If I were a conspiracy theorist — and I’m not, because I’ve found the world is rarely organized enough to conspire (and I found this to be especially true of News Corp. when I worked there, at TV Guide) — I’d imagine that the Journal ginned up this alleged exposé as a way to attack everyone else’s advertising business just as its parent company skulks behind its pay wall and surrenders its own ad business. But I’m not a conspiracy theorist. That’s why I’m confused.

The story uses the ominous passive voice of newspaper scare stories: “…a Wall Street Journal investigation has found…” As if this knowledge were hiding. Cookies have been around as long as the commercial browser, since October 1994. Or was that 1984?

The piece uses lots of scare words: “surveillance technology” … “tracking technology” … “intrusive” … “no warning” … “surreptitiously re-spawn” … “rich databases” … “so powerful and ubiquitous” … and my favorite: “targeted ads can get personal” (well, yeah, that’s the damned point).

The Journal acts as if it has discovered a conspiracy of its own: “Marketers are spying on Internet users — observing and remembering people’s clicks, and building and selling detailed dossiers of their activities and interests.” Gasp! Mabel, hide the kids, the Romans Huns Krauts Commies Marketers are coming!

There is absolutely nothing new — thus nothing newsworthy — in what the Journal promises threatens to be a series.

The Journal does measure its own cookies, finding its site moderate (I count 34 Journal cookies on my new Mac and I don’t use the site often) in what it ominously calls an “exposure index.” Mabel: Bring the Geiger counter!

Well, except the Journal is unique because unlike the other sites the story writes about, the Journal has my personally identifiable information! It has my friggin’ credit card number and name and address and phone number as well as my web behavior and it allows me to be tracked by third parties. The Journal has more information about me than ANY of the sites it warns about. And the Journal is owned by a company some people don’t trust. Hmmm.

It’s a fine thing that the Journal also tells readers how to “avoid prying eyes.” And if enough people do that, then the value of the advertising-supported web falls. Without cookies, the effectiveness and price of advertising would plummet as ads everywhere turn into remnant junk (smack the money), reducing revenue for media sites and reducing their content to junk. Hmmmm….

A story like this might also affect policy as the FTC is looking at regulating online advertising and marketing; its chairman, Jon Leibowitz testified before Congress on the topic this very week. Hmmm.

I think the Journal should have told exactly how it places and uses every one of its cookies and beacons and ominous tracking surveillance spying technology. It doesn’t. The story doesn’t even link to the paper’s privacy policy, which says that cookies and beacons and all that scary surveillance/tracking/spying technologies are used at WSJ.com and its affiliates and also by third parties over which the Journal has no control. Opportunity lost.

If I were an advertising-supported site, I’d be aggressively transparent. I’d tell you exactly what we track and what impact that has on what we serve in advertising and content. I’d create an app to read the cookies placed just for you and explain them. I’d give you the chance to correct information. I’d give you the chance to select your own advertising (now that would be valuable). I’d treat this with radical openness.

Otherwise the scare mongers like those regulation-loving, anticapitalist commies at News Corp. will win the day.

: Oh, and I neglected to point out that it was the very same Journal that had the wingnutty story about privacy and RFID tags on our pants, quoting as an expert a woman who thinks that RFIDs are — and I exaggerate not — the work of the devil. What the hell is happening there? Are they going out for drinks too often with their new neighbors at the Post?

: Oh and here’s more scaremongering from the commie Telegraph in London, which equates Wikileaks’ Julian Assange with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. Man, we are in silly season.

Case in point: on the list of content formats for which people do pay are iPhone apps. The success of these apps have clearly not gone unnoticed by businesses, who hustle to the Apple platform to create a direct bridge between the consumer and their product/content/information or whatever they’re peddling. There’s also the concept of the ‘new content experience’, referring to anything from recommended stories to self-bookmarks of content you like. Again, providers of access points will have to prove more versatile as they cater to a (paying) audience that not only wants more content, more quickly, but also wants more ‘self-service’ and sharing attributes.

In a debate on whether or not users will pay for content online, Clay Shirky mentions that people will only pay for that which is ‘necessary’, and that most content available isn’t so much ‘necessary’ as ‘optional’. But, a quick scan at the most popular of 60,000+ iPhone apps last year and I find Super Monkey Ball; hardly an app one might consider critical content. And yet, you’ll find many consumers drawing the line when newspapers announce their conversion to say, a non-free iPad app version.

In that case, maybe it’s not only about access point. Clearly, the consumer dynamic has changed enough with these platforms to reveal that access points won’t necessarily guarantee paying customers for all content, (and certainly previously considered ‘important’ content such as newspapers are suffering the harsh reality of this). What people were willing to pay for before may have been necessary, sure, but now people are willing to pay for content that’s fun, personalised, and shareable. It’s not just about getting to an access point, but how to use it, and the iPhone, iPad, Netflix, whatever the access point is, has met huge success in training consumers to pay for content. It is safe to say though that, echoing Shirky’s sentiments, not everyone might be willing to make the transition from a consumer generation that has accessed free content online by doing the exact opposite: not pay a dime.

“About.com is planning a major move into the business-to-business space, launching a number of industry-specific sites.”

Now, I know of a lot of major B2B publishers who have been in the online space for more than a decade. And yet, this is the reason About.com is making the move:

“We evaluated the landscape and found that it was really underserved online.”

This is how new competitors encroach on any market. Established brands have been working within a defined space in an established manner for years. Yet somehow, the new competitor sees a gap, and is willing to devote resources to either fill a hole, or overtake the existing players.

What I am most curious about is how existing B2B websites will react when About.com becomes a head-to-head competitor. Will they do nothing, justifying that About.com does not have the reputation, connections, or history in their niche field? Will they partner? Will About.com simply fail at these efforts?

It has me considering what drives innovation. In this case, what leads a B2B media company to go into overdrive to launch new products, devote new resources, reorganize their efforts to serve their market in new and exciting ways?

What pushes us in everyday life? What pushes us when we play games or sports? Some ideas:

We move quicker when others are at our heals.

