Maybe I’m feeling sentimental because I just watched an episode of Entourage called “The End,” but it breaks my heart to open “Media Gazer” and see a page of negative headlines. “2 major lessons from the demise of The Daily,” “Another Apology,” “Leveson blame for police reluctance to identify high-profile Savile probe suspect,” “Hackers Behind Tumblr Worm Say They Warned Tumblr of Vulnerability Weeks Ago,” “30 More Buyouts Coming to the New York Times,” etc. If a first time reader landed on “Media Gazer,” they might get the impression, the wrong impression, that the apocalypse has come a little early this year. 

I haven’t worked a very long time in the media industry, but I have worked at publishers large and small, print and digital, at magazines, newspapers, and startups trying to help legacy companies through the print-to-digital transition. I don’t think I’ll ever hold an editorial position at such a company, though I might speak from a time too soon and a mouth too young. Regardless, it does hurt me to see old, print media so wounded, so down on itself. Digital innovators are enjoying a surge of positivity and collective excitement. Look no further than events like the Mashable Media Summit, which testify to the forward-thinking, collaborative nature of digital media development. But the self-sabotaging rhetoric of so many media companies—and it is really an endemic problem, no longer isolated or containable—is disheartening.

I do not feel sentimental because I have any real financial or practical investment in the survival of print, but rather because I love what print stands for: I love the memories I have of paperback books, used books, falling-apart books that my parents studied in high school, of newspapers stained with maple syrup, of Gourmet and other magazines that have passed into the great digital beyond. And I worry that my children and, perhaps, my students, will not share those memories. I do not believe it is possible to qualify digital media as more or less ethical, moral, “good” than print. But I do believe that everything great and beautiful about print will yield to what will be and already is great and beautiful about digital.

Yet the growing up of print into digital has been way more painful than it needs to be. We are experiencing a catastrophic loss of confidence in the durability of print media values. It is true and unavoidable: what print stands for will and must disappear. If we were to occupy some golden age of print forever—a halycon that never existed, mind you—it wouldn’t seem so pleasant. For print was a mere step in the continuous evolution of the word. The world of the printed word per se is dying. To fight against that death is to prolong our suffering. For print must perish or decline into ignominy. To paraphrase Emerson (poorly), nature hates that which becomes. Twenty, ten, maybe five years from now, I fear that we will turn back and regret our resistance, indeed, our completely understandable but nevertheless irrational reluctance, to embrace the digital word with good feeling and generous spirit.

Letting go of the things we love, that we have named icons of our values and dreams, is a necessity of becoming: the movement of ourselves and our worlds along the arc of time’s arrow. Everything into newness. Thus growth, which cannot mean anything other than entropy, is aching, is agony. Everything that becomes more is becoming less, decaying in forward-motion. The pain of maturity is that going towards something demands an ending ahead. The magnitude and seriousness of that pain, its sincerity, should be neither underestimated nor dismissed. That is why the ending of a television show, however silly and fun in its heyday, can bear such weight on our real lives. We run our imaginations over the characters and their fictions and sense the texture of ourselves. There is something native, of us, that we discover in them. We form emotional attachments to their limited, unreal existences because we see what we wish to be in their images. Like the ending of Seinfeld, or Friends, or Entourage, the ending of print media, which is, in fact, the ending of a story about the printed word, threatens a fantasy that has become monstrous in proportion. The death of the television series or of a historical narrative finishes something we thought infinite. The End disrupts the illusion that the values we have inscribed on stories have become immortal. 

There are already too many clichés about how endings and beginnings are synonymous. Opening and closing doors, etc. My favorite comes from a ‘90s song, nostalgia, I know, “every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” The end of print means the beginning of digital. But Semisonic’s lyric (or maybe Seneca’s aphorism? so Wikipedia says…) refines my mediocre epigram: while a historical account of print has effaced its many minor deaths and rebirths and transformations, there is no sudden “end” of print and “beginning” of digital. The transition from print to digital has been a long-time coming. We might as well look forward into the present.

• Tags
• digital
• print
• media
• technology
• transition
• newspapers
• books
• magazines

Digital democracy is not a utopia. It is merely a more perfect organization of citizens within the field of new media.  In its first meaning, digital democracy references the actual practice of democratic politics in digital spaces, for example, discussions of Presidential debates on Twitter. In its second, digital democracy references the democratization of content production and distribution. The first, political meaning points to what is said, the second, to how it is said. Despite an obvious distinction between these two layers of democratic practice, the second is implicated in the first. In order to be political online, the citizen must be able to create a political statement and disseminate it. Unfortunately, both social networks and legacy media outlets have failed to democratize the digital world, at least to a sufficiently comprehensive extent. There are six best practices for getting from the status quo, which possesses a veneer of democratic freedom, to a digital democracy.

