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| Thursday, April 19, 2001 |
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Day Two on Radio. 
| | Thanks to Brent, Dave, and other Userland natives, I'm starting to groove on this thing. My short take: it's an instrument of journalism no less right for its time and its medium than the quill & inkwell, the typewriter and the word processor. What makes it so much more powerful than all that preceed it is the way it respects and uses the medium itself, which is most significantly comprised of writings by other journalists. Those writers' journals are its inkwell and the Web is its paper. Between the two, Radio serves both the need to know and the need to write. I've got more to say, but I'll probably put it in my own DaveNet equivalent a little later today. Meanwhile, it great to experience what's happening here, and not just to write about it.`` |
Today's reading:
| | First, what Dave says about integrity. Next, what Michael Ventura says about who, exactly we are: |
| | there may be no more important project of our time than displacing Christianist fiction of monopersonality. This fiction is the notion that each person has a central and unified "I" which determines his or her acts |
| | We talked about this in an interview with Craig Burton five years ago, when Netscape's barely-noticed moves with LDAP effectively kept Microsoft from setting up a toll booth at the intersection where we enter the Web -- the one controlled by a directory. |
| | I've also been writing about my own take on integrity -- that it's about where you come from -- for a long time. (One examples is here.) Dave exemplified what I mean when he opened today's DaveNet by listing the many personalities embodied in where he comes from: |
| | I was a math major in college. I didn't study practical mathematics, I studied a branch of topology called graph theory. At the time it was considered pretty esoteric stuff, but I loved it because it stretched my mind in ways that I liked. To me the meaning of a word is itself interesting. And the relationship between words is even more interesting. I'm also a humanist. The software I make, although some people feel it is not easy to use, is honed to be so, because I'm interested in the human mind. These disclaimers are part of integrity, but have little to do with honesty. Permit me to explain with an example |
| | Now Craig is excited about another, unrelated directory, which he's been explaining to me over the phone, and I still only barely understand: the one in Radio Userland. I don't think this is merely coincidental. |
| | We, the writers who type so much of the Web into existence, who add immeasurable value with every new idea we publish onto the vast paper we all share, need to care not only about our own integrity -- that integral agreement of selves that stand together behind our first person singular names and pronouns and constitute where we come from -- but about the integrity of the infrastructure that makes the Web function as nobody's property. In other words, where the Web comes from. |
| | I may have the details wrong here, but I know the right approach with Microsoft is engagement, which is exactly what Dave and other SmallCo developers are doing. |
| | I've said it before, but it bears repeating again here. The Net and the Web are a new world built by its creators ‹ which include many commercial developers as well as folks from the Free Software and Open Source communities ‹ to embody three principles: 1) Nobody owns it; 2) Everybody can use it; and 3) Anybody can improve it. |
| | And we owe a free lunch to the software jocks who walk and talk all three of those principles. |
Getting peronal
Make blove, not war
| | So Dave is getting called on as a source for anti-Microsoft stories by what he calls (with the quotes) "journalists": |
| | As you might imagine, I've been getting emails and calls from all kinds of "journalists" working for big pubs and TV and radio programs, wanting me to tell them how awful Microsoft is. I tell them all that I like working with Microsoft, have had a relationship with them for 20 years, they're now a BigCo, and behave like one, we've had ups and downs, that unlike other BigCo's they tend not to hold grudges, and the Times didn't tell the real story. They go away. Conclusion, if there are any reporters trying to do balanced stories on Microsoft, they aren't calling me. Actually I filed this bug report in April 1997. "The press only knows three stories, Apple is dead, Microsoft is evil, and Java is the future." |
| | I filed similar bug reports in '95 and '97. My point in both cases: the press likes to write stories, and stories always involve conflict. They don't start with "happily ever after" (unless they're press releases). Sports and war supply the best metaphors for stories about conflict, so those are what the press likes to use. And the process, as the linguists like to tell you, is almost completely unconscious. It's knee-jerk stuff. |
| | But what we're doing here, by writing both on and for the Web, is journalism in a much more literal sense. It isn't journalism for distribution. It's journalism for sharing. It isn't about the few writing for the many. It's about anybody writing for anybody -- through a publishing medium that has nothing to do with the publishing business. |
| | The old few-to-many system -- journalism for distribution -- is hard journalism. It's about telling and selling: telling stories and selling publications. The new any-to-any system is soft journalism. It's about talking and sharing. |
| | Soft journalism is what happens in real marketplaces -- the old noisy kind we had before Industry won the industrial revolution and redefined markets as abstractions, usually "targets" for products and for "messages" made only to whet "consumer" appetites for those products. In real marketplaces, anybody impassioned about anything is free to engage anybody else who shares those passions, and business is right in the thick of it. Thanks to the Web (and the hackers who built it), every business everywhere in the civilized world is melting back into its marketplace. The best hard journalists -- and journals -- are the ones that make the most of the soft truths that flow from constant conversation in those marketplaces, by participating in it. By talking with it, and not just to it. |
| | There's conflict in those marketplaces, make no mistake. The one that's soon going to make the best story is the one between hard and soft journalism. The problem in covering it will be in keeping it from being a versus story. It's hard for hard journalists not to use the OR logic of war, even when the story requires the AND logic of love, friendship and plain old conversation, which grows knowledge on all sides. |
| | Because it's the AND logic of real conversation and real markets that does the real work here in the real world. Both forms of journalism will work best by feeding each other. Think about it. We all syndicate each other every time we create a link what each other says. What grows isn't circulation, but authority and respect. |
| | And I submit that both depend on integrity. |
