The|Intangibles

Future of Newspapers - Debate Rages (?)

Debate about the future of newspapers won't die for some time yet I think . . . at least among journalists, news media watchers, some bloggers and Clay Shirky.

Roy Greenslade on Greenslade Blog wrote this week on newspapers and magazines charging for their online content. Greenslade's title alone raises the key question: "Paid content is all the rage with US publishers - but where's the proof that anyone will pay?"

I chuckled over the comment from Steven Brill, founder of Journalism Online, in the piece that JO "has helped shift the debate over charging for online news from 'if' to 'when and how'" because beleaguered publishers have moved past the "abstract debate" to agree that paid content is the way ahead." (JO's goal is to help them get there.)

Now there's a shock right? Publishers think the solution to declining print revenues is to charge people for accessing onlne content.

Megan McArdlein The Atlantic online framed the debate marvellously this way "The problem besetting newspapers is not that there are hordes of bloggers giving it away for free . . . Even if every newspaper and magazine in the country entered into a binding cartel agreement not to put more than a smidgen of free content on their websites, newspapers would still be losing money, and closing by the dozens.  It's the economics, stupid . . . We're witnessing the death of a business model."

So how exactly is pushing people to pay for online content recognizing, as people like Shirky and McArdle (and dozens of others) have been rightly trying to point out, that the paid online content model which has been tried many times before will not revive the fortunes of "old" media.

TechCrunch-Twitter Dust-Up

Some bickering broke out this week between Michael Arrington at TechCrunch and the folks at Twitter about some documents leaked to Mr. Arrington and then published in a column/post. I haven't been following the chatter about it, but there is a good summary at Social Media Today.

What caught my eye from Amy Mengel's report was this comment:

"But, let’s all remember that bloggers, like Arrington, aren’t journalists. They don’t operate under a professional code of ethics. they don’t report to an editor or publisher who tells them what to write about or what they can or can’t reveal. Many of them are ethical, many of them are former journalists, many of them would have chosen not to publish the documents."

Separate from the facts or otherwise of the particular events (now heading to the courts apparently), the question in my mind is this: When does a blogger who writes for a group-edited blog become de facto a journalist and perhaps subject to the same standards of ethical conduct to which journalists are expected to adhere (to the extent that they do in reality anyway)?

Wikipedia describes Mr. Arrington -- a lawyer -- as a "founder/co-editor" of TechCrunch. Many think of TechCrunch as an online news source. So, if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck . . . ?

Conceit in Business

Social media pundits are often critical of bloggers who devote too much of their digital space to referring to the posts of others. It is looked on as a form of solipsistic hackery.

But from time to time a writer posts something that is so to our advantage that it makes the charge worth bearing. So here goes.

Euan Semple, a fine writer and an intelligent, relaxed speaker (I heard him at an IPRA conference in London about three years ago) starts a short post with this almost axiomatic observation on the resistance of some in business (and to a frightful extent many communicators) to social computing:

"On an almost daily basis I am faced with someone asking me to tell them the return on investment of social computing in business or proclaiming that Twitter is all about people telling us what they had for breakfast. These interactions are always delivered in a particular tone -- at best pompous, at worst sneering and condescending."

Read the rest of the post here and be delighted that someone is pointing out what a waste of time - and how counterproductive - such conceit is.

Twitter's Biz Stone on How it All Started

Short video on how Twitter came about by one of its founders - Biz Stone (Admission . . . Hill & Knowlton, which sponsored this event, employs me.)

Social Media and News Miscellany

Lots of juicy factoids and information today that add a little more to my thinking on new communication memes:

• Of the many striking statistics in a report called 'Inside Twitter' out of Canada's Sysomos people, this one stands out for evidence of the sheer stupidity of the hordes who now call themselves  'social media consultants': "Of people who identify themselves as social media marketers, 65.5% have never posted an update (on Twitter)."  I guess they just can't be bothered . . . or don't have time?
  

• To be filed under the tab 'Public Relations Through the Rear View Mirror', according to an article today in the Ottawa Citizen Canada's National Defence HQ has a new 'conduit' approach to public relations (in which all media questions are funneled through public affairs staff, with the journalist never allowed to speak to a subject matter expert directly) that the writer calls the 24 DAY news cycle: "Into this brave new world of hyper-speed news gathering, NDHQ has rolled out what I’ve termed, the “24-day news cycle. Yes, 24 days…..That’s about the length of time I figure that it takes NDHQ to answer a question from the news media…..if it is answered at all."