1. Access to the Forum: In order to write or read anything at all, the citizen needs access to the material forums in which writing and reading happen. That is, if you don’t have a computer or Internet, it is awfully hard to participate in a digital democracy. It remains difficult for disadvantaged or otherwise impoverished communities to access hardware and software. In April 2012, the Pew Research Center reported that 62 percent of Americans making less than $30,000 a year are online. Among those without high school diplomas, that figure is 43 percent. The divide between high-speed Internet and more restricted Internet access has created an invisible second class within those who do have access. Improving the availability and affordability of computer and Internet services should be a priority. Lack of computer and Internet access is a human rights issue, both in America and on a global scale. When official government information, political news, and public discourse are increasingly confined to digital spaces, those without computer or Internet access become disenfranchised.

2. Equal Authority: We need to stand against an emerging technocracy. The status of professional journalists as information gatekeepers has created a clique of political trendsetters. Although Twitter and Facebook have devolved more control to consumers, social media has been colonized by old media. Who are the most influential voices on social networks? Authority emanates from the media powers that be, not the media powers that are becoming. Admittedly, Reddit and DIY journalism projects have destabilized an old media orthodoxy. But we must always be wary of new, ascendant orthodoxies. Does one person, one vote entail one person, one voice? We do not need to prevent coalitions and interest groups from forming organically. Rather, we should remain aware of who credentials digital political messages. 

3. Accountability of Representatives and Citizens: There is no room for anonymity in digital political discourse.  Elected representatives and the citizens who elect them must be held accountable for their digital political statements. The Internet has the capacity to bring strangers together in public forums. Consensus and reasoned disagreement are impossible unless those strangers can trust each other: trust that each speaks the truth to his or her best ability, does not deceive for personal gain, and respects the worth of all conversation partners. 

4. Question the Usefulness of Nation as Political Category: Just as the Internet brings together strangers of the same national citizenship, it builds a common forum across national lines. That forum remains imperfect due to censorship and asymmetrical access to computers and Internet. Nevertheless, the constant border crossing of Internet conversation discloses the limited usefulness of national identifications. There is no place for jingoism in a digital democracy. Instead, digital democracies ought to allow citizens to imagine a world where sovereignty is an individual and communal but not a national right.

5. Freedom of Information: News is not a commodity. Access to political news is a human right. Denying citizens access to political news affects a kind of disenfranchisement. For how are citizens to make political decisions and to contribute to political discourse without the relevant facts? Moving towards a true freedom of information will require entirely new revenue models for legacy media companies. Paywalls are not an acceptable solution, as revealed by the response of media outlets during the Hurricane Sandy disaster. News does not toggle between commodity and basic right according to a relative state of emergency. Withholding news from the public is not sometimes ethical and sometimes not.

6. Cybernetic Politics: Digital democracy should infiltrate real political forums and vice versa. The borders between a digital political life and real political action are permeable. Digital democracy will only be realized once digital conversations are given equal exchange and use values to real conversations; once the face-to-face becomes equivalent to the tweet-to-tweet; once digital political interaction and real political action are indistinguishable. 

• Tags
• digital
• democracy
• technology
• politics

I titled today’s blog post with full knowledge of the risk of posing a QTWTAIN (Question To Which The Answer Is No, a genre of headline collected by John Rentoul, indicative of journalistic sensationalism and irrationalism, like “Is the Loch Ness monster on Google Earth?). Alright, I confess: my headline is a QTWTAIN. Journalism should not be subsidized. Unlike most of the QTWTAIN genre, though, my headline suggests a forthcoming affirmative—the QTWTAIN must always masquerade as a QTWTAIY—while delivering no affirmation of no expected principles.

Today’s commentary was inspired by a blog post on The Guardian’s website, “A broadband levy to fund journalism? Now that’s a very clever idea.” In the first paragraph, we stumble on the following statement: “We have been puzzling for years about how to subsidise [sic] journalism once it makes the final transition from print to net.” The statement includes two assumptions, one, that journalism will require subsidization after the print-to-digital transition, and two, that some nebulous “we” ought to undertake that subsidization when the time arrives. Both of those assumptions must be addressed separately, but, spoiler alert, I disagree with both.

