Xark!

Paid content and free content at George's Restaurant

2009-12-04T10:44:31-05:00

While eating my breakfast at George's Restaurant in Oak Park this morning, I noticed that just about every other customer, upon entering and saying hello to George, stopped at the counter and browsed through a stack of newspapers: The Sun Times, the Tribune, the local Oak Park paper. They'd pick out one or more and carry the papers to their booths to read over breakfast.

On their way out, the diners would pay their bills and return the free (to them, anyway) newspaper to the stack for the next patron. And so on.

I've noticed similar systems elsewhere, including coffeehouses that provide free copies of The New York Times despite selling The NYT out of a rack by the cash register.

So yes, somebody paid for the content in those newspapers, but certainly not everybody who consumed it paid.

Which raises the question: Why aren't newspaper companies cracking down on the sharing of their products in restaurants, diners, bars, coffeehouses and other public gathering places? Why should newspapers sell copies to libraries, which are just going to share them with the public, at the same rate that they sell subscriptions to individuals?

And if newspapers aren't all whacked out about this blatant theft of their intellectual property at George's Restaurant, then why do so many otherwise rational newspaper employees wax certifiably insane whilst lecturing the rest of us about the evils of "giving away content on the Web?"

And the answer is: Because they're in the business of giving away content in order to sell ads. The only difference between "stealing" a read in a print copy versus the same free read online is that print ads are expensive enough that newspaper companies never had to care about all this rampant diner piracy. If online advertising were nearly as valuable, newspaper companies wouldn't be bitching.

Got it? Any questions?

The Imagination Gap

2009-11-27T13:45:17-05:00

As is often the case, things tend to come at me in ironic pairs. This week it was a video of Jeff Jarvis' introduction to the New Business Models for News conference at CUNY, followed a few hours later by a link to a December 2007 TED Talk by Kevin Kelly about the next 5,000 days (give or take 700) of the Web. And as is so typically the case, I found myself angling away from what appears to be the most reasonable and likely future.

For those of you not inclined to watch such videos, here's my short synopsis:

Jarvis: The Knight Foundation funded this exploration of what might happen if a major metropolitan newspaper vacated its monopoly and was replaced by a new media ecosystem (an eventuality I've discussed here and here). The study found evidence for a lively and profitable ecosystem including a healthy local-news blogosphere and a new-style news organization. In the spirit of this new enterprise, they've provided a freely downloadable spreadsheet for anyone who wants to tweak the numbers.

Kelly: Two years ago, when the Web was about 5,000 days old, Kelly wondered what the next 5,000 days would look like in retrospect (one of my favorite ways of exploring futurism, btw). 5,700 days ago, most futurists thought the Web was going to be "like TV, only better." He suggests that no one then would have taken seriously the development of the Web-based culture we enjoy today, with free and/or low-cost tools that would have seemed like foolish Utopianism had anyone suggested them in the early 1990s. As for the future, he sees a unifying trend toward a cloud-based "one machine," plus a number of developments that will be familiar to people steeped in quality science fiction.

Even shorter? Jarvis is pointing toward a new media economy that looks an awful lot like a steady-state extension of the old media economy, only better. Kelly is suggesting that we need to get better at imagining things that seem impossible.

Kelly is right, of course. We can't see what we can't imagine, and right now the greatest failure of the mainstream media economy is its inability to witness the forces that are reshaping it. As Clay Shirky put it, today's media "radicals" are the people who are describing what's actually occurring, in real time.

So it should come as no surprise that a Knight-funded exploration of a new-media economic ecosystem would come with certain rational biases, such as an emphasis on existing competitors to what we used to think of as mainstream media. If I were an institutionally funded guy, I'd probably do the same. It's smart, it's prudent, it's rational. And if history teaches us anything about prediction, it's also doomed.

But before we move on to talk about those types of flaws, let's talk about the most obvious (and so far as I've seen, not yet discussed) hole in the NBMFN projections: scale.

Without going into the figures too deeply (the researchers reasonably point out that the projections are just a "stake in the ground,"), the study assumes a bunch of start-up news blogs, each primarily funded by advertising, each supporting a small (six employees or fewer) payroll and making double-digit profits.

The business problem? No matter how much money you invest in one of these hypothetical news sites (and, to a lesser extent, the hypothetical new news organization), you will never create a salable asset. Even if you cover your hyperlocal community efficiently and profitably, you will never capture the economy of scale that turned metro papers (and television stations, with federally regulated competition) into cash cows. So what if your company makes 16 percent margins? If the raw numbers come out to $24,000 a year, pre-tax, who is going to spend the money to buy you out? Your business is your time and attention, and those things can't be duplicated or expanded. The hyperlocal market you can effectively serve isn't large enough to warrant anyone's investment.

Restated? The news blogs postulated by the study are essentially self-employed journalists. And if you look at them this way, you can imagine there could be quite a few of them, and that some could stick around for several years. Ad networks and shared resources (sales and development services, for example) will make that possible.

But that isn't a business. It's a job without benefits, sick days or vacation, and it's not likely to be sustainable for many people in most markets. That's what I found when I investigated the subject, and I knew just enough about entrepreneurial thinking to recognize a dead end and avoid it. If you don't create an asset, you don't have an exit strategy. If you don't have an exit strategy, you don't have a business. You have a job.

The big flaw, besides scale? Subsidy. These businesses are all founded on the idea of traditional advertising. And while smart people are starting to speak explicitly about the idea that the journalism we suppose to be a civic good requires a subsidy, very few of the possible sources are either sustainable, independent or potentially abundant.

In point of fact, only one potential subsidy aligns with the larger points of the developing Web, and that's journalism that creates structured and semi-structured data as part of its process.

How will such journalism create independent value? In a variety of ways, and each is connected to trends that actually have a future.

So why aren't these ideas discussed explicitly and more frequently? Well, most obviously because they're just too new for most people, which is why I now consider it my responsibility to talk about such things over and over. I once considered that the sign of a boring writer. Now I know it's the necessary act of manifesting a new idea in the physical world. Repetition is a required part of teaching, marketing and learning, and while these ideas will seem strange and improbable the first time you hear them, I'm betting that once you hear them enough to make actively imagining them worth your while, you'll wonder why you didn't think of it yourself. Neither are these ideas originally mine. They are just part of a movement that will not be visible in the mainstream culture for some time to come.

What will it take to make these ideas apparent? The continuing failure of the existing media economy, for starters. Beyond that, it will take tools that make a particular kind of writing and information structure efficient, plus the processes and practices required to turn data into products that visitors and clients will pay to own or use.

In the short term, foundation money is likely to continue producing studies based on business models that reflect conventional wisdom about media. But there are more people writing about these ideas this year than there were last year, and so it will continue, until we look back 4,300 days from now and say, "why didn't we see it then?"

And the answer will be, "Because we were only beginning to imagine."

The limits of social

2009-11-16T23:21:19-05:00

Today's post by Marc Danzinger (hat tip to Ad Ingle) isn't exactly wrong in its major assertions, but I feel the need to attack it if only because I find its abundant reasonableness so misleading.

To wit: Danzinger contends that the future of media is conversation, bringing up some very correct points about the value of curation, etc., along the way. In a related post, he makes the right observation about why mainstream mass media isn't equipped survive this transition from the old media economy to the new one. In a word: monopoly.

Danzinger makes some predictions, and since I'm crazy that way too, I'll join him. After the coming collapse of the "paywalls will save us!" suicide pact (which was supposed to take place this summmer -- a conclusion that has been delayed only by the industry's inherent slowness), the next big-media bandwagon will be "new" ideas about networked media. As in: Let's get other people to make content for free, and then we'll sell ads on it.

The problem with such ideas -- and my general critique of Danzinger's post -- is that they simply connect observations about the way people communicate now to observations about how news companies are failing in revenue and relevance and then postulates that adopting one will fix the other. Again, it seems reasonable. A relationship between the two exists, but is it causal, corrective... or merely symptomatic?

A relationship isn't in and of itself a profitable business, and let's be clear about the fact that the most immediately pressing problems facing the news industry in America are business problems (the fundamental problem is cultural). While mass media must embrace (or at least comprehend) the cultural lessons of Web 2.0 technologies, the hard truth is that a conversation isn't an asset that can belong to just one of its parties.

It's easy to see the growth in crowd-sourced media and the power of social networks and assume that this is a great model for future news media. But here are two points I want you to keep in mind:

The companies that are making money off of these conversations aren't in the information business or the conversation business, they're in the platform business; and
The last time I bothered to pay attention to such things, the value of a Facebook user was about 25 cents per month. There isn't a news media company on the planet that could build a business on margins that slim and still perform any function resembling original, useful journalism.

Neither is the business at the other end of the media spectrum particularly inviting. I looked into starting a hyperlocal news site in 2008-09, but it didn't take a lot of research to show me that building such a site isn't starting a business, it's giving yourself a stressful, low-paying job with no possibility of ever creating a salable asset.

So let's just stick with that word: Asset. What assets do journalists own?

Information? If the information in their stories was really a tangible asset, then why would the original sources of that information not expect payment? Do journalists own news? Nope. Even a reporter with a big scoop has only fleeting ownership of exclusive news before it passes into the realm of fair use, comment and analysis. Video and photographs are tangible assets, but beyond that, most journalistic material is ephemeral. The asset that mass media "owns" is the expectation that it can assemble enough of you into an audience to attract advertisers. Not exactly bedrock.

