regular intervals.

Right. And Johnson also says that’s why the legacy companies are the least likely to see and build for the new world.

Unfortunately, a chief executive only a few years from retirement is hardly motivated to sack loyal colleagues to bring on board lots of teenagers to turn their company upside down. Psychologically, we are congenitally opposed to tearing down what we have helped create in order to build anew. Hence the status quo prevails, even if it is the demoralising task of managing decline with no salvation in sight. And so all efforts are applied to preservation in spite of a realisation that the economic model is broken – because no one is forcing the company in a new direction.

Right again. On this week’s On the Media, Ava Seave, coauthor of The Curse of the Mogul, told Bob Garfield that the media businesses that media reporters love to cover are and long have been bad businesses. But we don’t hear that – because, one assumes, they don’t want to hear that.

So how well equipped are reporters in legacy media companies to analyze the upheaval in the industries they cover? Where are their bright young things who see the world in new ways? Who is the Google of financial reporting?

: Later: Gapper responds.

(Disclosures: Daggett is a neighbor and friend. I’ve decided to vote for him. And I’ve helped by making a few Flip videos.)

Well, our Knight Foundation-funded New Business Models for News can be a roadmap. Indeed, the 5-million-person hypothetical market we worked on looks an awful lot like Boston (because, truth be told, it is Boston).

We suggest that a new news organization working collaboratively with a large base of independent sites and companies can establish itself at low cost and risk because much of the news is produced by people other than employees. The company would be much smaller but it would be profitable, potentially at impressive margins. Getting smaller would be painful, of course, but if the Globe doesn’t do it, some kid in a Harvard dorm room could.

Incontinence and impotence are two frightening words for a grown man but they are the side-effects of removing the prostate and its cancer with it. Worth the price, or at least that’s the calculation one makes beforehand: Cancer or erections? Cancer or dry underwear? Cancer loses.

I didn’t know quite what to expect of the incontinence and didn’t hear a clear description (maybe because I feared hearing it). I was dreading puddles on the floor. But it’s nothing like that. It’s a matter of dribs and drabs. I wish I understood the physical explanation of what’s happening but the end result is this: Sometimes, when you expect it (standing, coughing, lifting…) and sometimes when you don’t (that’s the tough part) you feel – in the excellent description of Howard Stern Show producer Gary Dell’Abate – something moving where it shouldn’t. Drib. Next time, you hope you remember to clench your muscles first.

When I left the doctor’s office after my hosectomy, I was outfitted in a gigantic Baby Huey diaper plus a pad – which only heightened my fear – but I quickly realized this wasn’t necessary and downgraded to pads. After much trial and, thank goodness, no error, I found my dream brand. I can’t believe I’ve become a connoisseur of such products but I recommend Poise Ultrathins. [Confidential to the FTC: That is not a paid commercial endorsement). I should also note that nighttime is not a problem at all; no latter-day bedwetting for me. So it’s inconvenient and distracting but as with every step of this process, I have seen that I’m luckier than I thought I’d be.

As for the penis’ other job, well, that’s not going so well. The nurse warned me not to expect anything yet (it has been four weeks since surgery) and so I suppose I shouldn’t be depressed. But it’s hard. Because it’s not.

We men have complicated relationships with our penises, of course. We follow them (that’s why they’re in front). They tell us what we like. They have minds of their own. We anthropomorphize them; some give them names (I don’t; it’s just it). So when I see mine looking like an emaciated, depressed, shrunken old man in a hospital bed, well, it’s hard not to empathize.

The doctor prescribed a quarter of a Viagra pill every night, to prime the pump, apparently. I have a page of standard instructions that suggest taking a whole little blue pill once a week and then to, well, have a go at it. Imagine being a teenager and being told that masturbation is a medical necessity. Doctor’s orders. Sounds like fun, but it’s not. Even when things start working (I hope) they’ll be weird, as a good friend warned me. Today, there’s sensation but there’s no growth and when and if there is liftoff, there’ll still be no semen (the seminal vesicles were taken out with the prostate). This is changed forever.

I’ll spare you further progress reports on these topics. As you can tell from my lame gags about my lame thing, this is about as much transparency as I can bear. I have found my limit.

(The rest of the saga is here.)

