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Saving the Net–Doc Searls & Walter Cronkite

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Y2K and the Media

If you’re reading this, you’re old enough to remember the media coverage of the Y2K “catastrophe.” The Y2K problem was a computer issue based in a design flaw in then-current programming, which caused certain date-related processes to operate incorrectly for dates after January 1, 2000.

The total cost of the work done in preparation for Y2K was $US 300 billion. [10] There are two ways to view the events of 2000 from the perspective of its aftermath:

The vast majority of problems had been fixed correctly, and the money was well spent. The lack of problems at the date change reflect the completeness of the project.
There were no critical problems to begin with, and correcting the few minor mistakes as they occured would have been the most efficient way to solve the problem. This view was bolstered by the lack of Y2K-related problems in the Third World, which in general had not devoted the programming resources to remediation that the industrialized West had marshalled.
—Wikipedia, Year 2000 problem, Was the expenditure worth the effort?

The media made sure we knew about this problem–every day, any place we were.
The media moved our businesses to check our systems and upgrade.
The media also made the Y2K problem larger by over-reporting on actions of fanatics.

I see no evil intent in this. I do, however, see an incredibly unfortunate result of the Y2K media coverage, and the coverage of events like it, on where we are today.

When it comes to the media, I don’t know who or what to believe.

Where’s Walter Cronkite when you need him?

The Smoke Screen

Now the media is dancing around on the subject of blogs and bloggers. “We like you. Stay in your place. We respect citizen journalists. We’ need to be in control. Let us help you. You’ll be out of the way soon enough.” The message is incredibly unclear.

At first I thought media folks were talking down to me. Now, the more I read, the more I realize how much this sounds like Y2K again.

Something is happening, but no one is saying exactly what it is. The story is replete with opinion and conjecture intertwined with the facts. Examples aren’t representative. Words are filled with subtext and connotations. Reporters and bloggers spend as much time discussing each other as they do what’s happening.

I think that all of the talk in the media about blogging is just a smoke screen.

Doc Searls’ Three Scenarios

Brian Clark pointed me to Doc Searls article Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes. It’s not new. Doc Searls wrote it last November. Every blogger should read it to be able to speak about the future of the Internet with fluency. Doc Searls outlines three scenarios in compelling detail–any one of which is plausible.

[Read more…]

Who’s a Citizen Journalist?

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Okay, just for fun, let’s review.

I’m the nice one. I blog about business, writing, and thinking outside of the box.

According to Tom Glocer, Trevor Butterworth, and Roger Parry, today in the Financial Times, I’m also a citizen journalist. I didn’t know that. Should I put that on my resume?

If folks from the old Media such as Tom Glocer, Trevor Butterworth, and Roger Parry can talk about me and other bloggers. I see no reason that I can’t talk about the three of them and their little talk today.

There were 15 questions asked by 12 people. The floor for questions was open for a week–since Mr. Glocer’s speech to the Online Publisher’s Association in London ran as Old media must embrace the amateur on March 7. You’d think they might have found 15 questions by 15 different people that were worth answering . . .

The last question and the one that seemed most relevant to us was

The blogging revolution is in its infancy as the web was in the late 1990s. Bloggers will become more sophisticated and organised over time. The blogging community will itself split – between professional and amateur bloggers. Many professional bloggers will be experts in their own fields that do not have the desire/time to write for mainstream media. Add all these professional bloggers together (through technology or partnerships) and you potentially have the real challenge to old media in a few years. How can old media coerce or partner with a much more advanced and professional blogging community? Fighting hundreds of thousands of real niche experts will be a much different challenge. How can Reuters face this challenge?
Philip L Letts

If my search located the right Philip L. Letts, he appears to have an interesting business background. He also has several blogs.

Mr. Glocer’s answer showed a growing understanding, though he’s still breathing the air in the old media tower . . .

