Category — BuzzMachine

I got an email from someone writing about the suicide of an adman and those who say that nasty blog comments about him had a role in it. The question to me was the ethical responsibility of bloggers regarding their comments. My response:

First, I think you’re making a leap that is, unfortunately, frequently made when it comes to media and tragedy: the implied causality of song lyrics or a game or a movie and, say, a young person’s act of homicide or suicide. The implication is that there was nothing else wrong in this person’s life that may have caused this tragedy and that it could somehow be brought on by one song or scene and that that media is wrong or even evil. Clearly, that’s absurd — and offensive. It’s convenient to try to find such an easy cause and an easy answer. But it is shallow and dangerous to not look deeper.

I don’t know anything about this case beyond what I’ve read in stone-skipping-water news stories. But I would caution against making this same presumption here. In doing so, you’d also be indicting and convicting the commenters in a serious act. This is a tragedy and I imagine there are more causes than we can see, just as there will be more effects than we can see.

So please don’t be quick to condemn interaction online on the basis of this one tragedy. One effect of that would be to dismiss and devalue so much of the good that comes from the ability of everyone to speak today.

As for a blogger’s — or publisher’s — responsibility regarding comments: That is up to them. Under Section 230, a publisher is not legally responsible for content not created by them. That was necessary to insure an open forum for dialog and as a nation we are privileged to have it; it is our online First Amendment. I know you’re asking another question: the ethics of it. I don’t think there is a blanket rule. I say on my blog that I will kill comments that are patently offensive in their use of hate speech or in personal attacks. I’ve been attacked often in my own comments, of course, and I’ve killed only a few of those; I’m more likely to kill comments attacking others, but even then, there’ve not been many. Part of the problem is that there is a falling bar on the definition of offensiveness; we live in an age of offense and political correctness when someone can be offended by anything said and someone can insist that that speech should be silenced. There’s danger there. In a free democracy and an open market, we must value open discussion and the exchange of views and ideas. So who’s to say what goes too far? There is clearly no one standard.

Now, of course, I’m not defending gratuitous and anonymous attacks on people. I value civility in my blog comments and in the forums I used to run for publishers. I ran operations to kill the worst of those comments. And the communities were grateful for that effort. But I also would have fought any effort to take some number of comments or some event attributed to them to shut down all that discussion. That, too, would be a tragedy.

I urge you not to fall into the media trap of making this a simple cause-and-effect story. Note well this from the New York Times story on the event:But a colleague and friend of Mr. Tilley’s, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said, “There’s no way you or I will know why he did this, but it’s certainly not because of blogs.”

“I know it bothered him,” the colleague said, referring to the public criticism. “However, he was very intelligent, with lots of talents and skills, and this was not his whole life. Pointing to blogging and the media just trivializes a man whose life was not trivial.”

It’s amazing that reporters love horse-race coverage since they’re so damned lousy at it. Hillary Clinton has the nomination locked up. Rudy Giuliani is the sure nominee. Mike Huckabee is surging for the long haul. John McCain’s campaign is dead. Mitt Romney’s the one to beat. Hillary Clinton’s campaign is dead. Everything’s over last night.

Any idiot can bet on a horse and lose. And there’s a word for them. Losers.

In a comment under my post about restructuring the Times Company below, someone calling him or herself Timesman says that indeed Bill Keller of the Times does want to work collaboratively with his readers, the question is how:

But what, specifically, should journalists at the Times ask its users to do? Let’s hear some very concrete next steps. We’re listening.

OK, friends, let’s take up that challenge. I’ll start the bidding. Please add your ideas of how the Times and its public can work together to perform concrete acts of journalism. (And spare us the kneejerk Times-bashing; those sentiments are stipulated.) Some suggestions:

* Put large amounts of data or documents online and ask the public to help find the stories there. The Dallas Morning News did this with the just-released JFK documents. The Ft. Myers News Press did it with a FOIA on a botched hurricane-relief effort. The Sunlight Foundation has us exposing earmarks in spending bills. Someone, I can’t recall who, did it with Alberto Gonzales’ testimony before Congress. Use your access to get such data and then ask us to help dig into it because we know what’s going on or simply because you want the help. I’d start with Congress and get help from Sunlight and bloggers to strategize that.

