“If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.”

No, that quote isn’t from President Bush’s press statement today.  And it’s certainly not from Harry Reid.

It’s Digg.com’s founder Kevin Rose, forecasting possible doom for his high-profile Web 2.0 site over its decision to rescind an earlier decision to pull all posts that featured an HD-DVD hack:

In building and shaping the site I’ve always tried to stay as hands on as possible. We’ve always given site moderation (digging/burying) power to the community. Occasionally we step in to remove stories that violate our terms of use (eg. linking to pornography, illegal downloads, racial hate sites, etc.). So today was a difficult day for us. We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

The “bigger company” to which he refers is a video licensing authority that enforces copyrights on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs — the Advanced Access Content System consortium, which was working with the Motion Picture Association of America.  They sent cease and desist notes to other websites where the code was posted, including Google.  For a time yesterday, some of the sites complied.

Imagine a flood.  Imagine you want to stop the flood.  Imagine throwing seven pebbles into the flood and waiting for it to stop.

This from TG Daily:

Copies of the cease and desist letters started appearing on the web yesterday and as we’ve seen in so many previous cases it was “Game On!” for the hackers.  The processing key in its full hexadecimal glory  sprouted like a weed all over the Internet.  Users of popular websites like Digg and Slashdot thumbed their virtual noses at the MPAA by posting the key into the comments sections, often using decimal, binary and other permutations.  Some users have also been creative enough to make up a shopping list using the numbers, 9 oranges, 9 fruits, etc.

The leaking of the HD DVD processing key isn’t a complete doomsday for the high-definition movie industry because the key only affects some players and presumably the movie companies could push updates that would prevent copied movies from playing.

This might sound very familiar.  Some years back, when I was in PR, MPAA was a client, and our assignment was to support its litigation to stop spread of a DVD copy-protection code hack — the famous DeCSS.  Only a three or four sites existed then that would post the hack, but I was told there were kids walking around New York City with the hack code printed on their t-shirts.  Now…fuhgeddaboutit.

Imagine if you really wanted to stop this flood.  What would you use?  That’s what should  really worry us.  What kind of bill are the copyright owners’ lobbyists writing now to reflect this new world?

Old Media Gets the Vapors (CORRECTED)*

(via howardowens.com)

In addition to the LA Observed suite, another great Web 2.0-from-the-ground-up site is Pegasus News, which delivers content mostly of interest to Dallas-Ft. Worth area users. On Monday, Pegasus’ Mike Owens Orren posted a story on his ill-fated partnership with the local Fox 4 News outlet — a relationship that started very promisingly, but was killed by someone he doesn’t name in Fox’s corporate headquarters for what can only be described as whimsical reasons.  

At first, Owens Orren writes, it seemed like a great match:

They had the reach; we had the depth. We had the search engine rankings; they had video people wanted to find. We had the indie cred; they had the network cred. They could promote us to a million people at a pop; we could promote them a million times a month in little increments.

The downfall began when Pegasus got Fox to agree the partnership was newsworthy and should be announced in a press release.   At first, an enthusiastic “yes.” But then, “no,” with a request for what seemed to be a slight change in the copy that would introduce the Fox 4 content. (The copy was boilerplate stuff; Fox’s requested edit was the kind of thing only PR people would notice.)  

Pegasus’ web developers needed a few days to make the change (not an unusual frustration in this world), which Owens Orren hadn’t understood to be an urgent matter anyway. However, two days after the request, in a scene that reads like a bad break-up:

Late Wednesday afternoon, my phone rang with Saunders and Mahaney (from Fox 4) on the other end. A vigorously unnamed FOX exec, who it was now admitted had been against the deal happening at all on the conference call about the press release had visited our site and seen that the requested text change had not yet gone into effect and unilaterally called off the whole deal. Yes, no one told us that the request was critical. No, there was no explaining that. No, there was no chance of reasoning, discussing or even learning who had cut the deal off at the nub. No, no part of the partnership could be salvaged. Everything Fox needed to come off our site and we wouldn’t be working together on hyperlocal news.

The best that could be offered was “maybe give it a time interval and try again.” How long? “I have no idea … a long time.”

Given the amount of precious time Pegasus invested in the tech side of this marriage, Owens Orren is understandably a little bitter.  His meta-conclusion rings true, however:

You can wait for corporate media to “get it.” You can think they have. But, in the end, corporations aren’t inherently smart, even if people inside of them are. And corporations aren’t inherently honorable, even if people inside them are. And those who can’t see past their nose and who don’t have regard for their partners will pull stunts like we just saw from Fox.

(snip)

This Little Company is at its best when it is flying the jolly roger. We work and play well with others, but apparently mainly those others that, like us, are on the outside. This episode thoroughly re-taught me that lesson, one that I won’t soon forget. That’s not to say that we can’t work with big corporations — we just can’t until we look the people who pull the pursestrings in the eye and they tell us that they, too, believe. And probably even then, we wouldn’t be safe unless they had a financial stake in our success.

One other thing is clear to me: We will, sooner rather than later, eat these larger media corporations for lunch, unless they learn how to behave in a world of distributed media. Granted, that’s the larger “we.” I can’t guarantee that Pegasus News will be The One, or one of the ones to pull it off. We’ve grown more quickly than you could have ever imagined with fewer resources than you waste in an afternoon. The “people formerly known as the audience” are mobile and transient and will abandon their old media habits without prejudice — perhaps worse, without even realizing they have done so. Blogs, Wikipedia, Digg, YouTube, RSS, Flickr: how many had you heard of a few years ago? These and others have disrupted the hell out of media in general, but have had less of an impact on local media. That’s changing, and fast.