. . . I think media companies like ours need to experiment with both amateur and professional blogs. Reuters has been encouraging our own professional journalists to blog events, like the Consumer Electronics show – so you should not expect all the “experts� to come from the outside. To attract outside professionals you need to offer a platform, an audience and a brand that is appealing. The war will not be won by coercion but by mutual consent.

Mr. Butterworth, who makes no bones about his dislike of blogs, showed both his arrogance and his belief in the use of big vocabulary . . .

. . . there is a much more fundamental question: how many readers do you alienate as a news organisation by indulging in blogging? I think you (and mainstream media blog evangelists) overestimate, at the very least, American appetites for bloviation. Branded opinions yes; what DaveSpart68 in Ohio thinks about George W. Bush, no.

Presently, the reality of the blogathons at some newspapers in the U.S. seems to be less expert disquisition and more inquisitorial musing on American Idol or Lindsey Lohan. Fine, clearly there is a market for this kind of pop cultural chatter – but how much is it enhancing the newspaper as a business? Not as much as devoting more resources to producing original, insightful and well-written content, I’d warrant.

Second, the idea that there are hundreds of thousands of “niche experts� blogging away (or ready and willing to blog) lacks empirical evidence. I’m very impressed with scienceblogs.com – read the surgeon/scientist “respectful insolence� and you get a real sense of how the mainstream need to upgrade their medical reporting. . . .

Mr. Parry, won my favor by calling things as he sees them with the fewest words and seemingly the most experience of reality . . .

. . . The degree to which a blog is interesting to people other than its author will depend on the subject matter, the authority, the level of “new� information and the style of the writing. In short the most popular blogs will share the same characteristics as the most popular newspapers, magazines and broadcast programmes.

In some ways the blog is the digital version of the letter to the editor or the self produced leaflet but with the added dimensions or interactivity, real-time distribution and global access. The blogger who produces something of very narrow subject interest can still draw a sizable audience as they have the whole world as potential readers.

Existing media will have to embrace blogs as an enhancement to their content offer in the same way they commission articles from experts, run reader polls and invite letters.

Bloggers who do their job well will, like star columnists, attract a loyal following and will be paid (if they want to be ) to let their blog be aggregated into an existing media offering. . . .

I do have one question that didn’t get answered. If Tom Glocer, Trevor Butterworth, and Roger Parry got fired tomorrow, would they then be citizen journalists like me?

I wonder . . .

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related articles
Financial Times Debate On–Should Old Media Embrace New?
Tom Glocer Don’t Spin Stories to My Friends
Edelman Aces PR, NY Times Fails Research

Financial Times Debate On–Should Old Media Embrace New?

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If you’ve been following the conversation, Tom Glocer Don’t Spin Stories to My Friends, you might be interested in the debate going on this afternoon at the Financial Times. Click the screenshot to follow Tom Glocer, CEO of Reuters; Trevor Butterworth, Financial Times contributor; and Roger Parry of Clear Channel as they field questions on the topic of how the MSM should respond to the new media.

The Q&A has already started.

Financial Times Debate New Media Embrace Old?

I’m more than interested in your comments. Do come back and leave one.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related articles:
Edelman Aces PR, NY Times Fails Research
Why MSM Are Afraid of Blogs–and Should Be
Looking in the Right Direction — The MSM Isn’t. Are You?
Blogs Aren’t Mini-Websites. They’re Powerful Tools.

Edelman Aces PR, NY Times Fails Research

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Howie Kurtz writes about the nonflap the NY Times tried to stir up over Walmart and its PR company, Edelman, pitching their spin to bloggers

What’s not in dispute is that what was once dismissed as a pajama-clad brigade is becoming increasingly influential, to the point that giant companies have to worry about what they say.

Howie gives the bloggers the Times poked and prodded equal time to tell their stories (which includes the fact that the Times reporter doesn’t understand that a blockquote is our indication of taking an excerpt… except it’s not something we invented, it comes from academic practices).

