Disruption and disorientation in news media and the news business Presented by Fred Friendly Seminars. Moderated by Jeff Greenfield, CNN. March 11, 2004 8:30-10:45 am [starting with a joke and 'turn your cellphones off'] to Metropolis - average city, multicultural/diverse you are at brunch with your family. see teacher dude, "oliver", he's just one of these young folks who is into a lot of different things. "uncle brian": how come you never pick up a newspaper? o: i get all my news online. why should he buy a newspaper everyday? b: there's great stuff on the news of the day, what's happening overseas... o: the hometown paper doesn't cover these teams. the paper has limited space. i have specific interests. i'm going to the best source for each thing i want to read. [oh wow, that's nearly exactly how i think. oliver is a good model-person, at least for people like me. i'm the target audience, after all (young, literate, desiring knowledge, etc)...i get my news from a zillion places. blogs, google news, paper newspapers - not tv, though, since i rarely watch tv.] b: hoping that there's enough people - the time and effort that bloggers can't do yet, deep pockets... [usually better writing than I get online, too. and usually when i read the newspaper, i read the feature things, the in-depth things that bloggers don't have the time and resources to do. interestingly, people on http://del.icio.us/ (a social link-logging popular with bloggers) link to newspaper articles a lot, especially from the new york times. when i was in new jersey visiting my grandparents and didn't have internet access, i read the new york times thoroughly. i liked it a lot, but it took a lot of time to read - i guess because i couldn't skim it with an aggregator. i read it more deeply than i would have online, i remember more from it. reading paper is different than reading on screen. then, when i got back to civilization, i found that people were linking to many of those articles that i enjoyed most.] o: i see the value, i respect it...turning the neighborhood into a global community b: the newspaper is portable! you can take it to the toilet. you can archive it, you can trade it amongst your friends. [the main time i read the newspaper is while i'm in the kitchen eating something, especially breakfast. getting my news on the internet is too distracting/absorbing before school - i end up being late.] you can get local news from a blog [i only read a couple local blogs, and they don't post much news - more art/culture stuff. and i live in los angeles, probably the city with the most bloggers anywhere except san francisco. local blogs don't post much hard news unless they experience it first-hand, and that seems fairly rare. the local news i get is from the LA Times.] dead trees and pixels on screen ... brand ... [i'm losing this.] local news content provider! [art and culture content, yes] you are framing your world around what interests you...i'm concerned. [people do that with newspapers anyway - i only read the bits that interest me for some reason. prominence/locality/oddity...all those good elements of news. nobody's really been discussing what news is, exactly. i'm glad i'm taking a journalism class in high school.] trying to sell yesterday's product to somebody who's interested in tomorrow's it's not necessary to make somebody read something on paper. maybe eventually there won't be any paper things and you have to be prepared for that. [i doubt it, if only because paper is secure - nobody can track what articles you read. excepting physical survelliance of course, but shoulder-surfing is nothing unique to computers.] center of the universe or wider, more argumentative constituency is oliver an anomaly? [am i an anomaly?] the problem is not a question of consumers, it's that consumers are becoming producers. that's not a threat, that's an opportunity. the threat is financial! oliver found his job online, uses ebay, etc., not just news online. is it making him a different kind of citizen? making him a citizen of the world, a more global approach. like-minded people come together by default - very important thing for communities. what is he missing? earlier generations weren't living in quite the global society. i'm interested in where you find your sense of intimate connection to people. physical. media does more than find information, media lets people feel they belong. hard to find that sense of visibility or connectivity that you can find on print media. [what? blogs are way more personal/connected] what about television? on his own, he's going to be all alone in the global village. the local paper can survive on its own. we can provide the shared experience on television. oliver watches tv. [i don't watch tv. if i do watch tv, it's a pirated episode of either south park or mystery science theater 3000, watched on my computer screen.] o: i watch baseball games, google to find more. one of the beauties of blogs is that it's a two-way flow of information. i'm not depending on the editors. i can leave comments...Daily Kos... it's not an issue of platform, it's an issue of content. use neighborhood cameras to develop the local newscast. a lot of stuff that can be done in a much more compelling way than the "metropolis herald" - it's boring! i'm not so far away from oliver's age and i find it boring. i don't think the newspaper business is adapting. there's so many more opportunities in tv. [lots of blogs are boring too, they're just filtered more organically and effectively. also, it's a thing