Category Archives: ecosystemics

Twins separated at birth both fail as bloggers

tn_outing.jpg  Steve Outing & Scott Adams tn_scott-adams-1.jpg

Okay, they’re not  really twins. Outing is a citizen media guru. Adams draws the Dilbert cartoon. But their failures reveal a flaw in the DNA of the Web – it sucks as a money-making medium for content publishers. So what is it good for?

I woke this morning with a song in my head. Do you remember “War,” the 1970 Motown tune? With that in mind, I say:

Blogs! (pause) Huh?  (pause) Yeah!

What are they good for?

Absolutely nuthin!

As a reader and writer of blogs I often feel that way, especially this morning as I consider two recent declarations of failure by bloggers far more accomplished than me. Steve Outing is a newspaper guy turned new media commentator. He recently shut down a network of citizen journalism sites, the Enthusiast Group, devoted to biking, hiking and other outdoor activities. Outing, who had tried to construct his startup around user-generated content, found he couldn’t get enough good content to draw a large enough audience to win the ad sales he needed. His Editor & Publisher column, An Important Lesson About Grassroots Media, is a thoughtful and instructive warning to avoid the pitfalls that he discovered. 

Scott Adams. creator of the Dilbert strip, has blogged more or less daily for the last two years. But just before Thanksgiving he told readers he would be writing less frequently. Why? Because daily blogging had produced trivial ad income and, worse, he occasionally irritated blog readers who took their revenge by boycotting the Dilbert strip that pays his bills. Adams concluded his posting titled, “Going Forward,” with this quip:

“It’s hard to tell the family I can’t spend time with them because I need to create free content on the Internet that will lower our income.”

I don’t dare show that remark to my family because they feel the same way. When my teenaged sons say, “Dad, are you blogging,” what they really mean is, “Dad, are you still stupidly wasting your time?”

I don’t have a great answer for them yet I continue to blog. Why?

Because I do not expect to make money. What I expect from my blogging is to “meet” like-minded people with whom I will later collaborate on projects that none of us can yet imagine. It’s about organizing, stupid! It could be an information bank set up after the tsunami in Indonesia a few years ago, or the similar efforts that arose around Katrina. Or it could be the come-from-nowhere presidential campaign of Ron Paul (read about it).

These are ad hoc efforts and that is the only useful thing about blogs — and here I use blogs as a proxy for Web media in general. Web media and blogs are eclectic, edgy, entertaining, sometimes information and useful, sometimes even important — although the imporatance of any bit of commuication is measured by its value to the recipient and  not by some empirical measure such as weight or volume.

For the most part, however, blogs and the Web are distractions. They are a 24×7 pipeline to much of the accumulated wisdom, folly and drama of human kind. But how does the continual access to all of that . . . . content . . . help us get through our day? The fact is, it doesn’t. It is a distraction, not an assist. And though as a content creator it pains me to say this, I think Web content is properly valued at net to nothing because it is not terribly helpful to me or anyone else except on those rare instances when you or I really need  to find something. That is why a company like Gargle is worth a zillion dollars a share — and few other publishers are making any money at all.  Because investors have discerned that the Web – and its subset, the blogosphere — is simply one global shoe box filled with all sort of stuff that can so only found through a search. The rest of the time, we’d better stay away from this time-wasting sinkhole lest we fall into it and never be found again.

Errata: Thanks to my blog buddy Charlotte (ArtBlossom) Yee for pointing me to the Scott Adams posting. And if I could entice you to waste a bit more time, the Wikipedia entry on the War song is a cute, quick parable of one of the great protest songs of our time.

Citizen Journalism Toolkit Coming? Plus wi-fi tip

tn_toolkit.jpg What would such a toolkit contain?

My friend and occasional collaborator, Tim Bishop, spotted a reference to a forthcoming journalism toolkit that sounds, at least, like a project that he and I had proposed about a year ago in the first Knight 21st Century News Challenge. We didn’t get the grant, however, and left the idea undone.

So now I’m anxious and excited to see what comes out of this effort by the Tactical Technology Collective in the United Kingdom. The TTC appears to have an international focus and its current toolkits are for such things as “NGO in a box” to use the European term for what Americans call non-profits. The group describes several current and planned toolkits including one for citizen journalism that it offered for free, open source use.  

Tim passed on the link without comment but I’m willing to wager a month’s blog income that he grinned when he saw the British group’s terminology, “NGO-in-a-box.” We had called our unfunded and unfinished idea “Journalism in a Box” which we thought was awfully clever. So obviously these Brits must be both clever and better organized than were we.