Add this to the other blind spots these old media powers have about the new economic reality: the imperatives of the link economy, the need and benefit of giving up control, the advantages of creating open platforms over closed systems, the value of networks, the post-scarcity economy and the art of exploiting abundance, the need to be searchable to be found, the deflation innovation brings, the value of free, the triumph of process over product…. This is what I wrote in my book about. Trying to get media to understand it is why I wrote it.

Behind each of these new laws of the new age is a set of consequences that result if you don’t at least try to understand them and continue to operate under the expired rules of the industrial economy. We online folk tend to operate under entirely new assumptions and think that our legacy colleagues see the same world we do. But they don’t. That hit me square between the eyes – once again – this week at a Paley Center debate over paid content between Steven Brill and NPR chief Vivian Schiller.

“I don’t know of any worthwhile content that’s free,” Brill said at the start of his remarks. He said it as a truism, as if we’d all assume the same. But I think most of you reading this would think that false. You may not value this very blog, but it’s free. The web is filled with free wonders. There’s plenty of wonderful content that’s free, more every day.

Later, Brill suggested we imagine going into the New York Public Library and instead of seeing many books, we see millions of pages, loose and flying about. What would we do? His stated assumption is that we would recognized the need for professional editors and journalists to make sense of it all. My response to his question was, “Go to Google.” Not for the first time, he sneered at me. But others around the table agreed that Google brings together our editing through our links and clicks; we will make order of that pile of pages, given the means to do so. Our assumption is that we value those actions and opinions, even if they are free – perhaps all the moreso because they are free.

That afternoon, I finally read AP CEO Tom Curley’s remarks in Hong Kong – before his duet with Rupert Murdoch at the Forbidden City – in which he equated control with value. That is the distilled essence of the old media model.

Listen to Curley: “The value of that content has been undervalued. It’s now at the lowest level, I think in history…. But the reality is that all of us know that our content is valuable…. We deserve to be paid, and now it becomes a matter of trying to figure out how to do that…. It’s time for us to get control of our content, and so we shall do that.”

Curley is saying that it’s up to him – not us, not the market – to set value. That is possible only if one controls distribution. That is why he wants control – or wants it back. He asserts value as a matter of entitlement, emotions, and ego over economics. But in this open economy, there is unlimited competition and value is created in many places, measured in many currencies.

Curley says that “we intend to participate in that stream, in that revenue stream.” But what about the content stream? He needs to participate in what Marissa Mayer calls the hyperpersonal news stream. He has to break out of the idea of sites and portals and go to where the people are. Yet Curley said he’d prevent his customers from redistributing his content through emails or “re-syndication” – from the stream, in short.

Here’s the nub of it: Curley says, as has been quoted often already, that “there is an oversupply, at least in the short term, of us.” That is true only if you see the world in the old, owned, controlled, closed, centralized, professionalized, scarcity economy – only if you think you can own news and access to it and thus its price. In the post-scarcity economy, he can’t bear new competitors; he call them the oversupply.

But in the collaborative economy, it’s another matter. All those “extra” people add new value and efficiency – if you see the opportunity in it and enable them to. They’re us. That’s how Google sees us, capturing our links and clicks to discover the value of those million – no, trillion – flying pages. That’s how Wikipedia and Craigslist created their value, dealing in trust and membership as a new currency. That’s how I want next-generation news organizations to look at us, as the people who will create news while the news orgs add value to it: vetting, correcting, organizing, training, promoting, selling. The news orgs and their journalists then become so much more efficient because they work collaboratively with the public. That’s how they become sustainable and profitable again. But this happens only if you trust and value the others and understand the economics of collaboration.

Curley talks, at last, about wanting to link to journalism at its source, which is important, since the AP has long cut the link to original journalism by rewriting it, by turning it into a commodity. But Curley talks about his news registry doing this among his closed circuit of members and big old companies – not the unlimited number of witnesses and citizens who will create news now. He talks about creating “our own self-referring network” (after talking nonsense about Google referring to itself nine times out of ten when Google links out to news far more than the AP ever does). He still sees a closed, controlled world where he sets the value. He, like Brill, does not respect the links and clicks and creation of people outside their walls, paid or otherwise because he can’t control it and he thinks that control is what still gives him value; the truth in the new economy is exactly the opposite: You gain value by giving up control. They do not see the value in collaboration and collaboration as a key to the creation of value and the recognition of efficiency of the new news economy.