—Jeff Jarvis of Buzz Machine, The flack flack

Wal-Mart Logo

Public Relations. It’s called public relations because that’s what it’s meant to do–establish relationships between companies and the public. Walmart needed some. They hired Edelman to help them tell their story by providing press releases. Edelman, as part of their effort, enlisted the help of bloggers to get the Walmart message out. Edelman belives in bloggers as a way of reaching people. In editorial, we call this creative thinking. Good firm, good strategy, good execution. Walmart and Edelman get an A in PR.

New York Times on the Web

At the New York Times, however, they didn’t think of it as PR or as creativity. They were looking for a story–with bloggers involved, maybe a scandal. Would it have been a scandal if the writers were small-town newpaper journalists? I don’t think so. You’ll notice The Times tells the story of one blogger weaving in bits about a second making a pile of details sound representative of a large group–but the size of the group isn’t defined. Then sweeping generalizations come. To quote from the article, Wal-Mart Enlists Bloggers in PR Campaign, written by Michael Barbaro,

But the strategy raises questions about what bloggers, who pride themselves on independence, should disclose to readers. Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest private employer, has been forthright with bloggers about the origins of its communications, and the company and its public relations firm, Edelman, say they do not compensate the bloggers.

But some bloggers have posted information from Wal-Mart, at times word for word, without revealing where it came from.

Some bloggers? How many is some? I wonder.

Some bloggers posted them without telling their audience was that a scandal, a mistake,or an innocent lack of knowledge on the part of someone who’s being called an amateur when it’s convenient, but not today?

As a number of people have pointed out, however, bloggers are far from the first people in media to do this. (Dan Gilmor has a good overview of the controversy.) People say all the time that Mainstream Media cover various corporations or government initiatives as if they were just reproducing press releases. What about the Video News Releases, stories planted in the Iraqi press, or a quarter million dollars for favorable coverage of No Child Left Behind?
says Marshall Kirkpatrick in his piece When pitched bloggers go bad: Walmart and the blogosphere

The question is one of knowing intent isn’t it? Knowing intent, in this case, should be considered both on the part of the blogger and on the part of the New York Times reporter–who failed to contact the numerous bloggers who had things to say such as this:

Yours truly is one of the people to which Mr. Barbaro is referring in this last paragraph. I have been “fed” some of these “exclusive nuggets” and have had topics suggested for posting. And though my blog was not mentioned in the Times article, I’d like make to make one thing clear: excluding this one, I have written 12 other posts on Wal-Mart in the last five months. I started writing them long before I knew about or heard from Wal-Mart’s PR firms.

Every one of those posts is original. That is to say, I picked the article, the theme, and everything that was written- every sentence and every word and every typo. I challenge Mr. Barbaro to find even one sentence in those 12 posts that was written first by someone else.

I also have a question or two. How is it that my blog escaped your notice? It is the number one blog in Technorati about Wal-Mart. It has a dozen highly original, detailed, and analytical posts on that firm, each of which averages over 700 words. It’s written by a former MIT professor whose dissertation and first published papers were about information technology in the retailing industry. I ask not out of concern for not having my blog included in the article but because of this: if you missed that, what else did you miss?
— David Starling, The Business of America Is Business

I have to say that the research on The New York Times article leaves a lot out there waiting to be brought forward. The story is much more fascinating than what actually made it into print–just as bloggers are.

Finally this from Rich Edelman’s own blog:

We are proud of our groundbreaking work in reaching out to blogs on behalf of our clients and proud of this work for Wal-Mart. I suspect our clients have benefited hugely from insights gleaned from dialogue with bloggers.
Here are three blog postings from people I know and respect discussing the issues raised in the NY Times article:
The first is from Paul Holmes, editor of the Holmes Report, a PR trade publication. The second is from Jeff Jarvis, a widely respected blogger considered a leader in blog standards. The third is from Dan Gillmor, author of “We The Media.” As always, I appreciate your views.

Update: Robert Scoble suggests blogging — not emailing — is the best way to reach bloggers.

THAT’S an example of someone who “GET’S IT.”

Blogger is starting to feel like it rhymes with “second-class” citizen.

