Tag Archives: old-media

A Lament for Borders Bookstores

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Borders Bookstore

The news last week that Borders was declaring bankruptcy and closing some 200 stores was hardly surprising but was still, to me at least, a shock.

Back in the days when I covered the bookstore business for Publishers Weekly, Borders was perceived as an evil juggernaut that was going to destroy independent bookstores. But that argument worked much better against the previous villain, Crown Books. Crown made its ultimately short-lived business out of heavily discounting best-sellers, hardly a cultural benefit. But Borders (and, similarly, Barnes & Noble) wanted to reproduce the independent bookstore experience on a wide scale. That made it a threat to independents, but hardly evil.

One of the odd things about my line of work back then was that I was based outside of Chattanooga, Tennessee—not at the time a cultural center, to say the least. To find a decent bookstore I had to travel two hours or so to Atlanta. My situation improved when I moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1980s, but even then, getting to a good bookstore meant a longish drive out of the culturally barren San Fernando Valley into the Westside.

Within a few years, though, that changed, thanks to Borders and Barnes & Noble. By setting up shop in the Valley and back in Chattanooga and similar outposts, they made it possible to find culture alive and well in your own hometown, not just in some distant city. Sure, the best independents always outshone these chains, but both they and the chains did honorable duty. The difference was that the chains brought book culture to places where independents either wouldn’t or couldn’t go.

As a longtime fan of Amazon and a Kindle owner, I appreciate the convenience and long-tail abundance of online bookstores and e-books. Literary culture is the better for them. But they cannot replace physical bookstores as a social and tangible presence, as part of daily culture and commerce. Borders may be down, but I hope it is not out. I’ll be rooting for it to come roaring back.

A Lesson from the Digital Productivity Terrorists

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Portrait by Joi Ito (joi.ito.com), licensed CC-BY

Doctorow: Productivity Terrorist?

Some time ago I came across this comment from BoingBoing blogger Cory Doctorow that inspires both shock and awe: “As a co-parenting new father who writes at least a book per year, half-a-dozen columns a month, ten or more blog posts a day, plus assorted novellas and stories and speeches, I know just how short time can be and how dangerous distraction is.” Doctorow’s intent, I think, is to inspire, but his example is just as likely to depress.

Doctorow is just one of a relatively new breed of writers and reporters who, as digital natives working predominantly online, produce as much in one day as many print writers used to come up with in a month. To the traditional print journalist, their new ethos of digital productivity is not just foreign, it’s al-Qaeda foreign. They are publishing terrorists, threatening the placid print way of life.

From the print perspective, digital media and excessive workloads go hand in hand. Commenting on a Folio: magazine blog last week, an anonymous “Exhausted Editor” bemoaned an increasing digital workload: “I’ve got enough junk to write/post/cover. . . I’m tired of writing the stories, cooking the meals, flying the corporate digital jet and waxing the furniture—figuratively, of course.” And yesterday, B2B editorial consultant (and—full disclosure—my long-time mentor) Howard Rauch tweeted that “continuously overloading B2B editors with digital responsibilities undoubtedly is key reason why original content is dying a slow death.”

As a bred-in-the-bone print editor, I sympathize. And yet I wonder. Is it just our old print ways, our preconceptions and work habits, that make digital workloads look so extreme? We say that quality will invariably suffer with increased output. But does it? The content farms may be spewing out tons of junk, but there’s another digital press corps, found in news sites like Mashable, Engadget, TechCrunch, and ReadWriteWeb, that match high productivity with high quality.

Marshall Kirkpatrick

Kirkpatrick: Workload grueling but great

The prodigious output of some of these writers is inconceivable to most old-guard print people. Earlier this week, ReadWriteWeb co-editor Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote on Twitter (post now deleted) that  he was looking to hire a writer “to produce 5 solid web tech news articles a day, 5 days a week.”  Was this an unreasonable expectation? Maybe so. Fellow twitterer @Alex replied that few could meet this standard: “turns out the number of people who can do that is around 20. And we all have jobs.”

In a subsequent article on ReadWriteWeb, “I Worked on the AOL Content Farm & It Changed My Life,” Kirkpatrick acknowledged that he has indeed been having trouble filling the position. But his title suggests that he sees productivity not as a rare natural talent, but as the product of training. As he recounts in this article and another, he began his career blogging for AOL and two other sites, producing 10 to 12 posts a day. “It was grueling,” he writes, “and it was great.”