We band together when we are dealing with a threat.

I suppose this is why people say “competition is good.” It also has something to do with the whole “embrace failure” ideology – that if you are failing, it means you are trying new things, and will eventually hit on a new success.

Why do we innovate? Is it proactive or reactive? Is it organizational or individual? These are questions I’ve had for years – especially in times of massive change like that the media world is experience. As companies strive to protect existing revenue streams and work towards creating new ones, they need to develop skillsets that drive innovation as the norm.

Why? Because About.com is just another in a line of new competitors that B2B media companies are facing. And they are certainly not the last.

Here are other blog posts I wrote this week:

• Media Companies Need To Be Developing iPad Apps Today
• How Social Media Disrupts (But Unlocks Revenue)
• Customers Don’t Buy Features, They Buy Identity

If you feel I can help you evolve the skillsets of your organization, give me a call: 973-981-8882. Here are some other ways you can connect with me:

• Sign up for the We Grow Media Newsletter
• Sign up for the DanBlank.com Newsletter
• Follow me on Twitter: @DanBlank
• Connect with me on LinkedIn
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In my pollyanna way, I imagine a day when citizens could take over some tasks of government to save money and do them better. How about this as a small pilot:

Politico reports today that Rupert Murdoch wants to charge the White House $600,000 a year for access to news clips. The White House now pays $100,000 a year to a clipping service and News Corp. want to charge them for access to WSJ news in an apparent bid to make the White House deal directly with its own Factiva.

Well, to hell with that.

I have no doubt that we, the people, could do a spectacular job of curating clips — links and excerpts — for the White House (and us all). Imagine Wikiclips. Start with news data bases like Daylife (full disclosure: I’m a partner there) or GoogleNews as well as key RSS feeds (original sources and curated collections like RealClearPolitics) and canned searches and then create a very simple tool atop that to enable volunteer citizen-curators to find and highlight the important stuff. The Washington Post or New York Times or Techmeme could create the platform for the benefit of all.

There’s no reason for this task to be done at taxpayer expense. There’s no reason for the results of this work to be private; we all should see it. How could conservative Murdoch argue with saving tax dollars?

“I think it’s better separate,” Rusbridger responded. Wikileaks does things the paper wouldn’t want to do or couldn’t do. And a paper is easier to attack by governments and companies; it has greater liability than a stateless news organization, as Jay Rosen calls them. “I think the Afghan leaks make the case for journalism,” Rusbridger said. “We had the people and expertise to make sense of it.”

Right. The Afghan war logs story is a case study in what Rusbridger would call the mutualization of journalism. I’d call it collaboration. The leakers and their medium — that is, their mediator, Wikileaks — did what they did and the paper’s journalists added value: digging through the data, giving it perspective, editing out dangerous pieces, getting reaction, and then giving it audience and attention.

That is the role journalists will continuously perform in the future: adding value. Wikileaks and the leaker didn’t need the Guardian, The Times, and Der Spiegel; as Wikileaks has proven many times, it can publish its information to the world without help. But they chose to work through those publications because of the value they would add.

Thanks to the internet, the marginal cost of sharing information today is zero. So the value of the journalist in merely distributing information is nearing zero. Distribution was just the stranglehold the journalists’ companies had on the market that enabled them to be supported by monopoly economics. They can no longer build their businesses on that barrier to entry. This change in market reality forces us to examine journalists’ true value to the public in the market.

In the war logs story, journalists added value. In the story of a town board meeting, journalists also need to add value, not merely acting as stenographers — a task most anyone could perform — but adding perspective (which might — horrors! — mean having an opinion), standards of behavior (you shouldn’t call the mayor an idiot without the links to back it up), and audience (which doesn’t mean distribution in the old sense of a stranglehold; it means the ability to get people to pay attention because you bring them value and they’ll click on your links).

If you don’t add value, then you’re not needed. And that’s not necessarily bad. When you don’t add value and someone else can perform the task as stenographer or leaker or reporter — and you can link to it — then that means you save resources and money. This means journalists need to look at where they add maximum value.

That’s the moral to the Wikileaks war log story: you never know what might be leaked. Of course, that itself is nothing new: Whenever we reveal information to even one person, we risk it being spread. The ethic of confidentiality (and privacy) rests with the recipient of that information.

So what’s new now? There are more means to get information since it is pooled and digital. There are more means to share information; Daniel Ellsberg had to go through media to spread his Pentagon Papers while Wikileak chose to go through media so they could add value (perspective and attention) but didn’t have to. And there are new means to stay anonymous in the process.

I’m writing a book arguing that we are becoming more public and that’s good — and that institutions (government, companies) have no choice but to live up to our new standards of transparency and openness. But I am also examining when transparency goes too far.

Is the Wikileaks story an example of crossing a line? First, we have to ask where the line should be. I think it has to move so that our default, especially in government, is transparency. Rather than asking what should be made public we should ask why something should be kept private. Imagine if all government information and actions were public except matters of security and personal and private identification. There will be pressure to head there.

I make the mistake of thinking that we’ll navigate toward openness via rational and critical discussion. But we’ll more likely move the line because of purposeful subversion of the line like Wikileaks’. The line will be moved by force.

Now that they’ve made the war log public, it makes us examine the impact.

We need to ask whether the knowledge that anything written down could be made public will cause less to be written — and we lose information in the long run. That is my concern about efforts to make *all* government communication, including person-to-person email, permanent and public. I imagine that people will stop saying important things in email and instead pick up the phone and we lose the record.

We need to ask whether an ethic of transparency can be expected when leakers can be anonymous and their leaks swift.

We need to ask whether the government would have been better off making more public so that the leaker’s selective publication does not solely set the agenda and the government is stuck reacting.

In the war logs, we are learning things we should know. It’s the leakers — Wikileaks and its three media outlets — who are deciding what not to make public (with some consultation, post-leak, from government) and what should be open. So government loses the ability to decide secrets. Now leakers do. Which side do we trust to decide?

