Tag Archives: Quotable

Pew: State of News Media

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TV consultant Terry Heaton offers his take on the latest “State of the News Media” report from Pew (Project for Excellence in Journalism) and offers a few predictions:

  1. It’s gone and it’s not coming back. Acceptance of this is the beginning of reinvention.
  2. Future revenue is about enabling commerce, not about serving advertising adjacent to or as an interruption of “content.”
  3. Journalism will survive the death of its institutions.
  4. Most journalists will be independent and work for whoever pays them the most, on a non-exclusive basis.
  5. Journalists will develop and exploit niche specialties.
  6. “The News” will be fast, transparent and authentic.
  7. Anchors will become mostly obsolete, like other middlemen that the Web routes around. I simply can read faster than I can have it read to me. Those that remain will be live hubs that filter multiple content inputs.

From the reports intro:

“There are growing doubts within the business, indeed, about whether the generation in charge has the vision and the boldness to reinvent the industry. It is unclear, say some, who the innovative leaders are, and a good many well-known figures have left the business. Reinvention does not usually come from managers prudently charting course. It tends to come from risk takers trying the unreasonable, seeing what others cannot, imagining what is not there and creating it.”

“If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?”

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In a post titled “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable,” Clay Shirky provides some insight –and historical perspective– on what’s happening to newspapers. He starts with the question often asked by those committed to saving newspapers

“If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.”

“With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.”

“When someone demands to be told how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to. There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.”

I think this is the first time I’ve fully understood that old models can be broken before new ones are there to take their place.

“Blogs don’t make money. But people with blogs can.”

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Dave Winer says he’s made more than $2 million with his blog over the last 12 years. And he’s never put a single ad on it. He explains how this came to be –and the role of a blog– in this excellent post:

“…it’s a way of communicating what you’re doing. Companies, consultants and authors need to do a lot of communicating, and blogs allow you to go direct, and be more efficient, less diluted. People get a real feel for who you are and how you think and what you’re like as a person. Why would I ever let someone else hitch their “message” on this — it would get in the way of me making money!

If I had any advice to offer it’s this — get in the habit of communicating directly with the people you want to influence. Don’t charge them to read it and don’t let others interfere with your communication. Talk through your blog as you would talk face to face. You’d never stop mid-sentence and say “But first a word from my sponsor!” — so don’t do that on your blog either. I can’t promise you’ll make any money from your blog, and I think the more you try the less chance you have. Make a good product and listen to your customers to make it better, and use the tools to communicate, and you may well make money from the whole thing. To expect the blog alone to pay your bills is to misunderstand what a blog can do.”

If you’re a blogger or think you might ever be, this post is worth a read.

Terry Heaton: Field of Dreams and broadcasting

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“The geeks of the world built their own Field of Dreams years ago in this thing we call the World Wide Web, a disruption of Biblical proportions to the status quo. Like Busfield’s character, however, media companies walked right through it. We could see the playing field, but we couldn’t see the magical players. We scoffed and viewed it with contempt, because, after all, we are were “the media.” Now is the season of our tragedy, and our eyes are suddenly opening. Let’s hope it’s not too late.”

— Terry Heaton on Field of Dreams and broadcasting

Bruce Sterling: State of the World, 2009

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Every year on The Well, Bruce Sterling does an “overview of Things in General, the State of the World, Where We Have Been and Where We are Tending.” I’ve cherry-picked a few thoughts from the latest installment:

“I always knew the “War on Terror” bubble would go.  It’s gone. Nobody misses it.  It got no burial.  I knew it was gonna be replaced by another development that seemed much more burningly urgent than terror Terror TERROR, but I had a hard time figuring out what vast, abject fright that might be. Now I know.  Welcome to 2009!”

“You know what’s truly weird about any financial crisis? WE MADE IT UP.  Currency, money, finance, they’re all social inventions.  When the sun comes up in the morning it’s shining on the same physical landscape, all the atoms are in place.”

“The sheer galling come-down of watching the Bottom Line, the Almighty Dollar, revealed as a papier-mache pinata.  It’s like somebody burned their church.”

“I keep remembering the half-stunned, half-irritated looks on the faces of those car execs when they were chided for flying their company jets to Washington to beg.  I felt sorrow for them.  Truly.  These guys are the captains of American industry at the top of the food chain.  Of course they fly corporate jets.  Corporate jets were *invented* for guys like the board of General Motors.  And now they’re getting skewered for that by a bunch of punk-ass Congressmen they can usually buy and sell?”

“Practically everything we do in our civilization is directly predicated on setting fire to dead stuff.”