* Ask the public to help gather data points around a story. The quickly classical example of this was Brian Lehrer’s WNYC show asking listeners to find out the prices of milk, lettuce, and beer to find out who is being gouged where (which then enables the journalists to ask why — put their price maps against maps of income and race in New York and stories emerge). This should work particularly well on a local level: Ask people to tell you the price they pay for drugs and doctors and map that. Ask them to tell you just how late or dirty their trains are. And on and on. If you get enough data, you can pay attention to the center of the bell curve; the outliers are either mistakes are damned good stories.

* Get the public to help file no end of FOIAs to birddog government. Create a FOIA repository where you can help train them how to do it and record the responses (that bit’s a great idea from Tom Loosemore in the UK) and collect what’s learned.

* One of the great ideas that came out of my entrepreneurial journalism class — inspired by an idea from an intern I worked with at Burda last summer — is to have the public help assign reporters. Now that could get unwieldy quickly. But my CUNY student, Danny Massey, came up with a very smart structure for capturing what the public wants to know so news organizations can allocate at least some of their resource accordingly. I’ll introduce you.

* Establish communities of experts to help on stories, their reporting and checking and even their assignment. This could take the form of Jay Rosen’s beat-blogging idea or of the Ft. Myers panel of experts. Of course, every reporter has such panels in their Rolodexes. But Ft. Myers has learned that people want to be of service before the reporter happens to call. The Times’ crowd is very wise and filled with experts and so why not use the networking and linking power of the internet to help harness that to help with reporting? Imagine a social network around expertise.

* Hand out camera and recorders and ask citizens to capture meetings, lectures, events of all sorts and turn those into podcasts. Most of the time most of them will not get much audience, but the resource that went into each one is minor and the opportunity to spread a wider blanket of coverage on a community is great.

* Get the advertising side involved in supporting curated, quality blog networks: New York, political, business, and so on. The Washington Post has networks for travel and other topics, the Guardian for environment, Reuters for financial blogs. The Times could support the very best of these blogs and benefit from having a wider net of content and reporting at a low cost and risk. And this is the part they’ll like: They can set the definitions of quality. The Times also has an in-house advantage here because About.com knows how to manage and pay large, distributed networks of contributors based on ad and traffic performance.

These ideas work for most any news organization. As I’ll point out in a post I’m writing now: collaboration to create real value is the next generation of interactivity.

To get started, I’d hire a collaboration editor charged with getting such projects going all around the newsroom. But I’d make sure that job gets phased out as journalists collaborate on their own self-interested initiative.

So what other ideas do you have for how the Times — or any news organization — could work together to create journalism?

The problem with putting up a post on the weekend is that some of you probably don’t, since you have lives and don’t read blogs on Sundays. So I’d like to point out a weekend post about restructuring the New York Times Company below because there’s an interesting discussion underway in the comments and I’d like it to continue. And while I’m at it, there’s a really great discussion farther down about restructuring universities; please join in.

Well, at last, attention is being paid to the hand job that news media have been giving Barack Obama. Howie Kurtz was pretty much alone in questioning Obamedia (here he was on their slathering over the Ted Kennedy endorsement that did Obama little good in Massachusetts, and here I am complaining about their fawning). Now Saturday Night Live has taken up the story, followed at long last — and way too late, I’d say — by On the Media.

On Kurtz’ show this week, former Mitt Romney spokesman Kevin Madden called media coverage of Obama an “infomercial.” (With emphasis on the mercial, of course.) And former White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers shamed media critics and editors for missing their own story: “I think it’s interesting that it took pop culture to make the country focus on the question of whether Hillary Clinton is being treated unfairly, and that was Saturday Night Live.”

Here’s where SNL started, a week ago, with a debate skit. A wonderfully exaggerated Jorge Ramos of Univsion questions Obama: “Oh, my God, I’m so nervous. I can’t believe I’m actually talking to you…. I’m sorry to go on so long, I just really, really, really, really want you to be the next President. And not just because you’re a fantastic human being and the only person who can turn this nation around…. So my question is, are you mad at me?… I was afraid you might be mad at me because, you know, all the shilling for you in my campaign coverage has been so obvious.”

Obama replies: “As I travel around this country, I’ve been hearing the same sentiments from every journalist I meet…. For too long in this country, the press has been hearing the same old refrain: Just give us the news and not your personal opinions. And they’re tired. They’re tired of being told, you journalists have to say neutral, you can’t take sides in a political campaign. And they’re saying, yes, we can. Yes, we can take sides. Yes, we can.”

This week, the well-deserved skewering of puppy-love press continued with another debate skit, this one making fun of the MSNBC Barackfest debate. Clinton: “Maybe its just me but once again it seems as if (a) I’m getting the tougher questions and (b) with me, the overall tone is more hostile.” Cue Russert and Williams playing violins.

