Oh wiki wiki world…

The Whole Earth Cataloge for the digital age….kind of…

About two years ago, someone gave me a heads up that I had an entry in the Wikipedia under my name.

Well that was nice, and a certain sign of recognition in the digital age. The entry had been posted by someone in Europe, which was a kind gesture.  Over time, there were a few additions to it, and I had pretty much forgotten it was there.

Then, about three or four months ago, I was doing an interview with an American magazine, and asked if it was true that I called myself ‘the VJ idiot’.  I asked where they had gotten that from, and they told me it was in my entry in Wikipedia.

I went to Wikipedia, and I was astonished to read that I was listed at “the Jewish TV producer” and “Obama supporter”, among other things.  Well, these are both true, but not particularly germane to what I do. There were other perjoratives as well.

I went in and corrected the entry, and no sooner had I done this than other changes, far worse, were place on the site.

Look, anti Semitic comments and email are nothing new for me. Not since I was listed on jewwatch.com years ago.  Here’s an example of what comes in the mail. This from some mental case in Chicago:

Mike Sponza
mike.spon65@yahoo.com | 75.91.74.189

Your rabbi? It’s bad enough you’re a jew, now you want to throw your dirty religion down our throats by posting this crap all over your front page?

Shouldn’t you be out somewhere teaching companies how to slash their operating costs by firing the Cameraman, Editors, FP’s and the like? I mean come on, any copywriter can shoot and edit amazing stories with just 4 days of your shitty schooling. What is happening at KRON? What about DC? Hummm, the BBC isn’t too pleased either from what I hear. And now we hear rumors that the GAO is starting another investigation.

When will you stop?

When it comes to my own emails or blog, I could care less, but when it comes to Wikipedia, its vandalism.

And it was becoming a daily event.

That’s where someone named Andy Mabbett comes in.

He is one of a small corps of highly dedicated yet unpaid web professionals who spend their time making sure that places like Wikipedia are kept in shape.

Now I don’t know Andy Mabbett, and I have never spoken to him, but he found the vandalism and cleaned it up, time after time after time.

Other people came in an peeled away paragraph after paragraph as they were vandalized.  I am not supposed to deal with my own entry, and things I put in were removed as well.

Today, my entry is reduced to a line or two, but at least it’s accurate, and as I understand, protected from vandalism – at least for a while.

The world is filled with sick f***ers, and there is nothing I can do about that.  But at least people like Andy Mabbett are there as well.

Thanks, Andy.

The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You

First, many thanks to Buck over at b-roll.net. for finding this.  Nice research!

Austin likes to think of itself as ‘different’ from the rest of Texas.

And now, The Austin American-Statesman takes a giant step in moving from a paper to a digital information center.   They not only reprint articles from The New York Times and The Washington Post on a regular basis (hey, this is TEXAS!), but their websites, both the paper’s and their entertainment website, Austin360 are clean and heavy on blogging, video and citizen journalism.

As for their point about local TV news vs. newspapers…..

In my experience most local TV newsrooms start their day by scanning the paper for stories to cover.  I have never seen a newspaper scan local TV news for what to cover that day.

The Truman Syndrome

I’m voting you off the planet….

In 1969 the first man walked on the moon.

In 1972, the last man walked on the moon, and we have not been back since.

That’s 36 years.

For 36 years the moon has still hung there every night.  We have the technology to go. We just opt not to.

How come?

The reason, I think, is television and video.

Sadly.

When Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon for the first time on July 20th, 1969, Star Trek, the TV series was in it’s second season.

The moon experience was over 3 years later, but nearly 40 years into the franchise, Star Trek is still going strong:  5 iterations as series, endless re-runs, 8(?) movies, with the latest one due to be released shortly.  And of course, The Star Trek Experience in Las Vegas, ever popular, as is its gif shop.

Why is this? Why is it that we are so fixated on Star Trek (or Star Wars, take your pick), as opposed to real space adventures.