The unnamed Fox executive who got the vapors about protecting the corporate image, brand, name or whatever from contamination by upstarts will probably have some explaining to do down the road.   

*(Note: In an earlier version of this post, I misidentified Mike Orren as Mike Owens, leaving the impression that I was quoting Howard Owens.  My apologies to both Owens and Orren)

Responsibility for Child Abuse

I’m fascinated by the twist that the case of former Rep. Mark Foley has taken toward trying to locate the source of his predatory behavior at the precise moment in his childhood when a Catholic priest apparently fondled him. The Nancy Grace types scorn this as “the abuse excuse,” an attempt by wrongdoers like Foley to shift the blame and avoid responsibility. That’s how Foley’s statements initially hit my ears, too.

But then it turned out Foley wasn’t lying. The priest in question, Father Mercieca, publicly said, “Once maybe I touched him” during their naked times together in a jacuzzi.

Fr Mercieca said he had befriended the boy after he arrived in Florida from Brazil.

The priest said he didn’t understand why Mr Foley had decided to come forward after almost 40 years.

“`Why does he want to destroy me in my old age?” Fr Mercieca told the newspaper.

“I would say that if I offended him, I am sorry. But remember the good times we had together and how we enjoyed each other’s company, and let bygones be bygones,” he told WPTV.

Ugh.

And now, less than 24 hours later, the Catholic Archdiocese of Miami has issued a public apology to Foley.

THE Catholic Church today apologised for the “inexcusable” behaviour of a priest who allegedly fondled Mark Foley when the now disgraced ex-Republican politician was an altar boy.

“An apology is due to Mr. Foley for the hurt he has experienced,” the Archdiocese of Miami said after the State Attorney’s office in Palm Beach, Florida identified the priest who allegedly abused the former politician four decades ago.

“Such behaviour is morally reprehensible, canonically criminal and inexcusable,” the Church said.

Meanwhile, Foley is being encouraged by activists to file a police report, even though the statute of limitations has probably run out.

This story illustrates what we all know about child abuse — that it is passed on, that the abused frequently become the abusers. We might be able to learn from Fr. Mercieca about the episode in his childhood that led him to mistreat a child this way. Beyond that, the path will surely get murky, but going forward, there will be a record, if any of Foley’s victims become abusers.

Another angle to examine: Fr. Mercieca claimed his abuse occured because he was “down…taking tranquilizers.” And Foley has blamed alcohol for his actions. Again, the popular response is, “there they go again, shifting responsibility.” But maybe we need to think a little deeper about this. How many child molesters are sober when they commit their crimes? A primary role for alcohol in society is to lower inhibitions — that’s why it is served at parties, to help overcome social awkwardness. But in the hands of the abused/abuser, it is often the fuel that takes their awful fantasies into the realm of reality.

Truly, I am not suggesting that an abuser should be viewed sympathetically if they claim they were drunk or on drugs when they committed their heinous acts. If anything, I am suggesting the reverse. Perhaps there needs to be an affirmative responsibility on the part of those who are suppressing these evil impulses to stay away from alcohol and drugs, and to seek help in doing so. “Know thyself” needs to become more than just good advice, but a legal and moral responsibility.

There also needs to be an affirmative responsibility on the part of the alcohol industry to warn their customers that their product lowers inhibitions and might lead to extremely regrettable behavior. They already warn about drinking and driving and drinking while pregnant or nursing; but drinking and abuse are at least as big a threat. What would be so terrible if the alcohol industry were forced to post signs and create ads warning that, for certain individuals, drinking leads to abusive, criminal behavior? If it makes one potential abuser think twice, it might be worth it.

It is particularly reprehensible that a doctor prescribed tranquilizers, as Fr. Mercieca has said, and the result was his woozy indulgence in child sexual abuse. Who was the doctor? What were the pills? Do they bear any responsibility for these acts on the part of Fr. Mercieca, and thus for Foley? If doctors are aware that drugs they are prescribing have the effect of lowering inhibitions or overcoming good judgement, then they need to develop a risk profile of their patients before letting them have a prescription. Doesn’t that make sense? Shouldn’t the doctors at least be required to ask questions like, “Were you sexually abused as a child? Do you harbor fantasies of having sex with a child?”

Believe me, in some ways I recoil from the implications of my own thoughts here. I am talking about a massive increase in exposure to legal liability for doctors, pharmaceutical manufacturers and those who make and sell alcohol. I am also adding a layer of prosecutable offenses to what is already illegal — child abuse — by suggesting that individuals must be held accountable for knowing their own risk factors, and structuring their lives to minimize those risks. The trial lawyers hardly need more slop to feed on.

But if we have the power to break this chain of abuse by aggressive social intervention of this nature, shouldn’t we at least explore the potential to end this tragedy? Because it is a tragedy that ultimately victimizes the most innocent. If we can protect them, shouldn’t we?

Scoble Ankles

Robert Scoble's decision to leave Microsoft for a podcasting start-up generates a lot of comment today in the blogosphere. Scoble, an intelligent guy and a fine writer who conveys a winning personality in his blog Scobleizer, was characterized as the guy who "put a human face" on Microsoft. His departure from Microsoft was amicable, but from the media reaction, one would think this is a grievous loss for the software behemoth. From FT.com:

The internet was buzzing on Monday as bloggers digested news that Robert Scoble, the technical evangelist” whose Scobleizer weblog made him one of the foremost ambassadors for the world’s biggest software group, is to leave the company to join a Silicon Valley start-up.

The move, reported at the weekend, raises fresh questions about the importance of high-profile bloggers to companies that encourage employees to talk about work in their online journals.

(snip)

The move illustrates the challenge facing companies as they try to get to grips with a world in which the reputation of individual bloggers can come to be closely associated with – or have a big impact on – the reputation of a company’s own brand.