Brand? Newspaper marketing people tend to say that their brands are valuable. I don't think most regular people agree. Not after the cutbacks in staffing and quality over the past decade.

And so, again, what assets do newspapers own? Their archives? Well, now you're getting warmer. But because they're organized as libraries of text documents, the value of those archives is limited because of the cost involved in extracting the information they contain. It's like an energy company that owns a bunch of shale. Yes, there's oil in there, but there's no profit in drilling it. Yet.

The future value of journalism -- what I contend will be the next successful evolutionary step in media development -- will be in creating information products based on thoughtful structures. That doesn't mean the end of narrative, or the end of the live report from the field, but it does mean that journalists will have to learn to view "their story" as a subset of a larger file that stores information in ways that machines can search for interesting patterns.

I call this The Informatics Model, and I think it sounds a lot more complex than it really is. But once we've established it, everyone will come to understand that the asset that journalism creates and owns is the structure in which it assembles and stores freely available (but expensive to gather) information. No individual fact has an appreciable value. The structure in which each resides, complete with metadata that tells us its "aboutness," will be the resource that we sell not only to news consumers, but to researchers, businesses, networks and specialized clients.

Give away the stories. Sell the structures.

Not sure what I mean by information structures? Think about a baseball box score. It doesn't tell the whole story, but the set of box scores that comprises the history of Major League Baseball allows statisticians to find patterns of significance, enabling smart catchers to make informed decisions about when to call for the deuce. We are talking about creating box scores for events that don't take place in ballparks.

As my friend and occasional new-media inspiration Dave Slusher puts it, in the early days of the American petroleum industry, gasoline was a waste product created during the refining of kerosene. The American journalism industry is still years from spotting the parallels in that analogy, but that's OK, too. While those who lack the necessary vision scratch for scarce dollars in the barren fields of conventional wisdom, some of us are beginning to piece together the beginnings of an abundant new economy.

(For my overview of the possibilities in play for the future of journalism, please see this post. For more of my writing on media topics, I've created this directory.)

How blessed are you?

2009-11-14T11:56:57-05:00

Dan

Narrative is dead! Long live Narrative!

2009-10-30T18:15:51-04:00

A long-form narrative essay about long-form narrative, making the case for a non-narrative future for journalism and arguing with The Washington Post's Joel Achenbach, who needs to go sit in the car and think about things before he writes any more articles. In keeping with this theme, I've added a three-page, home-printer-optimized PDF for those of you who prefer to read long-form essays on paper, plus a shorter, semi-structured online summary.

I was sitting in a downtown Charleston coffee shop with Ken Hawkins last week when in walked Sally and Gary Smith. For those of you who don't know them, Ken is the guy behind TheDigitel, which just made news by announcing some new investment and out-of-town expansion plans, and Gary is the celebrated Sports Illustrated writer who on Thursday became the Washington Post's poster child for long-form narrative.

It struck me as symbolic.

On the one hand, there's Ken and his product, relentlessly chewing through newsfeeds and Twitterstreams and hashtags looking for anything of relevance and interest to local readers, summarizing and linking and enhancing it, and then grinding on. TheDigitel is as good a local news aggregator site as you'll find, but it's a restless, twitchy beast that cycles through more content than it can display, each item neatly summarized and updated in chunks that rarely exceed 300 words before being blown off the front by the next one..

On the other, Gary. He earns a sweet living south of Calhoun Street producing four beautifully written magazine stories a year.

I exist somewhere in the middle. I went into to journalism because I was a storyteller, and reporting gave me a chance to write every day and get paid for it. After more than a decade of editing, I went back to reporting as a feature writer, threw myself into trying to learn long-form, and won the highest award that was available to me. It proved the high-water mark of my interest in producing traditional narrative journalism.

That was 2005, the year Web 2.0 began its multimedia viral expansion, and when I saw the digital revolution going that-a-way, I followed along to record it. By the time I returned to the features department in February 2007, I was producing what was probably the first and only attempt to create a weekly features section without narrative. Every Friday I took a feature topic and broke it into five short "items" that could be arranged in any order. No story ever jumped. I gave myself a credit at the bottom of the page, but no bylines.

Since then, as the mass media industry continued to collapse in flames and confusion, I've found myself thinking and writing about narrative and information repeatedly. What people struggle to understand is this: I am, by nature, a storyteller, not a programmer. I love writing so much I do it without being paid. And so when I tell you that the next step in the evolution of journalism is non-narrative, it's not as someone who hates narrative, but as its ardent suitor.

A 100-inch thumbsucker, in convenient sonnet form

I found myself making this case Wednesday night in a Facebook chat with one of my former reporters, who now teaches journalism at an SEC university. The faculty there is struggling to come up with a meaningful core curriculum, and she was taken aback when another instructor challenged the assertion that teaching good writing is a fundamental function of a journalism education.

I love good writing, but I found myself arguing the non-narrative case. "What form of good writing?" I asked her. "A sonnet is a form of writing that can be done well or poorly, but journalists don't stress quality sonnet writing because we deem it irrelevant."

My point? Journalism schools have taught view-from-nowhere, AP Style-compliant, mass-media-voice long-form feature writing for decades, and readers just aren't interested. Educating another generation of students to file 75-inch profiles of local United Way executives, written for the annual press contest judges who determine next-year's promotions, just isn't much of an answer to the market-side questions that demand our attention.

Ultimately we concurred that there would always be a place for excellent long-form writing (congratulations, Gary), but concluded that the era of the mediocre middle had ended. Then we said goodnight, and I slipped back into my concurrent Facebook chat with technology entrepreneur Abe Abreu Sr. of e-Me Ventures. Beginning on Monday, I'll be working with Abe on a project that -- among other things -- hopes to give newspaper publishers an elegantly useful tool that extracts data from natural language articles.

Again with that crazy ironic juxtaposition thing...

The problem with narrative journalism

My 21st century journalism education began in 2004 on NYU Professor Jay Rosen's PressThink blog, where every article of faith in my traditional journalism canon was challenged. I already understood that stories are the way people make sense of their lives, but it was during 2004-05 that I began to see how journalistic narrative was distorting the way we viewed the world.

Classic narrative follows a subject through a conflict to a resolution. And if our primary means of understanding something as complex as global warming is just a series of narratives about conflict, then we're not going to make much progress. This is one reason why American mainstream news organizations kept emphasizing critics of global warming, even though the most credible peer-reviewed studies favored the anthropogenic warming theory championed by Al Gore.

It opened my eyes. We didn't need better narrative journalism about global warming, we needed less of it. We needed a way of communicating that encouraged the evaluation of facts instead of the balancing of rhetoric. It's a shift that requires a radically different theory of the press.

You can follow that thread through the rest of my newspaper career in various ways, but in the end I simply left the business and began writing about alternatives, unfettered by the complications of disapproving bosses.

At any rate, in one of those long-form pieces about the future of media I imagined a new way of making money off original reporting. Instead of coding up narratives with tags after the fact, reporters and editors could begin capturing structured and semi-structured data as part of their usual workflows. This idea of compiling and selling data products didn't get as much attention as my "rant" about paywalls, yet you never know what happens to the seeds you plant.

Fast forward to Saturday, at BarCamp Charleston, where writer/programmer/podcaster/futurist Dave Slusher told me that my "informatics model" had changed his thinking about news.

"You know, when someone's kid has just been killed, I don't want to know how they feel," he said. "I know how they feel. They feel terrible. That's a question that should never be asked. What I want to know is, how did it happen, why did it happen, and what we can do to prevent it from happening again."

His thinking, like mine, suggests that the best way to get at that last issue -- the speculative, corrective question -- is by taking the data out of the narrative story of a child's death and storing it in a structure that makes it easy for users (or, potentially, clients) to spot patterns. Mining information from narrative archives is expensive, inefficient and shockingly incomplete. But if reported information were stored in a structure rather than just woven into routine narratives, we'd have a lot more knowledge about the world around us.

Hence my interest in acronyms like XML and RDF. It's not that they represent a romantic ideal, it's that they represent a civic good.

But isn't this a long-form essay?

How observant of you, dear reader. Yes it is, and there are several reasons why..

First, it's a form I still enjoy. Second, it's the native language for the audience I hope to reach: people in the news business who are still open to change. And finally, if handled competently and deployed for the right topics, it can be extremely effective.

This is a persuasive essay in which I'm trying to convince you to stop looking at narrative through the nostalgic, recriminating lens deployed by Joel Achenbach. Yes, on Page 3 of his tale there's an attempt to balance things out a bit, but the story he's telling is about the noble long-form writer/sage, confronted by the shallow "i-hate-everything" trolls of the Web, fighting the good fight and prevailing. Now that's narrative!

It's also not true. More people are writing and publishing now than ever before, and most of it is narrative. Most of it is also low-grade, cheaply produced, overly personal and not of general interest, but frankly the same thing can be said about most of the metro columnists and editorial hacks still grinding out a living at America's flagship dailies.

Will there always be a place for quality long-form narrative? That's the resolution of Achenbach's story, but let me ask you: Did you ever really doubt that this is what he'd conclude? Narrative isn't under assault. The economic hegemony of mass media is, and with it go the fortunes of journalists who made a living via an advertising subsidy that went away.