with interest/importance. hard news is often boring, just in itself. oh, i'm so glad i'm taking a journalism class in school, i just wish the teacher didn't *hate* the internet like he does.] in the best world, it's a buffet. the herald has this elaborate website. why? we don't make money off of this. most newspaper subscribers are older, don't want all the internet stuff. maybe we should virtually shut down the website. the only thing that should be online is pay archives. am i on the right track? no. oliver, is there anybody you admire to kind of give you the information you're looking for? somewhere you've delegated to act on your behalf? [rss aggregators!] the purpose of the electronic version...is to have conversations with our clients in a unique and continuing way. [i read that as "is to allow and encourage people blogging about our articles"] should i shut it down? right direction, wrong answer. how to move people over to the content. don't give the website away, give access along with subscriptions. [like the economist does for many of its articles (the rest are free to anyone). my older sister has a subscription to the economist, but when she went away to college, she took the subscription with her. solution? she gave me the user/password for her subscriber account and now i read happily as ever.] he spends so much money on other stuff, why doesn't he buy the newspaper? [if he wanted it, he'd buy it...so...why doesn't he want it? how do we make him want it? that's the whole issue here, i think.] another theme - there is an important role for journalism in maintaining a free republic. also maintaining a market share...not just sources but people that they can debate with. public debate died with tv & newspaper consolidation. the electronic immediacy of tv - i'm not sure what oliver's getting on this blog. [hmm, tv does seem more immediate to me, for breaking-news type stuff. wikipedia's breaking-news articles quickly catch up, though.] why are we assuming that print media is dying? one section is dying, one is exploding. for every blog, there are also zines. [what about e-zines? i barely ever read a printed zine. i once tried to start one...it didn't work.] forty percent of metropolis speaks other languages than english at home. first, people especially young people, don't want to see business conflict. [oh, yes. gimme transparency, please.] the fundamental issue: you used to be funded by ads - you need a new business model. [radio is funded by ads. does radio need a new business model? oh yeah. radio news isn't being mentioned at all! so many people listen to news radio in the car. including the target audience - my boyfriend listens to a lot of npr (between deftones and tool, of course).] how to make money on this? say goodbye to the notion of an advertising-supported media business. fragmentation. demode the editorial heritage. [one good thing about newspapers is their generally-coherent point of view, though! i know i'll get one point of view reading the christian science monitor and another reading usa today. blogs too, but blogs aren't comprehensive in the same way. oh man.] you put on your website, not just your column, but questions. what is anybody getting out of this? my readers know more than i do. if i use that to make the column better, that's good for everyone. mimic the edge one gets from a blog while preserving the reliability of the newspaper. higher production values. more edge in our converage - we can get to our consumer. [edge? edge? what the heck is edge? maybe edge is poor editing, spontaneous thought, lots of emotion. my blog doesn't have edge. am i an anomaly?] why are you restricting the aggregation of what you do to the edges of metropolis? not only what's happening in metropolis, but what's happening in his world. the newspapers have a role. you are a conglomerate - you have based stuff on a legacy world. you can reach a billion olivers, reach them where they live. [world-wide publishing at the touch of a button. that's the insanely beautiful promise of the internet.] nobody outside of metropolis cares about what goes into our newspaper. i don't think there's a business there. we could build around our strength - the strength of our community. we could build an economic future on the online. people don't put obituary announcements on craigslist, they send them to the local newspaper. not so much about the format of the newspaper, it's about the community. people want a story, people want a narrative. emotionally involved. [when i read the newspaper, unless an article is clearly marked as such, i don't want a lot of emotional involvement. emotion-provoking content, well. that's soft news, and that's well and good, but you need hard news too.] blogs aren't just a medium for young people. it skews male, though. [yeah, there's lots of blog discussion about that maleness. it's really not just a medium for young people, really, unless you count 20-40 year olds as young. teenagers usually have *crappy* blogs.] corporate control of the blogs is never going to happen. the strength is that it's one person, who might have an agenda. [transparency! authenticity! spelling errors!] what about howard dean? he didn't control his campaign, made lots of money...not enough people supported his message. [in my not-too-informed view, dean's campaign crashed because he didn't quite reach critical mass - if he had edged out kerry in iowa, who knows? people vote socially.] is this old wine in new bottles...is using this tool going to make a substantive