I’ll try to get on TTC’s dissemination list and help spread the kit when it debuts. I’m anxious for whatever technical help it may provide and willing to use and, if possible, toss any improvements back into the “box” for others to use.

* * *

My distant collaborator, Deep Cuz, who had been a traveling salesman until he moved back into over-the-counter sales, recently passed on this tip about how to use a site called Wigle.net to find wireless hotspots on the road:

“The best site I know of to do that is the Wireless Geographic Logging Engine (WiGLE). At that site, you can use a free, map-based search that lets you drill down into cities, sort of like GoogleMaps does. If you sign up for an account, you can use their more-powerful search engine. The search engine lets you specify an address near where you’re headed, a state, a ZIP code, latitude and longitude, and a variety of other information to help you find the type of hotspot you’re looking for. Head to WiGLE and check it out!”

Is news outsourcing its future to search?

 Are newsies outsourcing their ad sales to search engines?

Most journalists are oblivious to, perhaps even dismissive of advertising. To some extent this is an ethical necessisty in that news judgment should not be influenced by whether it will help or hurt advertisers or other commercial interests. That is the ideal. In the real world every journalist knows that there are industries, housing developments, malls and all sorts of pet projects that news outlets support with favorable coverage and, in the case of newspapers, with positive editorials. And there’s no harm in this so long as the boosterism is kept within acceptable bounds.

Nevertheless journalism has a palpable disdain for ad sales. I’ve always considered that a childish attitude, as if the hard-bitten newsie were like Paris Hilton, a trust-fund baby who never worry about tawdry details such as ad lineage, cash flow or profit — largely because there used to be so much of the latter as to keep journalism living in the manner to which it had become accustomed.

Those days are gone. We’ve already seen some wave of newsroom layoffs and I fear they are not the last. Earlier this week newspaper industry analyst Ken Doctor with the market research firm Outsell forecast that news as a content category will experience  “a negative combined annual growth rate of 2.9 percent from 2007-2010” and went on to say:

“Publishers have hoped that online growth would make up for what is now seen as inevitable print losses. But with about one in ten News revenue dollars earned online and publishers so far unable to increase their share of that increasing online ad pie, these hopes are dimming . . . The industry is now facing life-and-death struggle.”

Outsell went on to say that in addition to job cuts and other economies, “More than 400 U.S. titles have joined the Yahoo! news consortium, in hopes of ramping revenues and gaining new readers.”

But today Paid Content points to an analysis of the Yahoo deal by Reuters that takes a dim view of the deal. Here is the Reuters link.  I’ll let the article speak for itself on the particulars. Paid Content contrasted Reuters’ dim view of the deal to the rosy forecast issued some days earlier by

On principle I think it is beyond brain dead for the news industry to outsource its ad sales whether to Yahoo or to any other entity. Selling must be a core competency of the news industry or it is toast. And yet I understand that as a practical matter even the biggest news corporations cannot field as many ad solicitors as the search engine aggregators. And from the point of view of the national ad buyers, it is a convenience to deal with a fewer number of ad calls. Big buyers — movie studios, car companies, consumer products giants, electronics vendors, etcetera — can get their ads placed with less effort by funneling them through, say, a Yahoo, than dealing with those 400 separate newspapers. But the newspapers must eventually get what my dad used to call the poop end of the stick. (Dad actually used strong language but I’m trying to clean up mine.)

Meanwhile, for weeks now a related tidbit, that originated with the online tracking firm Hitwise has been rattling around my inbox. Hitwise wrote:

“Search engines, especially Google, are responsible for more News and Media category website traffic than ever before, according to the report. Print News websites received 29.7 percent more traffic from Google in March 2007 than in March 2006, and Broadcast Media sites received 35.9 percent more traffic from Google in the same time period.” (Thanks to my occasional Floridian contributor, Der Cuz, for spotting this.)

OK, let’s do a quck recap. News entrusting online ad growth to Yahoo, and audience building to the search engines in general. Hmnnn. What does that leave as the core contribuition of news — bad attitude and sarcasm? Why does that not strike me as a sustainable business model?

The powers that be . . . or used to be?

 Burmese protesters, left, get shot, Danes, right, get tear-gassed. Big difference.

A few weeks ago world attention was briefly fixed on Burma, or Myanmar as it called by the military brutes who shot uncounted numbers of protestors demanding a glimmer of freedom. Last week, young Danes tried to occupy a building in Copenhagen that they wanted to turn into a youth center. Police who used tear gas and other means to disperse a protest that seems to have run the gamut from peaceful march to burning pranks. 