The first half of the day, we’ll be presenting and discussing the New Business Models for News Project projections for the local news ecosystem (earlier presented at a Knight Foundation-sponsored event at the Aspen Institute). In the second half of the day, we will have workshops and discussions aimed at improving local sites’ businesses: setting up; serving ads; selling ads; marketing; managing communities; and more – plus presentations by companies working to help these sites, including Outside.in Growthspur, Prism, Google, Addify, PaperG, Spot.us, and others. We will have a mix of bloggers, editors, publishers, entrepreneurs, investors, and companies working in the new local news ecosystem. Gannett New Jersey and The New York Times are contributing to the effort.

Space is limited so right now we’re just putting out the call for bloggers and journalists who have or plan to have local sites to give them priority. A preemptive apology to those for whom we don’t have room; we’ll do our best to accommodate everyone we can. Know also that we’ll be streaming the day. If you’d like an invite, please email David Cohn (david@spot.us), who’s kind enough to help organize this, our third CUNY conference on the topic, and who’s a helluva lot better organized than I am. Please make sure to give us a link to your site.

So my son and I wandered down the block and watched as Daggett and his wife and daughters and hardy campaign workers strategized media, calling assignment desks, sending out email blasts, updating their site, and making videos:

(Full disclosure: I worked with the Ledger for many years and lent the Daggett’s my Flip camera for the videos.)

Welcome to the future of content distribution, the new newsstand, if you ask me. Welcome to a den of thieves, if you ask the subjects of the story, Associated Press CEO Tom Curley and News Corp. oligarch Rupert Murdoch.

They stood near Tiananmen Square – as Alan Mairson retweeted, “Nice touch: They made announcement in Great Hall of the People, shrine to Central Control” – arguing once again that people who aggregate, curate, link to, talk about their stories are stealing their value.

“Crowd-sourcing Web services such as Wikipedia, YouTube and Facebook have become preferred customer destinations for breaking news, displacing Web sites of traditional news publishers,” Curley said. “We content creators must quickly and decisively act to take back control of our content.”

He said content aggregators, such as search engines and bloggers, were also directing audiences and revenue away from content creators. . . .

Murdoch also told the opening session of the World Media Summit in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People that content providers would be demanding to be paid.

“The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content. But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid content, it will be the content creators — the people in this hall — who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs who triumph,” the News Corp. chief executive said.

I rolled my eyes and hardly for the first time at their dangerous ignorance of the new realities of the next economy – at this suicidal attempt to protect outmoded models and fight the future – and tweeted my comment and thought that was it. But then I got a call from the AP reporter in Beijing who wrote this story, Alexa Olesen, and pulled off the road on my way to work to talk with her. I said exactly what you’d expect me to say, arguing against their arguments.

I presented an alternative future that is being built today, the future we see in the New Business Models for News Project with new efficiencies, specialization, targeting, value that comes with the collaboration that the internet and its links enable, with an ecosystem of many smaller but once-again profitable entities providing news we have reason to hope will be better. I got angry at the irresponsible stewardship over journalism that has been exercised by the Politburo of the Press meeting in Beijing, the people who did but no longer control the press and squandered the last 15 years. I said I was angry because they are the ones killing newspapers, not the internet.

Olesen asked whether I agreed with other talk in Beijing that it’s important for news to be on many platforms. Yes, I said, but that drive is about a decade late. Then I said I was being unfair; there is good work going on and I pointed to three or four things The New York Times is doing by example. But I then said the media world is moving to a next step, after sites and pages to streams.

And then I used this story as an example. I discovered the story through a tweet. I spread the story through a tweet. Others spread the story through their tweets. I’m spreading it again here. We are not kleptomaniacs. We are the new (free) distribution. We are providing value to news. I explained that Google News causes a billion clicks a month and Twitter causes more (Bit.ly alone causes a billion). But the comrades in Beijing can’t see that because they are ignorant of the imperatives of the link economy.

Among the many ironies in this tale is that Curley presages his own defeat. If he and Murdoch and the Central Committee put up walls and guards or unbelievably delays the news (as the AP is considering), we will go to the sites he cites – Wikipedia et al – and create better news with or without them. The way they are talking in Beijing, I fear it will be without them sooner than later.