The sane response to leaks, I think, is to open up as much as possible. Then there’s nothing to leak except the things that shouldn’t be leaked. If we had the faith that we knew more, there’d be fewer leaks, fewer reasons to.

I don’t think this is an inexorable process of opening everything, of making no secret safe. As much as I advocate transparency, I don’t advocate that. But when you don’t know how many secrets there are, when there are too many secrets, then everything can be a leak — in Afghanistan or in the Gulf of Mexico. Unless government and business take on a credible and complete ethic of transparency, they will hand over the job of transparency to leakers and no secret is safe.

ANOTHER THOUGHT: This story is a step to the end of access journalism. (NO, it won’t end. Whenever people like me declare the death of something, disbelieve and discount it; we’re just saying we’re heading away from something).

But Wikileaks didn’t need, doesn’t want, won’t ever get official, journalistic, beat access. The derailing of a general in Rolling Stone didn’t come from a beat reporter who cared about access anymore. ProPublica’s work isn’t built on access.

When I talk about how little is spent on investigative reporting in America — as a proportion of total editorial spending across all media, it’s minuscule … microscopic — editors remind me that my calculation doesn’t include beats and beats are the heart of reporting. True and not true. It’s true to the extent that we want ongoing coverage and want it performed by people who build up experience if not expertise in the subject. It’s not true to the extent that reporters who depend on access from the subjects won’t ruin the relationship by breaking the subject’s secrets or the access (and the reporter’s supposed value) ends. (This is why reporters aren’t supposed to blog their opinions about their beats, according to fresh orthodoxy: They would lose access.)

In access journalism, leaks come from the subject. In unaffiliated journalism, leaks come in spite of the subject. As more reporting is done through mechanisms like Wikileaks and ProPublica and bloggers and advocates, I think we’ll see more breaking of secrets, which reinforces my point above: the best way to fight leaks is transparency (not black-out paint).

The Pentagon learned that lesson just a bit when it realized that giving more access would mean more control. Thus the embedding program in Iraq and Afghanistan. But news organizations can’t afford to have reporters embedded in the war zone. Coverage was too dependent on relationships. That honeymoon is ended.

The coverage of this war revealed much of what we know from the war logs. Alex Thomson says, though, that the logs validated what we know. They added facts we couldn’t get with access.

As news organizations shrink, we’ll be able to afford less access journalism — fewer beat reporters building relationships with their subjects — and more reporting — and subversion — from people who have a viewpoint and an agenda. The tone and means of journalism changes. It becomes more uncomfortable. But then, isn’t journalism supposed to be uncomfortable?

: MORE: Many notes from Jay Rosen here: “I don’t have the answer; I don’t even know if I have framed the right problem.”

Jay talks about stateless journalism. Dave Winer says the blogosphere is that. I don’t think the issue is that journalism is stateless but instead that journalism is becoming independent of organizations (pace Clay Shirky). Journalism lacks affiliation. Anybody can feed WIkileaks; Wikileaks can feed anybody. The organizational — nevermind state — point of control disappears. Journalism is everywhere and its up to the public to decide what news is.

Though from another perspective, stateless does matter as we’re seeing more of it across many sectors of society. Our enemy in this war is stateless. Businesses are stateless. Journalism now becomes stateless. I believe the tools of publicness — that is, the internet’s — enable us to organize new societies around states.

: MORE: Andrew Potter breaks down the discussion into four questions.

“They”, are the Digital Natives.

The French polling institute BVA published an enlightening survey of this generation: between 18-24 years of age, born with a mouse and a keyboard, and now permanently tied to their smartphone. All of it shaping their vision of an unstable world. The study is titled GENE-TIC for Generation and Technology of Information and Communication. Between November 2009 and February 2010, BVA studied hundred young people in order to understand their digital habits. Various techniques where used: spyware in PCs , subjective glasses to “see what they see”, and hours of video recording. (The 500 pages survey is for sale but abstracts, in French, are here ; BVA is considering a similar study for the US market). Here are the key findings:

The constant gamer. The way a Digital Native see his (or, once for all “her“) environment is deeply shaped by computer games. “When he is buying something”, says Edouard Le Marechal who engineered the survey, “finding the best bargain is a process as important as acquiring the good. The Digital Native enjoys using all tools available in his arsenal to outsmart the merchant system and to find the best deal. He doesn’t trust the brand. Like in a game, the brand is the enemy to defeat”.

According to the study, brands face a serious challenge from the Digital Native. Not only does he gets a kick out of triumphing over the brand, but he is not deceived by the marketing pitch. To make things worse, he’ll become an expert, he’ll achieve more knowledge than the merchant trying to lure him. That’s part of the game. Reading the GENE-TIC survey, brands and their vector (advertising), appear under siege in multiple ways. They look increasingly disconnected and outpaced by their target. In addition, advertising is reduced to its utilitarian dimension: if an ad message does not carry an explicit promotion, it is unlikely to lead to a good bargain.

Weirdly enough, when I asked Edouard Le Marechal if big ad agencies were flocking to subscribe to his survey, he replied they were not. Instead, GENE-TIC is massively subscribed to by clients such as high tech or telecommunications companies. (That also reinforces the idea that the brand – whether it is a manufacturer or a service – is willing to (re)connect more directly with its customer base at the expense of the advertising intermediary which appears to have lost its power).

There are notable exceptions, such as brands that are direct components of the digital sphere. Sony and especially Apple, maybe very few others, have gained access to a unique status of blind trustfulness (which, in itself, shows the crucial importance of design and user interface).

Corporate Defiance. How come the corporate world can be so unsophisticated, so focused on its internal processes when compared to the digital world? It doesn’t come as a surprise: the Digital Native doesn’t fit into the corporation. When the digital sphere is seen as fast, efficient, transverse, the corporation appears slow, loaded with heavy rules, crippled by hierarchy. The Digital Native has a problem with authority, but he respects competence. Statutory dimension and attributes are pointless. “It mainly results from a generation gap in which management is still in the hands of people who don’t have a clue on how Digital Natives think”, says Edouard Le Marechal. The old style management can’t handle behavioral dispersion, inability to concentrate, compulsive multitasking. This difference from Digital Natives is almost irreconcilable. But it’s not highly conflictual either, as long as companies are able to grant recognition of its employees’ different affect.

