Tag: media

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Media Notebook Technology

$1 Billion-Dollar Valuations for Pipelines and Platforms, and for Creators?

Flipboard raises $50 million on near billion valuationI just… the insanity of this… “Flipboard, the online news magazine app, has raised $50m at a $800m valuation, which is almost 50% of the market cap of The New York Times Company at $1.75 billion.” A near-billion dollar valuation?

From Tom Forenski:

The valuation of Flipboard is an example of a Silicon Valley media company that produces no media content of its own. Its revenues come from advertising placed on its app which collects content recommended by the social networks of its users. Its revenues are not disclosed and it employs less than 200 people.

Compare to:

The New York Times Company  [$NYT] publishes two national newspapers plus 16 regional newspapers. It also owns eight television stations and two New York radio stations. It operates more than 40 web sites. It has 5,363 staff and 2012 revenues of $2 billion.

Here again, we support the pipeline instead of the content creator. As a pipeline aggregator, Flipboard “derives revenue with advertising splits with publishers for ads it places on Flipboard pages,” reports Kara Swisher. Here’s a prediction: the revenue will be enough to keep Flipboard in business, but not the New York Times. Maybe I’m wrong; startups don’t release revenues after all, not until they go public, so it’s possible Flipboard is rolling in money and sharing it with publishers. But then why raise another $50 million?

More likely is they have no idea how to monetize at scale (despite their first $50 million, they’re still only piloting advertising programs and have started to partner with sites like Etsy to get a cut of their cart). Not that it matters if a company makes money anymore, they can still IPO. If pipelines, like say, Beacon, can support content creators in a meaningful way, that would make a near-billion dollar valuation exciting. Until then, pipelines and platforms will just keep taking cuts until there’s nothing left for the creator. Oh wait, that’s now.

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Blogging Innovation Social media

Work is Irrelevant

Work, that of pursuing a specific passion or purpose, has become irrelevant. As technology increasingly gains momentum, we’ve moved from the age of work/life blur to the age of tech/life blur.

For instance, if you’re a writer, it’s not the content that matters (the work itself), but how the content is consumed and packaged. “We are on the brink of accessing digital content through what they call the ‘splinternet,’” argues Columbia Business School professor Rita McGrath. “Devices, hardware, software, applications and content, rather than being offered interoperably in a wide-open World Wide Web are increasingly going to be stacked up in proprietary ecosystems in which denizens can talk only to each other.”

So iPad apps like Flipboard, Zite and others like it are becoming the norm and offer “a much more natural way to consume content on a tablet, and the aggregation they provide is like having a customized newspaper available at any time,” argues Matthew Ingram on GigaOm. “The aggregation, personalization and customization that such apps allow is the future of content consumption.”

The introduction of the tablet has changed the reading experience such that it is now acceptable to charge for content. This is really the way the New York Times metered subscription is set up. When you pay for a New York Times subscription, you’re not really paying for content (the work), but paying to read it on your computer screen, your tablet, your Kindle, and your mobile app. You’re paying to read it how you want to on the splinternet. You’re not paying for the work, but the technology to consume it.

In the age of newspapers, we did charge for information, but now we charge for the customizability of how that information is delivered. It’s the media company’s job to design the experience of their digital offerings, not just create the content and they can’t keep up. So now, even though newspapers didn’t invent the printing press (the rapidity of typographical text production led to newspapers), they’re being pressured to invent the next revolution.

In reality, what will happen is just how the Internet created blogs (and what many are now calling a sub-optimal reading experience), tech start-ups will continue to invent new ways to consume information, and as a result, new companies and creators will come along with new types of content in response.

This is all happening at such a rapid pace (and in all industries, not just media which I’ve only used as an example), that we’re much more concerned with the rhythm and output of innovation than we are of the work itself.

We know most content on the web is crap. We know there’s nothing really amazing or revolutionary about what we consume on our iPhones. The most popular activity is Scrabble. I like to look and see where people are on Foursquare. You might check on the weather. On Google, I rarely find what I’m actually looking for, but I will receive twenty-four million results for trying. The tech/life blur says nevermind the banality of what you consume on technology, just be subservient to the fact that it exists.

That is why there is such a ginormous focus on work fulfillment when we have never cared about such a notion before. We want to work towards something bigger than ourselves, but technology is already bigger than ourselves, and so there’s a certain confusion, an aimlessness and a fractionation of our work. That which tells us that if you’re a writer, you’re no longer a writer. You’re a blogger, and an amateur coder, you can sell, you’re a marketer, you know PR, software and a bit of graphic design, you’re an accountant and you’re a publisher. Your side projects feed into your day job. And all of your jobs feed through the Internet. This is what it means to live on the Internet, consumed by the processes instead of the action.

