The thing that bothers me most is this notion that free news is a new idea. That “free” is some kind of techno-utopian plot hatched by Stewart Brand and put into action by Google’s evil don’t be evil plan. Equally idiotic is the contention that economic pressure (or just plain greedy human nature) has pushed the newspaper reader into the unholy practice of seeking the free while publishers (helpless under the glamouring of their readers) just could not resist compliance. This kind of horse shit completely ignores the real reason why most papers gave the news away for free to begin with – they never valued it is a salable item.

In fact the greatest proof that the implosion of the newspaper industry has nothing to do with “Free” as a business model is the fact that newspaper indsutry is perhaps the one place that the “Free” model has traditionally worked quite well. Free newspapers are fairly commonplace in most cities and have been for a long, long time. Newspapers didn’t just start giving away content with the rise of the internet – it’s been the fiber of the industry’s model almost since its inception. Give the news away and sell ads around it. Selling content itself? That’s what book publishers do.

No, the industry’s troubles have much more to do with the sort of things that are bringing down the US auto and finance industries – two industries that sure as shit never gave anything away. The newspaper industry was undone by the shifting sands of the culture on which it was built. News organizations became too big, too bloated, too concerned with creating shareholder value, too invested in runaway executive compensation, too disconnected from the communities and people they served. This collapse is the result of a disconnect, of unchecked and unrealistic growth. Macroeconomic asteroids taking out dinosaur organizations.

The bottom line in this whole mess is that the owners of most newspapers fell asleep. As the world continued to spin, life continued to evolve, and technology continued to advance, the hero of our story – Newspaperman – feel into a deep, ad revenue induced sleep. It was a pleasant dream filled drunken fairy tale of a slumber – the kind you never want to end.

Yet it always does…

[wavy dream transition effect would go here if this were video]

Scene One – The Awakening

Perhaps it was the feeling of hunger or the sound of a closing door or muffled laughter, but Newspaperman is waking up now. He’s stretches his arms, scratches his overfed belly (as it gurgles), opens his mouth wide and yawns. As he slowly rises into a sleepy stumble toward the bathroom he stops in front of the mirror. It takes him a second but as he starts to focus he sees it. One eyebrow – while he was asleep some joker shaved one of his eyebrows.

Newspaperman is pissed. He looks around the room and finds the first laughing face – his old friend Reader (who, for some reason, still sees Newspaperman as relevant, and stayed with him to make sure he didn’t choke on his own vomit) – and starts to blame him.

“It had to be you – you’re the only one hear – you’re laughing” Newspaperman bellows.

“No way” says Reader “it was Advertising.”

“What?”

Reader stood in the corner holding back a laugh. “Yeah – he shaved that shit and left the room – said something about not needing you – he has his blog and a Twitter account. And then ditched.”

“And you didn’t stop him?”

“Have you seen the size of that guy? He does what he wants.”

Newspaperman looked puzzled – flustered – as he leaned into the mirror feeling the smooth skin where his eyebrow used to be. “Well… if I ever see that guy again he’s going to get his. As for you – get the hell out of my room and don’t come back until you’re willing to make up for this – I demand compensation.”

Reader shrugged his shoulders and left. Out in the street he ran into some of his friends. They all had a bit of a laugh over Newspaperman’s tough morning and then forgot all about it as they got into talking about what was happening in Iran.

[end of the dream]

In reading the post in question I was struck by how some print minded folks apparently need to be “spoon-fed” their news. It just seems to me that the comfort of print isn’t so much about the ink on paper as it is about the limitation the format provides.

When I read about people taking perfectly good digital information and pushing it through the network right down to the last mile only to have it ossified in print it makes me wonder – do these people have no interest in feeding themselves? Is their need for authority, for editorial oversight, for somebody else’s fixed point of view, so all consuming that they would so willingly give up their right and ability to receive their information in a flexible, checkable, questionable, repairable, living, breathing digital format?

The more I thought on these questions the more the phrase “spoon-fed” stood out – it made me think of my one year old. And then I realized – that’s were we’ve been. In the twentieth century news and media model we were all infants, happily eating up whatever mamma (the press) fed to us. We didn’t care – we didn’t know any better. Strained peas was all we knew.

Now – here in the information age – we’re reaching a point were most of us are like my four year old. We have an idea of what we like. We still feel compelled to listen to mamma and eat our veggies from time to time, but for the most part we can decide what to eat and we can – again, for the most part – feed ourselves.