It is, I think, because we are increasingly becoming an image-driven culture.  (My good friend Dr. Len Shlain wrote a fascinating book about this, The Alphabet vs The Goddess, if you want a great read).

In any event, when Americans landed on the moon in 1969, the whole world watched on TV. If you are old enough, you probably have an image in your mind’s eye of those flickering black and white images as Neil Armstrong stepped onto the lunar surface.  “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind”. (Ok, he flubbed the line, but who wouldn’t have been nervous?)

Well, exciting, but not much in the way of character development or action, when you think about it.  Flip the dial and you get Captain Kirk blasting the Klingons at warp speed.  And, as we view the world through the filter of video, both fiction and fact, they tend to get confused.  Star Trek got renewed because it was exciting. Apollo got cancelled because it was not. It didn’t rate.

Now, Roy Greenslade, one of my favorite columnists in The Guardian, reports that psychiatrists are diagnosing a new mental disorder: The Truman Syndrome.  People who believe that they are living in a reality show all the time.

This is a new phenomenon, but I think we can expect to see more of these cases in the future.  We live in a world bathed in video. The average American now spends 4.5 hours a day watching TV, and that number is expected to jump to 7 hours a day when video comes to the web full-bore.

In the not too distant future, we may look a bit like one of those dysfunctional planets that Kirk and company used to visit from time to time. An entire culture that spends all it’s days staring at glowing screens.  In the old Star Trek episodes, Kirk was generally able to free the planet by asking the central command computer some tricky questions like ‘if I always tell the truth, what happens when I say, I’m lying?”  Given that knotty quiz, the computer generally blew up in a cloud of smoke and the planet was freed from bondage.”

Alas, here on earth, we may have to figure this one out on our own.

The Man Who Came to Breakfast

Notice the marmite……

Jeff Jarvis dropped over for breakfast yesterday.

Somewhere between Dubai and Davos, he carved out an hour for a few slices of Sullivan Street Bakery sesame bread and white fish salad.

He came over to talk about DNA2009.

Like Jeff, I attend many conferences. (I can’t turn down an audience).  But one of the greatest flaws I see at a lot of conferences are that once you assemble the great and the good, no one really knows what to do with them.  There is the ‘let’s give a speech’ route. You sit, a famous person we have paid 100k will recite a talk that someone else has written for them, and then we’ll have coffee.  Not great.

Then there is the ‘let’s pretend we’re in a TV studio’ route.  A well-known TV presenter who has little or no knowlege of the topic at hand will carry out a mock Dick Cavett (for those old enough) type TV interview, – lights, swivel chairs, set – all that is lacking is the TV cameras..and the broadcast.  The audience sits and watches this reinactment of a 1975 TV show and then thinks about what is wrong with TV…

Finally there is the much lamented Panel Discussion.  Five or six luminaires on an industry are invited to offer their opinions on a few topics while 300 people watch them try and explain very complex issues in 2 minute soundbites.  Also shows what is wrong with TV.

Well, it’s not easy.

The thing I like about Jarvis is he thinks out of the box all the time.  This goes for his new book, What Would Google Do, which I shamelessly pimp here (my pre-order is already in); but also for conferences.

At his last conference at CUNY, he tried quite hard to break the mold.  Lightning round, solve the problem, live webcasting with comments – he tried to get everyone involved.

So we’ve invited him to DNA (March 4-5, Brussels), where we’re going to try some new ideas on group involvement as opposed to sit and watch this stuff. I think it will make a big difference.

And, using my new flip cam (Jarvis was quick to note that he now has the HD version… so it’s back to B&H Photo as soon as I am done here), we got him to do a quick promo for us. (Well, it’s the least you can expect after bagels and ….. marmite?)

Gresham’s Law

World’s first media critic…..

Sir Thomas Gresham was an English merchant who worked for both King Edward VI and Queen Elizabeth I (1519-1579)

Gresham was also the world’s first media critic, although he didn’t know it at the time.