This is pretty silly. Scoble was an alternative source of information about Microsoft, and it spoke well of the company that it didn't fire him for filing posts that had a candid tone to them. But he was not Microsoft's "human" face. That honor still belongs to founder Bill Gates, one of the most recognized humans on the planet, and Steve Ballmer, the current CEO whose utterings are carefully parsed in the business and technology press.

Robert Scoble's left pinky was warmer, fuzzier and more "human" than Gates and Ballmer combined, but that doesn't change their relative impact on Microsoft. If Scoble's job was to take the focus off these two gentlemen, he failed. But I don't think that was the idea.

I think Scoble was driven to blog because he genuinely loved Microsoft and the people who worked there, and had a knack for articulating his passion about his company–and about his life. When I think about Scobleizer, I think about his incredibly honest posts about his mother, who died recently, and how the experience affected his view of his family and his life. I enjoyed his dispatches from the tech-conference circuit. They were human and humorous.

Frankly, I tended to discount whatever Scoble said about Microsoft, for two reasons. He was a marketing guy. You can't sell a product you don't believe in, and part of the psychology of salespersons is the ability to auto-generate the kind of belief needed to sell. Secondly, I'm not obsessed with Microsoft. I know Vista's coming, for example. But I won't be the first to try it. I realize I live in Microsoft's world, but I don't think about it much.

I want to see more businesses–big, small, and not-for-profit–hosting blogs. But over-reliance on one individual — and a lower-level employee at that — doesn't make much sense as a strategy.

To me, one point of a company blog is to dramatize the firm's expertise; to take its potential customers on an intellectual journey that parallels the company's growth, evolution, and new offerings. Another point is to demonstrate the commitment to transparent decision-making that companies' stakeholders increasingly demand — as Elizabeth Albrycht discussed in this required-reading post, and this follow-up. (I wrote about her ideas here.)

Scoble did some of the first, although it was mostly his intellectual journey. He wasn't in a position to do the second, because he wasn't a decision-maker.

The kind of blog I would envision as helpful to a company would be highly customized. There is no off-the-shelf strategy, and never will be, for this kind of communication. It must be flexible — a place where conversation about a new product could comfortably share space with responses to a crisis, or outlines of a decision-making process underway in real time.

I would look at a company blog as a cyberspace auditorium — a place targeted readers will want to go to hear from, and interact with, interesting people with relevant information to offer, whether they were executives, academics, customers or employees. Sometimes it might be an arena, where adversaries debate. The blog would become an essential experience for anyone who envisioned themselves as a potential customer, or who had any significant relationship with the company in question.

Above all, a company blog has to give its audience a reason to come back frequently — a hook. Robert Scoble's hook was: "How honest is he really going to be?" After awhile, the hook became Scoble himself — a guy we liked and rooted for. But as he said himself many times, he was just one person at Microsoft. For businesses, non-profits, public-sector agencies and others, the trick will be to create your own blog format, one that allows us to read and hear the many voices that make up your universe — and help us figure out how you fit into our lives.

The Secret to Making Money from Blogs

You can't make money blogging, or at least you can't make much. At least not now. Well, actually nobody knows. I don't have any ads on this site, the main reason being nobody has ever asked me to put their ad on this site. Maybe advertisers are missing a huge opportunity!

But I think I've figured out the secret to making money from blogs. Get someone to pay you to monitor them.

That's the conclusion I draw from Deborah Brown's op-ed (subscription required) in the current PR Week. Deborah Brown is senior director at Peppercom, a much-awarded small firm with offices in New York, San Francisco and London. She's got a common-sense approach to what she calls "digital media" that reminded me of the John Prine lyric, "It don't make much sense, this common sense don't make no sense no more."

For example, she says:

It’s also critical to understand that your company cannot state the same key messages via digital media that are allowed in other marketing initiatives such as advertising. With digital, the customer is in complete control. You need to understand how to communicate and connect in a new environment in which you have little or no control.

This is true, but it is fast becoming a cliche. Realizing you have little or no control is good Zen discipline, but pretty soon the clients are going to start asking their PR people for something more than a list of "what-not-to-do's." From my perch, I think we're at the point where an old economic idea, "Creative Destruction," needs to be applied to these new realities. From Joseph Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, written in 1942:

(T)he contents of the laborer's budget, say from 1760 to 1940, did not simply grow on unchanging lines but they underwent a process of qualitative change. Similarly, the history of the productive apparatus of a typical farm, from the beginnings of the rationalization of crop rotation, plowing and fattening to the mechanized thing of today–linking up with elevators and railroads–is a history of revolutions. So is the history of the productive apparatus of the iron and steel industry from the charcoal furnace to our own type of furnace, or the history of the apparatus of power production from the overshot water wheel to the modern power plant, or the history of transportation from the mailcoach to the airplane. The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation–if I may use that biological term–that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in. . . .

"Industrial mutation" — there's a term I'd like to see the PR blogs use more often! The fact is, in a breathtakingly short period of time, mass communications has undergone a profound mutation, to which the PR industry and current practices might not successfully adapt.

In PR Week, Brown quotes Christopher Barger, "Blogger-in-Chief" at IBM, saying the customers "want relationship building" and not "traditional messages." From this article and dozens more like it all over the PR blogosphere and trade media, you get the idea that some PR industry leaders see "relationship building" as just another tactic in the PR professional's arsenal.

I don't think so. Training in the PR industry is notoriously poor, but from what I remember, it's mostly about dealing with the news media, elements of good writing, client relations and "managing for profitability." There aren't many PR agency GMs who could instruct staff to go forth and help clients "build relationships" via "digital media" and have any confidence in how their employees would translate those words into action. Chaos would ensue. It might be funny like "The Office" is funny. But a client shouldn't pay for people to do something they aren't qualified to do.