The general argument underwriting the first assumption is that the print-to-digital transition will make “journalism” unsustainable. Such arguments rest on two prior and faulty assumptions, that print journalism (and its attendant forms and tropes) constitutes a kind of superior, ur- journalism so triumphant that it supersedes all alternates, and that the revenue model of print journalism will be infeasible in a digital ecosystem. Already, the media community is witnessing the transformation of journalism in a web milieu—crowdsharing, sourcing, and funding, instantaneous publishing, and social media have shifted expectations for not only digital journalism, but also its print sibling. That is to say, print journalism does not operate in stasis. Print media has been forced to evolve in tandem with new digital forms. The privileging of print media as a superior communication to digital journalism, or, for that matter, non-journalistic digital utterances, is a last stab by a struggling industry to slay its rival. There are few convincing arguments as to why digital journalism cannot accomplish the same objectives as print journalism, at least if digital journalism can sustain itself.

According to its detractors, the intrinsic problem with digital journalism is that it is not self-sustaining. Conventional (read: old) journalism relies on full-time journalists. Journalism has been professionalized and bureaucratized. And as we have learned since the days of Walter Lippmann’s “Drift and Mastery,” bureaucracy cannot survive without bureaucrats. If journalism is a bureaucracy that lives and breaths according to its subservient bureaucrats, then journalism needs adequate funds to feed those cells. Without the proper cash-money, journalists (who are often the ones making these claims) and journalism cannot last. Let us suppose that these claims are true, that superior formulations of journalism require a class of professional, bureaucratized journalists. Could digital journalism generate enough revenue to support its digital journalists? Not at the moment. It seems likely, however, that the enormous cash potential of online media consumption will become more accessible to content producers as digital advertising technologies become more sophisticated. The success of a companies like the New York Times and the Economist indicate that a print-to-digital transition is not a zero-sum game (meaning that print revenue streams will self-subsidize digital journalism for a long time to come) and that online revenue streams can develop to substitute for print advertising and subscriptions. 

What if the conventions of print journalism really are superior to digital journalism, and digital journalism cannot replicate those conventions, and digital journalism cannot support those replications? Subsidization would seem to be in order. Roy Greenslade  follows David Leigh’s proposal, a levy on broadband subscribers. A levy would help disentangle subsidies from the influence of the state on journalism. Concerns about subsidies usually center on those entanglements, wherein the state leverages its monetary support into undue influence. A levy system seems to solve the problem of state influence. I remain unconvinced, however, that in a worst case scenario, subsidies are the answer.

There are two problems with subsidies to large media companies making the print-to-digital transition. First, those subsidies will allow media providers to extend worst practices from the print to the digital ecosystem. One reason that print media is struggling is that print journalism no longer meets the demands of digital consumers. Subsidizing worst print practices online is like throwing money into a virtual hole. Subsidizing print journalism online will only perpetuate atavistic practices that ought to atrophy. Instead of preserving those outmoded practices, we should focus on incorporating the best applicable print practices into the digital ecosystems, and on rewarding those companies that are providing best digital journalism to consumers. Second, and in relation, subsidizing digital journalism will only subsidize the idea of “journalism” that has descended genealogically from print ancestors. Clinging to the idea of journalism is unlikely to prove profitable online. Journalism itself developed as a phenomenon of new material technologies in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. Now that we have newer material technologies, immaterial technologies as it were, we must jettison the structures of journalism that depend on print.

We must be free to experiment without the entailments of subsidies. Everything that we thought of as true regarding journalism needs reevaluation. We must test the hypotheses of the column, the news section, the byline, etc. Leaving journalism behind will be difficult for journalists most of all. Yet, we must look to journalists to reject the constrictions of their own profession. Without their cooperation, flexibility, and enthusiasm, nostalgia for newsprint could destroy everything they want to save in newsprint itself. 

• Tags
• newspapers
• print
• digital
• media
• news
• journalism
• transition
• technology
• innovation
• subsidies

If newspapers and magazines are to be believed, newspapers and magazines are alternatively on the edge of collapse and rife with corruption.

Last night, I landed on Mediagazer for an update on news about news. It wasn’t pretty. “Newsweek’s ‘Muslim Rage’ cover coincides with critique of Tina Brown,” “Exclusive: News of the World ‘ordered burglary’,” “The Times Needs a Policy on Quotation Approval, and Soon,” “Irish Daily Star Editor Michael O’Kane suspended over Kate Middleton photos”—all on one page. An incredible orgy of negativity, the likes of which are more common on celebrity news or tabloid web sites.