I’ve said it before: I think this is a failure of media. It is also a failure of media criticism. Media won’t cover their own failings. Indeed, it’s frightening to hear the logic of political correspondents — this week’s Kurtz show is only the latest example — when they blame the campaign for getting bad coverage because they’re not being nice to the press.

So I’m glad to finally hear On the Media take on the story. Though fat lot of good that will do since we’re only days away from what the horse-race correspondents say is make-or-break Tuesday. Said Brooke Gladstone: “The media heart Obama.”

On OTM, media critic Bill Powers says that Obama has “an amazing ability to deflect bad press and move on.” I think that’s criticizing the event from the wrong direction: The press has an amazing ability not to press. Even in OTM’s criticism, we hear more wet kisses for Obama. Says Powers: “The way he keeps is cool is remarkable for someone under fire, particularly someone relatively young running for president…. It is something we haven’t seen the like of since Kennedy.” Just once, I want to hear reporters talk about what Obama does not say. Just once, I want to see reporters to go into a crowd of Obamaniacs and ask 10 of them — or a pollster 1,000 of them: “What does change mean?” Let’s hear whether, indeed, they are one or whether Obama is an empty vessel for his supporters as he is for media.

On both On the Media and Kurtz, guests predict that once Obama wins and Hillary is out of the way — which they all eagerly predict — the press will start attacking him. I don’t believe that. They’ll continue to slather over him until he gets into the White House. And then we’ll just see whether they finally start doing their job.

(Disclosure: I voted for Clinton.)

: LATER: I post this and then pick up the New York Times this morning, which twice mentions the media’s slathering over Obama. Here they are mocking US magazine, of all journalistic paragons, under a journalism heading, of all places, for treating Obama’s wardrobe better than Clinton’s (though the Clinton feature was one in which she quite gamely made fun of her own outfits and got points for being so game). And here’s a feature on the SNL writer of the debate skits. Not a mention, though, of the Times’ newsroom’s own incurable crush. Reporters, report thyselves.

: But at least on the op-ed page, there has been acknowledgment of the media’s issue. Here was David Brooks’ mockery of it a few weeks ago. And Paul Krugman today:

What we do know is that Mr. Obama has never faced a serious Republican opponent — and that he has not yet faced the hostile media treatment doled out to every Democratic presidential candidate since 1988.

Yes, I know that both the Obama campaign and many reporters deny that he has received more favorable treatment than Hillary Clinton. But they’re kidding, right? Dana Milbank, the Washington Post national political reporter, told the truth back in December: “The press will savage her no matter what … they really have the knives out for her, there’s no question about it … Obama gets significantly better coverage.”

: LATER: I missed Jacques Steinberg’s story in the Times on Saturday that did, indeed, start to cover this, though I’d say it’s a much bigger story than this. See also Rachel Sklar’s complaint with his piece.

While I was in London, the Daily Mail opened a campaign — and quickly declared victory — to ban ecologically dangerous plastic bags from stores. Even the Guardian praised it as Martin Kettle said the Mail set an example for government of finding a problem and just solving it (see also Google).

His point is about government and society but I also see a lesson here for American newspaeprs, which in my day, children, used to crusade. They picked a problem and found a solution and then stacked the deck to take credit for solving it. But at least it got solved. Where did that spirit go?

Here’s Kettle on the Mail and its lessons:

Once the Mail went into action the outcome was settled. Ten pages on Wednesday, seven more on Thursday, another four on Friday and the job was done. The Banish the Bags campaign was well planned, well focused, well judged, well timed and was executed on a scale and with a ruthlessness that would have impressed Bismarck. M&S was lined up in advance to create a second-day wave with its 5p-per-bag charge announcement. . . .

In fact, I would go so far as to say that Labour politicians could learn more valuable practical lessons from what the Mail has done this week than from anything that Barack Obama is doing. This is not a fashionable view. Entranced by Obama’s success, every minister wants to know what he’s taking and how to get some of it for themselves. If only we too could somehow be like Obama, they say, trust and respect would flood back into the dried-up riverbed of British politics. But this is purest delusion. Most of Obama is not hard currency. It doesn’t transfer outside the American market. Forget it. . . .

On the other hand there are three lessons from the Mail campaign that really might be worth attention from our politicians. First, why does it take a newspaper to state the obvious and to get something done about it? . . .