Let’s hire Steve Rubel, a VP at Edelman, and ask him to do PR for bloggers as a group. Then the NY Times can write a piece called Bloggers Enlist Bloggers in PR Campaign.

I like the sound of that one much better.

But then I would.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related articles:
Gate Keepers v Amateurs by Jeff Jarvis
Mr. Glocer Don’t Spin Stories to My Fiends

Web 2.0 What IS It?

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Did you wake up one morning, hearing people talking about Web 2.0 and never quite catch a definition? At last, here’s a complete definition–an entire article with examples . . . This one will answer all of your questions and entertain you. I promise. Click the screenshot to find out.

[via Chartreuse]

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Tom Glocer Don’t Spin Stories to My Friends

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The Nice One

I was working for a privately-held publishing company for about 9 months. The company had been losing 10% a year for the past three years running. In the morning the Major Partner and Chief Financial Officer were coming to visit to hear our plan to turn the company around. I had been chosen to voice the plan.

That night at dinner, the Operations’ Director and close friend said to me over wine and dinner, “You know, the success of this company really depends on you.”

“You’re talking about our meeting tomorrow. That will be fine.” I said.

“No. I’m talking about the execution of the plan.”

“Elaborate.”

“You’re the only one who’s not jaded. You’re the nice one,” she said.

Why am I telling you this story?

So that I could say that my friend, Peg, said I am the nice one.

Reading the White Space?

Tom Glocer said some things to the Online Publishers in London. Almost everyone, except Scott Karp, Dave, a few others, and me, thinks he said good things. I wish I could agree with them. The truth is I can’t. I’m not sure he said anything at all that was good.

I commented on it earlier this week and was done. Then Tom Glocer said it again in this week’s Financial Times, which made more people–people smarter and nicer than me say that Tom is insightful.

I want to believe them. I just can’t. The editor in me knows better. It’s shouting out, “NO.” I worry that Tom is shaking their hands and smiling for the camera, while he’s checking their sleeves and planning his takeover.

I’m the nice one. I rarely go negative on anything. This situation is a problem for me.

Too many years in publishing has trained me to read the white space better than the words.

I went to my husband–we never agree on unimportant things. Without preamble, I asked him to read the Financial Times article. He responded the same way that I did. “Who does this guy think he is?” That’s saying something. My husband is not involved in the media or in blogging.

The Underlying Premises

Now that I’m sure that there’s a problem. I’ll lay out the basic premises before I begin. There are some things that most people, I think, aren’t considering and as the story moves on those basic facts are becoming less and less prominent. However, I find them to be very important to remember when considering Mr. Glocer’s words.

Premise 1: This Wasn’t Just Any Guy Talking

Tom Glocer is the CEO of Reuters. He didn’t get there by saying frivolous things in print. The words that he said were first said in a speech to the Online Publishers Association in London. This wasn’t some off the cuff conversation with a friend. I have no doubt that the words were carefully crafted, both what was said and what wasn’t.

Premise 2: He’s Talking ABOUT Bloggers Not TO Us

The speech that was written up in Financial Times as “Comments” was directed at the Mainstream Media not at what Mr. Glocer calls “not just bloggers – it is citizen journalists armed with their 1.3 megapixel camera phones, people “mashing” together music and images to create new music videos, kids making their own movies and posting them on sites such as Stupidvideos.com or MySpace.com.” Bloggers and citizen journalists are not being spoken to, they are being spoken about.

The Analysis

Part of my job all of these years has been learning to read what people aren’t saying as much as what they are. Editors use this information to coach authors to make sure that their message says what they mean it to. What follows is point by point what Tom said and how this editor would respond to him about the unwritten subtext.

Point 1: What Has Changed

It is important to understand what has changed. Bloggers, after all, have always been a part of history – read Daniel Defoe, Samuel Pepys or James Boswell. The same is true for citizen journalists: just check out first-hand accounts of any big historical event. The difference now is the scale of distribution and the ability to search. Because of this, we in the media industry face a profound challenge, as significant and transformational as Internet 1.0. So how should we respond to and control content fragmentation in this era of two-way flow?