The division of media along political and class lines is, by now, old news! That kind of negativity can only provoke a weary exasperation from rational commentators. But today, we are facing a very new and peculiar phenomenon in news media: a mean-spirited, even spiteful treatment of friendly competition. The mistakes of peers turn into fodder for gleeful analysis ad nauseam. Evidently, the reading public requires or demands a thorough explication of every media misstep. In reality, the negativity of news on news coverage follows from a transparent variety of Schadenfreude.  (“D’ja ever clap when a waitress falls and drops a tray of glasses?” Avenue Q is really quite good on Schadenfreude’s definition, unlike Alanis Morissette on irony.)

Since the beginning of time, or more accurately, the advent of digital media platforms, news media has been spelling out the near-future demise of news media. It seems to me, however, that obsessive and oversaturated reportage on ethical breaches and poor journalism is either a relatively recent phenomenon or reaching unprecedented levels. Perhaps, a focus on journalistic failure is the natural accompaniment to a general interest in the failure of journalism as a form. The two types of negative news on news both derive from a claim that conventional journalism is endangered, if not on the verge of extinction. The rules of the game, and, in fact, the language of the game, have changed so dramatically that the term journalism seems effectively meaningless, at least without laborious clarification and qualification., 

Regardless of cause, the self-destructive rhetoric of the news media must come to end. Unfortunately, the media is the dominant framing device by which public opinion about the media becomes organized. Unless the doomsaying stops, media risks a catastrophic loss of confidence in its basic functions.

I am not suggesting that the media industry should ignore serious ethical or structural problems in its constituents. Rather, I am advocating for optimism. Without a positive outlook and an emphasis on what media does right, instead of what media does wrong, the media giants of today will quickly recede into Goliaths of yesterday.

• Tags
• media
• digital
• social
• technology
• recursive
• reflexive
• commentary

On my multi-week hiatus from Parse.ly, I drove from St. Louis through Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, and Quebec. I listened to satellite radio from New Haven to Montreal and back down to New York City. The winding roads that cut through the Appalachians and the White Mountains get poor FM reception. Instead of searching for the station with the least static, I settled on Sirius XM.

Satellite radio is designed to simulate a multitude of options. If you can think of a possible radio station, it probably exists somewhere on the Sirius dial. For example, there are enough country music stations to cover all consumer demographics. “Willie’s Roadhouse” (classic country), “Prime Country” (‘90s country and more), “The Highway” (new country), and “Outlaw Country” (rockin’ country rebels). An equivalent variety exists for classic rock, punk, rap, soul, etc. In theory, this constructed diversity of music should satisfy every possible desire. No longer must listeners drive beholden to regional radio variations. All difference is internally generated. The careful cultivation of musical diversity cannot help but feel planned and artificial, though, like the contrast between fields of wildflowers and formal French gardens. There is a pleasure in either ecosystem, but I perhaps betray my preference for English landscaping, which at least makes a claim to wilderness. Similarly, I enjoy the inefficiencies of ordinary radio: static, kooky local stations, and the subtle shifts in musical landscape from one area to the next. After a few days of listening to satellite, I was bored.  Unlike the department store or online marketplaces, satellite radio promises to fulfill every desire but fails to produce new desire in the process. Satellite radio is too efficient for its own good.

The rhetoric of disruption has been criticized for its failure to apply the term appropriately. Despite appearances, I do not think that satellite radio “disrupted” traditional radio, per se. No truly new markets were created, no new customers acquired. Rather, the technology converted clients of an antiquated service. Satellite radio was not a disruption to the “people listening to music in cars” market. Satellite radio was an intervention.

I believe that most so-called disruption in social and digital media follows a logic of intervention. New social and digital media technologies rarely disrupt established markets. As with satellite radio, social and digital media tech intervenes in a market, changing the course of consumer behavior but never fracturing the market beyond recognition. Even the emerging market in e-books is merely a simulation of paper book markets. Digitization demands the migration of media from real to virtual spaces, but the economics of those virtual spaces remain fundamentally similar to their real counterparts. 

The real danger for interventionist technologies is that, like satellite radio, they will become too efficient. The modulation of desire in capitalist economies requires the perpetual suspension of satisfaction. That is a fancy way of saying that commodity consumption can never reach a point of exhaustion. That is a fancy way of saying that we will always need something more to purchase. What are we to make of services like Spotify that promise the exhaustion of music, or Google Books that promise the exhaustion of libraries, or Twitter that promise the exhaustion of social discourse? These technologies are self-defeating propositions.