The estrangement toward the corporate community also result from macro-economic considerations. For the most part, this generation has grown in a tormented business environment: industrial downsizing in the nineties, tech and financial bubbles (that inevitably burst), credit crunch, global financial crisis. The result is mostly a hopeless – but not desperate – future for this generation: it shares (at least in France where the survey was conducted) the belief that it won’t do better than its parents.

The Group they trust. The Digital Native does not rely on a single group but on several, each with a different degree of trust. The three concentric circles are : close friends and family as the core, a group of 20 to 30 pals whom they trust, and the “Facebook friends” of 200 or so, which acts as an echo chamber. Beyond these groups, behaviors such as elusiveness, temptation to trick and circumvent the social system will prevail.

How do they get the news? No wonder why the group is crucial to the Digital Native getting his information. First of all, the fastest is the best. Forget about long form journalism. Quick TV newscasts, free commuter newspapers, bursts of news bulletins on the radio are more than enough. The group will do the rest: it will organize the importance, the hierarchy of news elements, it will set the news cycle’s pace.

More chilling: the group’s belief in its power to decide what’s credible and what’s not. Truth – at least perceived truth – seems to emerge from an implicit group vote, in total disregard for actual facts. If the group believes it, chances are it is “true”. When something flares up, if it turns out to be a groundless rumor, it’s fine since it won’t last (which is little consolation for the victim of a baseless rumor); and the news cycle waves are so compressed that old-fashioned notions such as reliability or trustfulness become secondary. Anyway, because they are systematically manipulated, the Digital Natives don’t trust the media (when they themselves are not the manipulators).

Consequently, resources can only be group-related or collectively-driven. The perfect example is Wikipedia: because it is crowd-powered and carries an image of neutrality, it is embraced as trustworthy. In addition, Wikipedia is accessible, straightforward and well structured. As a result, many Digital Natives acknowledge turning to Wikipedia to check facts, or to get a good digest of the class there where given.

It would be presumptuous to draw too many conclusions from this survey. But let’s float few ideas:

Workplace. The corporation’s organization model has to be reconsidered in light of the Digital Native’s distrust. Personal rewards and empowerment must be redesigned. Top-down, the our-way-or-the-highway arbitrary system needs retooling. The survey showed that 3/4 of Digital Natives want to be entrepreneurs, not just for the the sake of it, but in order to be relieved from a hierarchy they don’t respect.

The group. Because it is at the core of the new social system, the group deserves a keener understanding. As for now, there is no sign of an “hostile disconnection” between the group and the rest of the society. But as long a the elite – political, corporate, media – is a disappointment to the group, a disconnect is looming. Today, no one in the ruling elite seems to understand the group’s arcane structure and rules. This, too, deserves a closer look.

The information. Trust will be difficult to restore. Again, such recovery will be achieved through a better understanding of the group. But the most likely scenario is a growing split of news consumers. The Digital Natives will be happy with superficial, quickly digestible streams of information. On the other hand, in-depth, balanced information will be the perquisite of a shrinking elite, sensitive to the notion of a trusted brand and ready to pay for it. This split is fine as long as we can be sure that a misinformed and growing share of the electorate is not becoming a threat to the very fabric of democracy.

—frederic.filloux@mondaynote.com

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Instead, we’ll look into the fun side of Apple’s antenna, or antennas (not antennae, a solecism from last week. A reader reminded me that antennae is reserved for actual bugs, as in insects.)

As they always do, savvy entrepreneurs immediately saw how to convert a problem into an opportunity, how to spin an unintended “feature” into $$.

Tongue-in-cheekiest of them all, we have Antenn-aid:

Nothing more need be said.

Etsy’s offering is a bit less subtle:

(and the pricetag is $4, not the $29 shown in the picture.) The label is a intentionally contradicatory: Placing the sticker over the gap will prevent involuntarily dropped calls, but the humor (and the product) works.

Let’s talk bumpers.

I like the sleek industrial design of the iPhone 4 but because the bumper and the charging dock are mutually exclusive, I’ve remained defiantly “unprotected.” I should have known better. One small slip of the hand, one bounce off the concrete and…

The local Apple store folks tried to console me: ‘Oh, this is nothing. Do you know why we have moisture sensors inside the iPhone? No idea? Ok, what’s the smallest room in your house? Yes, that one. The phone slips out of the jeans pocket and…”

I got luckier when I ordered a custom decal for the back of my iPhone. GelaSkins, a gem of a Canadian company, make skins for laptops, smartphones of almost any brand, and now iPads. Over the years, they’ve managed to incorporate interesting art, from Van Gogh to punk and Japanese street art (you can see their gallery here)

Recently, they’ve started offering custom skins: Create your very own special decal showing a picture of your family, your dog, your yacht or even your boss (if you think that will help). You upload a picture, crop it to fit your phone or laptop and they’ll ship you a neat decal printed on a clever 3M adhesive. It’s clever because it works for klutzes such as yours truly: Tiny channels crisscross the sticky side of the decal. One quick swipe and the air bubbles magically disappear. And, of course, no one gets the placement right the first time, or the second, or even the third (I know this from personal experience). With the GelaSkin adhesive you can try again and again until you get it right.

(Full disclosure: I have no relationship with GelaSkins other than being a full-price, satisfied customer.)

For my older iPhone, I submitted a picture from a now defunct art store on rue Saint Placide in Paris:

When I got my new iPhone 4, I repeated the process with the same picture and got a welcome surprise. GelaSkin knows the difference between the 3GS back skin:

…and the back of the iPhone 4:

The arrows at the top right point to three holes: one for the Mute button, the other two for the + and – keys on the phone’s side. Furthermore, the skin incorporates a correctly placed cutout for the camera and LED flash:

What I didn’t expect were two separate wrap-around skins for the phone’s sides, yielding this:

Reacting to critics, Apple has pointed to the weak spot on its interesting Antenna Performance page…

..but my custom skin covers the sides and the weak spot is “healed”:

Is it modesty or merely a combination of luck and ignorance? The Gelaskins site makes no mention of the “bonus feature”.