Gresham is best known today among Economics 101 students for what is commonly called ‘Gresham’s Law’. (Although Gresham never formally wrote anything out), as a merchant he quickly came to understand that ‘bad money drives out good’ which is the basis of ‘Gresham’s law.

What that means (as a grad in good standing of Econ 101, is that in any system that has two currencies, the debased (or more worthless)) currency will drive out the more valuable currency. People prefer to keep the currency they perceive as more valuable and hence will more quickly trade the currency they view as worth less, relatively.

The most recent example of this, at least when it comes to money, is our own dollar.

Until 1934, a US dollar was worth 1.5048 grams of gold, and could freely be exchanged for that at any time.  Pretty remarkable when you think about it.  Dollars and gold and gold coins were freely exchanged and really interchangeable.  When they said ’sound as a dollar’, it meant something.  (The UK Pound, interestingly, is called a pound because 1£ once was equally exchangeable for a pound of silver. That’s why it was called Pound Sterling.. and still is).

In any event, in 1934, Franklin Roosevelt, by executive order declared that the dollar henceforth would be redeemable for .850 grams of gold, effectively debasing the dollar in half (or almost so) immediately. The reaction? Gold disapperaed from common exchange almost immediately. People naturally began to horde gold and trade more paper dollars.  This created an independent market for the value of gold, and by 1971, one dollar was worth, effectively 1/35th of an ounce of gold. In 1971, Nixon disconnected the dollar from exchangeability at all, and henceforth the dollar was backed only by ‘faith in the US Government’. Gold itself was traded entirely independently from paper money.  When was the last time you bought something for a piece of gold? Or a gold coin?

Now, all this is very interesting, but what does this have to do with media?

A lot, really.

Our currency, so to speak today, is information. More than coins, if you think about it.

With the rise of the Interent, we have entered a world of “two currencies”, just like Gresham’s world.  I have printed newspapers but I also have online newspapers.  Two currencies, representing exactly the same thing.

In our own “Gresham’s Law”, the more dynamic currency drives out the less dynamic one. Hence, people are more likely to ‘trade’ online news than paper news.  It’s more easily acquired and it’s more flexible – it is more responsive, it changes faster.  This does not mean it is ‘better’. In some ways, it is debased… perceived as cheaper, hence more rapidly traded.  One is more likely to post an online article than clip and mail the very same article from the NY Times.   There is a difference. And in this difference, the more dynamic media drive out the less dynamic.

When all media on the web are compared, the same rule holds true – The more dynamic drives out the less dynamic.

Take two real estate web sites:  One has video, the other is only text, yet they are selling the very same house. Which garners more success?  Two dating sites: One is text only, the other has video. Which garners more dates?

Now take two news sites.  News is in many ways a commodity.  One news site has video, the other text and photos. Which garners more hits. Which is more ‘popular’, hence higher ad rates, hence it survives?

In England, Henry VIII and his son, Edward had progressively debased English coins by decreasing the silver content and adding brass.  England was deeply in debt.  Gresham urged Elizabeth to restore the value of the English money by pouring gold back into the coins, making them  more attractive to traders. This she did, at great cost, but in doing so, restored the solvency of the English economy and wiped out the debt.

Gresham’s discovery was not really all that new. Aristophanes made the point in The Frogs in 405 BC.

The course our city runs is the same towards men and money.

She has true and worthy sons.

She has fine new gold and ancient silver,

coins untouched with alloys, gold or silver,

each well minted, tested each and ringing clear.

Yet we never use them!

Others pass from hand to hand,

sorry brass just struck last week and branded with a wretched brand.

So with men we know for upright, blameless lives and noble names.

These we spurn for men of brass….

The Word From Down Under

hopping mad…

Pat Younge, President and GM for The Travel Channel sent me a very interesting article from The Australian.