• Bear with me on this one. Those who follow me on Twitter will know that as a native 'Geordie' I am an ardent -- and frustrated, some would say foolish -- supporter of the Newcastle United football club, formerly of the English Premier League now relegated to tier two football as a result of an abysmal season this past year. Thankfully, the owner has put the club up for sale (at about US$200 million). Before he did so, he published a statement in which he said "I'm sorry" about four or five times. Frankly, it sounded hollow given Ashley's unwillingness to invest in the club and his lack of commitment to its success in spite of having one of the most loyal fan bases of any football club. The lesson here is simple . . . saying 'Im sorry' in a crisis is not enough. An apology has to be backed up by action to resolve the underlying problem. In this case, the owner getting out is the right move, although that is not counsel I would give to many CEOs.

• Finally, this about philanthropic giving . . . "Today, the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy (CECP) shares a first-look at results from its annual philanthropy survey of nearly 140 leading companies, revealing that 53% of companies increased their total philanthropic donations in 2008, and 27% increased their giving by more than 10% year-over-year." So things are not as bad as the CR critics would have us believe.
  

Corporate Blogging: Still Hesitant After All These Years

More Fortune 500 companies are blogging, but the pace of growth is still shall we say restrained.

The full results of a study by Dr. Nora Ganim Barnes, Ph.D. and Eric Mattson, CEO of Financial Insite Inc., a Seattle-based research firm are available here and a summary of the key findings are in a news release by the Society for New Communications Research.

Of the findings posted in yesterday's statement, here are few of particular interest:

• 81 of the Fortune 500 or 16% currently have public-facing blogs, compared with 39 percent of the Inc. 500, 41 percent of the higher education sector and 57 percent of the nation’s Top 200 Charities.
• 28 percent of the Fortune 500’s blogs link to Twitter accounts
• 90 percent of the Fortune 500’s blogs have the comments feature enabled

Digital Campaigning

Thanks to a colleague with a personal blog here (really good, especially if you like indie music), I took a look at a CBC report of a blogging campaign targeted at pushing the song of an independent band to the top of the iTunes charts, bypassing the major record labels. The campaign -- called Bum Rush the Charts -- asks people to purchase a copy of the song Mine Again, by the alt-rock band Black Lab, at the iTunes Store on March 22nd.

Says podcaster Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff, the campaign organizer, "Taking an artist like Black Lab and making them No. 1 on the [iTunes] charts would be making a statement. It would be like giving the music industry the finger.”  On Nemcoff's blog (here), he describes the motivation behind the campaign as creating a social movement: "Podcasting gets little respect from traditional media. To them we're little more than a joke, than amateurs. What they don't understand is that podcasting is more than just a delivery mechanism - it's a social movement."

Since I'm personally (let me tell you about my background sometime) and professionally (our clients can sometimes be the benefactors or objects of these campaigns) fascinated with the potential of such social movements finding a home online, I will be watching to see how viral this becomes. Stay tuned. 

Spin Cycles Episode #6 - End of Post-Modern News

The final episode in Ira Basen's Spin Cycles series is a bit of a schmozzle (not to be confused with 'schlimazel' which refers to someone who is inept), a mix of the habitual juvenile sniping at public relations (especially agencies who create those corporately funded front groups or astroturf organizations that propogate "junk science"; Basen's example is Friends of Science,) some thumping of his colleagues in the media for being merely the "stenographers" of the powerful, and more unchallenged commentary by the Center for Media and Democracy, an organization that can spin with the best of them. Frankly, though, Basen finally hits a couple of home runs -- well, maybe infield singles -- in this episode:

Idea One:

Public relations professionals, and many companies, need to do some soul searching about our efforts to deny, or support the denial of, the impact of carbon emissions on climate. Basen claims "Audiences were led to believe there was a meaningful debate (over carbon emissions and climate change) within the scientific community long after there ceased to be one." Evidence now suggests this might be the case . . . see the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change and the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change.

Idea Two:

Social media represent in the words of Richard Edelman as heard on Spin Cycles "the wisdom of the crowd . . . the cacophony of participation." While still in its infancy, and suffering from childish bouts of self-absorption and silly pop culture pre-occupations, social media hold out hope as a replacement for retreating journalistic integrity and independence. I would argue that legitimate, intelligent, curious, and investigative bloggers may now become the "estate" for asking questions of power. George Pitcher, the author of The Death of Spin, says to escape spin we need a more vigorous public sphere: social media may be that sphere.

Idea Three:

Basen offers up two commentators who provide some truly interesting texture to discussions about the future of journalism and the role of public relations. Jay Rosen argues there is potential for a natural convergence of social media and journalism. His own blog, while dense, is focused on a fascinating idea: "The people who will invent the next press in America--and who are doing it now online--continue an experiment at least 250 years old. It has a powerful social history and political legend attached."

