I got a jump on OneWebDay with an autobiographical post at Linux Journal. In the spirit of (in this case, unintentionally) disclosive autobiography, I posted it yesterday in the mistaken belief that yesterday was actually OneWebDay, and not just the day on which the Berkman Center devoted its customary Luncheon to OneWebDay. So, rather than yank the piece and park it until Saturday, I left it there with an asterisk and a footnote explaining what I just explained here.
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I just got this email from The New York Times:
Dear TimesSelect Subscriber,
We are ending TimesSelect, effective today.
The Times’s Op-Ed and news columns are now available to everyone free of charge, along with Times File and News Tracker. In addition, The New York Times online Archive is now free back to 1987 for all of our readers.
Why the change?
Since we launched TimesSelect, the Web has evolved into an increasingly open environment. Readers find more news in a greater number of places and interact with it in more meaningful ways. This decision enhances the free flow of New York Times reporting and analysis around the world. It will enable everyone, everywhere to read our news and opinion – as well as to share it, link to it and comment on it.
We thank you for your support of TimesSelect, and hope you continue to enjoy The New York Times in all its electronic and print forms.
The spin here is that times have changed while The Times has not. This is worse than misleading. It’s delusional. Yes, “the Web has evolved”. But it had already evolved to a state where charging for archival editorial was a bad idea, long before Times Select was created. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of bloggers and smart publishing professionals had the clues, and kindly passed them along to the Times, which chose instead to remain insular and clueless.
Is it still? Follow the money. The “evolution” that matters here is the rise in the advertising money river, which now flows away from traditional media and into the Google Sea. As that river rises past flood stage, newspapers stand in its midst, guarding their precious “content” within dungeons behind paywalls, peering down from the parapets as the flood fills the moats and washes the foundations away.
For insight into the mentality behind paywall maintenance, read this, from David Weinberger’s Hyperlinks Subvert Hierarchy chapter in The Cluetrain Manifesto (written more than eight years ago):
Inside Fort Business
Somewhere along the line, we confused going to work with building a fort.
Strip away the financial jibber-jabber and the management corpo-speak, and here’s our fundamental image of business:
- It’s in an imposing office building that towers over the landscape.
- Inside is everything we need.
- And that’s good because the outside is dangerous. We are under siege by our competitors, and even by our partners and customers. Thank God for the thick, high walls!
- The king rules. If we have a wise king, we prosper.
- The king has a court. The dukes, viscounts, and other subluminaries each receive their authority from the king. (The king even countenances an official fool. Within limits.)
- We each have our role, our place. If we each do the job assigned to us by the king’s minions, our fort will beat all those other stinking forts.
- And then we will have succeeded — or, thinking it’s the same thing, we will say we have “won.” We get to dance a stupid jig while chanting “Number one! Number one!”
This fort is, at its heart, a place apart. We report there every morning and spend the next eight, ten, or twelve hours inaccessible to the “real” world. The portcullis drops not only to keep out our enemies, but to separate us from distractions such as our families. As the drawbridge goes up behind us, we become businesspeople, different enough from our normal selves that when we first bring our children to the office, they’ve been known to hide under our desk, crying.
Within this world, the Web looks like a medium that exists to allow Fort Business to publish online marketing materials and make credit card sales easier than ever. Officially, this point of view is known as “denial.”
The Web isn’t primarily a medium for information, marketing, or sales. It’s a world in which people meet, talk, build, fight, love, and play. In fact, the Web world is bigger than the business world and is swallowing the business world whole. The vague rumblings you’re hearing are the sounds of digestion.
The change is so profound that it’s not merely a negation of the current situation. You can’t just put a big “not” in front of Fort Business and say, “Ah, the walls are coming down.” No, the true opposite of a fort isn’t an unwalled city.
It’s a conversation.
As anybody who has ever tried to get a letter to the editor of the Times can tell you, the paper is not conversational. And hell, maybe it shouldn’t be. But that doesn’t mean it can’t, or shouldn’t, at least listen.
It’s time for the Times (and other papers) to put their ears, rather than just their walls, to the ground.
[Later…] Rob Paterson nails it on the subject of both relationships and what’s really scarce. Good stuff.
