The unbundled media world

Posted on May 30, 2009 by Steve Mays

I’ve been doing some work on the website of one of our networks and came across a story about what appears to be a big music festival. I exchanged some emails with the news director about linking and adding content from other sources (Google, flickr, YouTube, blogs, Twitter, etc). She expressed some concerns about this.

She, like some many veteran reporters I know, seemed to be coming from that place where you write your story (with audio/video/stills) and it goes into whatever distribution channel your company happens to own: paper, magazine, radio/TV station. That’s where her “audience” finds the story.

And it worked just fine for a long time. But then the web comes along and most of us clapped our hands because we saw it as just one more way to reach “our” audience. A one-way pipe from which they would “consume our content.”

From a recent post (“The Web’s Widening Stream”) by Terry Heaton:

“The “Browse” phase of the Web was its first, and it’s where the name of the desktop application known as the browser originated. The Web was seen as a series of roads leading to destinations, We hopped from site to site — or in the case of AOL, destinations within the site — and everybody was happy. “Visitors” to sites were welcomed through a front door, which became the most valuable online real estate in terms of advertising.

“Search” disrupted the paradigm by allowing people to access documents within a site without going through that front door. We were still visiting sites, though, because that’s “where” the content resided. Search destroyed the value of the home page, and also allowed for advertising adjacent to search results — a way of monetizing content that existed only in link form on the pages of the search. If you wanted to buy ads next to football content, you didn’t need to buy football pages, for example. You could simply buy ads on search results for football.

“Subscribe” blew everything apart, because users no longer had to even visit websites, assuming publishers were willing to make their content available in RSS form. Most major publishers refused to play the game, so media company RSS feeds have generally contained only a sentence or two, thereby forcing users back to the site of origin, where publishers can monetize pages. This irritating practice has kept publishers from exploring revenue possibilities in a truly subscriber-based environment, and it’s the key thing holding back the development of RSS.

But a new paradigm is threatening all of the others and will eventually force all publishers into the unbundled media world. The staggering popularity of social media messaging via Facebook and MySpace “status updates” and, of course, Twitter is creating an information ecosystem that is a series of real-time streams. These streams come in short bursts, but when added to the RSS of Microsoft’s “subscribe” phase of the Web, they form powerful, relevant and meaningful sources of knowledge and information for an increasingly networked world.

Mr. Heaton quotes (and links to) VC John Borthwick who views “streams” as the new metaphor for the web:

In the initial design of the web reading and writing (editing) were given equal consideration – yet for fifteen years the primary metaphor of the web has been pages and reading. The metaphors we used to circumscribe this possibility set were mostly drawn from books and architecture (pages, browser, sites etc.). Most of these metaphors were static and one way. The steam metaphor is fundamentally different. It’s dynamic, it doesn’t live very well within a page and still very much evolving.

A stream. A real time, flowing, dynamic stream of information — that we as users and participants can dip in and out of and whether we participate in them or simply observe are a part of this flow.

And then there is the advertiser:

“Advertising will be another fundamental part of the stream, but the rub for media companies is that advertisers can enter the stream themselves, without the assistance of being attached to media content. This is the inevitable end of a truly unbundled media world.”

If I started this post with a point in mind, I lost it along the way. I think it had something to do with the notion that a reporter –any reporter– could write/produce a story and expect others to find it and read it (and comment on it?) without being connected to them in some synchronous manner.

Or perhaps: All of us can tell the story better than any of us.

Whatever. Read Mr. Heaton’s piece.

Where is the advertising?

Posted on April 23, 2009 by Steve Mays

Print: Advertising is adjacent to content
Broadcast: Advertising interrupts content
Movies: Advertising is within content
The Web: Advertising IS content

— Terry Heaton

Zombie Jobs

Posted on April 19, 2009 by Steve Mays

“Real creative urges, those we are meant to express, don’t go away. If ignored, they bother us, affect our health, fester and eventually turn us into the living dead.”

— from Pamela Slim’s piece in NYT

Pew: State of News Media

Posted on March 18, 2009 by Steve Mays

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:

It’s gone and it’s not coming back. Acceptance of this is the beginning of reinvention.
Future revenue is about enabling commerce, not about serving advertising adjacent to or as an interruption of “content.”
Journalism will survive the death of its institutions.
Most journalists will be independent and work for whoever pays them the most, on a non-exclusive basis.
Journalists will develop and exploit niche specialties.
“The News” will be fast, transparent and authentic.
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?”

Posted on March 14, 2009 by Steve Mays

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.”

Posted on February 11, 2009 by Steve Mays

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

Posted on February 9, 2009 by Steve Mays

“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

Posted on January 5, 2009 by Steve Mays

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!”

Posted on December 31, 2008 by Steve Mays

“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!”