I don't mean to knock Deborah Brown. Her article is good as far as it goes. She has a clear view of the mutation process, and how control is slipping away. The rather tentative tone of her article is probably appropriate. Nobody really knows what to do, and she doesn't pretend to either.

However, she did make one suggestion that made me laugh.

Monitor…monitor….monitor…know what’s being said about your company, but know when it makes sense to react.

Digital monitoring: It's a tactic PR people can certainly do. It's just like media monitoring, except more billable hours, since, according to a Pew Internet & American Life Project report,

As of last December, 35 percent of Americans had posted to a blog, created a Web page, shared online photos, or otherwise generated content. That proportion is more than double the 16 percent that had posted any content to the Web in January 2002, when Pew first researched the topic.

Can you imagine how many of those posts mention a brand-name company, one that might have PR people in-house or under contract? Monitor… monitor… monitor… monitor… monitor… monitor… monitor… monitor… monitor… monitor…

Return of the Drive-In

Springwise.com alerted its subscribers today to MobMov, short for Mobile Movie. From its website:

What is the Mobile Movie?
We are a grassroots movement aimed at bringing back the forgotten joy of the great American drive-in. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, what used to be a dark and decrepit warehouse wall springs to life with the sublime sights and sounds of a big screen movie. Best of all, the MobMov is free.

(snip)

Our goal in creating the MobMov was to create a true "drive-in" experience by enclosing the projector and an FM transmitter inside a car. Participants drive in to a parking lot, tune their radios, and watch their favorite flick from the comfort of their car. As far as we know, we're the first ones to attempt this on a public scale. We didn't create the term "Guerilla Drive-in", but we're the first to use it correctly.

This new approach is better for a variety of reasons. Drive-ins were popular originally because it was like having your own private cineplex – if you wanted privacy, you'd just roll up your windows. If you wanted to be part of a community, you'd roll them down, open your doors, maybe even walk around. Secondly, while a traditional GDI only operates in the summer, you can stay in your car with the heater running while participating in a mobmov. That's rain or shine folks and folketts.

Like everyone my age, I am blessed with several great drive-in movie memories. The first few movies I saw were in drive-ins: One Hundred and One Dalmations, which was appropriate for kids, and Hud, which most certainly was not. I recall scenes from both of these movies vividly–Cruella DeVille's green cigarette smoke and horrible fur lust; Patricia Neal driving up to Paul Newman in a convertible, with a strange knowing look in her eyes.

A few years later, an attractive teenage babysitter took us to the drive-in see the James Bond spoof Casino Royale, with its bevy of 1960s beauties like Ursula Andress and Daliah Lavi, and, well, I still really haven't recovered. The drive-in is such an iconic experience, countless great movie scenes have been set at one — for example American Graffitti and Rebel Without A Cause. Just the other night, I saw a drive-in destroyed in Twister.

The MobMov has a sign-up area that indicates there are showing from Huntsville, Alabama to Winnepeg, Manitoba, but the copy on the site only references showings in Berkeley.

Post-Knight-Ridder Selloff Trauma

Jeff Jarvis’ invaluable Buzz Machine posts a revealing debate, sort of, between himself and an anonymous journalist who calls himself, er, ”journalist.” 

It started yesterday with a post about the sale of the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain to the McClatchy family, and the McClatchy family’s subsequent announcement that it would turn around and sell most of the biggest papers in the chain, including the San Jose Mercury News and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Jarvis said the underlying message of the transaction was this:

What the (news) industry needs now is tough, strategic management that drives the news business away from its dependence on paper to a very different future in any media. You have to shrink to grow.  

Newspaper industry analysts believe the former Knight-Ridder papers McClatchy plans to sell have virtually no growth potential, however profitable they might be now. When these papers are sold again, significant cutbacks will be the result.  Jarvis suggested that other “big, one-size-fits-all media companies” will suffer the same fate because “they are saddled with big costs while smaller, nimbler, more effective, targeted, and efficient competitors eat at them.”

“Journalist” was enraged at what he discerned to be Jarvis’ “internet evangelism.” His full comment must be read, but the essence of his argument was:

If you want to make a killing, sell pet rocks. The business of informing society should not be merely a cash cow for the greedy.

Today, in a lengthy response that also demands a full reading, Jarvis begins this way:

(S)omeone calling herself or himself “journalist” left a long comment that perfectly encapsulates the kinds of arguments I hear from some newsroom residents who quake with fear at the new world outside their doors and try desperately to protect their old world inside.

Jarvis is fair to this writer, but demolishes his pretentious sense of entitlement nonetheless. “Journalist” believes moving papers online will result in a sort of feudal society in which the few who are computer-literate rule over the losers in the digital divide. To which Jarvis replies:

My library has the internet for free. Soon Philadelphia — whose Knight Ridder papers are among those doomed to resale and uncertain futures — will have inexpensive universal broadband.

So I don’t buy your argument anymore…. Your argument says we should hold back progress to wait until the last person is on the rocketship: ‘If we can’t all afford to go to the moon, then no one should go.’ That attitude will get you precisely nowhere.

I love newspapers too, and don’t want to see them go. But if their final line of defense are self-satisfied scribes who are too refined, or too scared, to compete for our attention, then it might be time to pack it in. 

“Journalist” doesn’t have a strategy for newspapers to rebound. He’s given up on trying to attract readers by offering a better product. Instead, he suggests there is no room for improvement — so now it’s up to the public to subsidize them.  That’s not advocacy; that’s fatalism. “Journalist” needs to make way for a more vigorous breed of reporters who are interested in informing, rather than condemning, their audience.