In the phone business they call it a “minutes mentality”. For the newspaper business Jeff Jarvis cals it a “circulation mentality”. But the sad fact is that it’s a margin mentality that says you should charge for everything that’s chargable.
Years ago Craig Burton told me the smartest thing you can do in business is know what money to leave on the table. Don’t charge for everything. Know how to get your leverage by giving the right stuff away. Make money because of that stuff, rather than with it.
The New York Times is learning. Slowly. The hard way.
Sadly, they knew better. In Sprint of 2005, Jeff Jarvis and I stood with the Times’ Martin Niesenholtz at the back of the room at the first Syndicate conference in New York, while Martin was getting ready to give his keynote. He told us he had some news: that the Times was going to start charging $49.95 for access to all its archives, its columnists and other exclusive subscriber-only “content”. In other words, it was going to put up a paywall.
I said “Oh no!” and did my best to inveigh against it. He told us it was a firm decision. He also said it was driven by Circulation, not Editorial. Clearly his heart wasn’t in it. That conversation was confidential at the time, but now that Times Select is dead, I don’t think I’m betraying anything by talking about it. And it’s important for the Times, and other newspapers, to learn something here.
Martin talked about the decision in his keynote. So did I, the next day, in my own keynote to the same audience. You can go through the slides here. Or skip directly to what I said at the time about the Times.
In my How to Save Newspapers post this past March, my first (of ten) recommendations was this:
| 1) Stop giving away the news and charging for the olds. Okay, give away the news, if you have to, on your website. There’s advertising money there. But please, open up the archives. Stop putting tomorrow’s fishwrap behind paywalls. (Dean Landsman was the first to call this a “fishwrap fee”.) Writers hate it. Readers hate it. Worst of all, Google and Yahoo and Technorati and Icerocket and all your other search engines ignore it. Today we see the networked world through search engines. Hiding your archives behind a paywall makes your part of the world completely invisilble. If you open the archives, and make them crawlable by search engine spiders, your authority in your commmunity will increase immeasurably. (This point is proven by Santa Barbara vs. Fort Myers, both with papers called News-Press, one with contents behind a paywall and the other wide open.) Plus, you’ll open all that inventory to advertising possibilities. And I’ll betcha you’ll make more money with advertising than you ever made selling stale editorial to readers who hate paying for it. (And please, let’s not talk about Times Select. Your paper’s not the NY Times, and the jury is waaay out on that thing.) |
Well, the jury’s in now.
The big upside is that this raises the chances that other papers will stop copying the Times’ bad decisions with Times Select, and go ahead and open their own archives as well.
Maybe, if they’re lucky, they’ll listen to more of what the rest of us have been telling them all along.
Rex Hammock: I am sending out a request to Doc Searls to blog on this topic. And I wish he’d gloat and say, “Why didn’t you people listen to me three years ago?” But, then, Doc is not one to gloat. He’s right.
I’d rather be constructive. So here’s my big idea for the Times: Hire Dave Winer to come in and take the paper to the next level. Dave had Martin’s ear, and those of some other folks at the Times, way more than three years ago. And to some degree they listened. The Times did some good stuff with Dave’s advice (such as taking the lead with RSS). But the Times has otherwise ignored outstanding ideas such as the ones Dave demonstrates with nytimesriver, an application I often use on my cell phone. Nothing to lose, Times. Lots to gain. Trust me.
By the way, I just wrote this with an outliner Dave just helped me get rolling again. It’s great to be back riding in that saddle.
With apologies to those whose juice (or whatever) may be reduced by it, I’ve deep-sixed the blogroll. As a move this was long overdue. The ‘roll on my old blog had grown longer than Dumbledore’s beard, and was just as antique. When I moved the blog over here I carried along mixed feelings about having a blogroll at all, and then went through lots of uncomfortable questions about whose blogs go on it, in which order, and so on.
I don’t have time to explain much more at the moment, so here are the reasons I just gave in an email to a reader who asked me about it (while also providing some very good advice):
Fact is, it’s outlived its usefulness. I hardly use it. Others pay more attention to it than I do, and too often for selfish and/or trivial reasons. Maintaining it takes effort far out of proportion to its value. Blogrolling itself looks like advertising, gatekeeping, or both. Feh. Worst of all, it’s not live. It’s a stale relic of blogging’s origins in the Static Web era. Time to move on.