What is notably missing from Kirkpatrick’s career path is any exposure to print journalism. There was simply no one to tell him that his productivity was unreasonable.

It is—or was—quite otherwise in print. In my experience, the working environment of a print operation, particularly for monthly publications, was rarely conducive to what now passes for productivity. Yet we were exactly as productive as we needed to be. The deadlines were met, the pages were filled, and our readers were satisfied.

Now, though, digital media have set the bar much higher. There is no longer a limited number of pages to fill, but an infinite amount of cyberspace. Print veterans will have to reset their expectations and definitions of productivity. If not, they will simply fade away along with their medium.

Although it may be messy, the transition to digital does not have to be painful. As a first step, print editors might consider Kirkpatrick’s implied advice about digital workloads: to see them not as a threat, but an opportunity.

Commodity Content, Demand Media, and Quality

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Demand Media LogoAre commodity content and quality incompatible? That seems to be the underlying assumption of most discussions of  Demand Media’s “frothy” IPO successfully concluded yesterday. Ominously, perhaps, that event was preceded by Google’s promise last week to clamp down on high-ranking content-farm sites with “shallow or low-quality content.”

The terms content farm and content factory are meant to be disparaging, as if content is worthless if it isn’t lovingly crafted by hand. Even Demand Media’s CEO is insulted by the label. But the choice of metaphors is odd. Do we really think farms and factories are bad things? Or that the commodities they produce are worthless? Far from it. Their output is essential to modern life.

Likewise, commodity content is essential to publishing, especially B2B publishing and content marketing. Yes, there are unique and exciting developments to cover in any B2B industry, but most B2B media are built on a platform of commodity content.

This is not a new development. Early in my career I was the editor of an industrial product tabloid magazine. Consisting almost entirely of brief descriptions of new products, it was scarcely a glamorous publication. Though now and then it did cover some new, breakthrough technology, the bulk of it was pure, boring commodity content.

Yet through most the 1990s, it prospered. Readers and advertisers alike loved it because it fulfilled an essential need: the discovery of new materials, components, and services.

But the key reason for the magazine’s early success, I believe, was the premium it put on editorial quality. Though many of the products we wrote about were mundane, we made sure the descriptions were readable, accurate, pertinent, and objective. For us, there was nothing about commodity content that was incompatible with quality.

By 2000, of course, the die was cast, and the magazine began a long decline. The Internet is vastly more efficient than print as a tool of discovery.

Demand Media is all about the discovery of commodity content.  It is brilliantly geared towards identifying basic information needs on the Internet and fashioning content that meets those needs efficiently. The element it lacks so far is quality.

That isn’t to say the company is not aiming for quality, or not at least claiming to. CEO Richard Rosenblatt told the L. A. Times yesterday that Demand Media has put in place a “rigorous quality process,” in which each article is “touched by 14 humans, titling, writing, fact checking and copy editing.” The argument would be more compelling if it weren’t so easy to find failures of the quality process (evidently the titler on this one was having a bad day).

The weirdly fascinating thing for me about Demand Media is how it wants to build a high-growth business on commodity content. I’m not convinced it’s possible.

Private equity investors tried to do something similar in the last decade by betting big on B2B publishing as a platform for rapid growth. For most of them, it was a bad bet. The commodity content that B2B publications are built on is essential, but plentiful, and therefore cheap. Quality, the one thing that can distinguish commodity content, is expensive. So the only clear high-growth strategy is to cut expenses, which means cutting quality. As private equity investors discovered, that strategy is not sustainable.

Demand Media has done a brilliant job of recognizing the value of commodity content and making it easily discoverable.  But if it can’t match that brilliance in finding a low-cost way to improve the quality of its content, it may be doomed. Commodity content without editorial quality is a loser’s game.

UPDATE: Really, Demand Media, it doesn’t have to be this bad.

The Decline of the Single Editorial Voice

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Later today, Keith Olbermann will make a statement on Twitter about, presumably, the circumstances of his departure from MSNBC.  Though that’s a small thing in itself, says ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick, it’s a reflection of a huge shift in media.