My description of what's changing is something that Achenbach says himself, and he says it quite well:

Storytellers will have to be more disciplined or get a new line of work. This is not a crisis, this is progress. Fewer "jello ledes," quote-dumps, the whole notebook disgorged upon the page. Less overwriting by frustrated novelists. Sorry, we don't need to read Proust's version of the zoning hearing.

I'd give him points for this, but it's like acknowledging that proper spelling is good. My professors told me exactly this during my first year of J-school in 1988, and it's been reinforced by every boss I ever had. Yet nothing changes. Why?

Well, because getting to that new, efficient, honest, clearly communicated standard requires that senior journalists get serious about inventing alternatives to narrative, and after 20 years of talking about it, they're no closer than when I was a rookie. The truth is they're never going to get there on their own. and so journalism will continue to reward the narrative writers and punish the innovators. It's just all they know, and they're damn near maudlin about it.

For those of you keeping score at home...

The current mainstream assumption is that we have to dumb down journalism to survive in the digital era. Dave Kindred seems to have reached that conclusion and accepted it in a column that made me want to reach through the screen and shake him. The answer isn't dumbing down, and Baseball Hall of Fame sportswriters ought to be the first people to understand this.

Did the invention of the box score ruin sportswriting? No? Why not?

Could it be that human beings process different types of information in different ways, with different needs at different times?

Hey all you baseball guys: Where would you be with your Saberetrics and your arcane statistics if there hadn't been standardized, structured, non-narrative box scoring lo those many decades ago? If every statistician had to derive every insight by reading every baseball game story without the benefit of those box scores, how good would your stats be?

Not to put too fine a point on it, but without box scoring, how many at-bats would never have been recorded for future historians because they didn't fit into the narrative the writer picked as he hammered out a story on deadline?

Do you get it now? Today's revolution isn't about killing narrative, but about inventing box scores for actions that don't take place in ballparks.

TLDNR (Too long, did not read)

So what does the future hold? Let me conclude by answering that with a story

A friend of mine once told me that he thought I made good points in my blog posts, but that they were just too damned long. "You need an editor," he said (no argument here). And maybe a year later we were chatting and I mentioned I was reading Neil Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. His response? "Oh, that's a great series! And I love Cryptonomicon, too!"

To recap: A 3,000-word essay on a blog? Too long. A three-volume series, with each of those volumes so long that the publisher later broke them up into eight books, based on the intertwined, rollicking, meandering, elaborate, expository, BAROQUE stories of an army of exquisitely drawn characters? Great!

And it is great. It's also a great example of my point: The more efficient, short-form information we consume, the more we'll long for the pleasures of a good story, nicely presented. That's my bet as a novelist, anyway.

We need to make these distinctions so that we can have more productive conversations about what we do and how we're going to do it in the future. I hope after reading this you'll agree.

Thank you.

Dan

Stewart nails the White House "War on Fox"

2009-10-30T11:47:16-04:00

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

For Fox Sake!

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Health Care Crisis

New Charleston

2009-10-29T15:28:07-04:00

Defensive ornamentation, East Bay Street, Charleston (Dan Conover photo)

Because Charleston was founded in the 17th century at the southern tip of a north-south peninsula, power and class here have always run on something of a north-south axis. So in the 1970s, when the area around the navy base incorporated as North Charleston, the name spoke as much about the new city's blue-collar identity as it did about its relative location.

Well, I think it's time we imposed a new axis on Charleston. Not North and South, but Old and New.

Charleston, for all its considerable charms, remains a backward-looking city. Not "backwards," as in unsophisticated or unintelligent, but more enamored of its past than its present. So while the city officially recognizes the value of its "creative cluster," its "tech sector" and its "knowledge-based industries," Charleston's institutions, typically dominated by the same old families and traditions, remain wary -- if not openly hostile -- toward new ideas and new people.

Since that anti-outsider bias tends to limit opportunity, Charleston has developed a reputation as a place where who you know is more important than what you know. It's why so many talented people here seem to direct their energies toward celebrity instead of substance.

Once upon a time I wanted to change that. Now I believe we should let eccentric, odd Old Charleston be whatever it wants to be. I thank Old Charleston for preserving this beautiful city, and aren't we stronger when we value and preserve indigenous cultures?

Instead, I want to encourage Charleston's outsiders to start appreciating their own significance. The prosperity of the Lowcountry depends on the energy, creativity and spirit of people who moved here "from off," and once we start acting on that knowledge it simply won't matter whether Old Charleston recognizes this truth.

New Charleston doesn't have to beat Old Charleston. It simply has to stop looking to Old Charleston for permission.

What are we waiting for?

Go to a New Charleston event -- Kulture Klash, Pecha Kucha, BarCampCHS, a TweetUp or an SMCCHS happy hour -- and look around. Hundreds, thousands of musicians, writers, artists, designers, art directors, photographers, programmers, Web-heads, researchers, engineers, architects, entrepreneurs, chefs, dancers, filmmakers, actors and big-thinkers live here. How many are "from off?" Most.

Yet I still meet people who tell me different versions of the same story. Instead of being encouraged in their new ventures, they are visited by members of the local establishment who always deliver the same message. Get back in line. There's some kind of old-boy system here, and it wants to pick the winners of every contest in advance. I don't understand it, but there it is.

My question is, so what? Yes, these people have some money. Yes the city has various programs and perks it can dole out to the favored few. Yes, the local paper acts an unofficial enforcer of Old Charleston orthodoxy. Again: So what?

We don't need mass media to spread the word. We don't need membership in exclusive social clubs to meet interesting people. And the sophisticated tool users here can do more with less money in less time and with less formal organization than Old Charleston can even imagine.

It isn't as if they're offering us an alternative. You're never going to be accepted into the Old Charleston clubs, so why bother conforming to their rules? What have you got to lose by ignoring them?

When we stop fighting and cajoling Old Charleston, we can invest all that energy into building a healthy New Charleston. A separate culture that reflects the values of the people who came here by choice. A culture that's more egalitarian, educated, productive and open.

This change doesn't require government loans or angel investors. Just start small. Cooperate. Do business with each other -- and with the thousands of like-minded Lowcountry natives who are our good friends and collaborators. Support each other. Work together.

Opposing an existing power structure gets us nowhere. Building our own power structure, with our own open networks and values, is progress.

In conclusion...

You don't undo an old habit. You have to create new habits, and to make them stick you have to reinforce those new patterns until the old ones silt over.

That's how we're going to make progress. And the funny thing is, Old Charleston won't even notice it.

It will simply benefit from it, along with the rest of us. Now go forth, join ranks, and start inventing a new city.

(BarCampCHS photo via Ken Hawkins on Flickr)

BarCamp Charleston: Geoff's video

2009-10-28T19:11:47-04:00

Geoff Marshall has been a good friend since we met back in the early Lowcountry Blogs days. I helped him get a job at The Post and Courier and in the early days of the paper's web video push it was pretty much just the two of us, wandering around with cameras, figuring out technical tricks, comparing notes, and each of us trying to develop personal styles of storytelling.

It didn't take time much time for him to begin establishing a style that I thought was not only distinctly his, but very, very good.

Geoff covered BarCamp Charleston this weekend and just posted his video. I think it's excellent in all sorts of ways.

And it makes me feel a bit nostalgic. He's leaving Charleston in a few days with a one-way ticket back to London, his true home. So in a way, this #BarCampCHS video is his parting gift to the Lowcountry. It shows not only how far the tech community has come, but also how sophisticated Geoff has become.

Thanks, mate.

My other birthday

2009-10-15T18:48:00-04:00

Twenty-five years ago today I stepped out of the $190-a-month apartment I shared with my first wife and set off on foot across Boone, N.C., toward the Cardinal Motel on Highway 321. The Cardinal also served as our bus station, and I had a ticket for Charlotte, paid for by the U.S. government.

I'd said goodbye to my wife when she left for her morning class, and packing was easy: a change of clothes, a paperback (Ernest Hemingway's Nick Adams stories), some official paperwork in a folder and a few packs of cigarettes. I wore a denim jacket and sported the world's worst haircut, given to me the night before by my bride so as to offer the Army barber less of me to claim.

I don't remember much about the trip to Charlotte. I don't even remember how I got from Charlotte to Kentucky, although I'm pretty sure we flew.

I remember arriving at the reception station at Fort Knox on a bus in the dark, followed by mysterious, unexplained waits, followed by more driving, heads bobbing back and forth in unison as the driver ground through the gears, the bus heady with the anxious sweat and adrenaline-soaked pheromones of 50 nervous, excited adolescents. Then a drill sergeant bound up the steps and hustled us off the bus and onto the set of the movie Stripes.

Seriously. The Reception Station at the Fort Knox Armor School is the place where Bill Murray and John Candy and Harold Ramis enter the Army in the movie. That room full of big unit insignia where they meet their drill sergeant? Same room.

Anyway, Oct. 15, 1984, was the watershed between my youth and my adult life. Our transitions don't have to be as abrupt as joining the Army, giving up all your possessions and shaving your head, but young people need rites of passage. What marks the ending point of one phase of life and begins the next? For too many of our kids, it's a party after graduation, followed by a trip to the beach and then on into some nowhere job. Where's the adventure in that? .

Our lives are punctuated by transitions, and I'm in the midst of another one now. I hope I can make it across this divide with the same feeling I had that morning in Boone 25 years ago, determined and awake and ready to meet whatever awaited me. I'm pretty sure I will, too.

