Category: Analysis

The first time I went to work at a newspaper, I was startled by how much it was like a factory. Inspired by Chris Gulker, Tim Porter tracks a lot of the current purposelessness of the newspaper business to its factory mentality.

Of course, every newspaper contains a real factory — its printing presses churn out hundreds of tons of news and advertising every day, and its fleet of trucks deliver them to doorsteps in a coverage area of thousands of square miles.

Inside the news factory, productivity is sometimes measured in inches and not in insights. Sure, there may be a surprise in your local news package, but the rest of it is as surprising as a Happy Meal.

The factory mindset pervades newspapers like a grimy fungus. It manifests itself in rote stories scheduled by calendar (Hey, it’s August, time for back-to-school features) and sourced by a familiar rolodex of people who will take reporters’ calls. [ Read: Robert Thompson watches TV for a living, Salon ]; advertising staffs that rely on revenue from department stores and national brands while driving away local, community-based businesses with exorbitant ad rates (thereby creating an advertising product that is of little use to the actual residents in the market); and IT departments that hard-wired entire enterprises to legacy platforms and proved to be more truculent than defense contractors when nimbler technologies arrived.

The newsroom itself is perhaps the most factory-minded of all. It values tradition over invention; it sets deadlines to maximize press-room or distribution efficiency while compromising quality of content (can’t get the big game in the sports final? too bad); it continues to embrace managerial hierarchies that emphasize “dues-paying,” discourage collaboration and drive journalists to think they can actually improve their professional lot by aligning with the Teamsters when contract time comes around

I never imagined so many talented, creative, smart, funny, insightful, knowledgeable people could produce an editorial product of such stultifying banality as the typical daily newspaper.

There are about 1500 daily newspapers in America. Why do they all look the same? They’ve learned their ways from one another a long time ago, probably before you were born.

The next revolution is still up for grabs. Technology has empowered a lot of writers and reporters to be their own publishers. But, there are also plenty of economic reasons why future Internet news media and the networks they run on could be more concentrated–and even more like factories.

The real problem with the economy now is uncertainty.

What’s going to happen to the economy? How will the war affect the economy? How will the war affect advertising? How will the war affect gas prices? How about tech spending? What happens if the war takes an unexpected turn? How much will it cost to put Iraq back together, if we’re given the opportunity? What if there is a major act of terrorism? What the hell is going on with North Korea?

Scott Rosenberg’s “Eve of Destruction” DaveNet essay encapsulated a lot of my concerns. We have no clue what will happen over the next ten days, ten months, or ten years, and GWB is presenting victory as a foregone conclusion. The White House has discussed alternative outcomes internally, but none have been suggested to the citizens. The big lesson of war is that the outcome is usually a surprise. If it weren’t, there’d be fewer and shorter wars. Certainly the last ten years have taught us not to underestimate Saddam Hussein.

Generally, I feel that the president doesn’t have a lot of control over the economy. But GWB has a lot of options for reducing the amount uncertainty in the world. For some time he has been increasing the amount of uncertainty. In such an uncertain market, what are the odds that you’re going to do any hiring?

Gerry McGovern has a bizarre piece over at ClickZ where he says “The Web’s Hippie Period Is Over” :

Do hippies and pioneers run your Web site? Are the same people who got things going in the mid-’90s still in charge today? Probably not a good idea. A very interesting bunch of people was attracted to the Web in the early days. They loved its lawless nature; it allowed them to experiment and express themselves.

These people tended to be techies and graphic designers. What you need today are writers and editors. The technical elements of a Web site are largely solved. The graphic design elements are relatively minor. The day-to-day job of the average site is writing and editing.

Is this the same Gerry McGovern that told us,

Content management software hasn’t worked because it was badly designed and massively over-hyped. Software companies lied about their products, charging criminal prices for crap software. It hasn’t worked because organizations didn’t understand content. They wanted a quick fix. They issued specifications that bore little relation to what they actually needed.

The techies and graphic designers didn’t buy all those lousy content-management systems or Flash-infested agency-built web sites that still plague us. Those are the legacy of the suits and carpetbaggers who never understood content or its presentation. The techies and graphic designers have brought us common-sense alternatives like PHP, MySQL, and CSS.

I agree that the technical and graphic design problems of the Web are largely solved, and good techies and designers don’t reinvent the wheel. They do help you find the right wheel for your vehicle and attach it so that it won’t fall off.

Cyberjournalist has a link to a 3D map of Iraq, saying;

Online journalist Ernst Poulsen points out an interesting 3D map of Iraq on The Jutland-Post’s Web site, which highlights a few basic things like oil-fields, cities and military forces. “In a few years time, 3D maps like this could help journalists explain stories about military tactics and the layout of the country,” he says. [3/19]

I went there to see if this site would dispel my natural suspicion of 3-D maps, which doesn’t seem like an inherently useful concept to me. But the link took me to the home page of something called TurnTool, which says

TurnTool Viewer Not Installed

Your browser either failed to install the TurnTool Viewer or does not support ActiveX content at all. To install the Viewer download and run ViewerInstall.exe.

Supported platforms:

Microsoft Windows 95, 98, NT4, ME, 2000 and XP with Internet Explorer 4 or greater.

Apple Macintosh & Linux systems are currently not supported.