: Later: Olesen also said that she wasn’t hearing what I was saying in Beijing. And they call us in blogs an echo chamber, I replied.

Except one might have heard these things some years ago … from Messrs. Curley and Murdoch themselves. Kevin Anderson does a wonderful job making them eat their earlier words, a dish of Peking crow.

: The Brisbane Times Sydney Morning Herald says the summit in Beijing really is run by a media politburo.

The summit has a secretariat based at Xinhua’s Beijing headquarters and is chaired by Xinhua’s president, Li Congjun, previously vice-minister for propaganda. Co-chairmen include Mr Murdoch, Mr Curley and leaders from the BBC, the Japanese news service Kyodo, Russia’s official news agency, ITAR-TASS, and Google.

Big issues are decided through ”collective consultation” with the world media organisations that comprise the secretariat.

”This is beginning to look familiar, don’t you think?” wrote David Bandurski, from the University of Hong Kong’s China media project. ”A self-appointed group of elites making decisions through consultation among themselves … The World Media Summit has a politburo.”

The irony is just too obvious. At the summit, Chinese leaders tell media leaders to create just ”’true, correct, comprehensive and objective’ news coverage.” As we say online: Heh.

I went to Radio Shack today to buy wires and plugs to hook up my iPhone because the damned car radio has no plug and the damned FM kluges don’t work. I bought the wrong wires, realized it immediately, and returned in minutes to exchange them. Radio Shack, as it its irritating habit, demanded my phone number, name, and address. I refused. It was a cash exchange. The guy hassled me and then, on the fourth attempt, finally told his computer that I’d refused, which he could have done in the first place. I cursed myself for not going to Best Buy, where they don’t take your blood type to make a transaction; one of the reasons I like Best Buy is its no-nonsense return policy. They care about satisfied and returning customers over irritating rules. I tweeted that here. Now I’m blogging about it.

OK, so I just said something nice about Best Buy and something critical about its competitor. Look on my disclosures page and you’ll see that I had a business relationship with Best Buy. A few weeks ago, because of my book, they paid for me to come speak to various groups over two days (which I quite enjoyed and which taught me a lot about retail, which I’ve been contemplating and want to write about).

So is what I just said about Best Buy an ad? An endorsement? A testimonial? Or just a story and my opinion? I leave that to you to decide and trust you with that decision. My integrity and relationship with you depends on what you decide. I disclose my relationship for that reason. I believe in transparency and recommend it – in my book – to companies, governments, and journalists. So is this story an ad for my book? That, too, is up to you to decide.

But now the Federal Trade Commission is getting in the middle of our relationship. It has issued vaguely worded rules – amazing that they’re still vague after 80 pages – that make we wonder and worry whether my disclosure is adequate – should ever tweet carry a caveat? – and whether Best Buy will make my observations accurate (what if they give a customer a hassle on a return and that customer complains I misled him?). Best Buy, in turn, might need to worry about what I say about them.

Note that if I were writing for The New York Times – if I were, say, David Pogue – the FTC would not regulate my speech in this manner. First Amendment, you know. The press. But as a blogger, I am now a second class citizen in my speech. The government casts its net over all citizens who now use the tools of the internet to publish – no, to speak. This is a corollary to the debate that’s going on right now over who should be covered under a federal shield law. Who should be under the FTC’s net?

On this blog, that’s my problem and I can handle it. But what about all the huge proportion of the population who are now using the tools of the internet to publish – or what publishers and governments would call publishing when most of them think they’re just using blogs or Twitter or Facebook or YouTube or what comes next so they can talk with their friends – what about them? Now they have to worry about missteps.

Some of you have argued that the FTC is going after deceptive bad guys and that’s good. But what are the unintended consequences? What if one of those unsuspecting “publishers” falls for PayPerPost as Pied Piper and becomes human spam but the FTC sees her as a flim-flam mom? Some of you are pointing to the FCC saying it won’t be mean and it can’t enforce all its regs anyway so we shouldn’t worry – yes, selective enforcement, that’s comforting. But another FTC guy said absurdly that people who review books should return their review copies or they could be in trouble. Which is it? You could be the one person who was fined huge amounts of money because your kid pirated music in your house; you could be the example. Don’t want to take chances? Figure you’re playing it safe?