JOURNALISTS have been warned they cannot be spectators if they are to survive the new world of media fragmentation and digitalisation — an environment dubbed a “perfect storm”.

The impact of new technologies in the world of journalism is a global phenomenon.  More than 12,000 journalists have lost their jobs so far, and I think, we are only at the very beginning.

The report warns that we could see the collapse of the biggest media companies in the US in the very near future. This is disturbing, but certainly believable in light of recent events not just with GM, but also Citigroup.  GE, the parent company for NBC/Universal is apparently in trouble, largely owing to its exposure through GE Capital, but also due to reduced expectations for ad revenues in ‘09 due to the global slowdown.  Deep cuts are already predicted at NBC, but that may only be a harbinger of what other US media groups will have to face in the next few months.

As the shakedown continues, and consolidation mounts, those remaining in their cubicles will have to produce even more content for the same amount of pay.  The media business, and in particular, the news business is fundamentally a manufacturing business. We make the product that we sell every day.

Unlike the car companies, we do not have the luxury of reducing inventory – because air time must be filled. Newspapers can cut back on the number of pages they print, reducing their newsprint costs, but they also reduce ad space – and the attractiveness of buying the paper. In the onair and online world, there is almost no cost savings in reducing output – only in cutting the cost of manufacture.

This can be done, but it means fewer people doing more work, and for the same pay.

This is going to happen.

The best thing that those who are in the business now, or contemplating it as a carreer can do is to prepare themselves for a world of vastly higher productivity and far lower per unit costs.  When it comes to axing existing employees, the last to go will the the ones who put the most product on the screen (TV or computer or both) at the lowest possible cost.

Cruel, you bet.

But all too real.

Only Yesterday

Quiet kids, I’m trying to watch Dancing with the Stars….

In the 1920s, a new technology burst upon the scene.

Radio.

It was unlike anything that had ever existed before. Suddenly, you could hear events and people in your living room, even though they were hundreds or thousands of miles away.

God-like. Capturing.

And it captured a nation.  Radio penetration went from nothing to nearly 60% by 1930.  Radio quite literally opened millions and millions of homes to a vision of a world they had never seen before, and all its possibilities.

The radio business exploded in the 1920s. Everyone was in the radio business in one way or another.  There were thousands of radio stocks in the heady Cooledge boom days. You would recognize it. It was just like the dot-com boom of the Clinton years.

In fact, it was disturbingly like it.

Radio also introduced Average Americans to two other phenomena, also a bit disturbing in a way:  credit and stocks.

In 1922, advertising sales on radio totaled $22 million.  By 1929, they stood at $842 million, an increase of 1400% over 7 years.  Consumer demand, fueled almost entirely by credit followed suit. Radio created a demand for products and services; a demand that simply had not existed before.  And the consumer followed, by borrowing.  Debt exploded.

At the same time, a newly ‘aware’ listenership developed a sudden interest in investing in the stock market, a place they had never even known had existed before, and a massive run up in stock values and prices also followed, driven by easy credit and margin purchases of 10%.  (All of this comes from Frederick Lewis Allen’s excellent history of the US in the 1920s, Only Yesterday.)

The book was published in 1931, yet it could have been written yesterday.

The parallels are deeply, deeply disturbing.

Replace radio with Internet, and you could almost be reading today’s Wall Street Journal.

The same way in which a new technology, radio, suddenly drove first an investment bubble in the new technology, an explosion of  ’sites’, most of them money-losers (everyone and their brother was putting up radio antennae and starting local radio stations. Almost all eventually failed, as they were free or ad driven and did not have the traffic to sustain when the home radio maker got bored or went broke. Sound familiar?)

Then, the content and the mass penetration drove an explosion of both purchasing and investing, all done on credit. (sound familiar again?).  Even home equity loans!