“People don’t have to solve every problem in the world in order to be happy.  People will always have problems. People ARE problems.  People become happy when they have something coherent to be enthusiastic about.  People need to LOOK AND FEEL they’re solving some of mankind’s many problems.  People can’t stumble around in public like blacked-out alcoholics, then have some jerk like Phil Gramm tell them to buck up.”

“When you can’t imagine how things are going to change, that doesn’t mean that nothing will change.  It means that things will change in ways that are unimaginable.”

 

“We are the Arabs!”

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“In the 1980 film “The Formula,” George C. Scott plays a detective who uncovers a plot to kill anybody with knowledge of a secret Nazi formula for a synthetic fuel. The bad guy in the film is Adam Steiffel, the Chairman of Titan Oil, played by Marlon Brando. The two meet on Steiffel’s patio, where the oil mogul is enjoying breakfast, and the scene produces a couple of memorable lines in a case of art imitating life.

“You’re not in the oil business; you’re in the oil shortage business,” Scott says to Brando. An aide to Brando’s character races to the table with news of price activity by the Arab states, to which Brando’s character responds, “You idiot, we ARE the Arabs!”

— Terry Heaton

Henry Miller on “the awakeners”

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“As to salvation and all that… The greatest teachers, the true healers, I would say, have always insisted that they can only point the way. The Buddha went so far as to say: “Believe nothing, no matter where you read it or who has said it, not even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.”

The great ones do not set up offices, charge fees, give lectures, or write books. Wisdom is silent, and the most effective propaganda for truth is the force of personal example. The great ones attract disciples, lesser figures whose mission it is to preach and teach. These are the gospelers who, unequal to the highest task, spend their lives converting others. The great ones are indifferent, in the profoundest sense. They don’t ask you to believe: they electrify you by their behavior. They are the awakeners. What you do with your life is only of concern to you, they seem to say. In short, their only purpose here on earth is to inspire. And what more can one ask of a human being than that?”

— Henry Miller (Sexus)

Emphasis mine

Internet overtakes newspapers as news source

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From latest Pew Research Center Survey:

“Currently, 40% say they get most of their news about national and international issues from the internet, up from just 24% in September 2007. For the first time in a Pew survey, more people say they rely mostly on the internet for news than cite newspapers (35%).

For young people, however, the internet now rivals television as a main source of national and international news. Nearly six-in-ten Americans younger than 30 (59%) say they get most of their national and international news online; an identical percentage cites television. In September 2007, twice as many young people said they relied mostly on television for news than mentioned the internet (68% vs. 34%).”

Radio gained a little ground (from September 2007 to December 2008) among young people (18-29), up from 13% to 18%.

In this essay, Terry Heaton argues that just surviving is not a strategy:

“This theme of surviving 2009 is everywhere, but I’d like to pose an important question for anybody so hunkered, hanging, waiting or rowing, because waiting it out assumes “it” will end and that there will be a reward for those who are still standing when “it” is over. I’m not so sure, so here’s the question: What if the old model is gone for good and it doesn’t come back?”

UPDATE 12/26/08: A number of folks have accuratelty pointed out that a LOT of the news on the Net comes from newspapers. Worth noting but doesn’t solve any of the problems facing newspapers. If it comes down to getting less news (volume and variety) online or buying a copy of the Daily Bugle, online is gonna win. Business models will evlove that will support quality reporting w/o the overhead of current publishing models.

The Lathe of Heaven

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“He had grown up in a country run by politicians who sent the pilots to man the bombers to kill the babies to make the world safe for children to grow up in.”

— The Lathe of Heaven, by Ursula K. Le Guin (1971)

Now some folks say its too big and uses too much gas
Some folks say its too old and that it goes too fast
But my love is bigger than a honda, its bigger than a subaru

–Pink Cadillac, Bruce Springsteen

Terry Heaton: “The Age of Participation”

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I don’t know if I enjoy reading Terry Heaton because he’s smart or because I usually agree with him. In his latest essay he looks ahead to what he believes are the real challenges for media companies in 2009. It’s a very hope filled essay. Here are a couple of my favorite graphs:

“Whereas the Industrial Age forced the creation of powerful city states (the labor force had to be centrally located), the Information Age allows us to be where we want to be. Watch for movement to friendly, peaceful surroundings, where the locals have been smart enough to build hubs along the information superhighway. Contrarians will argue that people working from home will be isolated, but from what? What new businesses will spring up to cater to American workers in the future?

Whereas the Industrial Age brought us corporate marketing, the Age of Participation heralds the world of personal marketing and personal branding and a time of influence in expanding circles, rather than top-to-bottom. The time to gain traction in this world is today, for today’s action will determine your place in tomorrow’s culture.”