change in how politics plays out? [i'm not following...] the reporters we now hired are all under thirty. they're into blogs. does this new way of reporting the story overwhelm the real story? the mayor's not able to control the blog process. there'll going to be a lot of people writing things on his blog. the modus operadi has been to control the speech [i see this so much in my high school journalism teacher, totally controlling class discussions...maybe that's just him, though]. the new thing - like a movement - you can't own it, you can't control it. [smacks of the cluetrain manifesto] a story covered on blogs, not covered in the mainstream media: a rumor floating around that elected dude had a child by another woman. blog guy posts about it. ethical problem with the blogger? on one level, there's no problem with the bloggers if you know what they are. a potential cesspool of information! [including some lost/discarded diamond rings] i'm concerned if the new media of the blog will turn my reelection into a compilation of negatives - as opposed to traditional stuff focusing on positives. the blogger isn't playing by your rules. now, the tv is reporting about the mayor's other woman, attributing it to the blog. ethical standards are not community standards. started a process now - have to let it go. there's no leadership, no morals [no superego! (psychology class is infiltrating my mind)], we're just going to see how it turns out. can't we just assume that blogs are gossip? we're acting as if there's blogs and then there's traditional media. lots of people access ethnic media. do what willie brown did - cultivate the ethnic media, get the swing vote. the real journalist is trying to find out if this other woman exists. talking about the story is not as important as finding out whether it's true. that's a traditional media notion. creator of the Daily Kos - "the concept of ethics doesn't really matter...our readers draw our boundaries..." [ugh] blogs have to provide links. nobody accepts things until they see supporting evidence. there's going to be spin, etc. like that blogger posting about the other woamn: libel lawyer would sue blog for posting personal stuff. aclu would counter-sue, first amendment. there's different kinds of bloggers [yes, of course]. journalistic ethics pertaining to citing sources: channel 2 doesn't, channel 3 claims to, some bloggers do it, some don't. when the blog is read by 10-20 people, who cares? but when read by a zillion people, it matters. [but one of those ten readers could post about it on their blog, spreading it far. my blog is regularly read by less than fifty people, but one post was read by hundreds because a somewhat-popular blogger linked to it.] watch out with blogs, they put you at the top of google for "stupid" [haha, googlebombing.] the blog's standards are set by the community itself. i built up an audience - if i post something stupid, i'll get a zillion comments. what standards do you use to say 'i won't post this'? if i can't corroborate it, with a link preferably. there's a fiercely competitive marketplace of ideas in the blog world. there are a lot of people paying attention to lapses. [lots of people paying attention to newspapers too, but not with such a critical eye, i guess. or maybe it's easier to check facts on the web, easier to get in touch with the authors, immediate response etc.] you risk blog-capital when you go with a rumor. [attention is like blog money - see http://blogshares.com/] there's a rally of the metropolis mayor, lots of people there. a person body-bombs mayor, he gets injured. lots of people emotionally battered, great chaos. etc. under these circumstances, they're running to their television sets. isn't this time when the old media is going to be the center of attention? [ugh, parallels with the madrid bombings. my older sister's in madrid - she said (in an email), "The worst bombs went off at 8:15 in the morning in the Atocha station, and I had plans to meet at 8:45 inside Atocha." i should ask her where she went to first for her news.] what about the five people in the crowd with their cam-phones with them? aren't people going to be clustered in front of the tv? they're going to be in front of the tv for 10 minutes, but the third time they see the tape of the explosion, they're going to the internet. yeah, they're going to over-run the video to death. but everyone is going to watch the tv. everyone with a cam-phone is thinking distribution. selling cam-photos. [eh? somehow, i don't think so.] blogs in addition to tv. [and lots of "dark matter" conversation - people, email, chat] then, like the new york times & september 11th, the newspaper is going to run obituaries...[people laugh because of the earlier reference to newspapers being good for the publishing of obituaries] on the heels of a disaster, media viewing of all kinds goes up. journalists find anyone who's at the scene and get interviews, cam-phone pictures, local survelliance cameras, etc. are you giving any thought to your hopes/fears about what the new media is doing? i don't know if everyone can handle the amount of data hurling into their heads and souls. [arrrgh so true, but newspapers aren't the answer.] where's the talk about who can garner the most amount of audience over the longest time... [i'm not following] the fractionalization has quite literally been blown up. where might all the new media meet? it's not going to be in one place. blogs, list-servs, chat rooms, etc. same people in front of their television. want to see