In a moment I’ll pass on some tips about technology the Danes are using to get attention. But first let’s remember that the powers of protest only exists where there is the rule of law. Otherwise the authorities shoot you, as they did the Burmese, and they turn off the pictures, and fickle world attention moves elsewhere. We in the West, whose freedoms were won by people long since dead, have a special responsibility now to figure out how to use these new media and web technologies to turn the powers that be into the powers that used to be.

With that in mind Poytner Institute commentator and Danish broadcast journalist Ernst Poulsen notes how the young protestors in Copenhagen used Google Maps and cell phone text message logs to document police actions. Poulsen writes: 

“This combination of simple “moblogging” (mobile blogging) tools and map-tools allows participants to tell their side of the story unfiltered.”

Poulsen goes on to suggest that journalists covering such protests also need mobile technology and wireless Internet access to be able to cover such events. Absolutely! In fact I had an experience recently, in my day job as an ill-tempered reporter for a middling metropolitan daily, where I wished I’d had my own wireless service (perhaps EDVO) because I had to leave the event to file stories and was unable to blog from the scene. This would be a new expense but without an independent means to upload information the reporter might just as well have pulled a Jayson Blair and “covered” the story from home.

Indeed, whether you’re a protestor looking for attention or a journalist looking to cover an event, exciting new tools exist to better connect the roving reporter to his or her production bureaucrary, which is how I have come to think of the newsroom. Here’s a mass media conundrum.  We need to do more field reporting to retain or regain credibility with our audiences, to give them the action and the verite that will keep them subscribing or clicking or doing whatever it is they do to pay our bills. But every time I leave the newsroom I am cut off from the decision-makers. Were I to witness Jesus Christ leading a host of angels across the San Francisco Bay Bridge I would have a devil of a time contacting an editor, as they seem to spend most of their time lubricating the production machinery rather than nurturing ideas, and even if I did find one editor to listen, it sometimes takes a gaggle of them to get anything done, so the poor editor who takes the reporter’s call from the field — and isn’t usually a call — still faces the task of rounding up the critical mass of editors needed to push the sausage through the grinder. 

Is there a technological fix for this disconnect? Of course. Another  Poynter Institute commentary noted how Twitter, a social networking tool, was being used by newspapers such as the Orlando Sentinel, which used this tool to post updates to a pair of space shuttle launches over the summer. (My friend, former San Francisco Chronicle reporter Dan Fost wrote an article about Twitter with enough of the how-to so as to help you make sense of it if you are not familiar with the technology.)

One last thought for protestors and newsies alike. Think of technologies in combination to create capabilities that never before existed. For instance one weekend I happened to chance upon a group of guys who were flying remotely-controlled model airplanes. Apparently it is now within the reach of the ordinary person to put a small model plane or helicopter into the air and to control it from the ground. (See this Wikipedia article for more on that.) The models I saw were small, and the guys who were flying them said they could carry a few pounds into the air. My initial concern was that a remote plane, loaded with a few pounds of say, plastic explosive, could use these toys to wreak havoc. Of course in the media setting, it should be a cinch to put a video camera or still camera into the body of one of these model planes and have aerial surveillance of a protest scene. Alreadt hobbyists are experimenting with what is called Kite Aerial Photography.

The point is we have more and better communications tools than any human beings in history. Shame on us, especially those of us who call ourselves journalists, if we don’t learn how to use them.

MinnPost.com: philanthropy to prime journalism pump?

tn_kramer.jpgtn_kramer.jpg  Joel Kramer to bring public radio model to the web?

From Minneapolis comes news that Joel Kramer, former publisher of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, has lined up $1.1. million ($850K from four Twin Cities’ families plus $250K in Knight Foundation support) to launch a five-day, web-based daily called MinnPost.com.

Industry zine Paid Content says the new site “will feature traditional-style front page stories as well as blog posts based on original reporting by more than 20 professional journalists from around Minnesota.” Two former Star-Tribune staffers former deputy managing editor Roger Buoen and former online managing editorCorey Anderson, will join Kramer at the core of a network of regular freelance contributors. (Buoen will be managing editor and Anderson will be web editor; see list of other staffers and contributors.)

Knight’s financial backing represents an endorsement by the nation’s leading journalism support foundation, one focused on the preservation and expansion of local coverage in real or geographic communities. (Click here to read about their Oct. 15 deadline for $5 million in local media support fund.)

In June 2007 interview on Minnesota Public Radio, Kramer hinted at his intention to launch MinnPost.com and said “It remains to be seen if we can develop a sustainable business model and an exciting journalism model” and said he would want his new site to avoid the “pontificating” that seems to predominate on the blogosphere.