When there is nothing left to buy, nothing left to consume, when we own every song and book and have expelled every pithy witticism our desiccated brains can squeeze out, what will we have left except to bathe in the room temperature ether of the Internet? Today’s hysteria about “overstimulation” seems entirely misplaced. We do not occupy a world without boredom; we live in a digital universe where boredom is the only common currency.

That is not to say that some artists will not offer pushback, will not introduce friction into our superconducted systems. The possibility for disruption only increases when systems become over-efficient. Now, the most pressing concern is the incubation of talent that is willing to accept less than maximum data, maximum speed, and maximum choice. Otherwise, we may face a future in which disruption is foreclosed by general apathy.

• Tags
• innovation
• technology
• disruption
• digital
• media
• social
• publishing
• radio

Having spent much of the past three years writing about restaurants, it is only natural that my friends, when told about my job at Parse.ly, respond, “does that have something to do with food?” 

True, I clicked on Parse.ly’s job posting because of the name—I, too, wondered what Parse.ly might have to do with food. 

But having spent much of the past three years working for newspapers, magazines, and digital publications, it is only natural that I spent this summer working at Parse.ly, a startup that provides analytics for the web’s best publishers. 

When I started working at Parse.ly in June, I walked through the door with a few preconceived notions about digital publishing. Such generalizations are not even close to plausible. I thought that digital publishers were clinging to an analog era. I thought that digital publishing was lagging behind the evolving web-mobile interface. And I thought that most digital publishers wouldn’t know how to use analytics even if they were given a detailed instruction booklet. After all, as a recovering digital publisher myself, I was clinging to an analog era. I was lagging behind the web-mobile interface. And I personally believed analytics to be little more than a diversion and a sales tool for booking advertising space. 

Over the past three months, I have made up for most of the past three years’s mis-instruction. I learned that most publications have one foot in the analog, one foot in the digital pool. I learned that web-mobile platforms are being innovated by publishers, not by social developers. And I learned that given the best analytics—Parse.ly’s analytics—publishers are able to improve their editorial strategies and produce better content for all of us.

There is a reason why I needed to be reeducated: there is much obfuscation and misinformation on the part of digital publishers themselves. The media scrum around, well, digital media is insane. Every day one opens the ‘ol browser only to find conflicting stories and opinions on everything from the New York Times’s paywall to a pseudo-publisher like Google. The paywall is working! The paywall isn’t! Google is a publisher! Google isn’t! Although the big questions surrounding digital publishing don’t have easy answers, readers, like myself, tend to draw the wrong conclusions from such contradictory speculations. It is easier to see the battlefield of future publishing and conclude, digital publishing is doomed, than to see the battlefield of future publishing and conclude, digital publishing is spiraling in the right direction.

Debates over digital publishing are, fortunately, dialectic. Analog and digital perspectives meet: out of their grand collision, a fertile fireball emerges, a synthetic, creative compromise between the two perspectives. Thus, publishing innovation always proceeds as two steps forward, one step backward, or a halting, staggering wander forwards. Progress is not linear, but spiral. As we circle back with longing, as we linger and indulge in nostalgia, as we try to reclaim what is outmoded and atavistic, we are drifting forwards. The circle rotates around a progressive axis. Though we perceive its motion as cyclical or static, digital publishing is, indeed, making progress towards more viable economic models. The process is painful and slow.

For example, the great growing pain of our moment is plagiarism. In a web-based publishing world, “stealing” and “copying” might better be referred to as “recycling.” Is there a line between a reblog and a rip-off? What is the protocol for Internet attribution? To what extent can you rewrite your own ideas? We should not forget that plagiarism, of the self or of others, is not a modern phenomenon; it is merely the case that the Internet makes plagiarism all the more visible and traceable. Therein, digital publishing is forced to confront an issue that was submerged or avoided for the past two millennia. When we have drafted some half-way satisfactory answers, the rotation about the circle will be complete, and we will have made a few inches of “progress.”

TL;DR: Everyone needs to calm down. 

This summer, I learned that there is such a thing as a “fitness office.” I had the opportunity to talk with a ton of startup CEOs. I went to some good places for lunch, like Alidoro and the Calexico Cart. I lived in Crown Heights and explored neighborhoods beyond my usual reach, including Sunset Park, Hasidic Williamsburg, and Bay Ridge. I saw at least two movies a week, more art than I could safely swallow, and a concert or two. The pieces of my summer puzzle don’t fit together in a coherent picture, nor would I want them to. I trust, however, that my miscellany of experiences, along with my work at Parse.ly, condenses into a few productive and ambiguous configurations.