Let’s turn to an even sunnier side of the street. During his years at Pacific Bell, Scott Adams created the long running and still sharp Dilbert comics series, lampooning corpocatric culture and the drones infesting large organizations. You can find Scott’s insight into Job’s handling of the iPhone antennas problem (The High Ground Maneuver) on his blog. And, while you’re there, take a look at his weigh-ins on the iPad and Active Listening. I feel a little embarrassed to have only recently discovered Scott’s blog, but I’ve entered it into my Google Reader subscriptions.

One more Monday Note next week, then we go on break for two weeks.

—JLG@mondaynote.com

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Here we have a German government official saying that it is his job to protect consumers from themselves. In other words, they don’t know best; he does. Nevermind what they do — giving up private data on Facebook or giving Google the highest market penetration anywhere — he says they should do something else. And so he’ll use his regulatory power to change their behavior to his expectation.

And here we have a columnist for the Observer (aka Guardian), Will Hutton, who says in a fit of journalistic hubris that the BBC is “the last bulwark against populist government by the mob.” So the BBC is what protects the public from itself. He further says, “The bile, unfairness and lack of restraint in the blogosphere is infecting the mainstream media and thus American politics.” Which is to say that the press and government were unsullied and free of bile and unfairness until these damned bloggers (read: citizens with tongues) came along to corrupt them.

In both cases, we simply see members of a power structure threatened by the emergence of a public with its own mind and voice. We thus see the conflict that arises out of the rise of publicness. That’s one of the topics I’m thinking through as I write my book.

Advertising is fucked.

I’ve said that Rupert Murdoch’s paywall is also essentially his surrender of any hope that advertising can be grown or even maintained. He gave up and shrank like George Costanza’s privates. It’s one thing for the dirty digger to give up on car ads. It is quite another for Condé to go off its diet of Madison Avenue and Seventh Avenue in favor of a parking meter.

Photo: Flickr - wallyg

Good luck.

The company plans — like Murdoch — to try to suddenly get new money from consumers who for years — long, long before the internet — have been accustomed to almost-free content: $1-per-issue luxe magazines that cost probably four times that to produce and distribute (not to mention the tens of dollars it takes in marketing to acquire that subscription with advertising and schwag — a purse for Glamour readers or the fabled sneakerphone up the street at Sports Illustrated).

Condé promoted Bob Sauerberg, former head of consumer marketing (read: circulation) to its presidency. Bob is one of the good guys of Condé Nast (I don’t mean to damn him with faint praise there … sorry, couldn’t resist); he’s smart, mature, experienced. (I worked with him a good deal when I was at Advance’s parent company and he was at Fairchild; I should add that none of what I’m saying here comes from the slightest contemporary knowledge of the company; haven’t been in the cafeteria for many months.) Bob knows management and consumer marketing. The age of the ad sales guy is over because the age of the ad is over.

The problem is going to be that there is only more competition in content and so trying to suddenly charge more flies in the face of basic economics. The absurdity of the strategy struck me yesterday as Amazon tried to sell me a subscription to Time for 28.8 cents an issue while Time is trying to sell its iPad issues for $4.99 and I see no reason to buy either. In what world do these economics make sense? In their dreams.

“I want to collect income from the consumer,” Townsend told The Times earlier. “An annual magazine subscription may be something like anywhere bet[ween] $12 and $24. So I’m currently locked into a model that says I get a buck or two a month. How about I get a buck for a click?”

Dream on.

They’re not wrong that they need to get money from consumers but they’re not going to get it for content. Sorry guys. But as Google schooled the newspaper industry (I’ll substitute appropriate words):

The large profit margins [magazines] enjoyed in the past were built on an artificial scarcity: Limited choice for advertisers as well as readers. With the Internet, that scarcity has been taken away and replaced by abundance. No [dreaming] will be able to restore [magazine] revenues to what they were before the emergence of online [content]. It is not a question of analog dollars versus digital dimes, but rather a realistic assessment of how to make money in a world of abundant competitors and consumer choice.

Instead, I suggest they have to get new revenue through commerce — through selling the things they once advertised now that advertisers are deserting them to sell direct. Problem is, that’s hard, as Condé knows best from its experience with Style.com, which started as an attempt to create a high-end store (I worked there then). They created it in partnership with a retailer and the retailer bagged the effort when times got tough in the first bubble; it then became another ad-supported site. But the strategy wasn’t wrong. Problem is, there is no retail expertise in the company.

More recently, Condé should have bought Net-a-Porter but instead luxury conglomerate Richemont snarfed it up. (Disclosure: I spoke at Richemont’s corporate retreat recently.) Condé should buy Gilt to establish new skills, a new relationship with customers, and new revenue. Its content then becomes just added value: the Cinnabon’s in the mall.

A media company going into retail and selling in areas held by former advertisers has precedent: Media News’ Salt Lake City paper became a real estate broker and undersold the entire business in town. The Telegraph, as I like to point out, sells everything from hangers to wine to betting to its readers.

But if Condé and other media companies are going into retail, they need entirely new skills of merchandising and sales, an entirely new financial structure to cope with inventory costs and tight margins, the ability to cope with entirely new competitors and suppliers (that is, former advertisers — but, worse, Amazon), and an entirely new efficiency (forget the cafeteria; they’d be lucky to have a Wal-Mart lunch room with vending machines as a profit center).

They also have to defeat a calcified, entitled culture. For that, I’d suggest they buy Gawker Media to get the incredibly popular competitor Jezebel and to infuse the company with a new culture. Make Nick Denton editorial director and COO and then watch the fun.

I doubt they heard any of this from KcKinsey because in the few encounters I’ve had with them they remix known models rather than invent new ones, which is what is called for here. I’ll bet they proposed cutting some costs (done) and remixing revenue (started) when what’s really needed is a complete restrategizing.