Welcome to the chill. We all have our own FCC now. Broadcast is an exception to the First Amendment’s prohibition on regulating the press. Now bloggers are, too, because we’re not the press. But we are, aren’t we? See, there are bigger things at stake here than just a few fake Viagra ads. (Mind you, I’m not endorsing Viagra. It’s not working … yet. Now how’s that for disclosure?)

Jill: And what was the other book you were going to mention?

Atwood: This is a confession. I’m reading a book called What Would Google Do? [Laughter] It’s pretty interesting. It’s really about upcoming configurations in society and business and how the internet has changed people’s behavior and expectations.

Jill: I should probably read that book.

Atwood: Yes! You should. Did you know that I’ve now learned how to Twitter?

It is a monument to unintended consequence, hidden dangers, and dangerous assumptions.

Mind you, I hate one of its apparent targets: Pay Per Post and its ilk, which attempt to co-opt the voice of bloggers. But I hate government regulation of speech more.

And mind you, I am all in favor of transparency; I disclose to a comic fault here. I think that openness is the best fix for questions of trust and advise companies and politicians and certainly governments to become transparent by default as enlightened self-interest. But mandating this for anyone who dares speak online? Foolish.

There are so many bad assumptions inherent in the FTC’s rules.

First, Pay Per Post et al, as I realized late to the game, are not aimed at fooling consumers. Who would read the boring, sycophantic drivel its people write? No, they are aimed at fooling Google and its algorithms. It’s human spam. And it’s Google’s job to regulate that.

Second, the FTC assumes – as media people do – that the internet is a medium. It’s not. It’s a place where people talk. Most people who blog, as Pew found in a survey a few years ago, don’t think they are doing anything remotely connected to journalism. I imagine that virtually no one on Facebook thinks they’re making media. They’re connecting. They’re talking. So for the FTC to go after bloggers and social media – as they explicitly do – is the same as sending a government goon into Denny’s to listen to the conversations in the corner booth and demand that you disclose that your Uncle Vinnie owns the pizzeria whose product you just endorsed.

Insanity and inanity. And danger.

The regulations raise no end of questions. For example: How much do I have disclose? Before I say anything nice about anyone, do I need to list every advertiser I’ve ever had? Every possible business relationship? You think my disclosures are comical now, just wait.

And what about automated ads, such as those from Google? I have been writing nice things about my treatment at Sloan Kettering. This has caused ads to come up on my blog, via Google, from the hospital. Presuming someone clicked on them, I’ve made money from the hospital. Does that taint what I say or me if I don’t disclose the payment? That’s the level of absurdity this can reach.

The regulations are not aimed just as bloggers, of course, but at endorsements of all sorts, including from celebrities and experts. The FTC requires advertisers to continually reconfirm that endorsers are bona fide users of the endorsed product. Do we really believe that Tiger Woods drives a Buick? How will that be policed?

The FTC also concedes that it treats critics at publications differently – less stringently – than bloggers. Don’t they realize that people on travel and gadget and food publications get freebies all the time. I’ve long believed that ethics alone should compel them to disclose. But the FTC doesn’t.

I love this one: The FTC now forbids media advertisers from changing a critic’s opinion in a blurb. Ha! That happened to me constantly when I was a critic. (”Colossal piece of crap” became “Colossal! – Jeff Jarvis, People”.) I even wrote a column in People complaining about an “NBC pinhead” doing this. A few weeks later, my colleague on the launch of Entertainment Weekly, went to Burbank for a business meeting with the network with an exec who identified himself as that pinhead.

Note, by the way, that when I did cover entertainment in Time Inc., conflict came not only from advertisers (Hallmark pulled all its advertising after I dared give Hall of Fame
treacle the reviews it deserved) but also from within the company (the head of HBO wanted me fired and the editors of Time Inc. tried to change my opinions). How the hell could that be regulated? Only by my fighting back, it turned out.

And there is the greatest myth embedded within the FTC’s rules: that the government can and should sanitize the internet for our protection. The internet is the world and the world is messy and I don’t want anyone – not the government, not a newspaper editor – to clean it up for me, for I fear what will go out in the garbage: namely, my rights.