May your life be blessed with memorable milestones as well..

The Moscow Cloud

2009-10-14T14:14:13-04:00

Via Yahoo Buzz. Apparently this was spotted on Oct. 7.

Conservative Talking Points? There's an app for that!

2009-10-12T21:21:56-04:00

Dan

The Big Pool of Money experiment

2009-10-09T15:42:31-04:00

At last night's meeting of the Columbia chapter of Social Media Club, I mentioned something I heard suggested in an off-hand way at the Infovalet Conference in May. What if every American paid a fee as part of his or her monthly ISP bill, and then that money were divided up among content creators?

Of course, what I found ironic about this back in May was that the people suggesting it weren't suggesting that ANYONE be able to share in this revenue. The idea was that only content creators who happened to also own printing presses and/or FCC licenses would be eligible. That's absurd on its face, which is probably why that idea hasn't gone anywhere. Try selling that politically.

But as I drove home to Charleston, I reconsidered the idea. Which is why I want you to play along in a thought experiment with me.

What if we all paid into a fund that could be distributed among EVERYONE who creates content, of any kind, that can distributed online? Bloggers, filmmakers, musicians, reporters, pornographers, comedians, ANYONE.

How would it work? How could it be administered?

Ten assumptions

The thing that got me excited on the ride home was the result of one realization. Instead of assuming that you'd have to create a system that applied to everyone, I realized that creating a system in which people had to nominate themselves for participation in the program would make everything far easier.

For instance, while it might be nice to get paid for the occasional Xark post that goes viral, I don't write Xark for money. None of the people who write here do. So if you offered me the chance to be paid for what we publish here, my answer would be a qualified maybe. I'd appreciate the opportunity, but given the requirements that would likely go with receiving the money, I might well decline and just continue to blog the way I do now.

Hence, Assumption No. 1: Anyone wishing to be compensated for the content they create and publish online would have to agree to abide by a set of rules.

Most likely, this would mean agreeing to a series of disclosure statements, plus web standards and code that would allow for the tallying, tracking and auditing of web traffic, activity and bandwidth. It would mean working in accordance with copyright rules. It would mean submitting one's online activities to some degree of public scrutiny, if only to allow robots, regulators and agencies like the IRS to look into our books to make sure we're not attempting to defraud the public by padding traffic and hacking the system.

You couldn't create a system like that for the entire Internet. But you MIGHT be able create a voluntary system for content creators.

Assumption No. 2? Traffic wouldn't be the only metric. For instance, if I wanted to be paid for the number of people who read my eBook, you wouldn't want to compute that value by tallying the number of people who looked at my home page. And since the value of an eBook and the value of a free music download can't be equated by studying the bandwidth involved in the transmission of a file, then we'd need to figure out some way of assigning values to types of content.

Assumption No. 3: The system would have to rely on content creators tagging the content for which they wish to be paid.

Imagine, for example, that I want to be paid for people who read Xark. I agree to meet a set of standards, I file the necessary disclosures and tax forms, and install various regulatory bots and code snippets in my meta fields. And perhaps there's an automated tag on all my blog posts that codes all my text to be valued by the page view. What about when I put up a video?

Well, it would be up to me to tag that video with the appropriate code. If I don't, I don't get paid for that content type. Same if I want to be paid for a graphic, a cartoon, etc. I've got to be sure that I identify the content for the bots. I have to certify that the content is mine, that I meet all copyright restrictions, etc.

Assumption No. 4: Various groups would need to have some input into how to value certain types of content, but decisions would have to be made for the entire system. What's the value of a single ebook download? What if you stream my five-minute video? What if you download my five-minute video? And so on. Determining these values would likely be highly politicized, with enormous lobbies trying to game the regulatory system. Just assume that, because in this case, government would be picking winners and losers. The question is, can we imagine a way in which we could do this with some degree of fairness? Could we create a system that controls hacking via lobbyists and corruption in the same way that we control hacking via click fraud and botnets?

Assumption No. 5: Since content creators would be receiving a share of the Big Pool of Money (BPOM), free content enablers could / would put in for a share. Consider YouTube. It hosts our videos for free. But what if I put in for compensation? What if my video goes viral and gets a million views, earning me something on the order of, say, $10,000? Shouldn't YouTube have the right to take its cut? I think so, and I think this could be a great way for us to extend "free" Internet services for most of the population.

I'm not saying that YouTube would charge everyone a bandwidth surcharge. I'm saying that videomakers who host on YouTube, put in for reimbursement from the BPOM and then receive payments exceeding some arbitrary threshold (say $50) could be subject to YouTube taking a percentage for hosting the content. This could apply to P2P filesharing, or to music services like Pandora, etc.

Assumption No. 6: The tagging I mentioned before would likely have to operate as some form of digital watermark, enabling the auditing agency to "ping" for distribution as well as track usage as it occurs. So when I tag my eBook, or when Don tags his video, our "makers mark" travels with the file, no matter how many times it is replicated and retransmitted. This isn't really a question of punishing end users, but of auditing activity, so that fraud would be easier to spot.

Assumption No. 7: Fraud would have to be detectable via algorithm, and enforcement would be both a constant challenge and an evolving process. As soon we we'd launch this, people would begin scamming it. But this isn't a reason not to do it. People are constantly scamming everything, and we just deal with it as part of living in a civilized and networked world.

Assumption No. 8: Some people would still get stuff for free and not pay into the system. For instance, other nations won't charge the fee, which means users there won't pay into the system. So there are going to be inequities.

Assumption No. 9: The value of content would rise and fall based on the amount of money that flows into the system and the volume of total activity. In other words, the value of a page click would be affected by the total number of pages clicked. The value of an individual eBook would relate to the total number of all tagged eBooks downloaded within the period.

Assumption No. 10: None of this is worth spit without copyright reform. Period.

Outlining the system

For the sake of argument, imagine that we created a system that collected the equivalent of roughly $1 per internet user per month (since the fee is attached to an ISP account, the monthly fee would have to be based on some assumption of an average number of users per account). That's about $250 million per month, or about $3 billion per year.

I assume that the system would be revenue-neutral. To wit: The cost of administering and enforcing it would be covered by the taxes levied against the payments. So that leaves about $2.25 billion per year to be distributed. To put that in perspective, legal digital music downloads in 2008 amounted to $1.6 billion.

In other words, a dollar per person per month isn't going to replace book sales or iTunes. It's not meant to. Anyone who has a business model that currently pays them for content should not be affected.

Instead, the BPOM would replace the idea of content paywalls, micropayments, etc., with a shared resource. It would pay content producers based on usage patterns without forcing them to become bill collectors. And most importantly, it would get us out of the unresolvable question of fair use. When is a link to your content fair use and when is it theft? With the BPOM, I don't think anyone will care about that question anymore.

Today the Associated Press is brandishing its saber about some absurd vision of protecting its copyright from aggregators and portals that already pay for its "services." Under BPOM, where inbound links to content increase revenue, AP would actually be ENCOURAGING others to aggregate its stories. In fact, aggregators might well come to AP and ask for a piece of the BPOM action based on the value of their links.

Is there enough money in the pot I just described to "save American newspapers?" Of course not. But let's continue this thought experiment just a bit further. If content usage follows the pattern of The Long Tail, then about half of the $2.25 billion in my example would be divided up among mainstream media. That means that we'd have $1.2 billion to divide between the rest of the people who are creating content for the Web.

Let's say that roughly 22.5 million Americans (9 percent of American Internet users) put in for some share of the original-content pie. That's about $50 per person, per year, on average.

But this money would more likely be distributed on a curve. And while someone else will have to the math for this distribution, by my estimates you're talking about several million Americans receiving thousands of dollars a year for their efforts, with the top 5 percent (probably more than a million Americans) able to earn a modest living off the content they create and distribute.

So, my questions to the panel:

Is this worth exploring?

How should it be run?

Who would propose it?

How would we proceed?

And so on.

Discuss.

BarCamp Charleston!

2009-09-30T12:04:27-04:00

It's Saturday, Oct. 24th. Be there. Aloha.

Romo-itis

2009-09-28T20:30:38-04:00

Tony Romo is a good quarterback. He has a winning record, good statistics, a great arm and above-average wheels. In Week One, he threw for a personal best in yardage, plus three touchdowns.

But in Week Two, the Cowboys lost to the New York Giants in their stadium opener. Romo's stats were poor, and he threw three interceptions.

By Monday morning, the media was calling for the man to be ritually eviscerated. One after another, the talking heads on TV paraded by, talking about what a failure Romo was. How he couldn't lead. Blah, blah, blah.

Welcome to what's worst about America.

What's worst about America are retired prima dona wide receivers who ought to know better, reducing the ultimate team game down to one man. Posturing and preening former stars talking about how "it all boils down to winning."

Why do they do that?

Because we encourage it. Because we love this in-your-face, reality TV psycho drama.

Because the truth is boring. The truth is that after two games, the supremely talented Dallas defense still hasn't picked up a fumble or an interception, much less a sack. The truth is that, when it counted, Romo led the Cowboys from behind to take the lead with less than four minutes left. The truth is that the Dallas defense let the Giants drive 56 yards in 11 plays, milking every last second off the clock before kicking the winning field goal.

The headline on Yahoo Sports the next morning? "Romo costs his team the win."