Or maybe I”m wrong. Maybe 4 Times Square will become the world’s lushest mall, with one helluva food court.

Nevermind my advice. The moral of this story remains that advertising is next to fall into the black hole (as a Time Inc. president once dubbed this damned internet thing). Welcome to Bob Garfield’s Chaos Scenario.

And then this dropped in my lap: a reputed outcry by these putative privacy advocates against Wal-Mart putting RFID tags on pants.

What could possibly violate our privacy with tracking pants in a store to make sure there aren’t too many extra-large sizes on the shelves? (That was my experience with Wal-Mart when I tried to buy sweats before my surgery; I wish they’d restocked the mediums.)

Well, say the advocates the Journal found: “While the tags can be removed from clothing and packages, they can’t be turned off, and they are trackable. Some privacy advocates hypothesize that unscrupulous marketers or criminals will be able to drive by consumers’ homes and scan their garbage to discover what they have recently bought.”

Yeah, and then what? So they find out that I bought 33/34 jeans. And with that precious personal data they will do what? Blackmail me because I’m no longer the svelte 32 I once was? Sell me illegal diet aids? Sell me ice cream? Target advertising for medium jockeys to me? Subject me to public ridicule as a pencil-necked geek?

Don’t the reporter and editor at the Journal stand back and laugh at the absurdity of this worry? Don’t they ask the next, obvious question: “Yeah, and…?” Isn’t that their job?

Ah, but they report more and find further cause for worry:

“Some privacy advocates contend that retailers could theoretically scan people with such [encoded] licenses as they make purchases, combine the info with their credit card data, and then know the person’s identity the next time they stepped into the store.”

And that would be worth the trouble and risk for the store how? That would give them more data than they already have from credit cards and other means?

So often, articles calling on “privacy advocates” leave them unnamed — anonymous and private, you understand. The Journal digs up one Katherine Albrecht, “founder of a group called Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering and author of a book called ‘Spychips‘ that argues against RFID technology.” Group? Just how many people go to her meetings? And does the book come with tin-foil underwear? The “group” was founded to oppose grocery-store loyalty cards. Yes, we see the damage they have done to countless lives.

Her own site says that she has “earned her accolades from Advertising Age and Business Week and caused pundits to label her a PR genius.” I dare say. She next got the Journal to swallow her silliness.

Listen, I’m all for privacy. I’m working hard to define it in my book on publicness. I will vigorously defend the need and right to control one’s information. There are plenty of serious and difficult issues to discuss. But this kind of idiocy does not serve the cause. It only finds a spy under every leisure suit. In the long run, it turns the cause of privacy into an object of ridicule. And that’s wrong.

But this is often the case with technology and privacy. Technology spawns fears — and worries these advocates — because it introduces change and it’s really change that they fear. Here’s a tidbit from my manuscript illustrating the point:

Alan F. Westin, in his influential 1967 book Privacy and Freedom … found many devices to fear: LSD “may greatly affect the individual’s daily personal balance between what he keeps private about himself and what he discloses to those around him” and could again be used for government surveillance. Westin worried about radio pills, miniature transmitters, and even about fluorescent powders and dyes—not to mention radioactive substances—that could be applied to “hands, shoes, clothing, hair, umbrella, and the like, or can be added to such items as soap, after-shave lotion, and hair tonic” to track the unsuspecting person.

Secret, miniature cameras, infrared film, microminiature microphones the size of match-heads, battery-operated tape-recorders, hidden “television-eye” monitoring, telephone tapping, “truth measurement” by polygraph tests, personality testing, brain-wave analysis, dossiers of personal data, and the means to steam open envelopes and measure TV audiences—these all concerned him. He speculated about “invisible magnetic-ink tattoos [that] might be applied (for example, to babies at birth)” and transmitters that could be implanted and “wireless, battery-operated television ‘eyes’ the size of buttons,” not to mention U-2 spy cameras from above as well as the ability to read brain signals.

Westin warned of the dangers of computers. In 1966, he wrote, there were 30,000 computers used in the U.S., 2,600 of them in the federal government. What happens, he asked, when we come to the day when “computers in the field of health will eventually establish total medical profiles on everyone in the country ‘from the hour of birth’ and updated through life. Each record will be almost instantly accessible to medical personnel.” Oh, if only.

Westin listed his fears of technology’s impact on privacy 45 years before you read this. How many of his dreads came to life? Few if any, I’d say. That is not to mock him nor even to diminish his warnings, only to put the fears technology fosters into context as we grapple with the concerns attached to our more-modern sciences.

LATER: I looked at all the coverage I could find on Google News and I found but one piece that, like me, dared to question the “Cassandras of the privacy movement.” CNBC’s Dennis Kneale wrote:

One day RFID tags will permeate the U.S. and global economies, cutting costs for manufacturers and retailers and letting them better respond to consumer tastes. A whole new stock-sector boom could loom as well, in companies that cash in on this inevitable tech trend.

That is, unless the Privacy Police gets in the way. . . .

Um, so what is it I should fear that Wal-Mart will do with this new data horde showing that I just bought a pair of boxers? (Alright let’s stipulate: We’d be less keen on Wal-Mart’s knowing we just bought Spanx.)

The privacy guys always do this—raise well-intended but fear-provoking possibilities at the advent of most any new, promising technology. It is part of what the 1990s Internet sage, Nicholas Negroponte, called the “demonization of bits.” If a salesperson follows us around a store watching our purchases, fine; but use technology to do it and suddenly it’s Orwellian.

Playing the privacy card seems a bit antiquated in this exhibitionistic era of gleefully revealing your inner-most foibles and fetishes to potentially millions of other equally indiscreet folks on Facebook.

: LATER: RFID Journal blasts “privacy nonsense” around chips.

: UPDATE: The WSJ’s RFID expert believes that the chips are a fulfillment of an end-time biblical prophesy. Did I say wingnuts?

“Early on we decided there would be four pillars of types of courses which will be reflected in 101 courses: editorial; marketing to a growing audience; technical skills, because publishing online means putting tools in the writers’ hands; and then information that is specific to Examiner.com, such as how our referral program works.”