Editorial notes:
1. It sounds as if you are saying “We can no longer ignore that bloggers are here to stay. They are, in fact, gaining ground.”

2. It appears that you are trying to show you respect bloggers by tying it to great men in history. However, this doesn’t work given your earlier definition of people mashing music and StupidVideos.com. In fact, it’s more likely that fans of Daniel Defoe et.al. should be insulted to be grouped into your aforementioned definition of blogger.

3. An operative phrase here is “we in the media face a profound challenge.” This phrase is excluding in nature, particularly since it is followed by the question of how the media should control things.

Point 2: Seeder of Clouds

. . . media companies need to be “seeders of clouds”?. To have access to high-value new content, we need to attract a community around us. To achieve that we have to produce high-quality content ourselves, then display it and let people interact with it. If you attract an audience to your content and build a brand, people will want to join your community. This is as true for traditional “letters to the editor” as for MySpace.com.

Editorial notes:
1. It appears you are saying “Only the media can provide quality content. If we don’t get a community around us soon and hold onto it we will become irrelevent.”

2. Operative phrase: “let people interact with it.” Let us? Allows us to? Let implies control. Invite would have been a better word.

3. Operative example here is MySpace.com Why choose what’s primarily a teen hangout as an example rather than something mainstream readers might easily relate to, such as TomPeters.com or Slacker Manager? This seems to continue the stereotype that blogs are online journals–unorganized, undocumented information, and therefore “less than” mainstream media.

Point 3: Provider of Tools

. . . we need to be “the provider of tools”?. This means promoting open standards and interoperability, which will allow a diverse set of consumer-creators to combine disparate types of content.

Editorial notes:
1. You appear to be saying “If we don’t open the doors to new ideas, they will EXCLUDE US.”

2. Provider of tools? This is total spin, using big words to cover it. Bloggers already have the tools that they need–bloggers are teaching corporate how to use them not the other way around.

Point 4: Filter and Editor

. . . we must improve on our skills as the “filter and editor”?. Media have always had these functions. The world will always need editing: consumers place value in others making decisions about what is good and what is not.

Editorial notes:
1. False premise–media has NOT always been filter and editor.

2. Unstated assumption–the audience wants the mainstream media to choose for them. This is not spin. This is just a faulty and telling premise on the part of media.

This is proof that Mr. Glocer DOES NOT as they say “get it.”

Synthesis

Editors know that the words and examples writers and speakers choose show how they think. Mr. Glocer, you use words of control and superiority. Your examples reinforce that view. This speech has voice of congeniality, but the subtext is a defensive posture. You speak as if you are strong, but your words betray weakness.

The paragraphs that follow those that I quoted go on to say how the professionals should work with the amateurs. That leaves me wondering how you define those two words. Corporate job, you are one and no corporate job, you’re the other?

As any four-year-old might say, “Mr. G., I’m sorry, but you’re not a dictionary. YOU DON’T GET TO PICK.”

A blogger is an entrepreneur by definition. That’s why the corporate rules aren’t working.

Some Folks DO Get It

Some in the “Mainstream Media” do “get it.” They are learning not teaching, and there are plenty in my neighborhood. OnMilwaukee is a thriving online magazine that boasts major advertising accounts. The suburban newspaper, The Chicago Herald has recently started Beep, a blog Network for 21- to 34-year-old professional. The Chicago Tribune has Metromix that’s Tribune Interactive–both print and online.

The idea is to let go of what you think should be in favor of making content that readers find relevant.

Got that Mr. Glocer? . . . I thought not.

Call me. Let’s talk. I promise I won’t call you an amateur.

I’m the nice one.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related articles:
Why MSM Are Afraid of Blogs — and Should Be
Looking in the Right Direction — The MSM Isn’t. Are You?
Blogs Aren’t Mini-Websites. They’re Powerful Tools.
Chicago Goes Wi-Fi . . . What Does that Mean to Business?