Proselytizing for Fun and Profit

If you want to read a succinct case study of successful Word of Mouth marketing/PR campaigns, the Los Angeles Times has it for you today. Charles Duhigg profiles the eight-year old, Silver Lake-based firm M80 that charges its entertainment clients healthy fees to find the “superfans” of entertainers like Rob Zombie or TV shows like “Highlander” and then get them to make superfans of others they encounter, especially on the Internet.

The fans don’t get paid. You can’t fake their kind of passion and you can’t buy it. Do the superfans feel used? Not really. They’re fans. My son will be eternally grateful to the superfans M80 unleashed on behalf of the satirical cartoon “Family Guy.” Deployed to promote the DVD, their activism forced Fox to order new episodes of the show.

But that’s not all the superfans get out of the experience, according to the Times:

Who are M80’s superfans? Kathleen Mayo of Austin, Texas, discovered the company when she was surfing the Internet to confirm rumors that one of her favorite television shows, the sci-fi epic “Highlander,” was about to come out on DVD.

Mayo, 32, had spent much of her life feeling socially uncomfortable. In high school, she said, “maybe 10 people out of 3,600 even knew my name. I was used to being ignored.”

But through M80, she discovered a community of other “Highlander” fans who were eager to teach her how to be outgoing enough to approach strangers online.

“M80 gave me a reason to put myself out there,” said Mayo, who estimated that she spent as many as 10 hours a week volunteering. “M80 team members taught me how to start a conversation. It’s been so important in helping me come out of my shell.”

You can check out M80’s “Online Team” site for yourself. They’re recruiting fans for eight or nine different entertainment properties, from a WWII show called “Over There,” to DVDs of chestnuts like “Hill Street Blues” and the movie “9 to 5,” to a singer named Rocco Deluca, “recommended if you like: Jeff Buckley, Ben Harper, Travis.”  You can even become a member if you want to unleash your inner superfan…or overcome social anxiety disorder.

Dave Barry on “the mutant version of news that is evolving online”

On CNN’s “Reliable Sources” this morning, former Miami Herald columnist Dave Barry was questioned about a recent comment that “Newspapers are Dead.” From the transcript of the interview by host Howard Kurtz:

BARRY: …I think about my son, who is 25, very smart, likes to think of himself as well-informed. Neither he nor anybody that he knows, as far as I can tell, reads a newspaper. He might call me up sometimes and ask me if there was something in the newspaper that I should tell him about, but that’s a widespread — I mean, I’m not the first person to observe that. And…

KURTZ: Is that because he is reading news online, or is he just tuned out of news altogether?

BARRY: I think it’s a combination. I used to say they were reading the news online, and I think they still sort of are, but they read this kind of mutant version of news that is evolving online where there’s the traditional news sources like “The Washington Post,” but there’s also blogs and there’s also email and there’s also who knows what. And I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing.

I just think newspapers — and again, I’m not the first to observe this — have to sort of accept the fact that it’s not so much the news that people don’t want, it’s the paper that’s getting harder and harder to be — you know, to include in people’s lives. Especially younger people.

KURTZ: Is that because newspapers, in an age of caution and political correctness and all of that have gotten boring?

BARRY: Yes. That is part of the reason.

I mean, I really believe that if I were to try to start my career now, writing essentially the same kind of just sort of weird column I wrote, it would be much more difficult for me to be accepted because I think editors, because of the shrinking readership and because of the limited news hole (ph) now, are much more cautious about what they’re willing to put in there, and they’re competing against media that are not cautious, that are — that like to be edgy, and we know who wins that fight usually.

So I think that’s — that’s one reason. But I also think that people kind of — including people my age — are spoil(ed) by the Internet. We like the idea that we can affect it, that it’s not just the — you know, the all-powerful news medium telling us what’s true and what’s not, and that’s that. And maybe we can write a letter to the editor, and maybe three weeks later they’ll print it.

Now people don’t accept that. They like to know, well, what is your source, and what other sources are there, and who disagrees with you? And they like to be able to put something on the Internet themselves if they find a flaw. And obviously we get lots of nut balls doing that, but there’s lots of really smart people doing that too.

(snip)

KURTZ: But that’s fascinating to me that you feel that if you were starting out today with the same column, you would have trouble, you know, getting a foothold in the business.

What about these podcasts? Your wife, you mentioned, Miami Herald sportswriter. And she recently covered the Olympics, and I understand her editors asked her to do podcasts.

What was your reaction to that?

BARRY: I thought that was pretty stupid. I mean, you know, it’s like, the newspaper business is kind of grabbing at everything now. For a while they didn’t even know what a blog was. Then they didn’t want any part of them.

Now they want everybody to have a blog. So now they’ve heard about podcasts, and they suddenly think everybody should be doing those. Or at least some people do. And it’s nuts to — in the case of my wife.

Here she is, she’s going over to cover the Olympics. They want her to be at the speed-skating venue and record something that, you know, can appear on the Internet as an — as an audio file about an event that’s on television.

You know, it seems like a little bit — we’ll get it all sorted out. I’m not — you know, I think there’s probably a place for podcasts. I just don’t think, you know, essentially reading a news story into a — into some kind of recording device is the answer.

Nothing terribly unfamiliar, but interesting coming from one of the most successful newspaper writers of our time. Worth pondering in light of Reuters’ CEO Tom Glocer’s recent comments about bringing the blogosphere into the mainstream news media.  If Glocer’s words are taken to mean, as Barry says, “essentially reading a news story into … some kind of recording device,” that sounds like a dead end.