This is destruction of human beings and their reputations as entertainment. And we're all of us implicit in this farce, because we encourage it. We allow it.

Here we go again. If Romo has a decent game, will we then anoint him the second coming of Christ?

New media virtual interview No. 2

2009-09-22T21:28:31-04:00

I'm going up the road to talk with the folks at Social Media Club Columbia on Oct. 8, and in preparation for the event the organizers posted short bios of the panelists, along with a series of possible questions. There's no way we'll have time to get around to each, but I thought these questions were so excellent that each was worthy of yet another Virtual Interview.

This time the questions come from Chip Oglesby.

What’s the best way for media companies to move from a print first to a web first mentality?

The tricky part is that what you're really talking about here is swapping out engines on an airplane in flight, and I think we should acknowledge the difficulty of that maneuver, plus the fact that doing something like this is never going to be as efficient as starting from scratch with a dedicated staff and a blank tablet.

But when it comes to the print-first vs. web-first shift, it's actually not rocket surgery. You have to take some of your staff and give it the mission of doing incremental, breaking news on the Web. And then you have to get your key newsroom people, and I'm talking managing editors, city editors, sports editors, and you've got to make the success of the website part of their mission. If you do those two things, you're going to wind up producing news in a different workflow and it's going to work.

Most places want to treat this as a training issue and a systems issue, and don't get me wrong. Both are important. But it's really a trust and accountability issue. Unless your top leaders are actually accountable for the success of your Web efforts, they're going to be sabotaging or at least undermining them. It's just too easy for them to give the Web lip service, and then stick to doing the same old thing. And employees aren't stupid. They see that, and they just wait out most “web-first” initiatives.

There are plenty of people who can walk into your newsroom and set up the workflows and training sessions that can make a web-first system work (like, say, me for instance). But unless your top management is accountable for its success, and by that I mean that their salaries and bonuses are tied to it, it's not going to change. This is a cultural challenge masquerading as a technical problem.

How will mobile computing pay into the future of journalism?

The word here could be “pay” or it could be “play” and in either case it's an interesting question.

So let's assume two things: 1. The early adapters of mobile computing are both the high-end tech users and another demographic of users who will invest in smart phones but not desktop or even laptop computing. You're going to have lots of people who won't invest in computer technology who will invest in a snappy phone that is basically a handheld computer, and I think we have to understand that divide and what it means. I think one laboratory for that is Twitter, which is divided into the pre-Oprah group and the post-Oprah group, and they're both using the same service with basically zero overlap.

The second thing is, you don't use a handheld device the way you use a desktop. You relate to things differently, for various reasons.

So how does mobile computing "play" into the future of journalism? Well, I think the first thing you have to recognize is that the news you deliver on a smart phone is going to cross the line into annoyance very quickly if your method of determining what to deliver and at what level of intrusion isn't extremely sensitive. And the way to do that is that you have to have apps that learn from the users' actions.

We like to think you can ask people some questions and then use that to determine their preferences. But we communicate much more honestly by what we do than what we say. So if I were in the news business today I'd be working with an iPhone app developer to create an app that tracks a user's actions while interacting with news. And I would be creating formulas that match your expressed interests AND your unexpressed preferences to determine what priorities to give certain types of stories and headlines. Because if it's just editors picking stories for you, you're not going to use it. It's going to become an annoyance, not a tool.

How does mobile computing “pay” into journalism? I think the answer there is that I probably won't be able to sell you content, but I might be able to sell you an intelligent application that keeps you satisfied and informed about things that actually concern or excite you. I think we should be trying to create mobile devices that act as extensions of each user's interests and personality. And I think you could sell that both as an application and as a subscription-based service.

Should media companies focus on developing the semantic web on their sites?

Semantic Web in the capital letter, W3C, perfectly validating code sense? No. That becomes a question of abstract correctness rather than utility.

Semantic in the sense that the structure conveys meaning? In the sense that the structure adds, captures, enhances and expands meaning? Yes, yes, yes. I'm usually with the geeks on most subjects, but the discussion of semantic structure has degraded into a snarky pissing contest about using the tables tag, and it's just bullshit. The semantic web is not about web design. It's about building an information economy.

The big lesson that analog thinkers have to grasp before they pass Go is that a fact without a context is simply noise. Its value approaches zero. Facts that exist in “stories” have analog value to human readers in the moment that they read it, but the cost of extracting those archived facts and putting them into a structure that provides a machine-readable context (and preserves that value over time) will typically be greater than the value of the original facts.

So what news companies should be doing is creating workflows that capture facts within a structure that connects them to their context and stores them with those connections. You don't have to create new jobs and add work – you just have to provide workflows and tools that make digitizing information as much a part of the process as typing your byline. Once you've done that, all sorts of options open up for you. Until you've done that, you're just on the receiving end of a massive historical change.

You have to think ahead, and media companies hate that.

Will the singularity save journalism? :)

Ken McLeod says that The Singularity is “the Rapture for nerds,” and I agree. I think about The Singularity a lot, because in the abstract sense it's inevitable, but in the historical sense it's impossible, because humanity is chaotic and defies mathematical abstraction. In other words, we generate enough friction to keep The Singularity always over the next rise..

I kid around about how we'll wake up on Jan. 1, 2045, look around and we'll be surrounded by flying golden unicorns. But there's a serious side to this question, and it's really about expectations based on the pace of change. You don't have to go over an event horizon for the rate of change to become destabilizing, and I would argue that's what mass media is experiencing now.

When I arrived at The Post and Courier in April 1994, the editor who showed me around the newsroom proudly demonstrated the new 486 computers he'd just purchased. “These are top of the line,” he said. “We won't have to upgrade for another 10 years.”

That sounds absurd now, but you have to understand that from the perspective of a late-20^th century executive, that was a very reasonable assumption about capital amortization. If you invested in a major equipment expense like a newsroom technology upgrade, you just assumed it would be good for 10 years. Industries that depend on computers have adjusted their expectations since then, but most leaders and managers are not comfortable with the idea that the pace of change keeps doubling and doubling and doubling.You can tell them that, but they just can't imagine it, and things that you can't imagine are invisible even if you're staring at them under Klieg lights.

So the singularity won't save journalism, but the acceleration of change should give us clues as to how we're going to have to manage information and make decisions. You could say that our inability to imagine that acceleration is part of what's killing mass media journalism, and the act of imagining adequate responses frees the act of committing journalism from the control of people who simply want to extract 20 percent profits from it, regardless of the effect on society.

What are your thoughts on Augmented Reality and data relationships in journalism?

William Gibson's most recent novel features a character who is an augmented reality artist, and he's going around creating these scenes that you'll see only if you're a user. In one instance he's created a holographic recreation of a horrific murder in a hotel lobby or something, but it's visible only to the people who are wearing the proper devices and know how to tune in. So you have the people who aren't tuned in walking through the scene in real life, but users with the right headgear are seeing the present reality and the recreated image, simultaneously. That stuck with me, because if you wanna talk about the ultimate mashup, there you go, and if you want an analogy for what it all means, there it is.

I think in many ways we're already experiencing separate realities, but that makes it graphic.

So the main thing is that because your mobile device is going to locate you within a two-dimensional plane, you're going to have all sorts of information pushed towards you. And the question, again, is how to create systems that manage your interests in a non-complex way.

If I'm walking through Charleston and every time I pass a store I get an unwanted sales pitch on my phone, I'm eventually going to turn that app off. But if my mobile device is essentially an intelligent agent operating on my behalf, and it's finding things that I want, in real time, and picking them out of my physical environment in interesting and entertaining ways, I'm going to be all about it.

The augmented reality that I think about most is restaurants. You can only tell so much by looking at them, which is why I'd want an augmented reality that told me more. And since I want reliable commercial information rather than just sales pitches, I think there's value in a system like that.

The issue with augmented reality, then, isn't the technology. You need a platform that communicates it, a system that structures and creates it, a business model that understands its value and how to communicate it, and user devices and software agents that accurately interpret and negotiate it. The issue is content and how to pay for it.

The problem is that we need a business model that rewards someone for adding value (i.e., meaningful content that people actually want). Until that happens, then every business that approaches augmented reality is going to treat it as just another way of delivering no-cost crap. It's going to be mass-media executives trying to figure out how to use Facebook all over again. Business people tend to look at networked media as a way to make free money off of somebody else's content, but there's not going to be a sustainable business here until we work out the connections and expectations and exchanges..

We're all going to live in a highly augmented world. But the reality is, our brains are tuned to only a certainly degree of awareness, and everything beyond that is not only surplus, it's actually unhealthy. The challenge for humans, and for media companies, is that from here on out, we're going to be managing attention very judiciously. The secret will be to create signal-to-noise ratios that are extremely high, and the only way to do that is to make everything as personal as DNA.

And I don't have to tell you what worries and challenges and nightmares come bundled with that statement. But it's where we have to go.

Content Managment Systems for media companies, cloud-based (Drupal) or client-based (CCI).

I don't know. Great question, but I haven't studied it yet.

Discuss how the general-interest product has become obsolete.

I tell people that the problem with the kind of mass-media news judgment that I learned over 20 years in the business is that it's just this giant averaging machine. It's creating news and information products that are based on the lowest common denominator within large groups , delivering content based on what's the least objectionable compromise versus what people care about.

And my advice has been, base your business on love. Create content for people to love, not for people to encounter in this zipless, bloodless, view-from-nowhere mass-media fantasy world that we created in the 20th century.