Work is empty. Technology fills us. It’s not what we do, but how we do it. Of course that can only last so long before the focus on how we do something obliterates all meaning of what we’re doing.

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The Objectivity Myth

Old Media Needs an Opinion

Journalists are objective. Bloggers are not. The two have been duking it out since the dawn of the Internet age. Journalists think objectivity will save their jobs and bloggers know that is nonsense. Old media is not irrelevant, but they are digging themselves into a hole. Let me explain.

First, understand that journalism has never been objective. Newspapers first emerged as political publications funded by partisan parties and read by the top of society’s pyramid. Then in a move to both democratize media and increase profits, newspapers dropped their prices and attracted multitudes of immigrants and workers as subscribers in order to sell those eyeballs to eager advertisers.

That should sound similar to today’s content farm with one big exception – newspapers were written by an elite group of thought-leaders (and still are), and so the power to create and distribute information remained in the hands of just a few.

Fast-forward a century, give or take a few decades, and you have the media industry that politics and technology built. But now the Internet has given everyone the opportunity to create and distribute information. No longer is news controlled by large media conglomerates, but by anyone who wants to contribute to the conversation.

On the Internet, we have largely admitted that individual and institutional objectivity is impossible. Not even Google tries to offer impartial news results when you search, preferring instead to offer up “the most articulate and passionate people arguing both sides of the equation,” says Google News’ founder, Krishna Bharat. Today we trust algorithms to deliver objectivity since humans cannot.

Objectivity is null on the web because the reader can always self-verify and fact-check themselves. That is what the proliferation of information is there for. You will be tracked. “Objectivity is a trust mechanism you rely on when your medium can’t do links,” technologist David Weinberger argued back in the day. “Transparency is the new objectivity.”

Fair enough if you have the time to click on all of those links, but none of us do. Not to mention transparency often stifles meaningful dialogue. Nevertheless and despite my own bias on it, transparency is just as useful as objectivity in holding individuals and companies accountable, and as a big bonus, it doesn’t require you to act like an impartial noob.

Now, here’s what’s important.

The real reason newspapers can’t transition online is because they’re holding onto the veil of objectivity as the reason for their relevance. Readers, in turn, cry foul because they know objectivity is unreasonable, and instead uphold the virtues of new media. Then everyone declares traditional media is dead.

Sad face.

The thing is, objectivity is irrelevant, not news organizations. Rule number one in running a business is to determine the value you provide to your customers. A newspaper’s value doesn’t lie in it’s impartiality, so it’s ridiculous that traditional media continues to place those virtues on a pedestal. The traditional news model is not outdated, but journalists’ ideologies are.

Why do news companies continue to praise impartiality? Well, the veil of objectivity did allow newspapers to have a successful advertiser-subscriber model. And being profitable subsequently allowed newspapers to fund long investigations that readers came to rely on. So media organizations often confuse their business model, objective reporting and actual good journalism – that is, investigative reporting, news that is highly crafted and cared for, and that continuous sifting and winnowing for the truth at all costs.

A journalist doesn’t ask “Why? What? How?” because they’re impartial. They ask because they care. They ask because they have passion for the topic. They ask because they want to uncover injustices, right wrongs and make a difference.

There’s no reason why the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune and New York Times should insist on objectivity as superiority. It has nothing to do with the actual amazing content they provide day in and day out.

The real travesty is not the loss of impartiality then, which never existed anyway, but the fact that without big profits, there are no big budgets, and no big investigations. Only half of the states in the U.S. now have even one full-time reporter in Washington, D.C., for instance. Can we keep our politicians accountable through our computer screens if a smaller and smaller number of people show up in real life?

No, we cannot. Nor can we uphold fair labor practices or ensure financial rigor at banks or keep up with everything else that’s important to our society. Blogs don’t have big budgets either. So journalists and bloggers both end up having to pander to page-view journalism, which serves advertisers alone (witness the devolution of media).

Here’s what the New York Times and the rest should do. Let go of objectivity. It’s elitist, it’s unattainable and it’s not important. Talk about real benefits. Charge for access and load up on advertisers to make mad money and deliver mad value.

It’s okay to have an opinion. In fact, it’s what makes us human.

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Expertise

How Amateur Content Makes Us Dumb

newspaper collagePhoto: mypixbox

It’s a misnomer that the web was the innovation that gave amateurs their place alongside experts in credibility. We were actually primed for this during the industrial revolution when things like hot dogs became an abstraction of real food. Processed and pushed into its casing, hot dogs look nothing like and have no relation to anything they are made from. As meals go, this is one for the amateurs. Real foodies eat sweet pork sausage that is made on-site at the restaurant. And the real, real foodies (experts), make sure that the pork didn’t come from an industrial hog.