The Blogosphere Pushes the Media to Ponder Change

Tom Glocer, CEO of Reuters, published an op-ed in the Financial Times yesterday that represents another educated guess, this time from a traditional news content provider, of what the future holds.

Last year, Glocer’s crystal ball told him the media needs to expect its consumers want to be their own editors of multiple streams of content–news “my way.” Now, Glocer says, the pace of change has accelerated. We don’t just want to read the news we want to read. We want to create our own content, using the mainstream media’s content as one element:

(W)e have seen an explosion of creativity. Conservative estimates suggest 80,000 new blogging sites are launched every week. David Miliband will soon be the first British cabinet minister to have his own blog site.

But it is 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. In fact, Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of MySpace.com, one of the most popular of the online forums, is probably the best indication yet that home-made content has made it to the boardroom decision-makers.

What can the mainstream media add to this outburst of creativity? Glocer suggests three things:

• “(M)edia 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.”
• “(W)e 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.”
• “(W)e 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.”

He’s on the right track, but I have concerns about each of these suggestions.

True, if every news story and opinion piece on (the example I’ll use throughout) the LA Times‘ website was open to comments, you might get some engaging discussions going. But there are good and bad online communities. I’m thinking of one site that covers LA politics whose reader comments are heavily weighted toward anonymous accusations and rumor-mongering. Some bloggers are also pseudonymous, but their “brand” must be accountable or they will lose audience. Not so with commenters, who can freely hit-and-run. I’ve heard of comment boards where “trolls” assume two different fake identities and argue with each other, just to whip everyone else into a frenzy. That gets boring. So, if Glocer wants media outlets to create a community around them, community members need to accept some level of accountability.

A better idea might be to open the doors to citizen journalists (CJ’s) who would take responsibility for what they write under their own names. Adding a corps of CJ’s to the Times‘ website who would file their own reports as well as commenting on the staff’s work could give their site significantly greater depth and reach. How well does the Times even pretend to cover the Inland Empire, Orange County or the South Bay? CJ’s could fill in the many gaps in the Times‘ coverage. How well do Times’ reporters understand the industries they cover? I got particularly exercised a few weeks ago about an LAX story that betrayed little knowledge of the airline industry. This town is full of aviation, aerospace and defense specialists. Wouldn’t one of them make a great CJ?

As for having the media outlets become “providers of tools,” my question would be, what value do you add? WordPress lets me blog here for free, and they make it easy. If I want to post a photo, I can, or I can insert a link to pictures on Flickr. I haven’t messed with video, but if I did, I could put up my content on Youtube.com, and point you toward it. Within a year or two, I bet WordPress or its competitors will incorporate the ability to download or link to video directly into their templates.

To be sure, the state-of-the-art will change. Perhaps the media can run ahead of the curve to find new and better tools that aren’t already available. But if you owned stock in the Tribune Co., would you feel comfortable if the Times invested money in developing or picking the next generation of tools? Maybe.

The “filter and editor” role that Glocer suggests throws up a yellow flag to me. It’s precisely because so many intelligent people no longer trust the media to be a fair, comprehensive or accurate “filter and editor” that political blogs get so many hits. (For a good example, read the item “Cherry Picking” from this column).

I’m not entirely happy about this. The perception of an unfair media has right wingers reading only right wing sites that apply a right wing filter. Likewise, the left-wing sites. Their most loyal readers live in ideological bubbles now. Will these readers suddenly start trusting the LA Times to tell them, “these blogs are good, those blogs are bad?” It’s analogous to criticism of government industrial policy. Government is not qualified to pick winners and losers among competing technologies. Newspapers might be qualified to pick winners and losers among blogs, but they aren’t trusted with that role.

The fact is, the blogosphere doesn’t need any favors from the mainstream media, except to get out of the way. This wheel’s on fire, it’s rolling down the road and no one going to stop it or co-opt it. However, the media can learn from what works in the blogosphere, and make their products more valuable by creatively integrating part of what has been developed out on the frontiers.

(A major hat tip to Jeff Jarvis’ Buzz Machine, for pointing to this op-ed, which he heard first as a speech Glocer gave at the Online Publishers’ Association.)

Alien vs. Predator: The Press Release Battles the Blog*

The nearness to death of the old-fashioned press release. The remaining half-life of the blogging phenomenon. Among people in the PR business, speculation on these questions now generates exceptional passion. Thoughtful PR professionals look through a glass, darkly, to discern the future shape of their industry — and whether it has a future at all. Journalists and bloggers are part of this conversation, too.

The communications assembly-line that has been taken for granted for nearly a century has a plague of monkey-wrenches, and a lengthening queue of engineers who think they can fix it. The clients have started to notice. “There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.”

In the past month, I’ve read at least a dozen blog posts about the utility of the press release vs. the blog. Tom Foremski, the “Silicon Valley Watcher,” who I’ve quoted on this topic before, started a recent ruckus with his Russ Meyer-inspired Die! Press Release! Die! Die!” :

Press releases are nearly useless. They typically start with a tremendous amount of top-spin, they contain pat-on-the-back phrases and meaningless quotes. Often they will contain quotes from C-level executives praising their customer focus. They often contain praise from analysts, (who are almost always paid or have a customer relationship.) And so on…

Press releases are created by committees, edited by lawyers, and then sent out at great expense through Businesswire or PRnewswire to reach the digital and physical trash bins of tens of thousands of journalists.

This madness has to end. It is wasted time and effort by hundreds of thousands of professionals.

Foremski isn’t and wasn’t a PR guy. He was a reporter who became a blogger. Kevin Dugan has been a blogger for longer that Foremski has. His tagline includes the fact that he’s been blogging since 2002, which in blog-years makes him Colonial Williamsburg. The title of his response post is “Tom Foremski is Wrong.”:

EVERYONE trying to nail this coffin shut and bury it is missing the point.