You have to leave the mass-media business to talk that kind of craziness, because these executives have, for the most part, spent the past 20 to 40 years learning that system, and it's all they know. You cannot underestimate how threatening these ideas are, in a very personal way, to many top editors and publishers.

You'll hear a lot in the coming years about post-scarcity economics. Well, the first model for that is the information economy, and while post-scarcity sounds great, it's an enormous shift for everyone involved, and it isn't all sunshine and dancing penguins. What it should teach us is, in a world in which there is more than enough of Commodity X, you simply have to stand out. Being average isn't a good strategy anymore.

People feel this way and that way about Seth Godin, but he plowed this ground early and he has plowed it very fine. The Television Industrial Complex is broken, and it's never coming back.

I say thank goodness, but the result is a very lean time for people like me.

Myth Communication

2009-09-17T20:12:33-04:00

King of Swamp Castle: Guards, make sure the prince doesn't leave this room until I come and get him.
Guard #1: Not to leave the room... even if you come and get him.
Guard #2: [hiccups]
King of Swamp Castle: No, no. *Until* I come and get him.
Guard #1: Until you come and get him, we're not to enter the room.
King of Swamp Castle: No, no, no. You *stay* in the room, and make sure *he* doesn't leave.
Guard #1: And you'll come and get him.
Guard #2: [hiccups]
King of Swamp Castle: Right.
Guard #1: We don't need to do anything, apart from just stop him entering the room.
King of Swamp Castle: No, no. *Leaving* the room.
Guard #1: Leaving the room, yes.
King of Swamp Castle: All right?
Guard #2: [hiccups]
Guard #1: Right. Oh, if, if, if, uh, if, if, uh, if, if, if, we... oh, if... oh...
King of Swamp Castle: Look, it's quite simple. You just stay here, and make sure he doesn't leave the room. All right?
Guard #2: [hiccups]
Guard #1: Oh, I remember, uh, can he leave the room with us?
King of Swamp Castle: No, no, no, no, you just keep him in here, and make sure...
Guard #1: Oh yeah, we'll keep him in here, obviously, but if he had to leave, and we were with him...
King of Swamp Castle: No, just keep him in here...
Guard #1: Until you, or anyone else...
King of Swamp Castle: No, not anyone else. Just me.
Guard #1: Just you.
Guard #2: [hiccups]
King of Swamp Castle: Get back.
Guard #1: Get back.
King of Swamp Castle: All right?
Guard #1: Right, we'll stay here until you get back.
King of Swamp Castle: And make sure he doesn't leave.
Guard #1: What?
King of Swamp Castle: Make sure he doesn't leave.
Guard #1: The prince?
King of Swamp Castle: Yes, make sure he doesn't leave.
Guard #1: Oh, yes, of course.
[Points at Guard #2]
Guard #1: I thought you meant him. You know, it seemed a bit daft me I were to guard him when he's a guard.
King of Swamp Castle: Is that clear?
Guard #2: [hiccups]
Guard #1: Oh, quite clear. No problems.
King of Swamp Castle: Right.
[King of Swamp Castle turns to leave the room, both guards follow him]
King of Swamp Castle: Where are you going?
Guard #1: We're coming with you.
King of Swamp Castle: No, no, no. I want you to stay here and make sure *he* doesn't leave.
Guard #1: Oh, I see. Right.

Just laugh

2009-09-16T10:16:38-04:00

Dan

The Joy of Underachieving

2009-09-08T10:21:38-04:00

Here's my big news: I feel good.

That's pretty meaningless to everyone else, but it means the world to me at the moment. After years of unhappy inactivity brought on by an even longer period of chronic pain and multiple injuries, I'm moving around again and feeling progressively better.

My secret? Underachievement.

Coaches and drill sergeants taught me that the only way to live legitimately was to push things, starting with my own limits. My instructors at Wolfcreek Wilderness Institute taught me at 14 that no matter how bad things got, I could always take a little more. And then a little more. And so on.

So while I've never been much of an athlete, I was usually game to push on a bit more. And over the years, that attitude got me into a lot of trouble. Because the answer to every question isn't "More." Sometimes it needs to be "Enough."

I've lost 50 pounds since December, and since I limped into my doctor's office in January to complain about my feet, I've gone from hobbled to happy. I didn't do this by starving myself or pushing my exercise limits. I've done it slowly. And when I've felt like "being all that I could be" (as my drill sergeant used to put it), I've waited until that feeling passed.

On yesterday's run I thought I might double the length of my route, but when I got to the turn I thought the better of it. My body is getting healthier, but it's still a mess of torn ligaments and missing cartilage, ghost sprains and old hurts. It's like an old dog that enjoys the feeling of running in the park, not some young greyhound that's training for the track.

The need to achieve isn't a bad thing, but it's ego talking. My knees don't have an ego. By underachieving, day by day, mile by mile, I get a little better every week. And the healthier I get, the easier it seems for me to forgive myself for not being perfect.

Amen.

God Bless Keith Olbermann

2009-09-04T08:38:53-04:00

Dan

TKTD's Soft-Launch

2009-09-02T14:33:27-04:00

When I left the newspaper business in a year ago, one of my goals was to see whether there was anything that could be done with The Key to Darbas, a novel I wrote in 2003. The book made it to the brink of publication in 2005 and wasn't out of options, but the experience of dealing with mainstream publishers and agents discouraged me.

Much has changed in the world since 2005, including the rise of social (networked) media, print-on-demand publishing, better e-book devices and public-spirited copyright reforms. So last fall I took my 2003 manuscript and rewrote it, then hired a friend to copy edit it, all with an eye toward an alternative means of publication.. But my attention turned to freelance gigs in early 2009, and the manuscript sat in a box for more than six months.

It was still sitting there in August when I decided to wrap up all my personal projects by the end of the month so I could go looking for more regular work in September. So over the past four weeks I:

Wrote through the suggested edits;
Created four maps in Illustrator;
Produced some additional material (introduction, notes, etc.);
Designed front and back covers;
Typeset it in InDesign for trade paperback and home printing;
Output it as a free PDF;
Encoded it as a DRM-free .PRC e-book file;
Built a complete personal website, with links to the project;
Launched a stub of a site for the novel, including a wiki (and, at some point forums);
Solicited some friends for advice on how to begin developing a publishing project that's unlike anything I've seen before.

On the one hand, The Key to Darbas is just a science-fiction/fantasy hybrid by an unpublished novelist (though not an unpublished writer). On the other, though, it's an experiment with an entirely new way of defining the relationship between writers and readers.

The crux of that relationship is a different approach to copyright. Under the traditional system, I would reserve all rights to the characters and situations I created in the novel, then sell some portion of those rights to a publisher. If the novel acquired fans, those fans could build an online community around the book, and perhaps even generate reference materials. But any hobbyist fan-fiction they produced would fall into a copyright gray area, and woe-betide the writer of a fan-fiction novel who tries to sell copies without the approval of (and payments to) the original novel's publisher (Sept. 4 update: and/or author)..

That's too bad, because as a genre, SF/F is different. A SF/F novel is a story that takes place in a unique world that extends beyond the plot. Many fans are devoted as much to what intrigues them about that world as they are to the story per se. They're curious its larger context. They want to know more about unanswered questions.

Before I wrote the first word of the novel, I wrote tens of thousands of words to help me imagine and understand the world in which my story would take place. At some point, Janet and I realized that I could have just as easily written interesting stories out of multiple other aspects of the world and its backstory.

So I thought, why waste all that?

Why not keep my story but give its world to the fans, and let THEM own it?

I didn't consider this in early 2005. I didn't know about Creative Commons then. Chris Anderson's Long Tail was still a new idea, and his Free: Why $0.00 Is The Future of Business was still three years in the future. Cory Doctorow hadn't yet boosted sales of Little Brother by offering it for free. In Rainbows hadn't been released. Wookieepedia hadn't been launched. Amazon hadn't yet acquired P.O.D. pioneer BookSurge. There was no Twitter, no Facebook. And so on. I didn't think of this idea then because the intellectual, legal, cultural and technical infrastructure necessary to support it didn't yet exist.

What remains to be done, then, is to figure out ways to connect these trends and tools and ideas into one system. I think the ultimate expression of this idea might look like this:

A community copyright license in which the author donates the intellectual property that underlies his or her story (i.e., the original novel or series, to which the author retains rights) to its fans, with the expressed purpose of allowing fans to develop and expand that fictional world cooperatively and commercially.
The community license would set up a foundation, run by community-elected officers, that would manage that license. The license would require that any subsequent commercial works would pay a royalty back to the community, to be used in whatever way the foundation sees fit. The community would decide, for instance, what rights it would allow to third-party publishers, community royalty percentages, etc..
Matters of canon, etc., would be determined and governed by the community, not the original writer or any publishing company.

Why do this? Well, in the first place, it's good karma, and good karma is often good business. Plus, if a writer and his or her readers are literally partners, then everyone shares a mutual interest.

Think of it this way: Writing a book is easy compared to the task of finding readers. But if my book attracts a community of fans who are interested in the extended world I've created, then anyone else who chooses to write in that world automatically benefits from the readers I've already assembled.This means writers could self-publish in the Darbas world and make money without having to market their work, hire lawyers and agents, or sign over their rights to publishing companies.