The web did however reinforce what we already knew – that you can’t define expertise by whether you are a blogger or a journalist, whether you have a PhD or not, or whether you have put in your 10,000 hours, so the distinction between amateur and expert remains along the line of abstraction – or hot dogs vs sustainable sweet pork sausage.

Here’s how I look at it —

Amateur content is 1) written for a mass audience and 2) does not make connections between larger systems or ideas. Just like you don’t care where your hot dog came from or what it’s made of, amateurs write in a silo and on the surface. This has nothing to do with size. Both Oprah and a small personal development blogger can distribute amateur content on any given day (and do).

Expert content on the other hand is 1) written for a niche audience – but in a way that a mass audience can learn from – and 2) does make connections between those larger topics and ideas.

Amateur content has devolved into meta content, where it’s increasingly abstracted to the point where everything is “how to be rich, be happy, quit your day job, have sex every day and live well” and in these five buckets (happiness, money, work, life, relationships), we’re seeing people repeat the same things over and over to the point where there is no value anymore.

Oh it is alluring to read, again and again, how you can incubate and execute an idea or motivate yourself on a Monday, especially when can’t quite seem to master these seemingly elusive tasks. But it’s also a self-referential profanity of the mind.

And rather pointless I might add, as you would not still be consuming such content if any of it was of any value. All processes are the same – pick one and go with it. Or develop your own if you want to be teacher’s pet, but don’t ignore the deep dive that getting your fingers sticky with actual knowledge provides. Expert content drives a whole other level of learning and discovery and questioning.

The five buckets of furthering your own sparkle and hustle are only meta descriptors for the actual beef of living. Work, life, love, money and happiness are useful insofar as they are labels or subject headings to the intricate web of understanding. But when amateur content insists that we relate to our lives on this meta level, it ignores well, the rest of the iceberg.

This isn’t to say amateur content isn’t entertaining or necessary in some contexts. I like a good hot dog from time to time, love Oprah all the time, and generally consume amateur content for different (and good) reasons throughout the day. But we need more writers to create expert content and more publishers to distribute it. Not only for the sanity of our selves, but for the evolution of media.

Content will have to be that which cannot be easily copied, and that which cannot be abstracted into a big meta bow. And it will have to dive deep into the many sub-headings and levels, continually sifting and winnowing through energy innovations, media, healthcare, philosophy, the sharing economy,  technology, fashion, the food industry, political history and much, so very much more.

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Politics

The Rise of Transparency and the Fall of Dialogue

When Republican Governor Scott Walker recently sought to eliminate collective bargaining rights, it was less about Wisconsin’s budget deficit or labor unions themselves, and more of a thinly veiled attempt to destroy the Democratic party. That’s because labor unions are one of the few organized groups that can counter-balance large companies in the money department when campaign time rolls around. Without the backing and support of labor unions, the Democratic party would be in trouble.

Walker’s actions weren’t unjustified however, nor representative of solely the Republican party. Today’s elected officials align themselves with their political party over their constituents, and find it more beneficial to abide by the party line than to compromise. That’s because the need for transparency necessitates every comment be combed through with a fine-toothed analysis thereby crippling what was once known as the world’s greatest deliberative bodies.

“Mr. Walker’s conduct has provoked a level of divisiveness and bitter partisan hostility the likes of which have not been seen in this state since at least the Vietnam War,” argues UW-Madison professor William Cronon in the New York Times. “Many citizens are furious at their governor and his party, not only because of profound policy differences, but because these particular Republicans have exercised power in abusively nontransparent ways that represent such a radical break from the state’s tradition of open government.”

But Walker didn’t create partisan dysfunction; he only lit its fire. Transparency is the real culprit, and while yes, transparency is a mechanism to keep officials accountable, it is also an enabler of partisanship.

C-SPAN was the first to flip on the light of accountability. “After C-SPAN went on the air, the cozy atmosphere that encouraged both deliberation and back-room deals began to yield to transparency and, with it, posturing,” argues George Packer in The New Yorker. “The weakened institution could no longer withstand pressures from outside its walls; as money and cameras rushed in, independent minds fell more and more in line with the partisans. Rough parity between the two parties meant that every election had the potential to make or break a majority, crushing the incentive to cooperate across the aisle.”