It’s the content, not the format, that’s the problem.

Change the format by adding tags or taking an entirely new approach and crap will still be shoveled into reporters’ email/voicemail/landmail inboxes. GUARANTEED. (Not to mention, tagged blocks of copy ensure content can be used out of context.)

(snip)If press releases are dead, someone should tell CBS. CBS issued a news release when they filed suit against Howard Stern. This news release was also used in a news story…which is how I found it in the first place.

One thing we do agree with Foremski on is this quote: “Things cannot go along as they are…business as usual while mainstream media goes to hell in a hand basket.”

But blaming the current state of PR on the news release is like blaming Enron on faulty calculators.

Steve Rubell, a blog expert recently hired by Edelman, posted on his Edelman-independent site Micro Persuasion:

Tom Foremski says: “Die! Press release! Die! Die! Die!”.

Kevin Duggan responds: “It’s the content, not the format, that’s the problem.”

Enough! Everything is a press release.

(snip)(E)veryone’s blogging for a reason. Many of us, although not all, are selling something and when we blog it’s released not just to the public but to the press as well. So can we stop the blog vs. press release debate? Everything is a press release, even if it’s not formatted that way.

Rubell’s got a point, but he assumes blogs have taken up permanent residence on the media landscape. If you believe Daniel Gross of Slate, however, blogging might just be a fad. He sees telltale signs of a dot-com style bubble about to burst, such as:

The Excited Dinosaurs: Big, unwieldy media conglomerates—the types whose large-circulation magazines always publish trend stories six months too late, like Time Warner—are enthralled with this hot new niche. Last October, in a deal that put blogs on the map as a business, Time Warner paid a reported $25 million for Weblogs, Inc., a group of blogs cobbled together by tech-culture-Barnum Jason Calacanis. This week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Time Warner is poised to introduce Office Pirates. The bloggy site is run by Mark Golin, the brains behind Maxim’s U.S. edition. A spokeswomen for Dodge, the “exclusive automotive sponsor of the site,” is calling it a “daily blend of funny videos, strange news and downloads, rolled up in an office-themed wrapper.” Apparently, Time Warner executives are not aware that there’s a place online where you can go to see pictures of large-breasted women and read dirty jokes, without having to look at Dodge ads—it’s called the Internet.

“Conversational media consultant” Amy Gahran tells Gross and anyone who believes blogs are a blip to “Get a Grip.” Gross has set up a straw man, defining blogs narrowly as ad-supported entertainment/information destinations. That misses the point of what the blog phenomenon represents, Gahran says:

Inevitably, blogs will be superceded by whatever else is cool, usable, and new in conversational media. That’s fine. Conversational media was always the bigger deal.

But in the meantime, before blogs evolve into the next big step in conversational media, don’t underestimate their value — especially their business value.

Yes, it’s true that directly monetizing blogs is problematic. That’s why, so far, I’ve steered clear of “blog networks” and similar schemes. I believe that can work, but it takes a ton of effort, skill, and time, and it probably can’t be done on a massive scale. (I may be wrong about that, but so far that’s what the marketplace has shown, I think.)

However, the true business value of blogs — and the reason why every company should be hiring people skilled in conversational media to monitor relevant conversations — is that blogs can directly and effectively support every business goal while strengthening the relationships upon which all business depends.

In short, stop viewing blogs as “bells and whistles” or side projects, and start viewing them as core systems.

(snip)

Do you worry about whether your telephones and computers are direct revenue producers? Do you calculate the ROI on the door to your office? Probably not. Would you ever consider doing business without either? Yeah, I’d like to see you try.

Behind the blog hype (and yes, there is a lot of blog hype), the tools and channels of conversational media are fast becoming as crucial to the fabric of business and the economy as doors and phones.

Points for Amy Gahran. Her re-casting of the blog phenomenon as just one form of “conversational media,” though clunky phraseology, captures what’s really new and what all businesses (including non-profits and governmental agencies) have to start pondering. Is there any business that does not have a relationship with customers, with a market segment? Any government agency that doesn’t need to communicate? Any non-profit that doesn’t need to explain its mission to its supporters? It’s hard to think of one. These entitities are already in a “conversation” with customers. The only question is whether the conversation is productive and satisfying. Blogs facilitate conversations.

I have a hard time completely giving up on the press release. In its ideal form, it is a highly efficient structure to convey information. Without realizing it, I learned how to write a press release when I learned how to write a standard news story, from Professor James Spalding of UC Berkeley’s journalism school. He taught me to write lean news stories that emphasized clarity over style. In my natural state, I express myself in torrents of style and wordplay, so it was difficult to learn what Professor Spalding taught, but exhilarating once I mastered it.

I got further training in this craft at City News Service, where most stories we filed were between 4-8 paragraphs with no fluff. The optimal press release is just like that. It should not read like “hype.” It is news, written like a news story. It should use active, direct and clear English to ensure client messages will be understood quickly and easily. It follows the reverse pyramid structure, which ensures clients’ messages will be presented in order of priority.

A good press release is like a window — a clear view of the idea, concept or product that is its subject. It’s a classic form. Through the final weeks of my previous PR career, when everything around me seemed painful and chaotic, I still found a kind of cobbler’s peace in editing my staff’s press release drafts so they measured up to Professor Spalding’s ideal of a news story. Cutting a 10-line lede down to four lines…ahh, so satisfying. Foremski correctly describes the bloated, unreadable documents tagged as “press releases” that too many PR agencies lazily tolerate. Bad press releases diminish their own value. But a well-written, well-constructed release can be effective.