In theory, at least, the majority of these people would want to read the original novels rather than just the descriptions of them on the free DarbasWiki. So even though I wouldn't be taking a cut of their sales, I'd still be profiting from their participation. And that's enough.

There are any number of problems with this model, the most obvious being the fact that my novel currently has only one fan (Janet) and it's possible that's all it will ever find. So how do you take an unknown novel and build a fan-base that could eventually become self-sustaining? I don't know yet. And I'll have to accomplish that task before I can afford to take on the challenge of crafting a legally valid community license.

But that's where this blog post and DarbasWeb and Twitter come in. Because I don't have to answer all those questions at once, and I might not have to answer all of them myself. If this book has an audience, I have to trust that I can find it. If community licensing has a future, I have to trust that we can construct it as a community.

So I'm proceeding with a few basic assumptions. That I'll be able to use networked media to build an organic audience for my free book. That people will donate enough cash to help me fund the first print-on-demand trade-paperback edition. That early returns from my first marketing campaign (called The Hundred Books... e-mail dan@danconover.com for details) will generate enough cash for me to cover expenses and hire an intellectual property attorney to write the community license. I'm assuming that the growth of the community would provide me a financial base from which to write the final two books in my planned trilogy (and that I'll be able to work out the legal details of those rights within the community license).

To get anywhere, you have to know where you're headed. When I imagine the success of this project, I imagine myself with a trilogy on the shelves and a happy fan-base that is enjoying (and profiting) from the fruits of its labors. I imagine donating the legal language for a community license to Creative Commons (I've contacted them and they've expressed interest). I don't know if I'll ever write other stories out of the world I've begun, but if I do, I'll do so as just another fan under a community license. And I imagine that if any portion of these things comes true, then the world will be a little bit happier for it.

But today I start small.

If you'd like to read my book, please download a copy for your home printer or for your e-book reader. If you don't have reader software, get yours free here.
If you'd like to advise me on how to promote this book and these ideas, write me (dan@danconover.com).
If you'd like to join the fan community, sign-up at DarbasWeb.
If you'd like to advise or assist me on technical matters, I need that, too.
If you're a lawyer or copyright expert and you'd like to volunteer to work with me to create the world's first (that I know of, anyway) community license, we need to talk.

And if you like my book, or these ideas, please let me know. And tell your friends. Because I know I'm not enough, by myself, to make any of this happen.

The Singularity (trailer)

2009-09-02T09:46:40-04:00

Dan

'Business model! Business model!'

2009-09-02T09:34:15-04:00

"Business model! Business model! All they care about is business model. I am excited about the way the Web is transforming society and all they care is how to save their jobs! I get it - they should care. The new media ecosystem can support a much smaller number of professional journalists than the old one... I don't have an interest in that aspect of the media business at all... I am interested in the ways new media channels are changing the world, not the parochial or individual insecurities of those whose world is changing. I am an interested observer of the revolution and saving the inevitable victims is not my job."

- Science blogger Bora Zivkovic, expressing a sentiment that is often near to my heart.

It's a good, short post, with Bora's routinely excellent comment section once again bubbling with interesting ideas.

All politics are tribal

2009-09-01T20:02:48-04:00

When Tip O'Neil said that "All politics are local," the quote became famous because it was contrarian. It came in the ultimate age of wholesale politicking, when Seth Godin's "television-industrial complex" worked equally well at selling politicians as it did soap. Just commodities.

One interpretation of O'Neil's dictum is that you become successful by taking care of the people back home. Others have used it to justify pork, or explain a weird vote in Congress. But here's what I think it wound up meaning: No matter how powerful you got, you had to remain connected to, and empowered by, your base. Because let's face it: by the time O'Neil was speaker of the house, he had bigger things to worry about than whether his district got an extra million or two in community block development grants.

OK, it seems like sound advice. Or it used to be. But here's my contrarian update: Local is out. Tribal is in. And if tribal is the new basis of political and economic power in America, then we're going to have to change the way we do some things.

Why local was big
Local is important because no matter who you are, there's this big bunch of people who share many of your concerns and interests simply by accident of geography. It's the easiest bit of market analysis you can do.

There are other, more meaningful things that define us as groups, and companies spend lots of money learning those things so they can sell us more things. This information was valuable (and expensive) because in the old days we had no way of knowing what our neighbors liked or didn't like. And if people halfway across the country shared our exact set of values and passions, well great, but the odds of us finding those people was essentially nil.

Today, of course, we find those people. We are Bee Girl Nation, dispersed geographically but now frantically sorting ourselves out by interests and tastes and all sorts of ephemeral but essential traits and experiences. Locality may have been a cheap and more-or-less accurate way to create representative democracy and conduct marketing campaigns, but it's got nothing on our tribal identities in terms of intensity.

Why tribal power is different
In wholesale (mass media) politicking and sales, Job No. 1 is attracting attention without alienating people. Hence the averaged-out blandness. In local politicking, the job is winning a majority from a group with a shared geographic interest but diverse ideas about culture and class and justice. Hence the coded speech.

But when you are acting politically in a tribe, where the group is defined more by its narrow focus than by its broad generalities, you gain power by being authentic and helpful and sincere. In a group of friends, someone who acts like a TV pundit is a douchebag. You wouldn't vote for that person, and you're not going to let him represent your interests informally, either. Same thing with the player who says one thing to this person, another to that one, and so on. In a tribe, communication is one-to-one, horizontal and networked, which means word gets around that you're a phony.

This is frustrating to the old power brokers for one very obvious reason: Building power or brand-recognition person-to-person is EXPENSIVE. It's slow. And it's based on intermediaries you can't control.

What this might look like
What we call the LGBT "movement" has been a big deal in Democratic party politics for a long time. It's not one movement but several, and those groups don't really get along. Lesbians and gay men share the experience of being discriminated against and no much else. And the transgendered? A lot of "regular" gays didn't want them in the movement in the first place.

So the LGBT Movement is probably better understood as a set of cooperating tribes with a common interest in sexual equality. It's run by activists, because doing politics is hard work (try it some time). But as we continue this process of self-sorting into multiple categories, political participation will be only one of many ways we participate in our tribes. And since we can communicate personally with our tribal "leaders," we won't be satisfied with intermediaries.

Which means that "activist" will no longer be synonymous with "leader." Activists will perform roles in all tribes, but leadership will be about things beyond electoral politics. Leadership will be a function of personal relationships and culture, too. It will be about trust and integrity. We'll have leaders who've never won an election, yet they'll be the ones their like-minded tribespeople naturally turn to when they need perspective and insight.

In other words, imagine a culture in which political movements are comprised of cooperating tribes that have a persistent identity beyond the reach of their political activism. Not groups that claim to represent abstract interests, but the actual people who express those interests.

You can talk to them, but if you want their backing, you will have to listen. The good news -- the great news -- is that you can, if you wish, speak directly to the people. You don't have to talk to their political agents as proxies anymore. And that diminishes their power, while enhancing the organic power of trust that exists within any healthy tribe.

The new power brokers in America won't be activists and wealthy rainmakers, but millions of networked "influencers," leaders of tribes without names, scattered across the country. There is no directory of such people. They don't have titles. The only way to reach them will be to recognize them, and that requires getting to know a tribe from the inside.

We've had identity politics and interest groups. How will we adapt to politics that arise from groups that are not, by their focus or membership, overtly political?

#CHSTL DRAFT ORDER

2009-08-30T11:48:36-04:00

In case you wanna download and print this out before you come.

Download CHSTLdRAFT

A virtual new-media interview

2009-08-27T15:44:47-04:00

So I just finished my first live chat (for the American Society of Newspaper Editors, on the topic of new business models), and one thing I learned is that before a live chat, you're suppose to prepare some canned copy that you can paste in, so the guests don't sit there waiting while you type.

And since I was invited to this chat by the great Steve Buttry, he sent me a list of possible questions in an email earlier this week. I thought they were damn fine questions, too, and since I've already answered them in preparation for the chat (which only got around to a fraction of this material), I figured I'd reconstruct it here, as an interview, for as much of an audience as cares about it.

Joining hypothetical chat... -->

DC: Hi, I'm Dan Conover. I spent about 20 years in the newspaper business (reporter, city editor, web guy, cartoonist, videographer) before taking a buyout in 2008, and I've written quite a bit about 21st century journalism and online business models. The best way to understand my perspective is that I'm far enough removed from the daily grind that I no longer have a personal interest in the outcome, but I'd like to see what was good about journalism conserved across this Media Interregnum and translated into modern forms. And I'm generally appalled by the lack of curiosity and excitement that my profession has demonstrated in the face of this revolution.

SB: In your 2020 Vision: What's Next For News, you predicted that companies that build their news platforms on informatics-friendly systems “will grab the first sizable newsmedia profits from sources other than advertising and paid subscriptions.” Can you explain what you mean by that and how a company might grab those profits?

DC: I call that idea “The Informatics Scenario” and I went into some detail explaining it here . Basically, companies have to learn how to capture potentially valuable data in their standard newsgathering workflows. This means we'll need to update our word processing interfaces (check out the work E-Me Ventures is doing with Zemanta on this) so that they integrate data collection into newswriting. I suspect this will be a combination of automation and good database design/management.