I will never understand why journalistic organizations continue to tie their future to Microsoft’s domination of the Internet.

Besides, does anyone still use ActiveX? Microsoft’s Activex web site has hardly been updated since 1999.

I understand why Puma was upset by the brilliant, revolting parody Puma ads that are making their way around the Net.

The real issue isn’t the ads, but that we’re all ready to believe that they’re real. And why not? The recent controversy over a FCUK ad in the Boston Globe shows how plausible it all is. The position of the advertisers and their media enablers is that of a young child caught pooping in the kitchen.

First, deny the obvious:

French Connection UK spokeswoman Laura Bernstein acknowledges that the discovery of the acronym a few years ago sparked a sales boon. She demurs on the meaning of the word. ”It isn’t the play on words people often think it is,” she says. However, a visit to the company’s online store (you can buy T-shirts with such logos as ”fcuk on the beach” or ”too busy to fcuk”) suggest otherwise.

Then, explain to Mom that “Everybody is doing it.”:

Critics, says Bernstein, should note the far more provocative ads produced by other companies. ”I challenge them to look at what other fashion magazines are doing,” she says.

As I said, the media have enabled this behavior and cloaked it in the First Amendment.

‘We believe in freedom of speech, and our inclination is to run ads rather than not run them,” said Mary Jane Patrone, senior vice president for marketing and sales.

It’s unfortunate that this attitude didn’t prevail when MTV refused to accept antiwar advertising, or when PayPal unplugged an antiwar web site.

Corporate media are eager to beat the first amendment drum in support of soft-core pornvertising, witless consolidation, or ugly know-nothingism, but they’re unwilling to permit their channels to be used for the promotion of unpopular points of view.

Today I found a link on MediaGeek to a Washington Post profile of Amy Goodman. I don’t agree with her on most political issues and MediaGeek is right about her humorless earnestness, but she’s the closest thing I have to a media hero these days. She actively defied a renegade board of directors and made huge personal sacrifices to make a difference and tell the truth. That is what the first amendment is about.

It’s really good news that Knight-Ridder is joining Google’s Adwords network.

This is a welcome relief from the alarming growth of “rich-media” advertising. Instead of annoying, intentionally distracting Flash advertising, we’re going to get less-obnoxious text advertising in a context where we’re a lot more likely to be interested in what they’re selling.

Google aggregates so many searches and consequently so many keyword ads that they’re able to sell some extremely specific keywords on sites that could not have justified it. Although, some doubt even Google can do this.

It’s unfortunate that Knight-Ridder’s not big enough to be an ad network all by themselves. But joining Google’s network seems like the right approach–advertising on news sites based on the content of the pages and not simply their unexceptional demographics and reach.The big question is whether Google can aggregate enough ads to justify (at least at the margin) the cost of putting news and information online for free.

Google may be in a position to dominate the back end of the Web experience (as well as the way a lot of sites are financed) the way that they already dominate the front end. No wonder we’re beginning to see some backlash against Google — out of self-interest and paranoia.

There has never been a benevolent monopoly, but Google seems to be a technology company with the soul of a content company. It doesn’t hurt that they seem to have discovered the commercial value of fairness and putting the consumer first. They’re breath of fresh air in the midst of the sleazy venality of Overture and the intrusive pushiness of “rich-media” advertising.

Gerry McGovern has some advice to the content management industry, in response to the recent Jupiter Research report on the failure of content management systems:

Content management software hasn’t worked because it was badly designed and massively over-hyped. Software companies lied about their products, charging criminal prices for crap software. It hasn’t worked because organizations didn’t understand content. They wanted a quick fix. They issued specifications that bore little relation to what they actually needed.

He goes on to prescribe some changes for software companies (starting with telling the truth) and their customers (such as being realistic about what content management is going to do for you).

This is strong stuff and a good starting place for companies thinking about content management, or thinking about abandoning it.

Dim copper is a useful new meme from Bob Frankston.

He points out telephone calls use a lot less than one percent of the carrying capacity of the copper lines that already come into our homes. We’re nowhere near using them to the extent that we should. Why are we worrying about lighting dark fiber or deploying even more fiber?

Bob’s analysis sheds some light on why the telephone access monopolies are unhappy with the FCC’s decision to deregulate new lines, but insure competitive access to existing lines. In the two years since they last thought that was a good idea, they’ve probably realized that the future belongs to copper.

Tim Porter takes on the question “Are bloggers journalists?“

I have a hard time getting excited about this question, but [traditional | real | old-fashioned] journalists care a lot about it. Dave Winer cares about this too, but (as always) he’s driven by his personal demons. After all, Dave says Dan Gillmor isn’t a journalist.

Ultimately, Tim asks the most important question. Don’t worry about who else can call themselves a journalist, but what kind of journalism you’re doing. As far as I’m concerned, the industry lost any right to bar the door once they let local TV news call itself “journalism”.

[This piece features two wonderful wordplays: Mini Me(dia) and “troglodyte traditional journalists hunker defensively in their newsholes”]

What the heck is “algorithmic” search?

I had never heard this term before Overture started using it. As far as I can tell, they’re using it as a way to put what they do (paid search) on a par with what Google does (search). What’s surprising to me is the extent to which the press has latched on to this term. [Google news search]