replays, new news, anything a good journalist can find. they're going to want to talk, not going to wait for a letter from the editor - opportunity for people to debate. [yeah, this rings true] missing something? the ethnic/linguistic diversity? [ethnic traditional news media is still traditional news media] add a chinese-language part to your site. multiple languages, or at least linking to them. making sure you have translators on stuff. after 9/11, we learned a lot more about islam, third world poverty, etc. our memories are too short. we're asking questions about the business model. only a part of it - what about the leadership in this community? we cannot use the old media models. collaboration and partnership across media, working with blogs etc. inclusive journalism. more collaboration. not consolidation and ownership. we can roll our own news, as consumers, like oliver. a couple years into the future - the herald made some changes. still shrinking. maybe just the evolution of the business. three different models for the future: shut down print operations, put everything online, no more dead trees. shut down most print operations, wire services model, sell to providers of internet content, commodity news. don't shut down print operations, non-profit organization, pbs model. which might work? [i like the third best, maybe mixed with number two a little] part of the challenge: we are a big media conglomerate. all three models sound likely. we have to try stuff. long-term future. we're selling more than just bits of information, we're selling the process and immediacy of the information [yeah, timeliness is a basic element of news] we should raise the price of the newspaper. we should provide our intellectual property to a number of channels. [raising the price sounds ok. not too high! i wonder if they do that optimizing-costs exercise we did in algebra ii class, or if things are wildly more complicated than that.] why can't we have the blog, the tv, the newspaper, etc, and turn the knobs up and down on any of these mediums, depending on information and money. [wait, that's what the reader does, right? pick the best source?] the blog is already making money. no editors to pay, etc. [most blogs don't make money. if they do, it's from advertising. i thought advertising as a business model was dead...] young people pick the best medium. one platform vs. another. wall street looks for a plan, a vision, long-term transitionary plans. go for option 1. shift away from concept of print. [nooo i like print! i like the coherent comprehensiveness, the quality-guarantee of a real live newspaper! actually, about the quality guarantee...sort of. quality writing at least, which i partially thank the copyeditors for. when i grow up, i think i want to be a copyeditor. or a journalist - a cool one like xeni jardin.] analogy to the movies - nothing sadder than watching theaters shut down in the 70s-80s. they came back, in a way attractive to consumers. [clap clap clap] while the media landscape is changing, the old models still apply. point-to-point communications leads to a happy kingdom anarchy thing? but humans are very clumpy, clustery. the locus of the clumps is changing. advertisers flock to those clumps. that's the traditional media model. human nature is to cluster, human nature is also to fragment. if you go to technorati...very little at the top, most fragmented. [power laws!] oliver was interested in sports - wanted customizable information. solution? with websites, in future with print, customizable information. we can aggregate his information. [customizable? sounds easy-to-do-wrong, but maybe. i'd like it if the newspaper somehow predicted what articles i'd like to read and presented them to me in a neat rss feed...] do you need the metropolis herald to do that? o: yahoo, google news does that. [yahoo is gross. i like google news, it's my browser homepage. slower to load than the traditional http://google.com, but it's worth it. i get a general view of what's happening in the world, almost subliminally.] media companies collect/create intellectual property, aggregate it, push it out. [coherently! that's a good thing. like tv channels. aggregating your tv shows (with a pvr, like tivo) wouldn't work if the tv channels were incoherent...hmm, actually, i don't know where i'm going with this.] collaboration among alt-media. remix. cultural way in which perception has changed. different cultural logics...shift by electronic medium. the measurement model. the record has shown that the majority of newspapers are making money online. oliver is a young person with a lot of time. many people don't have that time to sort out what they want to read. there's a real role for people who want to sift through that for them. [good point, but everything - blogs, newspaers - is about sifting, filtering the blog- or news-worthy from the rest. just need a better sifter, i guess.] susan: blogs can provide immediate response. new services - technorati, feedster - search blogosphere. opening up a kind of dialog in the political world that didn't exist a few years ago. control, behaviors, actions of people. looking around the people, people were doing many things at once - negative space time [joi ito calls it polychronic time]. propositions: the know-trust network. informal communities of people exchange conversation and information, discovery. digital everything. all news needs to be digital/virtual/mobile. individual. unprecedented power of the individual, creating own information, portable.