The example in the post I just sited is how I might cover a fire if I were thinking semantically, and the answer is you include structured/semistructured information that doesn't appear in the “story” but would be useful to potential clients for fire-related data: insurance companies, lawyers, certain types of vendors. None of this changes the individual fire “stories” that reporters write (other than making sure the facts are solid), but it creates a new product that ISN'T generic.

One important thing I learned from blogging this idea is where people lose the thread. The biggest misunderstanding people have is that they think “Well, if the data is so valuable, then why are people giving it to us?” The insight is, the data isn't valuable, at all. The value exists entirely in the quality of the structure in which the data appears. Data without structure is just noise.

This is why newspaper archives aren't valuable as data today. Because archives are structured as collections of narrative stories, the cost of mining usable data from news archives typically exceeds the value of the resulting data set.

So the goal for news companies will be to understand what information is valuable to which industries and sectors, and then to integrate good data practices into their newsgathering. Ultimately, this should lead to some industry-wide data standards, perhaps a cooperative consortium or two.

SB: One of your most intriguing predictions in the 2020 vision was that: “News organizations will give away their human-readable documents and sell their datasets.” Can you discuss an example of a dataset news organizations have or could develop that have this kind of economic potential?

DC: The obvious example to me is that once you create the ultimate compilation of geo-tagged data sets for your neighborhood, you've got all sorts of products. So for starters, I could license my collection of map overlays to real estate companies that are showing MLS listings on their sites.You want paid content? Then start producing proprietary data-set mashups. They're unique. You can't “quote” from them. There's no fair-use issue. Go ahead – put up a paywall!

So if local Realtors are licensing my overlays, that's giving them a competitive advantage over sites that don't have my overlays. Think about that.

And meanwhile, I'm free to start developing my own products. Let's say I want to create a “community quality index” based on a publicly available algorithm that crunches different sets of numbers that I've structured, collected, etc.: crime rates, school test scores, price per square foot, etc. If I put that on my site and make that tool available to paid subscribers – let them pick and choose data to display, areas to compare, etc. -- then I can do that and sell ads on it. In fact, building unique mashups and user tools should be the engine that drives online news subscriptions in the future. Because they're USEFUL and UNIQUE and COOL. Why else would I pay to read free, generic narrative news and opinion? Give away the documents, sell the data.

SB: You forecast that news organizations might fund their operations “largely by getting paid for adding value to transactions on behalf of the buyer.” What did you mean by this? And can you discuss an example?

DC: So I'm not a golfer, but one of the things I noticed back in 2005 was that all the news execs at my company were useless in the afternoon because they were trying to find out if there were any discount tee-times available. So I thought, Well, there's a business: We build a site on our site that lets all the local golf courses offer real-time discounts to fill available tee-times. Hence, if I'm the starter at Joe's Golf Course and it's 3:15 and I've still got an open tee-time at 5:25, I log on to my free vendor account and type “Four-person 5:25 tee time at Joe's Golf Course, $25 per player, marked down from $50, first response takes it” and it pops up on the site. The first person to click on that link and enter credit card info reserves the tee time.

As the news company with the golf site, I added value for the seller (Joe's Golf Course got paid for a late available tee-time) and the buyer (someone got a discount for something they wanted). I didn't have to worry about pricing, selling accounts or any of that stuff. I simply take a percentage (say 15 percent) of the transaction, which goes directly into my account before the rest of the money gets sent on to Joe's Golf Course.

My company never went for this idea, although I've heard there's a web service like this now. How much better would it be if it were part of the news site that represented the No. 1 source for local information? I had similar proposals for real-time restaurant deals, etc.

How would you do this with car shopping? Or apartment rentals? Maybe you'd offer an online inventory service that allows shoppers to compare locally available items. I dunno. But in every case, you'd have to figure out where you can add value to the transaction and then let that insight guide how you get paid. One size does not fit all. You don't buy and pay for tee times like you buy and pay for cars. So you figure it out, case by case.

In any situation you imagine, both buyer and seller benefit when a deal is made. What's different in this model, however, is that instead of acting as the agent for the seller (advertiser) you're really acting as the buyer's agent, because you're providing commercial info that's vendor agnostic. You're not pitching for one seller, you're creating a free marketplace in which commercial information is available in useful ways. And if it's the best marketplace, then people will come there to do business... which means ... you can sell advertising on it, too.

Putting the seller at the heart of your business and then pretending that your company is acting on behalf of the buyer (our industry's status quo) is fundamentally hypocritical. Reversing that paradigm aligns our interests in a way that offers integrity and clarity.

SB: You cited 15 potential business models in the “known competitors” section of your 2020 vision. If you were running an established media organization trying to make the transition today, which of those would you pursue first and why?

DC: Honestly, it's just too late for a lot of these established news companies (think corporately owned mid-sized metros) to make the transition – particularly if they're carrying a heavy debt load based on their acquisitions policies. My advice to those guys is: negotiate the best terms you can and get out. Read Section I, Item 5.

But let's say you're a moderately leveraged media company with some brand value in your local metro market. Let's say you're losing money on your daily paper and that your web operation, even without a comprehensive P&L sheet, is really just breaking even. If that's you, try this plan:

Drop your AP membership
Cut back the number of days you publish a metro print edition:
Use that freed-up press capacity to create any niche pubs demanded by your market.
Get out of any business that you don't understand and don't do well. That could include getting out of the news business entirely (Section I, Item 5, again)
Shift your daily focus to Item No. 2: Web-only news sites. This is your new core product. Adjust your P&Ls accordingly, and put your energies into making this subset profitable.
Your print editions, which are no longer dailies, now become a subset of your news org's products. They cost whatever they cost to produce and distribute, but your editorial costs consist of hiring some decent page designers and rewrite editors. Think of the print edition as a form of premium content (Item No. 3) If you can make them profitable, keep them. If not, drop them.
Add premium content (Item No. 3) ONLY in those instances where what you produce it is UNIQUE, USEFUL and COOL (cool as in: It addresses a topic where people want to be).. Immediately turn your website into the best intelligent aggregation (Item No. 15) of all news in your market. Include commercial information, too.
Begin exploring sponsorships and micro-sponsorships (Item 8) for specific aspects of your operation/products. General “support our brand” sponsorships for legacy media don't make sense. And be prepared to give something of value back. This isn't a magic bullet – it's a spot on a buffet line.
Begin aggressively developing every possible opportunity for providing shared infrastructure (Item No. 5, a.k.a. “content enabling”), even if you're providing it to your “competitors.” This could include something like providing the shared editing and printing resources to turn a local conservative news site into a printed publication, or, in the case of Charleston, spinning out a news staff that serves a liberal-to-moderate audience. Stop pretending to be all things to all people, even if that means accepting slim margins. Those old fat margins are never coming back anyway. Sharing infrastructure makes slim margins more attractive.
If you've divided up your publication into more targeted products, then immediately pursue Item No. 10: Interest-funded journalism. Do you have a conservative product? Get the Heritage Foundation to fund three in-depth investigative projects this year. Got a liberal product? Let Greenpeace fund a series on water quality. Be transparent about all these arrangements and show your work.
Approach every for-profit sports team in your market (yes, that includes “revenue” college sports) and begin discussions about direct subsidy programs (Item 12). The pro- and semi-pro teams in your market depend on your sports section as part of their business. So why not be in business together?
Start making plans for value-added transactional products (not listed here) and developing your own Informatics Scenario. And once you've got that in the works – but not until – start talking about Item No. 13: Premium accounts. To sell a premium you must offer a premium

SB: You said that, “Sites that develop intelligent ways of curating old information could play a big role in the presentation of breaking news information.” Can you give us an example of a recent breaking news story where curation of archived information could provide current value?

DC: Well, the most glaring example is health care. The press is covering this story as if it were a series of Jerry Springer showdowns at town hall meetings. Which is just shameful. Every news organization that claims to cover health care reform seriously should have a carefully edited, constantly upgraded page that links out to everything we know about health care in America, health care elsewhere, previous efforts at reform, current proposals, critiques and compromises, etc. And I'm not talking about a link dump here: You'll have to build the topic infrastructure with lots of summary and explainers, and the idea is that you can link down to definitive statements about every topic, with links out to source material.

I'll bet if you did a really great job on that, you could sell your curated explainer web pages to other organizations, too.

Health care reform isn't really a breaking story. And if all you offer readers is a selection of links to old stories, that's just inexcusable. That's treating this huge issue in American life like the plot of the movie Groundhog Day.

SB: You’ve been out of the newsroom for a year now. From that distance, what do you see as the major cultural obstacles that newsroom leaders need to address to prepare their organizations for successful innovation?

DC: In most cases, the newsroom leaders are the cultural obstacle. They don't like to hear that, but it's true.

This is why I feel like a Bond villain sometimes when I talk about newspapers: “Innovate? I don't expect you to innovate, Mr. Newsroom Leader. I expect you to DIE!”

And I'd like to be wrong about this, but today's newsrooms aren't focused on doing good work or innovating – they're focused on not getting fired. I'm sure there are exceptions, but this is the new rule.

Newspaper employees need to understand this: Reporters and editors used to be the people that other people wanted to invite to their parties because we knew stuff and told the best stories. Nobody wants to invite us to parties anymore, and I think that's because we're a bunch of bitter, know-it-all jerks whose only discernible message in the 21st century is “GET OFF OUR LAWN.” If people don't want to talk to you, why would they want to read you?”

So my biggest piece of advice is, stop being such unpleasant, unhappy human beings. Start with that.