Second, look what can be achieved by identifying a problem, deciding what should happen instead, and planning a strategy that can make it succeed. Modern politics has mislaid that hugely important skill. . . .

Third, isn’t it interesting that Britain is full of people who are keen and ready to respond to a call to do the right thing? . . .

Plastic bags are a problem. They can be reduced by leaders proposing clear solutions and promoting good norms. Don’t make people feel guilty. Don’t always reach for new laws. Help people also to feel they can make a difference and that things can be done differently and better. The Daily Mail understood that. The future may belong to the politicians who understand it too.

The Guardian has a fairly frightening story today with “climate science maverick” James Lovelock arguing that we shouldn’t even bother with the feel-good green gimmicks — carbon offsetting, recycling, alternative fuels (other than nuclear, which he favors) are a deluded fantasy, he says– because it’s already too late and disaster is inevitable. “Enjoy life while you can,” is his advice. It makes one wonder whether we should be devoting resources, then, to disaster preparation — especially food, Lovelock argues — over carbon taxes and such.

The other day, when I noted that the hedge fund breathing down the necks of the NY Times Company board and management had acquired as much stock as the Sulzberger family, I said that strategic change in the company is inevitable and I asked you what you’d do with the business. Here are some of my answers:

* I fear it’s too late to sell the Boston Globe (which just announced more buyouts). Bet they’re kicking themselves now. Jack Welch was interested in taking it off their hands in 2006, when it was valued at $500-600 million — down from the $1.1 billion the Times Company paid for it in 1993; the Times just wrote-down the value of the Globe and a sister company by more than $800 million. Whoopsie daisy. I doubt they can sell the thing today.

So I would make the most radical restructuring of a newspaper anywhere in the world and use that as a laboratory for the Times itself and for other newspapers (see how new Tribune Company boss Sam Zell is using his smaller papers as “petri dishes“). I’d follow Dave Morgan’s advice and cut the newspaper company into four: production, distribution, advertising, and content. I’d sell the first two (getting rid of huge amounts of staff and shutdown obligation) and free up the advertising company to sell any local media, starting with a collaborative, distributed hyperlocal network the Globe must start to complete with the local papers that ring the city and strangle the Globe (papers the previous owners should have bought but didn’t). This sales effort has to work in radically different ways, setting up high-volume automated systems that members of the network itself can sell into. The old structure of well-lunched sales people who didn’t really sell but just handled lists of inherited clients won’t work anymore; Google is about to eat their lunch locally.

The content arm, meanwhile, needs to get rid of anything that does not focus on local news. More radical, it needs to start to aggressively drive readers from print to online, leapfrogging to the future that publishers dread, past paper. The Globe should become a testbed for reverse syndication, handing readers over to the Times for national and international coverage and perhaps also for national business and sports and even entertainment (and getting a revenue share for the new traffic the Globe sends Times’ way). The paper should take a hard look at whether to make sports a separate product and whether that should be in print or digital (a decision driven in great measure by ad sales). The print product should be ruthlessly local and anything else in it should be well-supported by advertising. Such a denuded but focused product may need to be free.

The Globe should then define itself first and foremost as a digital company and, more important, as a community company, a relationship network. It should become a platform for local news, information, and action and for new local sites and companies. That’s what comes after being a content company. This means that the staff must change radically as roles evolve from producing content to organizing, enabling, and educating collaborative and distributed networks.

The Globe that emerges should be of a radically different size but I fully believe that if the Times Company showed the balls to be the first to completely and radically reinvent a newspaper, its value would increase.

* As for the New York Times itself, I’d cut bait and turn it into a national newspaper — international in their dreams. The Times is not now and has not been for sometime a New York paper. So I’d either spin off or kill metro coverage. It could become a new local online collaborative journalistic network in the mold of the new Globe. Or it could die and I firmly believe a new and more nimble local network can emerge and take up the slack left. With that spinoff goes the Times production and distribution arms, in the Morgan model.

The New York Times itself should focus on what it does best and wants most to do: national and international coverage for a national audience. Either the Times will succeed at being the premiere American national news brand or . . . well, there is no “or.” That is the Times’ only choice; it is the box into which it has boxed itself.

What form does that take? It clearly should be more online than print — soon or immediatley exclusively online. It must focus on great reporting. It should be open to all media. It should become the host of opinion and discussion about all issues — which will be tough for them. The Times will have hearty competition from both the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal but it should bravely leap ahead and recognize that Dow Jones management is scared of change (thus their mewling and successful efforts to convince Rupert Murdoch not to take down the pay wall . . . for now). It will also have competition from international news brands coming to America: the Guardian, the BBC, and possibly others.