| | The hardest thing to figure out right now is, Where do we come from? What is our integrity? What we need more than anything else right now is to continue building out the Web's infrastructure in ways that work for us, and not just for me. It's environmentalism of a whole new sort, because we're actually building out the environment (or, as Craig puts it, terraforming our new world). |
| | Microsoft is in that world. So are all the other BigCos and SmallCos. So are the free software and open source software jocks. John Perry Barlow talks about how real communities, like the one where he grew up on a ranch in Idaho, are composed of very different people who depend on each other and come together for common needs in spite of their differences. That's what we're doing here. And that's where these august old nouns -- integrity, authority, respect, honesty -- really start to mean something again. |
Applied summitry
| | Craig Hansen wrote me a fabulous email this morning, that he aptly called an "editorial." With his permission, I just published it. My favorite line: |
| | The retailer must earn the trust of the customer. That's the immutable nature of the game since the days when monkeys danced around the Monolith, and no amount of technology or education will ever change it. |
It doesn't exist
| | ...and already I want one. |
Publish and perish
| | The banner ad is a complete, unmitigated failure: When we look back on this industry, it will be considered the biggest mistake we ever made. Furthermore, the IAB is a complete, unmitigated failure for sitting around and pretending that by making them a little bigger they are going to work. |
| | Unfortunately, his solution is to charge for "content" (jeez, I hate that word): |
| | The New York Times has all of our demographic information already, and they are one of the only sites that could go to Ford and say, "Every single person who comes to our site will see your ad, and we will target the cars you want to promote by age, gender, or location." The next day, it could be NBC to take the full-page ad to promote their shows, and Times Digital could go right on down the line collecting money hand over fist. |
| | As many of you know, we started our dedicated e-mail program a couple of weeks ago. By now you've gotten a total of four dedicated e-mails, including one from a university and one from a local restaurant. These sponsors got a lot out of the dedicated e-mails, and you, our loyal readers, are still getting the Daily for free every day. I think it is a pretty fair deal, and based upon your feedback, I think you agree. |
| | I'm very happy with the dedicated e-mail program, because we're running in the black and haven't had any layoffs, while many of our peers are shutting down. |
| | Looking back, the only thing I regret is that we didn't start this one dedicated e-mail for a free Daily three years ago! (If we had, I could have hired another editor or two and given you guys even better editorial.) |
| | That's what we are all looking for right? Deeper and wider content for free. Well, these full-page ads would do that. I would love to see the Times' website add staff instead of making cuts as they have done. If I have to sit through a 20-second ad for every 10 pages so they can keep the free content coming, bring it on... |
| | It is up to publishers to take ownership of this issue, and all they have to do is talk to their customers and explain the situation: You pay with your eyes or you pay for a subscription. If not, we shut the doors. |
| | Jason's a good guy and I like him. But where he's coming from here is mostly the publishing business, which still concieves itself as a distribution business. This was fine when all it distributed was today's news. But like every other incumbent distribution medium, the Web came along and looked like yet another way to deliver so much more... what? |
| | Content, of course. It's a nice inclusive noun, like the pervasive "solution," which is marketing gas that nearly always means nothing more than "product." |
| | The problem for newspapers is that the only content customers have ever been glad to pay for is today's paper. There has never been much of a business in selling last week's paper, even though many papers have been doing that for years. On line they sold their archives through Dialog and other services for many years. But Dialog had a corner on that business and charged arms and legs for customer access to it. From the mid-80s through the mid-90s my companies spent thousands of dollars on Dialog and Compuserve for access to old newspaper and magazine stories. Maybe the publishers are nostalgic for that business, but mostly it made money for the intermediaries. The Web put that business in a wide open space where companies like Dialog couldn't corner it, and it's pretty much relegated to ignored services like Northern Light's Special Collection. I see, for example, that Northen Light wants to charge me $2.95 for a 212 word piece about Cluetrain that ran in Marketing Magazine. They're not getting it from me. They're also not getting a link to the piece. That would be worth a lot more than $2.95, because it would increase the magazine's authority and its exposure to the linked world of the Web. |
| | Yesterday's newspaper is worth nothing beyond the persistent authority it embodies -- when it's made persistently available, so anybody can still find it when they need it. But there's not much business in selling it. Nearly all its sales value perished when today's issue came out. |
| | Authority isn't a business, but it's a business value. It makes your business and its products worth more. You can increase the authority of your print publication by making it available for free on the Web, where anybody can link to it, quote it, source it for anything new they write that references it. You're still going to sell plenty of hard copies. That business is as safe and promising as ever. |
| | My advice to the Times, and to every newspaper and magazine, is to stop trying to run a portal and just be as good as you can be at what you've always done. Remember where you come from. Have integrity with that. Encourage all your writers to run their own blogs, and link to them. Create links to all your old material -- what in the trade we used to call The Morgue (which tells you what we really thought it was worth) and just do your stuff. |
That sucking sound
| | Wanna know why commercial radio sucks? Because it's part of the pay-to-play music distro system, that's why. Forty years ago, when every great radio station was a restaurant where every disc jockey was a chef mixing and serving the best stuff out of his or her record collection, some of the best jocks got busted for "payola" -- for taking money from record companies to play one song or another. It was a huge scandal that killed Alan Freed, the original Rock & Roll deejay (who named the genre, in fact). |
| | Now the whole system is pure payola. None of the jocks pick the music any more. The record companies do. All taste has been disintermediated out of the plumbing that runs from the record mills to the speakers in your car. Thanks to Salon for pointing that one out (more than once, in fact). |
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