Today, bloggers are the ones that carry transparency’s torch in the name of open government. “Bloggers carry so much influence that many senators have a young press aide dedicated to the care and feeding of online media,” says Packer. “News about, by, and for a tiny kingdom of political obsessives dominates the attention of senators and staff, while stories that might affect their constituents go unreported because their home-state papers can no longer afford to have bureaus in Washington.”

Transparency has become the enabler for what The Daily Beast’s Washington bureau chief Howard Kurtz calls an “era of sound-bite warfare on steroids.” Partisan organizations now exist whose sole aim is to discredit public officials and craft previously benign remarks into incendiary blows. Sound-bite snippets are volleyed up and copied into the broadcast and blogger media while these organizations claim that they “make their research transparent,” and are thus able to escape culpability on the denigration of our political system.

Senior Senator Lamar Alexander (Republican) describes the effect as “this instant radicalizing of positions to the left and the right.” No longer do the right and left sides speak to or even look at each other. No one is actually even in the governing chamber when their colleagues stand up. And whereas Senators in the seventies would have lunch together, if a Republican joins a lunch full of Democrats today, their identity is kept a secret to protect their reputation. Trust is non-existent, and the tradition of politics – that of “substantive, thoughtful and moderate discussion” – is swept aside.

Massive demonstrations around Wisconsin’s Capitol led to the eventual block of Walker’s legislation – hey, don’t mess with a Sconnie – but most protesters understood they weren’t marching for the right to retain collective bargaining, but against the pure ego-centric, heavy-handed idiocy that is Scott Walker. They were marching for the right to have a conversation. Wisconsin’s Democartic Senators went so far as to flee the state and hide out in Illinois to stall the passing of the bill.

“Walker doesn’t negotiate. Whether it’s with state workers or Democratic lawmakers, he wouldn’t come to the table,” State Representative Joe Parisi said. “And that’s the problem.” So the Dems decided not to show up either. Instead, both parties talked to the press as if media were meditator, and the bloggers and media did what they do best, reducing an issue to one remark versus another and one party against the other.

Meanwhile, it wasn’t reported that both sides – Republicans and Democrats – came to march around the Capitol. And lest we forget, during the winter in Wisconsin, that is an especially big deal.  It wasn’t reported that the demonstrations were peaceful and respectful. And it wasn’t reported that demonstrators showed up to talk to each other when our politicians would not.

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Media

The Devolution of the Huffington Post, Forbes, and Hopefully Not The New York Times

With the arrival of the open web, it was okay not to pay writers. And when you didn’t pay writers, you needed more of them. As an editor, perhaps you invited writers to contribute that you wouldn’t normally to increase page views. You weren’t serving the reader, you were serving the advertiser. Soon you had the Huffington Post, which at one point was the darling of the free and open web, with nary a question on the model, because the content was good.

Inspired by its decentralized technology, the open web was supposed to shift the power from the corporation to the people. Many imagined a sort of utopian society that relied on abundance instead of the current economy’s premise of scarcity. And the web did fulfill the promise of abundance in the form of Free, but utopia would have to wait.

With distribution came dislocation, and companies were able to use the web to extract more and more value out of the people creating the value. The same industrial model worked on the networked net because technology still favors efficiency over say, any other human value.

As a result, the most popular articles on the Huffington Post today read more like TMZ or People magazine: “Awkward Wedding Photos: Who Knew That Tying The Knot Could Be This Hilarious?,” “Khloe Kardashian Talks Weight: ‘Love Handles’ And ‘Fat Days’,” “Courteney Cox on ‘Strictly Platonic’ Vacation With Co-Star Josh Hopkins,” “’Dancing With the Stars’ Recap: Week Two Elimination,” and “Woman Can’t Close Her Eyes After Bungled Plastic Surgery.”

Not to mention, the advertisements on Huffington Post are indistinguishable from the content, and both are seemingly designed that way: “The Original Crime Family – The Borgias Premiere Sunday 9p e/p on Showtime.”

Whatever Arianna Huffington banked from that list of articles (ads?) allowed her the audacity to poke fun of the New York Times paid subscription model this past April Fools’ Day. To be fair, the post pokes fun at the New York Times and the Huffington Post simultaneously, declaring in jest that the Huffington Post’s move to digital subscriptions will be “one that will strengthen our ability to provide high-quality journalism to readers around the world.” (We’re all in on the joke; Huffington hasn’t valued high-quality journalism for a great while.) Later, Huffington facetiously describes HuffPo’s signature offering as an adorable kitten slideshow. Which isn’t far from the truth. In fact, a kitten slideshow might be an improvement on their most popular offerings.