Having spent much of the past three months writing about startups, it is only natural that my friends, when told about my job at Parse.ly, respond, “what did you do?” I could answer with a straightforward explanation of my duties, obligations, and responsibilities. Instead, I usually say, “I learned as much as I could.” That implies an unequal transaction of value between myself and my employer, but I think it’s an honest and fair description of what happened in Herald Square. 

I’ll be taking a few weeks off from blogging here; look for content from some other Parse.ly employers. In September, I’ll be back on a weekly basis. Enjoy the dog days. ~Jason

• Tags
• Parse.ly
• Dash
• analytics
• digital
• publishing
• technology
• startups

Read Part 5, In Search of Traffic. And sidle on over to our homepage, if you will.

The headline of this post is misleading, unfortunately, but I needed to capture your attention on whatever social media saloon you frequent. And if you’re reading this, it worked; you clicked-through. Congratulations; another victim of false headline advertising. Instead of arguing, counterintuitively, that building an audience for a digital publication requires a minimization of “conversation” between content creators and readers, I advocate for a maximization of interaction between producers and consumers. Digital publications do need a little less conversation and a little more action. But I mean that editorial teams need to think about conversation as a valuable “action,” not a diversionary side project or an annoying obligation.

Thanking readers for retweets and rewarding frequent engagement on social media are fine for a start but unlikely to forge enduring relationships. Before the rise of social media, there was an asymmetry between writers and readers. The former made content, the latter consumed it and occasionally commented on it via letters, or later, emails. Social media empowers the reading public to directly and publicly comment on content and comment to content creators. The divide between journalists and their audiences is rapidly shrinking; the power imbalance is approaching a kind of equilibrium; the fundamental binary of media is becoming more symmetrical.

As readers feel more confident in their own voices, and as social media platforms commoditize user-generated content, the condescending position of professional journalists towards readers will become a less effective strategy for building an audience. Rather, readers are expecting a more equitable relationship and a continuous exchange of commentary. The incorporation of forums and aggregation platforms like Reddit into the journalist’s toolkit has increased the visibility of readers as content creators. In effect, the convergence of journalists and readers has given formerly silent audiences a new entitlement. Readers feel deserving of special attention.

How can journalists make conversation more active?

1. Search social media for your content. Find out who’s talking about your content on social media platforms. Talk back—which means more than just thanking readers, for, well, reading. Ask readers their opinions about your article. From Twitter bios, identify the individual interests of individual readers and target your inquiries. For example, if you write an article about gymnastics, and a Twitter user who identifies as a former gymnastics coach retweets the article, an obvious opportunity emerges for a personalized conversation.

2. Search social media for related content. Brainstorm a list of related and peripheral topics to your recent content. Insert yourself into on-going conversations. Redistribute your relevant content to those parties. Talk back, rinse, repeat.

3. Let your readers provide you with value. Take advantage of your readers’s expertise. Ask questions, ask for quotes, query the crowd. USA Today has a well-developed campaign for extracting the aggregate value of their readers. USA Today’s official social media accounts regularly ask their thousands of followers for help with articles. Acknowledging the power of readers—their intrinsic value as information sources—makes them feel like valued members of a community. 

4. Share outside your product. Once you engage in orbital-level conversations about related topics, don’t be afraid to share content from other media outlets. Behaving in non-self-promotional ways demonstrates your sincere interest in the reader and your altruistic commitment to the conversation.

5. Don’t be anonymous. Employees of large, corporate media outlets should engage their readers from personal Twitter accounts. But official, anonymous social media channels should exhibit more personalized, non-anonymous behavior, too. Don’t just use the official channel for distributing your own content; share cool stuff with your readers and contribute to related conversations. Become a many tentacled beast with a face. (Slate does a great job with an officially faceless channel.)

Active conversations are the best way to build a resilient and loyal audience base. Quantity of interaction is meaningless minus quality. Don’t be afraid of treating readers like…real people.

• Tags
• analytics
• technology
• digital publishing
• publishing
• media
• social media

Yesterday morning, Ann Friedman published a post on Poynter titled, “What journalists need to know about animated GIFs—really.” Friedman provides a comprehensive explanation of GIF culture, and rightly concludes that the ascendency of Tumblr as a blogging platform has facilitated the proliferation of GIFs. Although her post is targeted at late adopters—”Animated GIFs 101”—she has solid advice for journalists who might be more familiar with consuming GIFs than creating them. Friedman also outlines the legal issues associated with producing GIFs from copyrighted material and distributed GIFs that are created by others. But I wonder about her conclusion: “Armed with a fair-use defense and all of these tools, it’s time for journalists to truly embrace the animated GIF.” 