The article makes it clear that these companies can’t require contributors to take the courses, and that while they feel there is positive results, they didn’t share much hard data on their effect.

But this had me considering how traditional media companies and publishers train and evolve the skillsets of their employees. Those in book publishing, magazines and newspapers. Many of these companies are smaller than they were five years ago – with each staff member doing multiple roles. Some may be doing more work to make up for “reduced headcount,” and others may be doing more work because of the changes in media.

For instance: a magazine editor who now must post articles to the web, not just print, send out a newsletter, and organize online contributors. This is not just more items they are responsible for, but a wider range of skills, some editorial, some management, some technical, some marketing, some print media, some online media.

How are companies not just giving these employees more responsibility, but more opportunity to excel at these tasks? Like the Demand Media’s of the world, traditional media companies need to scale systems and processes across a wide range of brands. So they put in systems for content management, for email, and the processes behind them, which clearly makes sense on many levels.

But are these staff members evolving their skills, or are they becoming cogs in the machine? Let’s take our print magazine editor example.

• Are they learning how email newsletters drive business forward, and becoming experts in email marketing – or are they merely filling in a template with “content” that came from print or the website?
• Are they learning the process of product development online – how to test and determine what makes a great homepage and article page – or are they merely racing to fill it with “content” that originated with a writer who would have written it the same for print?
• When sourcing bloggers, are they digging into web analytics and researching who has existing influence in online communities, or are they tapping the same sources in their network – columnists from print who will now write print columns online?

This is in no way, shape, or form a complaint against templates, editors, print, or anything else. My concern is simply this:

How do we help those in established media companies grow their skills and evolve their careers? How do we take them from being cogs to controlling the levers of the machine? How do we increase employee satisfaction, not just their workload?

I can’t pretend to look into the future and think that large media companies in established markets (books, magazines, newspapers) will be larger. Likely, they will be smaller. But how can we make them hotbeds for talent, groups of vibrant people who are growing, who are pushing boundaries, who feel they are being not only respected for what they’ve done in the past, but respected enough to help them navigate a changing media landscape and grow their skillset for the future.

How do we get them to say “I am not a dime-a-dozen, I am Willy Loman.”

If you feel I can help you evolve the skillsets of your organization, give me a call: 973-981-8882. Here are some other ways you can connect with me:

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Fragmenting content such that one has to buy one device to read one author and another to read another is blind to the needs and realities of the market. It’s dealmaking for dealmaking’s sake.

If I were one of those authors, I’d squeal like a columnist put behind a Times paywall (either one). Random House is right to stick it back to Wylie and refuse to do business with the now-niche agency. And Amazon is putting itself in a dangerous position to be the enemy, not the friend, of writers, publishers, and readers. But Amazon’s no fool. It is driving a wedge into the heart of the industry.

The real upshot of this deal, I think, is that agents and publishers alike will find themselves locked out as big authors make deals directly with Amazon.

Yes, the Kindle reader is available on laptops and phones and iPads and coming Android tablets. But it won’t be available on other eBooks, and that’s going to hurt the eBook market’s growth, which could affect Amazon, even as it announces that its Kindle book sales exceeded hardback sales last month.

This is the same fear I have about the appification of content with magazine editors gleefully slapping their stories onto iPad apps in the belief that it returns control of the experience and business model to them when, in fact, it cuts them off from every browser user around the world. Nose. Face. Where’s my knife?

In the early days of content on mobile, we saw this game play out: Carriers made exclusive deals to get content in hopes that would get users to buy their phones instead of the other guys’. Didn’t work. A phone’s a phone. A browser’s a browser. A book’s a book.

And an e-book better damned well be an e-book, or books and authors and publishers and agents are all screwed.

1. Usefulness/ Value to user

We knew this news aggregating app. would be a winner when it featured in Steve Jobs’ Keynote speech. Although, its public collation of RSS feeds caused a spot of  trouble recently with the New York Times. But hurrah, the issue was quickly sorted, pictures were changed and now the fast moving app is back on track. So why does Pulse deserve our vote? Because it makes reading mass amounts of content incredibly easy.. and pretty; it is a step-up from the RSS reader. Not only can you can jump between bite-size snippets and deeper articles, the sources are also laid out in a pretty, agreeable interface..(yes, I am female).

2. useability/interface

The interface is as neat as a 1950s show-kitchen. The application displays a magical grid of news sources where websites are listed vertically and individual stories for that site are displayed horizontally. The visual and textual experience of news has been merged here as each source includes photos as well. Portrait is good for focusing on one source; landscape is better for browsing. The transition from portrait to landscape is so slick and you can amuse yourself for hours flipping the iPad. Although the user is in control of the aggregation, there is a sense that you don’t have to do the work by managing RSS feeds. It updates in a matter of seconds to keep you up-to-date with the top news stories.

3. Price/Business model

Pulse is not free. It costs $3.99. But it needs that revenue as there are no ads blocking up the content. But the app has been downloaded over 35,000 times, so it is doing pretty well for itself.

4. Additional functionality

There are lots of additional functions for the Pulse Reader including Google Reader support, sharing news on twitter and facebook, easy searching- through source name, web ir feed URL, or any custom keyword and feed renaming. There is promise of in-line videos to come as well as extending the current limit of twenty RSS feeds.

Summary

The accusations of the New York Times are ironic because this app. gives great publicity to the newspaper apps. that it links to. It aggregates news sources into a neat, easy-to-read format, where the user then taps through to the original article.

Digital Post

The Digital Post straddles authentic, newspaper design and modern innovation. Its ability to aggregate multiple sources attracts the ‘nomadic’ reader concerned with varied and mass content at speed over brand loyalty. It exploits the inability of print to provide user-chosen content and lets the reader pioneer the search from neatly divided categories. This is the major superiority of digital, malleable content over newspapers. Yet, respect for the authentic, reputable design of newspaper print shines through and Digital Post is trying to pretend it is a paper as much as possible, even the point of a tedious little virtual coffee stain. It is definitely an app. for the pad user that cannot quite let go of the old design; a memory which the ad can sustain with its overgenerous screen size.