Nevertheless, other sites have followed suit (if anything, the web excels at copying). Almost a year ago, Forbes.com announced that it would open the door “to 1000s of unpaid contributors and [rather than commissioning quality in-house journalism] ‘Forbes editors will increasingly become curators of talent,’” reported Tech Crunch writer Paul Carr.

Carr predicted that the Forbes decision would result in the magazine suffering the “Death of a Thousand Hacks,” which has two meanings: “The first, much like the death of a thousand cuts, is that they’re chipping away at everything they used to represent by replacing real reporting with SEO-driven bullshit and an army of unpaid amateur hack bloggers. The second meaning is that those thousand hacks are going to kill their brand.”

Since then, hundreds of bloggers received invitations to join Forbes.com including myself. The email I received implored me to “Just continue to do what you do best–write. I am not looking for exclusive content (although it’s most welcome), request copyright or ask that you blog any more than you already do. Forbes does not wish to control, alter or affect your blog in any way,” the editor told me. “You can publish simultaneously on your blog and your personal Forbes.com blog… As an uncompensated contributor, your posts will be available to millions of dedicated Forbes readers.”

To be clear, the editor is only requesting permission to copy my work onto the open web in exchange for increased exposure instead of compensation. I wouldn’t even have to be held accountable for blogging regularly. When I inquired about the possibility of a consistent, paid position, the editor replied: “Can I *promise* regular, consistent writing position? That’s something you can do with your blog. Which brings us to your next question: Can I *promise* paid writing at a later date? I can say it is a possibility.”

Her response seemed fair and promising. However, when I asked her to point me to any examples of any bloggers on Forbes that started uncompensated and were now paid, the editor came up short. “This is such a new platform that I honestly can’t,” she replied. Instead, the editor supplied me with the contact information of a writer she had to cut when she lost her freelance budget, but was now excited to bring back with “some compensation.”

I expect this would be no surprise to Carr if he heard. He argued Forbes would do “what the Huffington Post does: pay a meager stipend to a tiny percentage top traffic drivers to save face [indeed, Forbes admits this proudly], and then expect the rest to work ‘for the exposure’. As the old saying goes, people die from exposure – but in this case, it might just be the whole publication that’s not long for this world.”

Companies of formerly strong reputation take on the content farm model, and then editors have the job of throwing spaghetti on the cupboard to see what sticks. Forbes calls this curation, but I sensed a distinct desperation from the editor who emailed.

The value shift from core product to peripheral offerings on the free web means companies extract enormous amounts of value from writers who rely on the promise of monetizing their exposure, in the form of, say, speaking engagements or TV appearances, instead of their work.

“Of course, the people hiring us to do those appearances believe they should get us for free as well, because our live performances will help publicize our books and movies. And so it goes, all the while being characterized as the new openness of a digital society, when in fact we are less open to one another than we are to exploitation from the usual suspects at the top of the traditional food chain,” argues digital theorist Douglas Rushkoff.

“The very same kinds of companies are making the same money off text, music, and movies—simply by different means,” argues Rushkoff. “Value is still being extracted from everyone who creates content that ends up freely viewable online. It’s simply not being passed down anymore.” Writers aren’t being paid, but advertisers are.

The New York Times has thus refused such a model in the interest of creating value, not extracting it. Good journalism, after all, is expensive. It takes time, money, bodies, effort and significant resources. While it can be replicated by machine, it can’t originate from one.

The recent introduction of the New York Times pay wall however, did not inspire the valuation of content from readers, but a further alignment with corporatism.

“When we insist on consuming it for free, we are pushing them toward something much closer to the broadcast television model, where ads fund everything,” argues Rushokoff. “We already know what that does for the quality of news and entertainment. Yet this is precisely the model that the ad-based hosts and search engines are pushing for. By encouraging us to devalue and deprofessionalize our work, these companies guarantee a mediaspace where only they get paid. They devalue the potential of the network itself to create value in new ways.”

So eager are we to let advertising dictate the availability of quality content that the free and open web has only given us an abundance of copies. The aggregation of creative material and original thought has declined.  No longer can we rely on corporate interests to create, sustain, build and evolve our platforms in a post-scarcity society. The solution, simply, is to value content, to respect the labor of individuals.

Lest you think such an approach is pie-in-the-sky, turn your attention towards The New Yorker, which “puts investigations of national security on the cover instead of celebs, yet it has the highest subscription renewal rate of any magazine in the country. A privately owned company, it is thought to be turning a profit of around $10m. Editorial decisions there are never made by focus groups,” reports Matt of 37signals.

If we want anything more than the most mediocre culture to survive, inform our consciousness and influence our future, writers deserve to get paid.