In Friedman’s post, there’s one example of how major media outlets might implement GIFs. The Atlantic explained “Why Jordan Wieber Didn’t Make It” with the aid of GIFs, each of which illustrated part of Wieber’s gymnastics routine and the reactions to it. The Atlantic’s GIF storytelling is divergent from the most common GIF usage: the comic, and comedic, introduction of tone to text. The GIF substitutes for voice and body language; it is an alternative medium of connotation, a way for writers to indicate their orientation to a subject other than the written word. Needless to say, the kind of sarcastic and snarky attitude that accompanies GIF insertion would be out of place at most digital publications. The Atlantic’s implementation is interesting, though, because it focuses on the animated illustration of content, not tone. There are a limited number of contexts in which GIF illustration is appropriate for news reportage. For example, it would be in extremely poor taste to illustrate a disaster with GIFs. Saturating a text article with GIFs harms the user experience, too, because GIF heavy pages typically load slowly and may fail to load at all on mobile platforms. GIFs are distracting, and frankly, annoying. Even in cases where the context is tasteful, the tasteful deployment of GIFs is a tricky maneuver. 

Friedman admits that the quality of GIFs is low. Image resolution, color, and playback are poor. For most GIF creators, however, the lo-fi look is an intrinsic part of the appeal. GIF culture, derivative of 8-bit video games and stop motion animation, fetishizes what might be referred to as poor quality. Would people entrenched in GIF culture—not so ‘sub-’ anymore—respond well to “animated GIFs created by professional photojournalists?” I am not convinced GIF culture is sustainable minus the fundamental aesthetic of the GIF. 

Instead of GIFs, I’d like to see digital publishers working on better video implementations. There’s no reason why we need to see Jordan Wieber’s routine broken apart into short choppy GIFs when we could see it broken apart into short smooth videos. While the data load of a GIF is smaller than its video counterpart, and its creation is simpler—easy enough for a regular journalist—serious news reportage demands a more serious medium. Sure, the cultural valance of a medium can shift over time, as with the novel or even the newspaper, but the lowbrow valance of the GIF is embedded into the GIF itself. Until—or unless—journalists can develop an entirely new GIF style (which, I might add, wouldn’t be related to GIFs except in technical terms), illustrating articles with GIFs is unlikely to help publishers capture untapped audiences.

• Tags
• GIF
• journalism
• digital
• publishing
• media
• technology
• animation
• multimedia

Twitter is aflame this morning with reports that Barack Obama prefers to read his magazines from the newsstand, in print. Most of those tweets reference this New York Times article, which really says nothing to that effect.

“A writer before he was a politician, Mr. Obama is a voracious consumer of news, reading newspapers and magazines on his iPad and in print and dipping into blogs and Twitter…During the day, Mr. Obama reads newspapers on his iPad and print copies of magazines like The Economist and The New Yorker.”

That’s it, I promise. Not exactly a resounding endorsement of the print magazine.

We could ask, what would it mean if Obama consumed his magazines in print? (Answer: nothing in particular.) Instead, it might be more productive to ask, what does it mean that newsstand sales of magazines are down around 10 percent?

In order to evaluate the severity of the situation, there are a few other relevant statistics in play. The bad news for the magazine industry was Tuesday by the Audit Bureau of Circulations. The Audit Bureau recorded only a slight net decline in magazine sales, 0.1 percent; the loss in newsstand sales is generally considered an indication of a collapse in magazine appeal, especially among women and “prestige” audiences. Publications like Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, Christine Haughney’s blog post for the Times notes, suffered even worse at the newsstand, along with celebrity magazines like People. How bad? About 18 percent declines for those three aforementioned magazines. Struggling numbers could be symptomatic of our repression economy. Newsstand sales are tied to shopping behavior in supermarkets, where consumers can exercise conscious restraint over impulse purchases. But the merely modest growth of digital sales, which John Harrington, an industry consultant quoted in Haughney’s blog, called “minute compared to even newsstands and subscriptions,” signal a more endemic problem. The magazine industry is falling apart, and the decay seems to be accelerating. Improvements in home and food magazine sales point to the real issue. Harrington told the Times, “by the time the magazine comes out, it’s old news.”