Before long there will come a time when mamma’s not around – or at least not so around. In our college years we feast on a pleasing yet fundamentally unhealthy diet of beer, fast food, beer, pizza, beer, and maybe – from time to time – some weed. That’s fun, but when the shit really hits the fan we still head home to momma for Thanksgiving turkey.

At some point almost everyone graduates – almost everyone will reach that post college world where we maybe have a little bit of money and a slight idea that there’s more to food that just Cheetos. We start to seek out new tastes, exotic flavors, wild aromas. We may even start to dabble with cooking some of our own meals.

At first there are mistakes… fires even. Yet slowly we learn to cook. We learn techniques, we experiment with spices, we may even grow our food. We become self-sustaining.

Perhaps not everyone’s food journey goes like that – and there is no reason why we should think that everyone’s informational consumption will either. Still, if this sloppy analogy has given any clarity at all to the way I view what’s happening in the media space, it’s this: we are evolving… we are growing up and away from mamma.

Somewhere along the way I lost that. Somewhere along the way life became economic. Somewhere along the way the mundane and profitable insinuated itself into my everyday experience. Somewhere along the way pragmatic sense became the currency of my thought.

It must have been natural, organic, painless. I didn’t feel it. I didn’t notice any shift, any change. There is no regret, no lament, no emptiness. There is only a continuing curiosity. An approach. A way of seeing.

It comes, when it comes at all, in waves. An occasional need to be cryptic. A fleeting objective correlation. A sense of something outside everyday speech. It comes, always, as a riff.

It comes most often as music, in music.

It comes as a simple thought:

This band makes me want to write poetry again.

Money quote: “But top-heavy, poorly run, arrogant-to-the-bitter-end media companies? This is their crisis, not our crisis, and it certainly isn’t about journalism.”

Bingo. This is an economic paradigm shift in which over sized corporations of all stripes are failing – it’s not just media, it’s finance, it’s auto, it’s agriculture, it’s any industry that has extracted value from a 20th century technology set that allowed (and to some extent encouraged) oligarchies to form and prosper.

What we are witnessing is the slow, painful death of the corporate paradigm. 21st century technologies are atomizing and distributing and empowering at the individual level.

Multinational monster banks are dying – peer to peer micro lending and local currency exchange is growing. Centralized auto manufacturing is dying – a better place and useful mass transit is coming. Factory farms are creating viruses and nutritionally bankrupt foodstuffs – backyard victory gardens and local farmers markets are restoring health.

And, thankfully, Newspapers are dying – Newsgroups are forming.

It seems to me that Professor Clemons’ detractors are primarily coming at this from a post web, late digital perspective. They don’t seem to have the broader experience with advertising in traditional media that might give them a fuller understanding of display’s ability to generate extraordinary, mansion building, yacht buying revenue for publishers. Or perhaps they are so vested in the display model that they have a difficult time in admitting that it’s failing. Either way there is a frightening amount of blindness (either unconscious or willful) to the plummeting value of traditional display advertising.

The main point of the Clemons piece – that the Internet is neutralizing the ability of traditional advertising methods to control brand message (thereby destroying its real value – leading to its failure) – is a valid point that is easily supported by simple, economic fact. Opponents of this thesis need only take a good, long, careful look at the situation in which print media now finds itself.

Ad dollars are draining from magazines and newspapers – you would have to be deaf, dumb, and blind to not have come across the “print is dead” meme. The accepted reasons why are simple. Money spent on the internet provides more in terms of ROI, analytics, and measured response (it’s easy for brands to see their ad budget at work) – AND – the web lets brands capitalize on purchase intention by displaying advertising messages directly to consumer’s in active search mode.

Still, to maintain that this shift is not an indication of the declining value of display (print’s only form of advertising) – to attribute this exodus solely to money finding better, more efficient media – is to commit an act of horribly simplistic and dangerously superficial analysis. In fact it’s an analysis that would seem to refute the “print is dead” meme entirely (a particular problem for those who are arguing both that print is dead AND a display based model can work on the Internet).

If advertising in it’s traditional format (display) is alive and well then these magazines and newspapers should be able to transition to digital formats without missing a beat. They haven’t – they can’t. There is just no way to sustain their traditional business on the stunted margins the web generates – ask any print publisher.

That depletion of digital ad revenue compared to its print counterpart is easily chalked up to greatly expanded competition and a glut of available inventory pushing prices down. In short – supply overpowering demand leading to a devaluation of traditional display based advertising.