Julia Hobsbawn even accepts a role for public relations in this new convergence. To get the best sense of her ideas, don't bother listening to the audio which suffers from Basen's prejudicial subjectivity: her transcipt interview here is more instructive about her views and provides some evidence about what has been wrong with this whole series . . .

"But I also think it's worth emphasizing that journalism also has its paymaster. It's extremely rare for journalism not to have an actual expectation of bias in some quarters or an institutional bias. Now I don't mean that is to say that all journalism is coloured but what I do mean is that editorials and comment pieces are bias and that they're absolutely standard in many newspapers and broadcasters, that a certain kind of coverage will be given to one thing and not another. So I think we have to be, at the very least, philosophical and . . . quite apart from anything else, getting a bit more real about the actual differences between the moral parameters of PR and the moral parameters of journalism."

Hobsbawn's comments -- be philosophical; get real -- underscore the chief failings, on balance, of the Spin Cycles series. It allowed prejudice about public relations to get in the way of exploring the complexities of transparency and truth in the information-sharing industries. It assumed a fundamental moral superiority to broadcast and newspaper journalism corrupted now by political and business spin, and a basic bankruptcy to the whole concept of public relations now simply more slick and manipulative. And it looked at the nature of the new online demos and its "cacophony of participation" with the same unfortunate cynical, even dismissive, tone that it approached most of the major questions about communication in our age. 

Comment, argument, disagreement and, of course, praise about my assessment more than welcome.

Spin Cycles Episode #4 - The Real Spin Masters

Interest in my commentary on the Spin Cycles series appears to be waning as evidenced by the declining number of views. This may be because my writing is somewhat pedantic, which I recognize as a fault. But I like to think the indifference is more a function of my argument that the series -- so far -- has little new to say about public relations and the media.

Episode four, though, actually makes some worthy observations and heaves up a host of red flags about democracy. (If you are wondering what happened to episode three, the audio doesn't appear to be available. A rather odd technical glitch for Canada's public broadcaster don't you think? Once CBC gets its act together, I'll comment.) Focusing on political spin, Basen and his interviewees argue that a contracting news cycle, all-news channels with plenty of dead air to fill, shrinking newsrooms and writing for the front page rather than for accuracy have changed the relationship between reporters and political spinners. (In the field of politics at least the term "spin" is apt.)

As former BBC newsman Nigel Jones says journalists are no longer "judged on reliability nor on judgment but on the ability to deliver exclusive stories" . . . and I would add stories delivered quickly and certainly before rivals, whether corporate or professional. The new zeitgeist is fertile ground for political spinners who believe -- in the peerless words of Paul Rhodes (a Canadian spin master) -- that what they do is "arrange facts in a certain order so that you are more inclined to believe my version of the truth than my opponent's." It's an atmosphere in which being first is rewarded before being right or shrewd, an ethos in which the "source" is often the politician or party who has "favored" the reporter with a leaked revelation.

Political spin is a subject about which I know very little, at least from the inside. Never having been involved actively with a mainstream political party, I am only a cynical bystander or watcher (and great fan of the Allison Janney presidential press secretary character on the now defunct television show The West Wing). But I do find it surprising that reporters care so much about covering the posturing and transparent manipulation of fact and emotion of our politicians, even when not in an election fight. Political spin is a game in which the players think others care far more about its devices and demagoguery than they do.

I wonder what would happen if a politician gave a news conference, or offered a leaked exclusive, and no reporter cared. I wonder what would happen if reporters and editors stopped worrying about the imperative of speed and concentrated on playing the role of the Fourth Estate as defined by Carlyle.

I wonder if it will really matter for long in the new demos that is social media.

Public Policy and Social Media

Debate on public policy should find a natural outlet in the demos of social media. It is a stage set ready made for the presentation and exploration of complex ideas (maybe best in single rather than multiple acts.) Of course, social media also require commitment to engagement at a minimum and dialogue at best, which timid or over-academic think tanks might find a little menacing. 

Nevertheless, I have asked our research department to help find and analyze best practices of North American think tanks with respect to their use of various social media -- including blogs and podcasts -- as a forum for engaging with their audiences about the ideas they research and present . . . although I assume we can rule out You Tube as a popular  infrastructure for releasing white papers.

If any one can direct me towards a think tank or academic center that is using social media well as tools for the presentation and discussion of focused ideas (other than those U.S. think tanks which seem to specialize in the interminable discussion of the minutiae of popular politics), I would love to know about them. Post a comment and link if you don't mind.