For what little it’s worth, I’ve sometimes been credited with coining the term “blogrolling”. But that was 10,000 blog years ago, before we had RSS and Live Web search engines that index everything posted within seconds, plus countless other ways to assist and participate in the public polylog.
I’m open to suggestions for what other things I might put in my sidebars. Guidance: I’d like it to be live, or at least current, engaged in Conversations, and (perhaps even) fun.
I managed to irk pretty much everybody with my post Citizen journal breaks a heroic story. Shelley Powers and David Kearns both took issue with the “citizen journalism” concept. Shelley said it doesn’t work, and David pleaded “for the demise of that horrible ‘citizen journalist’ meme”. Liz Straus, who pointed me to the story in the first place, said “Aw Doc, why the focus on citizen journalism and not the focus — as David point’s out — on the oral history that’s been happening since time began?” More than one comment gave David Armano a hard time for apparently preferring to report via Twitter and blog, rather than through mainstream news media. David himself weighed in with good answers to his critics, and added, “This isn’t real journalism and I don’t think anyone would claim it to be (I wouldn’t). It just demonstrates that the average person can tell a story from there perspective. I was there, I saw what I saw and told that story. That’s all.”
But is it?
“Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”, Linus’s Law says. But we have to do better than just de-bugging posts like David Armano’s and mine. The mainstream media never had enough eyeballs, or time, to do a job that was even close to ideal. And now, as advertising money and eyeballs both flood over the banks of mainstream media and out through the surrounding jungle of blogs, twitters, cell calls, text messages and countless other outlets for information, we clearly need to think afresh about re-institutionalizing the means by which we get trustworthy news to each other, and how we then debug and interpret it along the way.
We’ve not only hardly started to build the new (or renewed) institutions we require; we barely have a common understanding for what we’re doing in the meantime. “Citizen journalism” sounds right to some, “horrible” to others. Blogs are journals in the literal sense, but few carry the same breed of responsibility long ferried by major newspapers and magazines. (Although fate may put bloggers in that position from time to time.) While we debate whether or not new media authors practice “real journalism”, the need to report What’s Going On not only persists, but has more means than ever.
This is why I’ve lamented the dying not only of local newspapers, but of full-service local radio in most smaller U.S. cities, and the failure thus far of everybody (bloggers, public radio, you name it) to fill the void. Old acts are failing and new acts are not fully together.
Earlier this year Dan Gillmor and JD Lasica put together five basic Principles of Citizen Journalism (accuracy, thoroughness, transparency, fairness, independence) that should refresh veteran journalists while educating rookie ones. We also need new institutions where these kinds of principles can be practiced. And new practices where these principles can be institutionalized.
If you’re looking for a good cross-section of possibilities here, check out JLab and the Knight-Batten awards, which are given to worthy efforts in constructive journalistic directions.
While all these are good, the larger trend to watch over time is the inevitable decline in advertising support for journalistic work, and the growing need to find means for replacing that funding — or to face the fact that journalism will become largely an amateur calling, and to make the most of it.
This trend is hard to see. While rivers of advertising money flow away from old media and toward new ones, both the old and the new media crowds continue to assume that advertising money will flow forever. This is a mistake. Advertising remains an extremely inefficient and wasteful way for sellers to find buyers. I’m not saying advertising isn’t effective, by the way; just that massive inefficiency and waste have always been involved, and that this fact constitutes a problem we’ve long been waiting to solve, whether we know it or not.
Google has radically improved the advertising process, first by making advertising accountable (you pay only for click-throughs) and second by shifting advertising waste from ink and air time to pixels and server cycles. Yet even this success does not diminish the fact that advertising itself remains inefficient, wasteful and speculative. Even with advanced targeting and pay-per-click accountability, the ratio of “impressions” to click-throughs still runs at lottery-odds levels.
The holy grail for advertisers isn’t advertising at all, because it’s not about sellers hunting down buyers. In fact it’s the reverse: buyers hunting for sellers. It’s also for customers who remain customers because they enjoy meaningful and productive relationships with sellers — on customers’ terms and not just on vendors’ alone. This is VRM: Vendor Relationship Management. It not only relieves many sellers of the need to advertise — or to advertise heavily — but also allows CRM (Customer Relatinship Management) to actually relate, and not just to capture and control.