Now, I ask those of you who find Professor Clemons’ piece to be something short of wise – doesn’t the fact that the price of display is in free-fall indicate that display advertising is in crisis? Isn’t this crisis fairly described as the failing of traditional display advertising – the failing of advertising as it was originally conceived? As the price of display based advertising falls isn’t the resulting influx of budget conscious, mom and pop ad content going to muddle the signal to noise ratio progressively limiting display’s effectiveness and further driving down price? Doesn’t that scenario indicate a potential death spiral for display?

I think the emerging trend of premium brands moving an increasingly significant percentage of spend away from display and banners and into more considered campaigns – campaigns that realize the value of trust – begins to answer those questions. Premium brands know they have to go beyond talking at their customers and start talking with them – the web demands it and publishers who can deliver that type of innovative program will thrive.

Certainly display based advertising is not dead yet. In fact it could live on forever in some crippled way. Print display will continue to be a small piece of the puzzle and outfits like TechCrunch can and will make a go of it – for now – because they entered the fray at a certain price point. To them – and most other web native publishers – the value of display based advertising isn’t a problem. They’ve built their business around that price – their operations are tailored to it.

Still, with inventory growing exponentially and effectiveness being diluted by the network chatter, it’s a pretty good bet that the value of display continues to crash. With this in mind any publisher relying on display advertising revenue for their continued existence should be actively – fervently – looking for other avenues of growth.

To the extent that they’re not is attributable to their relative youth. TechCrunch and other web first publishers are young enough to not feel the free-fall – they don’t have the perspective of more mature ventures. They toil away on the net – their own digital Flatland - feeling safe and sound and shrugging off the possibility that this outlandish notion of some inky Spaceland holds any significance for their world.

———————————–
UPDATE 3/23/09 @ 12:22pm: For a more statistical analysis of what I’ve written above see this AdAge piece by Bob Garfield – miraculously published just one day after my rant and Professor Clemons’ TechCrunch post.

In this piece in the New York Times today Nicholas Kristof reaches into the newspaperman defense kit and pulls out the old “Daily Me” theme. Perhaps you have heard of it? It’s the absurd notion that all of this choice – all of these blogs and forums and opinions flowing through the wire – all of this conversation and reading and thinking that’s going on out there on the interweb – is actually going to make us more likely to have unconsidered opinions. Strange, I know.

To back up this position Kristof cites a number of books and some statistics that show how we are becoming a more polarized and divisive nation. We are clinging to our party – our political affiliation with an unprecedented zeal. This much is obvious. What’s not quite as obvious – at least to anyone with half an interest in thinking – is what is causing that.

Ask the newspaper folks – the ones who would rather cry about how things are changing than try to understand and work with that change – and they’ll tell you straight away – it’s the Internet (and you – the implicit point in this argument is that you’re just not qualified to formulate your own opinion – you need a professional editor to tell you what’s important – to not let you go off the rails into some unauthorized, dangerous thinking).

Yet, if we stop and think about this we begin to see a different picture. If we stop and really look at political coverage over the last several decades – especially since the advent of CNN and 24 hour news – we see that it is traditional media that has stoked and fueled this NFL style competitive atmosphere. With their red and blue maps the old school media elite have entrenched the two party system deep into the collective consciousness – old school media has simplified debate, banished nuance, and developed the sound bite to the point that the idea of a viable third party is now looked at as something of a joke. In the interest of profit old school media – the television/newspaper cabal – have poisoned political discourse in this country.

Really, the more I think about it, the more I think it’s columns like this one by Kristof that are killing newspapers. It’s just so detached from reality, so lost in it’s own narrative that it is simultaneously sad and enraging. Sad because this is people’s (journalists) livelihoods we’re talking about here – and enraged because we have let people who think this way manipulate our every thought for so long – too long.

———————————————-

Want to hear some people talk about the media intelligently?

Without a doubt it could be a part of where we end up, but the system as outlined in Wikert’s post suffers from the fatal flaw that almost all these new models – for both newspapers and magazines – suffer from. It’s an editorially driven solution.

To his credit Wikert does at least realize that a model that doesn’t address advertising is a bankrupt model (I’m just talking about traditional consumer space here – I realize other models can and will do without ad revenue – but that’s another post) and he does his best to shoehorn an ad based revenue stream into his – but it’s still the underperforming CPM display model that is the foundation of the traditional consumer magazine. If there is one thing that is fairly clear at this point in the game it’s that the explosion of competition and the abundance of inventory in the digital space has killed display advertising as a primary revenue generator. Display will never be as profitable in the digital space as it is/was in print.