My problem with news releases is not the format. It’s that so much of the effort put into them is wasted. Though accessible, readers usually are not directed to them. They are neither organized nor presented in a way that would engage anyone but a reporter doing research for a story. The distribution of most press releases is woefully off-target (as Bad Pitch Blog documents), and even if you get your release to the proper target, you’ve got to penetrate a thick membrane of crap detection. But the people who really might be interested — the audience that you’re hoping the news media will help you reach — rarely get to see them.

I’m thinking of one major LA corporation that has fascinating information buried in the “news” section of its website. The home page is just company boilerplate — a brochure with hyperlinks. What would make someone come back to that company’s website repeatedly is news, but the news takes too long to find. On such sites, past press releases are archived instead of presented, even though it seems obvious to me that potential customers might want to read some of them.

I think this company would like its potential customers to get in the habit of checking their website on a regular basis. It’s within their power to become publishers of information more relevant to their market segment than any other news source. And not just publish it — get into a dialogue about it, with other smart people who are equally passionate about the subject. How fascinating this could be. How dramatic. How fun.

The challenge is this: As Foremski and others have noted, PR people can’t help but talk in PR-speak. Hype. The engaged reader of the company’s new “conversation” will quickly click off if it feel too much like hype. It would be better, ideally, if the conversation was run by another type of employee, a decision-maker or someone schooled in the trade, rather than someone who only learned enough to flack it. In a conversation, it shouldn’t feel like you’re driving home “key messages, ” or steering the conversation back to the main point, or all the other tricks PR people preach in media training. If it’s supposed to be a conversation, it’s got to have the freedom from boundaries of a conversation.

Can a PR person, or some other kind of consultant, teach professional staff at a company, non-profit or government agency, to write in a conversational way? Can the employee take the time to do it? Can upper management get comfortable knowing these conversations are, in a sense, defining the company and becoming one of the primary ways in which the company interacts with the world?

That’s how clients should be thinking about these issues. If you’re a PR person, you’re intensely focused on a) if there’s still a role for you in the world of the future and b) what’s the new state-of-the-art that I need to know to stay relevant?

But your clients shouldn’t spend a moment worrying about you. Companies, government agencies and non-profits need to reflect on themselves, and how their potential and current customers want to interact with them. I don’t think there is a state-of-the-art yet, but there’s a lot to explore and think about.

My advice to executives is, don’t delegate this journey to your PR department. Get online yourself. Mix with the folks. Read blogs about your favorite football team, or political party, or hobby. Read blogs written by people who violently disagree with your political views, and read the comments, too. If you’re an attorney, read law professor blogs. If you go to church, read God blogs. Read blogs being written by citizens of Iraq and by our soldiers. Read blogs from New Orleans. In other words, blogs where something important is at stake to the writer and their readers. Get to understand things like syndication and tagging by doing it yourself. Don’t make decisions or commit money to a new strategy until you’ve hung out in this new space for awhile and can start to conceive of where you might fit, what kind of conversation you are ready to conduct.

Once you’ve achieved that level of understanding, that’s when to bring in someone to help shape your online presence for you. But don’t let them get too far in front of you, and don’t let them sell you a black box. It’s got to be uniquely yours.

Press releases, dead or alive? Blogs, on the way up or down? These questions exist because communications are in such flux — and because money and careers are on the line. But they are distracting. The real question for most people in business is, How do I create an authentic version of myself and my enterprise on the Web? And how does that change my business?

*(P.S. I re-read this post later this morning and did some editing to it.)

New Holiday Tradition: Feathers Fly

What to do on Valentine's Day if you aren't in a relationship? Send yourself flowers? A flash-mob organized in San Francisco offered this alternative:

Roughly 1,000 people drawn by internet postings and word-of-mouth converged near San Francisco's Ferry Building on Tuesday night for a half-hour pillow fight.

The underground event erupted at 6 p.m. in the center of Justin Herman Plaza with a mass rush of shrieking, laughing combatants – many of whom arrived with pillows concealed in shopping bags, backpacks and the like.

Within minutes, pillows were arcing, feathers were flying, and by the time the Ferry Building's clock tower clanged the half-hour, the plaza and hundreds of people were covered in white down that gave the scene a wintry lustre.

"I haven't giggled so hard for a really long time,'' said San Francisco resident Amy Davis, 35, an office manager for a construction company that manufactures stone facades for buildings.

Davis – who said she has been unlucky in love and was grateful for an antidote to Valentine's Day — lasted for most of the battle, but pulled out toward the end when she had her fill of breathing feathers.

Like many others, Davis learned of the pillow fight from a friend who directed her to a web site – in her case it was Wikipedia – that gave details about a planned flash mob pillow fight on Valentine's Day in San Francisco.

Apparently, last night's combat was only the latest in what is becoming a worldwide phenomenon: Pillow Fight Club. As in the "Fight Club" movie, Pillow Fight Club has rules (according to Wikipedia):

1. Tell everyone about Pillow Fight Club.
2. Tell everyone about Pillow Fight Club.
3. Turn up at the arranged Pillow Fight Club venue with pillow hidden in a bag.
4. At the exact given time pull out pillow and fight.
5. You cannot fight anyone without a pillow (unless they want it).
6. Nothing heavy can be hidden in the pillows

In addition, you are strongly encouraged to bring a feather-filled pillow. A fiber-filled pillow doesn't cut it.

The San Francisco Chronicle's SFgate.com has photos. Here's one.

San Francisco, like Los Angeles, has a lot of people in it who are separated from family roots; especially single, young people. Couldn't you see pillow fights become an alternative way to celebrate Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter… ?

UPDATE: More pictures here from SF blogger Laughing Squid, who participated and said afterward:

Man, I now have feathers in really strange places.