What I now truly dread is that the FTC is holding hearings about journalism on Dec. 1 and 2. As Star-Ledger editor Jim Willse (full disclosure: he hired me a few times) said in my Guardian podcast last month (full disclosure: I work for the Guardian): the words, “we’re from the government, we’re here to help,” should be met with trepidation.

: See also Reason’s take. More comments from others coming soon.

Dan Gillmor sees full employment for First Amendment attorneys.

Steve Garfield’s disclosure is longer than his post. Fit that in Twitter.

Andrew Keen says the regs should include “bent reviewers on Amazon.” Damn, Keen and I are agreeing too much these days.

FTC guy tells blogger to return books after a review. These people have no clue as to reality. Publishers don’t want them back.

Here’s Fortune on the story.

Here’s the Guardian’s Bobbie Johnson, unsure about the regs. And here’s Daniel Tunkelang, also debating with himself.

Techdirt points out more absurdities.

Jack Shafer calls the rules the FTC’s mad power grab.

(Disclosures: I worked in Condé for bits of a dozen years as a corporate online guy. I was privileged to be there when Epicurious was started around Gourmet and the surviving Bon Appetit. When the company bought Modern Bride, I twice worked on its digital presence and strategy. Oh, well.)

When Condé folded Portfolio, I said it didn’t yet presage the death of magazines, only of magazine launches. Well, that “yet” has arrived and now magazines are going to start dropping like newspapers – faster, even, for there’s more direct competition among the slicks.

We will see at least one business magazine go after BusinessWeek is sold. One or even all three of the general-interest news magazines is toast. There’ll be death among women’s magazines. Men’s magazines are already sinking. Showbiz magazines will have more and trouble competing with online (I fear for my baby, Entertainment Weekly). Watch for blood in the trade publishing business as blogs beat B-to-B magazines in service and efficiency.

Magazines as a medium won’t die and when ads come back – or at least stop falling – the survivors will get a gulp of oxygen (AdAge reports that magazine revenue fell 6.9% last year). But it still won’t be pretty. The valuable FitchRatings media report, which I received just today, decrees:

Fitch remains skeptical about the ability of magazines to profitably make the digital transition. Fitch believes the larger players will seek to rationalize available print advertising inventory through consolidation and closing down titles. The remaining players will have scale through portfolios of top brands in demographics that are attractive to advertisers, but sustainable profitability remains uncertain as advertiser sentiment is likely to continue to shift away from print mediums.

Fitch is prescient about Condé: It is closing multiple magazines in a category and keeping the strongest. Bon Appetit is the winner, I’d imagine, because its demographic is younger and its cost lower. Brides is the better brand in that category. When Condé bought Modern Bride, it thought it owned the category but was shocked to see that in the meantime, the No. 1 brand among brides – a market that is replaced every 18 months – has become The Knot. That’s how fast a venerable brand can sink from preeminence.

I used to buy magazines by the ton (especially when I had an expense account to support the habit). I loved rifling through them. I loved working on them. But now I have all but stopped reading them in print. I still read magazine stories now and then but, like everything else in my media day, I come to them through links, from peers and aggregators. Just as other media have been disaggregated – the atomic unit is no longer the album but the song, the equivalent in news was the publication or the section or the article and now is the post – so is the essential element of the magazine no longer the publication but now the article, at least for now. So what separates a magazine article now from a newspaper article or a blog post except, perhaps, length (and online, length is often seen as a liability)?

Packaging used to be a key value of magazines: the great editor selecting the interesting topics and good writers and cooking a meal out of it. But in the era of media unbundling, the magazine becomes an instant anachronism. Reading the New Yorker or Economist or Vanity Fair becomes an act of living nostalgia, at least for those who can remember them. For the next generation reading magazines and newspapers and buying albums is – haven’t we learned this yet? – an alien experience, a media oddity.

So go to the newsstand today and look around. You’ll never see so many magazines again. One by one, like the trees they used to kill, they will fall. Some will remain standing, stronger because they’re not competing for sunlight and nutrition. But magazines as a medium and an industry will only shrink.

As a former magazine man, am I sad about that? What’s the point of emotions? It’s economics. As I’ve been saying about my cancer:It is what it is. There are new and wonderful ways to tell stories and to curate good and interesting work and so the value of the magazine can continue even if the form cannot.