Read this from Allen’s book:

Prosperity was assisted, too, by two new stimulants to purchasing, each of which mortgaged the future but kep the factories roaring while it was being injected. The first was the increase in the installment buying. People were getting to consider it old-fashioned to limit their purchases to the amount of their cash balance; the thing to do was to “excercise their credit.” By the latter part of the decade, economists figured that 15 per cent of all retail sales were on an installment basis, and that there were some six billions of “easy payment” paper outstanding. The other stimulant was stock-market speculation. When stocks were skyrocketing in 1928 and 1929 it is probable that hundreds of thousands of people were buying goods with money which represented, essentiall, a gamble on the business profits of the nineteen-thirties. It was fun while it lasted.

All of this, Allen believes, was driven by the new technology of radio, and radio’s driver – advertising:

If these were the principal causes of Coolidge Prosperity, the salesman and the advertising mas were at least its agents and evangels. Business had learned as never before the immense importance to it of the ultimate consumer. Unless, he could be persuaded to buy and buy lavishly, the whole stream of six-cylinder cars, super-heterodynes, cigaretts, rouge compacts, and electric ice-boxes would be dammed at its outlet. The salesman and the advertising man held the key to this outlet. As competition increased their methods became more strenuous. No longer was it considered enough to reccomend one’s goods in modest and and explicit terms and to place them on the counter in the hope that the ultimate consumer would make up his mind to purchase. The advertiser must plan elaborate national campaigns, consult with psychologists, and employ all the eloquence of poets to cajole, exhort, or intimidate the consumer into buying–to “break down consumer resistance.”

In the end, the radio driven craze to buy and buy and buy all on credit had to come crashing down. It was a house of cards. The end result – the Great Depression.

Did we do the same with the web?  Did history repeat itself?  Did the sudden exposure to eTrade, online buying at a click, the dot-com boom… all of that… do to us what radio and the boom years of the 1920s did to our grandparents?

Scary, scary stuff.

Flipped Out

Two weeks ago, I was interviewed by Jemima Kiss from The Guardian.

She did the interview using a Mino Flip Cam.

She propped it up on a pile of plates and let loose.  Then she plugged it into her laptop, and in a few minutes, my interview was on the Guardian’s website.

Now that was impressive.

The video then went viral, and that was even more impressive.

So I went and ordered a flipcam from Amazon.

It was $179.99 plus tax and shipping last week. Now I see it’s down to $159.00

unbelievable.

And it works great. So simple.

OK. No one is going to argue that this is broadcast quality… yet.

But they are coming out with an HD model very soon.

What I have been using it for the most is Vmail.

You record your message, you plug it into the laptop and its got an ‘email this video’ function.

Very cool.

And so simple.

The only problem with it is you can’t flip the screen so you can see the framing. But you can’t have everything.

CRASH!

bye bye SNL… and I have no idea who that guy is…

For the past four years, we have had our offices at 1619 Broadway, where we sublet space from Broadway Video and SNL.  It was an interesting place to work.

Then, on Tuesday, BV called and said that they had sold part of the building and they were consolidating and we had to vacate…. by the end of the month.

Well, with Thanksgiving coming, this did not look like a particularly pleasant prospect.  I like to keep the office close to home and midtown office space is notoriously difficult to find, particularly on short notice.

I was wrong.

The economic downturn has hit harder and faster than I thought.

Within a few hours, we had found a space.  And it was not the kind of space I had thought we would end up in.

Our new address is on 54th and Park.  It is the office of a former hedge fund. Former, in that it was all there, all but the people.

It has a fireplace. And a bathroom with a tub. And wired rooms with desks with Bloomberg terminals and leather furniture. Just no people.  You might call it a fire sale.  “Just take it” said the last person there, who then turned out the lights.

This morning I opened The Guardian to read the headline:

Woolworths, Founded in 1909, 820 Stores, once worth £830m, for sale yesterday for £1

It’s all pretty sobering stuff.

Like 1929 all over again.. maybe.