Ultimately any new digital model for consumer based, ad supported magazines is going to have to rethink the development of ad revenue. The days of selling space are quickly disappearing – sales has to pick up its game. Publishers need to retool their operations so that they can position themselves as solutions providers. Advertisers are now clients – full page ads are now full fledged campaigns.

This new tack is going to require some rather intense restructuring as clients will now require more than just a sales contact. Account support will need to be enhanced, creative teams will need to be built, production and design will need to be re-imagined. This is not your father’s magazine workflow.

It it sounds like what I’m describing is an advertising agency – you’re hearing me right. This model will be a shot across the agency bow. It’s a necessary shot though. In a networked, digital world the supply chain is compressed – once important links in that chain are displaced by automation and digital convenience. We’ve seen it happen time and again over the last two decades – prepress houses, color shops, paste-up and stat camera operators have all faced a change or die proposition over that time. Now that compression is affecting the creative link in the chain.

The good news for publishers is that we occupy the most important part of the chain – we provide the emotional and creative link to the consumer. It’s going to be a lot easier for us to build our workflow backwards to service the client in agency fashion than it will be for the agency to build their workflow forward and forge a trusted, editorial relationship with our readers.

Inevitably there will have to be something of a confluence of agency and publication talent – perhaps (in extreme cases) even formal mergers of publishing and agency houses. The smart and the lucky will be able to navigate this change and we should see a lot of familiar titles (brands if you want to go there) preserved in the process.

Anyway, I’ve gone on a bit longer than I anticipated here and what I’ve dumped above is pretty tightly packed – so I’m just going to back away from the keyboard, get a cup of coffee, and let this marinate – please don’t hesitate to add your thoughts – this cake ain’t baked yet.

Here’s a bit of free advice for the seasoned editorial minds out there – put down the beer, cancel the pizza, and take a good long look at yourself. You’ve been living like a drunk, spoiled college kid and I’m here to play Dean Wormer for a spell. You’ve had a fun time – great parties, maybe learned a thing here and there – but now it’s time to graduate – a seventh year senior is not fun – it’s just pathetic.

What am I getting at? Your relentless drive to discredit and demonize the Freshman: the blogs. Not only is it mean spirited it just demeans you. You’re better than that. Sure it’s fun and easy to pick on them – they’re awkward, they make mistakes, they can’t get girls – but you were there once yourself. And guess what? At the rate you’re going – and with the kind of smarts these new kids have – you’ll be working for them in a few short years.

Not sure what I mean? Let me give you some examples…

From the MPA’s recent 24/7 conference we get this inane comment from Rodale EVP MaryAnn Bekkedahl: “The 23-year-old on an iMac in the café—people are beginning to realize that isn’t great content. He doesn’t have the experience.” 

Here we see – once we get around the fact that the iMac (though lightweight and compact) is probably not being used all that much by the cafe crowd – a speaker so consumed with contempt for the young, tech savvy though unauthorized content creator it’s comical if not worriesome.   Forget the fact that T.S. Eliot wrote “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” at the age of 22 or that The Beatles essentially changed the face of modern music before they even turned 24 – Ms. Bekkedahl wants you to believe that you need to have a good number of years in at nice, corporate, sanctioned environment before you can start to do compelling work.

Then there is this little dig delivered at American Business Media’s Digital Velocity conference by Christian Science Monitor editor John Yemma: “The old watchdog function of the news media is being fundamentally challenged now … I hope this can be done by bloggers, but I’m not sure it can be.”  Subtle… just a touch of the “bloggers can’t be trusted” vibe, a little slice of red meat thrown to the print lords – enough to keep the talking point alive.

Then of course you have the stats, the studies, the surveys, that keep telling us that Joe America doesn’t trust a blogger as far as he can throw him. Take this survey by the Rosen Group – a PR firm that caters to a bevy of print media concerns (I won’t even bother going into the implications of that – you can draw your own conclusions).  It tells us – among other things – that 60% of those surveyed believe information on blogs is not credible.   Surveys like this are a vicous circle – they are massaged to validate the egos of old media editors – who then trumpet the “findings” in their crusade against blogs – which leads to a reinforced perception among their readership that blogs can’t be trusted – which leads to another round of surveys with the same kind of results.  You can see the outcome of this process clearly in posts like this one:  If you ignore the blahblah-o-sphere, Print is doing fine. [editorial note: including this link here is a bit misleading - Michael Josefowicz is not an editor but rather a print-think guy with some good ideas on print's role in the future. However - I couldn't pass on that headline - the blahblah-o-sphere? too illustrative.]