After citing other examples of how social media allows individual voices to flourish outside of traditional mass-media outlets, Kirkpatrick writes that

“None of these are huge news in and of themselves, but together they paint a picture of dramatic change. Change away from a past where huge audiences sat passively and consumed a small quantity of time-restricted, highly-produced streams of content, delivered through a limited number of distribution channels that were secured by conglomerates at great cost. The days in which there was just one media game in town are fading fast, pushed into history one Tweet at a time.”

In a way that was inconceivable 20 years ago, social media technologies have empowered individual voices to compete for attention at the same level as  the old mass-media channels.  In fact, those channels themselves are gradually being transformed by social media from single, unified wholes into a bundle of constantly shifting and realigning voices.

For traditional media, which still expect control, this trend is difficult to accept. The discussion last week about which department within a publishing company should “control” social media indicates how much rethinking remains to be done.

In some ways, bundling voices is not a new idea for magazines. As the word itself suggests, a magazine is a kind of container for a variety of things. But for successful magazines, there has always always been a creative tension between this inherent diversity and a need to impose on it some form of unity. Through editorial control, the best magazines found a way to blend their many constituent parts into a single, distinct voice.

But as individual voices gain the power through social media to be heard on their own, the concept of editorial control and a single editorial voice has to change. There will still be channels made up of many voices, but identity will come increasingly less from an editor and more from collaboration and common interest. The individuals whose voices make up channels will leave and rejoin more frequently, and the identity of those channels will evolve more rapidly.

Though we don’t know the full story yet, it seems likely that Olbermann’s departure from MSNBC is part of an identity crisis. Like CNN with Rick Sanchez and NPR with Juan Williams before it, MSNBC let go a prominent voice because it didn’t reflect the identity management wanted for the channel.  But somehow these efforts to build identity seem only to have diminished it.

Perhaps, in the new-media world, fighting to maintain control over identity is a loser’s strategy. Success will more likely come not from stifling individual voices, but from providing a platform and environment where they will flourish.

Do You Need a Personal Ethics Statement?

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In an age when transparency is becoming the accepted norm for ethical reporting, is it enough to disclose your potential conflicts of interest only when you think the need arises? Or should writers, whether journalists, bloggers, or content marketers, go on the record with a preemptive announcement of their ethical beliefs and possible biases?

In an article published earlier this week on the Knight Digital Media Center, Amy Gahran looks at how the writers and editors for Dow Jones’s All Things Digital Web site answered this question.  As she reports, each of them has included a personal ethics statement on an “about me” page. In that statement, the writer discloses potential conflicts of interest and how he or she deals with them.

Gahran recommends this approach to others. Transparency, she says, “is not just about disclosure, but about visibility”. The problem with relying only on disclosure in passing, in an article where you think it’s relevant, she argues, is that “you’re less likely to gain the visibility needed to make transparency effective.”  Building a page devoted to those disclosures helps ensure visibility.

To me, at least, it’s an appealing theory. There is something refreshing about not relying on a corporate or professional code, but stating for all to see, “This is who I am, these are my biases and allegiances, judge my work accordingly.”

But in practice, how important are such statements to building a reader’s trust? The answer, I think, depends very much on the writer’s ethical circumstances.

In the case of Kara Swisher, All Things Digital co-executive editor and the focus of Gahran’s story, the statement is critically important. (I’d guess, in fact, that the idea for the ethics statements began with her.) Why is it critical? Because of a potential conflict so huge that it could influence virtually every story she writes.

As Swisher explains in her statement, she is married to a senior executive at Google. Ordinarily, this fact would run afoul of Dow Jones’s policy against reporters covering a company in which an immediate family member has a financial interest. What makes an exception possible is the high visibility of her disclosure enabled by the nature of online media. So “while some may raise objections, Dow Jones feels the transparency will give readers a chance to judge my work on its merits.”

Swisher’s circumstances are extraordinary, and her statement essential. But for at least some of her colleagues, the value of their statements is not so clear. For them, as they write, there is “little . . . to report” or “not much to reveal.”  If Swisher hadn’t needed to write one, they would surely not have bothered.

Personal ethics statements do no harm, and can do much good. But for many writers, they probably aren’t necessary. As Swisher says, the ultimate goal is to earn a reader’s trust. That isn’t achieved by a single statement, but by a consistent and reliable body of work.