“I’m more interested in informed commentary as well as hard-hitting news gathering,” Kramer said. 

Poynter Institute business commentator Rick Edmonds has written a lengthy but insightful and sympathetic essay that gets to the heart of what is importand — and worrisome — about the MinnPost.com experiment. Kramer does not propose to create what Edmonds calls a “hyperlocal chatter and photo site” but rather a place to create:

“. . . an alternative model, zigging to professionalism when so many think they can organize the collective force of volunteered content into something significant. There is room enough for both, but success for Kramer’s venture might get the pendulum swinging back to news for people who care about news . . .” 

In the Poynter essay Kramer says he hopes get about 15- to 20 percent of the one-million person Twin Cities audience, presumably the high-brow, engaged-citizen, public broadcasting segment of the audience that would appreciate professional journalism.

We’ll see. This is an imporant experiment. Kramer has freed newspaper journalism from two of its current constraints, corporate ownership and print production. We’re about to find out what happens when you remove those shackles and let motivated journalists create a public forum in a metropolis with a Scandihoovian ethic of civic involvement — and long winters that offer few leisure options between ice fishing and reading public policy white papers.

Okay well perhaps that’s a bit harsh. It isn’t fair to poke fun at people simply because their geography tends toward pale skin and mosquito and fish jokes. But then the humor isn’t accidental on my part nor will I apologize because the web is, above all, an irreverent medium much closer to bombastic and hyperbolic styles of, say, the Mark Twain era. Will print journalists, freed from the normal constraints, suffer under its own seriousness or ignite the sort of public discussion that would make the web the forum it is designed to be as opposed to merely the newspaper-killer.

So no pressure Kramer and company just because everybody’s watching.

Stick together like glue? Not in decentralized world

tn_newsies1.jpg How the world has changed since street urchins like these had to buy “papes” from the stingy newsbarons Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, who provoke a strike by “Newsies” as dramatized in a Disney musical of the same name. I watched it last night as part of a Labor Day homeschooling assignment dreamed up by my wife. It was a rousing film and based on the true story of an 1899 strike led by a one-eyed fellow that the other papers nicknamed Kid Blink, who is reported to have told 2,000 rallying strikers, in dialect:

“Friens and feller workers. Dis is a time which tries de hearts of men. Dis is de time when we’se got to stick together like glue…. We know wot we wants and we’ll git it even if we is blind.”

Very rousing stuff but so anachronistic. I’m mindful of this because I’ve been wondering what to say in response to Tish Grier, who recently wondered aloud “Could a Blogger’s Union Help Us Negotiate Fair Wages?” I certainly sympathize with the wish for higher wages. But it’s difficult to imagine a diffused workforce coalesing. And if it did who is there to strike against in a decentralized world? Mass media? If that were weak versus labor their incumbent unions would be in better shape. Should a union try to enforce terms on web publishing startups? That seems rather like chasing smoke with the added aura of thuggery — youse guys will pay us what we’re wort or we’ll mail-bomb your site — or some such cyber equivalent of the brute force that settles strikes.

I continue to think that it difficult to get people together for any sustained purpose based on anger, not any productive purpose at any rate and if we can organize at all, why not organize for self improvement and form small teams with greater earning power based on a melding of skills. And not to stick together like glue but rather as “Small Pieces Loosely Joined” to use the title and the spirit of the book by David Weinberger.

I’ve laid out some of my own thoughs about media cooperatives. Of course I so far lack the oomph to get this idea beyond the blathering stage. I’ll keep on thinking and plotting. But wouldn’t it be easier if we were newsies and we at least had somebody we could hate, maybe even punch!

Citizen journalism that works from NowPublic?

A Poynter Institute commentary inspired me to revisit NowPublic.com, “the citizen journalism site that recently lined up $10.6 million in funding. “

In clicking through NowPublic, I came across a posting filed by a Jim Colela, a self-identified British freelancer living near Istanbul:

“Turkish authorities have blocked all access to WordPress.com . . . it is completely unknown why  . . .  the move strikes at the very heart of freedom of speech from a country supposedly on the road to EU membership. This can only add to the controversy of the infamous Article 301 remaining on the statute books. In recent years numerous intellectuals and writers, such as 2006 Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk, assassinated Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink and novelist Elif Åžafak have all been tried under the auspices of Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code for ‘insulting Turkishness’.”

The piece had an interesting urgency. I’ll try to check in to NowPublic from time to time.Â