Unlike newspapers, which have pivoted to online content generation more successfully, magazines are struggling to differentiate their digital content from competitors and to monetize their web presences. The shrinking of long-form content to a niche market—a luxury good consumed by a quasi-elite demographic—has shoved magazines into new and uncomfortable market spaces. Attempts to redesign print magazines, rebooting classics like Newsweek (newsstand sales down 9.7%) with sexy infographics and big pretty pictures, failed to retain the industry’s bread-and-butter business: large sub-elite audiences whose reading habits have changed the most over the last decade. Serious “news analysis” is not a compelling sales point for those audiences. Thus, the relative success of The Economist and The Financial Times can be attributed to the distribution of their consumer demographic, specifically, the concentration of their audience into elite channels. The migration of celebrity, fashion, and lifestyle content into digital publishing spaces has damaged the value of print publications with non-luxury demographics; and those who once shelled out for long-form are seeing bigger bonuses in making the move online, too.

Sales reports from the first half of 2012 indicate that the magazine industry is in deep water with no life preserver. Digital sales need to increase substantially to ensure long-term survival. Magazines have reached the point of no return in the print-to-digital transition. Without a serious commitment to the digital transition, the magazine industry will downsize itself. 

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If Paul Bowles had been born 70 years later, in 1980, not 1910, he would have been a startup founder and a social media genius.

Bowles was a Renaissance man in his own right. He was a composer, a world traveler, an American expat who moved in Gertrude Stein’s Parisian circles, a translator of Moroccan literature, and a prolific author. His novel The Sheltering Sky made it onto Time’s list of Top 100 English Novels, 1923 to 2005. I must confess a preference for Bowles’s travel essays. As Paul Theroux writes in the introduction to a recent collection of those essays, Bowles lead “a life of his choice. He never compromised…writing what he wished, he never did anything he did not want to do; he kept at it until he died.”

One of the worst essays in Travels: Collected Writings 1950-1993 is ”Windows On the Past,” a kind of dreamy thought piece in which Bowles luxuriates in the image of a young man who, on a late July day, “will step out of the glare of Seville’s Plaza de la Falange Española into the shade of the Calle Sierpes, walk along under the canvas tenting stretched high above the street, and turn into the Restaurant Los Corrales.” Bowles is writing about himself, quite transparently. His talent for capturing the essential sensory experience of a place and a time is lost in the future tense, which lends the essay a purposefully affected pretension. But Bowles needs the future tense to make his point, to transition into a bit of lofty and quotable philosophizing on global politics post-1950. 

Bowles thinks that America is the 20th century’s trendsetter, a variety of moddish dilettante, not unlike Bowles himself. America—and perhaps, Bowles, too—looks forward while rubbernecking back at Europe for cultural guidance. The metaphor of the young man in the Restaurant Los Corrales, the expat searching for something like “culture,” explains Bowles’s vision of America: young, promising, technically educated but desiring of the intangible brush of European sophistication. Bowles explains that the young man’s—and America’s—obsession with technical detail, process, and method is inhibiting progress: 

“I think it is the business of technique that stands in the way of our own culture’s complete and unimpeded flowering,” Bowles claims. “In the rush to learn how we have forgotten that first we must know what.”

Although there are many objects that I could pass through Bowles’s analysis—many examples of an overemphasis on technique, on the how instead of the what—this blog focuses on startup culture, social media, digital publishing, etc. And so, it’s natural to expect the following argument: contemporary startups overemphasize technique: depend on a how proposition, not a what proposition. That is to say, too many startups focus on the technical buildout of the product instead of macro-consumer trends; too many highlight the technical skills of their teams, not their capacity to generate original ideas; too many answer the question, “how will digital citizens do X (share photos, listen to music, communicate with their friends,” instead of, “what will digital citizens do?”

To paraphrase Bowles, in the rush to control how people use technology, we have forgotten that we have the ability to change what people use technology for. 

I think the most obvious evidence for this theory is the number of piggybacking and iterative innovations launched into consumer space: Groupon for soccer moms, Facebook for pets, Twitter for offices; and “new email,” “new social media,” “new e-commerce.” The problem is that we need more inventions and less fine tuning; the new new media’s same as the old new media. Real success will be found in something really new, not a clever repackaging of technique intended for a quick exit.

Bowles wrote “Windows On the Past” in 1955, in the midst of the Cold War, when Western, Capitalist techno-cultural innovation met its antonym in Eastern, Communist strategy. Clearly, Bowles’s commentary on the how versus the what, on technique versus concept, references the innovation races of Cold War geopolitics. In the post-tech bubble, post-2008 American economy, politicians and investors deploy a similar rhetoric to distinguish America from both the Eurozone and some nebulous Eastern axis. If that rhetoric interrupts transnational economic cooperation and global technological cooperation, it at least can push entrepreneurs to compete against phantoms, driving innovation into productive channels. 

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