it all comes out in the wash

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.

During a campaign stop in Ohio last week, ABC’s Jake Tapper asked Barack Obama about what he called “an attempt by conservatives and Republicans to paint you as unpatriotic.”

Host Howard Kurtz turns a critical lens on the media in this weekly CNN program.

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?

Is Barack Obama protected by a special suit of armor–one that fits only African Americans?

There may be a few pundits out there who believe that Hillary Clinton clearly won Tuesday’s debate, is headed toward victory in Ohio and Texas and has a really strong shot at the nomination.

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.

What happened to “shame on you”?