Once all this inflammatory rhetoric is good and baked into the minds of the industry it’s just a stone’s throw to the echo chamber. Witness, my friends, this masterful piece of blog bashing by the Canadian magazine about magazines Masthead (which no longer prints by the way – wake up Masthead – you’re a blog now).

With the glut of media options available to today’s consumer, what makes magazines special? In a guest column for MastheadOnline, freelance editor and writer Allan Britnell proposes that the not-so-heralded practice of fact-checking is what sets our medium apart from the not-so-trustworthy world of blogs, Twitter feeds, even newspapers and books. So why, Britnell asks, hasn’t the industry put more effort into spreading the word about checking the facts?

Here’s my initial comment on that post:

Interesting idea – a campaign to point out how painfully inefficient print media is while simultaneously demonstrating how utterly clueless the industry is to the nature of networked communication. That magazines need a “fact checker” is an extension of the print medium’s most troubling qualities – stagnancy, rigidity, inflexibility, permanence. These are the things that are pushing people away from print and toward living digital information. You see, on the internet fact checking is done – and remarkably well – by a cadre of experts, aficionados, enthusiasts, and other interested parties – in realtime. If something is wrong – it is immediately corrected. Links to factual information and supporting arguments are only a click away. The ecology of the web makes it by and large a much better tool for finding fact and truth than print ever could be. Don’t get me wrong – print has it’s advantages (mostly aesthetic) over digital media – however, being an effective tool for quickly finding and distributing and correcting factual information (or any information) just isn’t one of them. Our industry needs to learn that belittling the work of new, digitally based competitors is simply not a way forward. When we try to separate ourselves – position ourselves as the only keepers of quality content – we only succeed at looking self absorbed. There is a lot of quality work being done on the internet – on blogs (gasp!) – and we need to recognize and respect that.

And that my friends, brings me around to my ultimate point here: we (and I am speaking as a payed member of the print establishment here) are doing ourselves a dis-service when we dis blogs. It’s wrongheaded, shortsighted, counterproductive and self destructive. Certainly there is a lot of bogus information on the web – but there is also a lot of bogus information in print – at least the web has built in tools that effectively help the reader separate the wheat from the chaff. The web makes us better, more active readers and that is something editors of all stripes should be celebrating. Rather than engaging in smear campaigns we should be studying the things that blogs (well run blogs with editorial process and ethics in place) are doing to push the editorial skillset forward.

So let’s all of us, please, grow up, graduate, and hug a Freshman. After all – in this economy – there could come a day when you find yourself on the other end of that smear – you may just have to go back to school – you may just end up a blogger.

Traditional cyclical downturns are weathered. The basic structure and principles that guided the economy at the outset of the recession are primarily preserved at the end of it. If you had enough cash to ride out the storm you would most certainly live to fight another day.

This time around things are different. There are undercurrents and shifts in the very nature of the economy that make it unlikely that this storm can simply be waited out. Institutions that grew strong on the centralized, master-servant, control oriented industrial model are being destroyed by a rapid shift to a decentralized, networked, peer oriented social technology model. We are speedily moving away from an economy dominated by a small group of big companies to one dominated by a big group of small companies.

The problem with this is that public policy isn’t working with the natural flow of things. Plans, programs, and policies are being written as attempts to preserve the dying model. Ultimately this will make the transition much rougher than it needs to be. It is this response – this urge to preserve the old order – that will most quickly lead to a more socialistic phase. As unemployment skyrockets and old model firms fail the government will have no choice but to provide emergency support to the millions not yet over their institutional dependency.

There is no doubt that the friction of fundamentally different ages grinding against each other is going to be painful no matter what route we take. And in the end, only time will tell how this all turns out – but if public policy can shift to an emphasis on helping individuals take advantage of the new rules – shift to policy that makes it easier for them to create the new small business economy – shift away from the emphasis on keeping corporate yachts afloat – then we might just yet see a better day.

UPDATE/BONUS LINK: Jeff Jarvis has a good, detailed post at his blog. The Great Restructuring was also linked to from Stowe’s post, but it’s good enough (even if he does over-plug his book) that I wanted to call your attention to it once more.