As VRM grows, advertising will shrink to the the perimeters defined by “no other way”. It’s hard to say how large those perimeters will be, or how much journalism will continue to thrive inside of them; but the sum will likely be less than advertising supports today.
The result will be a combination of two things: 1) a new business model for much of journalism; or 2) no business model at all, because much of it will be done gratis, as its creators look for because effects — building reputations and making money because of one’s work, rather than with one’s work. Some bloggers, for example, have already experienced this. Today I have fellowships at two major universities, plus consulting and speaking work, all of which I enjoy because of blogging. The money involved far exceeds what I might have made from advertising on my blogs. (For what it’s worth, I have never made a dime of advertising money by blogging, nor have I sought any.)
On the with effects side — money made with journalism, rather than because of it — perhaps the new institutions of journalism will become more accountable as journalism’s consumers pay its producers directly. I don’t know how we’ll get to that, but it will necessarily involve VRM, and I would love to help build it.
One sure thing: a primary building material for the future institutions of journalism will be the work of amateurs sort, the best of which will honor that adjective’s original meaning: one who loves a subject, but does not require payment for obsessing constructively about it. Again, the old system does not go away, but grows to include both the old and the new.
Just don’t expect advertising to fund the new institutions in the way it funded the old.
A Chicago Tribune story begins, A car that got stuck on tracks in north suburban Glenview was hit by two Amtrak trains Saturday night, but no injuries were reported, authorities said. It ends, Glenview police were at the scene investigating, and details about the car and driver were not available, an officer said.
But there was an eyewitness: The blogger David Armano. He reports,
While riding my motorbike I pulled up to a red light adjacent to a train crossing minutes from my home in Glenview IL. Across the intersection I could make out a few teenagers running across the tracks. There was something on the tracks—it appeared to be a car, but I couldn’t be sure. The next thing I knew the train crossing lit up and the guards went down.
It all happened within seconds.
I saw 2 young men dash away from the car and literally dive into the weeds next to the tracks. They were holding something. SECONDS later—no more than 5 or so, TWO diesel trains ripped the car to shreds. It might have been a scene out of a movie. I pulled over my bike to where the teenagers were and two boys emerged from the weeds carrying an elderly woman. Turns out she mistakingly made a right turn on the tracks and ended up facing an ongoing train. Her car was stuck on the tracks and she was disoriented.
He adds,
I was there, and I captured what I saw with my own eyes via Twitter. There are some very special heroes out there that may be getting some attention from the press in the days to come. I went up to those young men and could only say this:
“You did something good here—you did the right thing”
He also provides the Twitter transcript where he reported it first.
Thanks for the pointage goes to Liz Strauss.
[Later…] I don’t know why, but WordPress doesn’t like something I’m doing with the last sentence above, or any sentence at the bottom of this post. So I’m not sure this one is going to make it, but anyway check out Jon Garfunkel’s comments, below. Shelley’s too.
At this point, this poor girl making a fool of herself on a Miss Teen USA broadcast has been viewed 13,135,234 times on YouTube. How many people saw the actual broadcast on TV? Anybody know?
In What journalists need to know about snowballs and fire, Kristine Lowe leverages what I wrote here to explain what journalists need to know about distributed conversations. And rolls with a great example:
In the framework of my blog it works like this: I write about a company like Mecom in Norway and another blogger adds a German or Polish perspective, another tips me off about a story I might find interesting in my comment field. Or I write about a law I find worrying, another blogger picks up on the thread and asks a hard question or two, a third does an interview to clarify the situation and adds some very valuable thoughts on what impact the law might have on regimes in Africa, and another cool person analyses the law in a comment (follow-up here).
And even this is really too narrow a description of distributed conversations, but here’s a good stab at deconstructing them. Besides, all of this comes on top of how my blog has the marvellous effect of attracting readers who are passionate about the issues I’m passionate about.
…this necessitates tracking conversations about the issues you write or care about, e.g. with Technorati, and ideally linking to them; how there’s lots of opportunities for MSM to engage more with their readers here, and how journalists as well, whether we approve of it or not, are trapped in those Catholic Churches…
Thus the ball blazes on…