If there is a silver lining (and it’s pretty well hidden so far), it is that, as The New York Times pondered yesterday, this depression will be different. Instead of the family hanging together on Walton Mountain, it is more likely that people will sit at home in front of their TV sets… or laptops.

That is what you do when you are unemployed.

And that means that the demand for content for TV will at least remain.. to some extent. Some cable operations will no doubt go dark, as advertising dollars evaporate.  But those that stay in business will still have to put product on the air.

But… but… they are going to have far less money to pay for that product. So cost cutting will become paramount. More content for less dollars…

The handwriting, so to speak, is on the wall.

And the inquiries we have gotten so far seem to reflect this quite clearly.

The best course you can take for the coming storm?  Prepare yourself for deep cost cuts.  Those who survive? Those who can deliver content for the lowest possible cost.

And as for the new office?

Well, I will certainly miss some aspects of the old one.

There was nothing like walking a client past lifesize photos of John Belushi or Eddie Murphy on the way to the conference room to instill a sense of confidence.

But now, we can do the roaring fire thing instead.

Goes well with the British accent, I think.

Out of Detroit

Motown news

When it comes to cutting edge trends, we generally say that California leads and the nation follows.

When it comes to contracting industries, maybe that accolade should go to Detroit.

This week, as automakers made their case for a $25 billion bail-out, one could not help but think that this was but a harbinger of what is going to face every other industry in the very near future.

Newspapers and now local TV are also facing the same kind of financial downturn and pressure, so it might be reasonable to look to Detroit to try and unwind the Media Mess, and therein perhaps, lies an answer or two.

In 1982, there were two newspapers in Detroit.  The Gannett owned Detroit Free Press and the Knight Ridder owned Detroit News.

One was a morning paper, the other and afternoon. One was a broadsheet, the other a tabloid.

Yet both were in trouble.

Detroit, it seemed, could only support one paper.

In those halcyon days long gone, it was thought that it was unhealthy for a city like Detroit to only have one newspaper (today, we are facing the very real prospect of no-newspaper cities).

In any event, to cut operating costs and stave off a perceived journalism disaster, the papers filed for something called a JOA, or Joint Operating Agreement. The papers would henceforth share the same printing plant, the same back office to do the books, and perhaps even the same newsroom.  Economies of scale

Such a sharing arrangement (assuming the principals didn’t inadvertently kill each other), would have been a clear violation of anti-trust laws, and so they needed clearance for the Dept of Justice.

Hence, a JOA.

Today, as newspapers move to the web and video, and TV stations do the same, they are finding themselves increasingly on each other’s turf – in terms of viewers/readers, content and advertisers.  In many cases, there simply is not enough advertiser dollars or viewer/readers to go around. Something has to go.

If we wan to preserve the diversity of opinion that multiple media outlets offer (and that is a debate for another day), perhaps what is needed her is a kind of Media JOA.

Most local TV stations start their news day by reading the local paper. That’s where they get the bulk, if not all, of their stories. When the local paper goes, the local TV news will not be far behind. Mostly because their best source of information has suddenly vanished.

What is killing local TV news (and networks, but more slowly) is its massive overhead. The enormous staffing required (or so it seems) to put the product on the air. (Not to mention building, studios, trucks, tower…)

Why not create then, a kind of media JOA.  A sharing of resources with two distinct and different outlets.

First, as newspapers begin to send their reporters out on the street with video cameras, the local news should use that video for their TV news shows.  Makes sense, no? Why repeat the same act over and over. Cut the costs and share the revenue as well as the content.

Second, share the newsroom. Run the local newscast from the newspaper’s newsroom. Looks like ‘real news’ without having to build a set. Hey, it IS real news. What do you know.

Share advertisers.  Bundle the ads for the paper and the on air play (and the web) all at the same time. One buy helps all, and by the way, you only need one ad sales staff, not two.

Getter a smaller piece of a shrinking pie than no pie at all.