I think the Times should explore the reverse syndication model I propose above and have the ambition to be the source of national and international reporting for every metro and local news site in America. If those sites send them enough traffic that generates enough revenue, the Times could expand its news coverage. By sharing revenue with those sites, it would beat the other competition in the old syndication business: wire services. But they’d better watch out: Reuters could be right behind them.

The Times should create and sell quality collaborative networks and expand the brand around its value: reporting. It should invest heavily in digital innovation and learn well from work that is going on elsewhere, especially London. And it has to become the product of collaboration with networks and independent professionals and its audience. I agree with Fred Wilson here: “I’d make the NY Times all about their audience. Let the people who read the paper have a much larger role in the content that gets published, both online and offline. The best thing about the NY Times is their readers. The only way they can fix their problems is by leveraging them as the other half of their newsroom.”

* Some — including the hedge fund pressuring the company — would sell About.com but I’d hold onto it. (Disclosure: I consulted there for about a year and a half.) About is the one bright-spot in the Times P&L. It has brought understanding of online, SEO, and new means of content creation into the company and had an influence on the paper. It is, for now, the company’s only real digital asset. The reason to sell it, I think, would be to recognize profits and to set up the company’s balance sheet to go private if it chooses. But I think that’d be a strategic cop-out.

* I agree with Fred Wilson that I’d sell other assets. They are a distraction and management has enough on its hands. This includes the Herald-Tribune, which I’d probably fold into the Times operation and brand.

* Yes, and I’d sell the building.

At the end, the company can concentrate on rebuilding and extending its core asset, the Times’ reputation, and build a new relationship with its public.

Puke a pie? No thanks.

Wouldn’t we all like to post that over our doors?

A post written for Comment is Free on the Microsoft fine; crossposted here. Interesting comments already underway over there.)

I have a theory about the regulation of companies that get too big and too powerful: by the time government notices they really are so powerful, they are usually already in decline, having grown too big.

The EU today levied a record €899m (£680m) fine - adding up to a total of €1.7bn in the past four years - against Microsoft for charging “unreasonable” prices for access to its code.

The EU competition commissioner, Neelie Kroes, wanted to pile on even more: another €600m for good measure. Take that, big, bad Microsoft!

Except, in my mind, Microsoft is turning into a bit of a laughing stock these days for trying to buy Yahoo, which itself is a company in rapid decline.

The reason Microsoft is desperate to do this is that, even after all these years, it still does not have a successful internet strategy. So it is trying to buy one.

But I say it is buying the wrong one, a strategy based on an old-media worldview in which we are all masses that can be bought and sold. Microsoft - like too many advertisers and media companies - thinks we think of the internet as just another TV. It believes it can own content and technology when, in truth, we own it now.

Microsoft just yesterday released some of its code under a new “open source interoperability initiative” that offers open interfaces, support for standards, data portability and cooperation with third parties.

Of course, a cynic might say that doing this only a day before its record fine was Microsoft’s way to suck up to the teacher and avoid punishment; the cynic would have a fair point.

But it’s also true that Microsoft needs to open up to play in the internet or it will continue to be left behind by the open and free movements that are taking over operating systems, browsers and - with Google’s goosing - office software.

One could also see the move as a mark of desperation. Poor Microsoft.

In the US, regulators and activists continue to rail at media companies that they say have grown too big. But these media conglomerates, too, are pathetic shells of their former powerful selves, shrinking in audience and advertising at ever faster rates. The internet is killing their mass models, and they don’t know what to do about it.

Their response, like Microsoft’s, has been to buy up competitors, to grow bigger. But that strategy is not working: witness the collapse of the radio giant Clear Channel into a private company and the tragic gobbling up of the newspaper chain Knight Ridder and the cross-media synergy giant Tribune Company.

It might make more sense for the conglomerates to invest, like Microsoft, in new companies, or even in their own innovation. But they have lost the touch. Poor conglomerates.

Looking back, I could even argue that the breaking up of telecoms companies that grew too big only presaged the inevitable opening up of communications that led to the decline of the split-up telcos and their desire now to reconsolidate.

This should be a children’s story, in which, at the end, we discover that the big, bad, scary monster is actually a pussycat inside, and a sad and lonely one at that. Paint these giants as dinosaurs with tears in their eyes.

And their regulatory conquerors? Are they knights in shining armour or are they the real bullies?

Either way, I’m not scared of Microsoft any more.