Our ratings:

1) Usefulness / Value to user

Rundle has designed an easily accessible, content aggregator which provides varying and mass content. This content is limited to a pre-selected choice of news sources. However the sources are varied and from a wide spectrum such as Reuters, Politico and Yahoo News. I think of the Digital Post as one, giant RSS feed in the esthetically pleasing body of an authentic newspaper. So this newspaper is self updating and it covers multiple sources, so there is no need to manage multiple newspaper apps. This is not a watered down version of a print newspaper. It is unfiltered content direct from the sources. 9/10

2) Useability/ Interface
The interface keeps print authenticity whilst being interactive. The method of usage is very simple. Articles are presented in categories on the top panel such as World News, Technology. The user presses to open them and pinches in and out to open. You can swipe across many articles through the usual swiping motion of the ipad. There are also over 200 articles are loaded up instantly without the need to make extra downloads. The screen presents a full article view with fairly large text. And the app just presents the web page of the content without reformatting to what looks good on the iPad screen. People have expressed an interest in Randle updating the app to have an experience like Instapaper or Read it Later.8/10

3) Price/ Business Model

The price of The Digital Post is extremely attractive to the user, being only $2.99 to download with no subscription fee. It is a considerably cheaper price than other compulsory newspaper subscriptions and so it is going to very popular. 9/10

4) Additional Functionality

The shape-shifting Digital Post can play up to the popularist suite of new media tools like RSS feeds, bookmarks and social networks.. You can share articles with your friends and family and there is an interactive photo gallery. There has been talk of people wanting the app to resemble Instapaper.

Summary

A personalised newspaper app. with a reasonable price-tag and all the nostalgia of the old-print format.

Who needs Inception? We’ve formed our own world here in these pixels; a society formed brick by brick, tag by tag and like by like. And now our society has its own ‘glossy’.

Flipboard is the natural extension of the consumer-driven, news delivery ecosystem that is the iPad. The content here is not just chosen by us, it is us; our lives and our tweets. Flipboard is highly relevant in our current social targeting phenomenon, where corporations are hungry to know our friends and our tastes; where behavioural tracking drives advertising. So why shouldn’t our local magazine be tailored exactly to our tastes? We don’t need editors to spoon-feed us news – let’s have an editorial anarchy!

Our ratings:

1) Usefulness / Value to user

So why would having your social network pages present in a magazine template be useful to you?

1) Ego. This is the Hello! or Tatler of our domestic lives. We love publicity, we love to be heard, and when you flick to your own picture and a personal quote, ‘going to Tescos’, appearing like the front page of a top Glamour feature, you can’t help but feel important.

2) Faster consumption of social content. We follow regular icons on Twitter. Whether it’s the daily antics of Stephen Fry or even Apple tweeting this app, tweets and links are priceless for breaking news and trending topics. But they can be tedious to find; rifling through your news stream. This model maintains the redeeming feature of the regular Newspaper apps: faster consumption of content. In this case: faster consumption of social news. The real-time web flies by at a bewildering pace with an even more bewildering amount of content and pictures. But when you can flick and flick across your twitter feeds and facebook pages, it is faster to consume this grapevine.

2) Usability/ Interface

So how do you use it?

Moving through the Flipboard content is like wading your hand through butter; it is so easy to scrape through. You go to the left hand side of the page and tap; it flips just like a magazine. The articles replicate magazine templates too, with headlines and pictures.

But the flexibility of the interface is better than any app I have seen. In classic, newspaper app style, clicking on a story opens the article. But you can pinch one tweeted article till it’s a small square and move it to the side to open another. So there is an alternative to just flicking: you can multi-task-read the content.

The magazine homepage is made up of photos from your social networking friends, a content page and sections you personalize. There are nine sections which can include topics, facebook and Twitter lists.

On each page lies Facebook status updates, photos and even articles. Only articles that your friends have shared though. The abundance of white space of these pages creates a tidy image without surrounding advertising. Although, note when you are reading an article that you need to tap through to the full article using an included in-app Web browser.

8/10

3) Price/ Business Mode

Hurrah! This app is free! But no one is losing out. Many apps make a free debut so they can reach high ranking and publicity. In the future Flipboard could introduce iAds for extra revenue too. In addition to your facebook and twitter contents, Flipboard offers their own categories like ‘flipboard news’ and music. If companies wanted to be featured as contributors in these categories, Flipboard could make some more money.

9/10

4) Additional Functionality

Flipboard goes further than just creating a magazine out of twitter. After the first version was released, Flipboard joined up with ‘Ellerdale’ whose intelligent data-parsing algorithms have previously been used to create a real-time search engine and trends tracker. Soon, Flipboard utilise this semantic data-analysis technology in its application which will make information and updates from your various social networking connections more relevant.

Teething Problems

The app is currently struggling under a huge usage weight. Connecting it to twitter and facebook can take ages, if it connects at all. Hopefully these teething issues will subside, to leave a great, usable app. The main thing it misses right now, which I believe is in the works, is the ability to add an RSS feed directly into the news stream.

The Flipboard team are trying to sort the over-usage problem out as quickly as possible and you can see their response here

Highlights:

This says it best:

The large profit margins newspapers enjoyed in the past were built on an artificial scarcity: Limited choice for advertisers as well as readers. With the Internet, that scarcity has been taken away and replaced by abundance. No policy proposal will be able to restore newspaper revenues to what they were before the emergence of online news. It is not a question of analog dollars versus digital dimes, but rather a realistic assessment of how to make money in a world of abundant competitors and consumer choice.

Google’s doc leads off with promotion of its efforts to work with news organizations: Living Stories, traffic sent to news sites, technology help, and so on. They might as well just have linked to James Fallows’ paean and Eric Schmidt’s Wall Street Journal op-ed. You’ve heard these points before. My problem with them, as I’ve said, is that Google is trying to make friends with an industry that only wants enemies to blame for its failures. But at last, Google stops pulling punches and slaps down the industry’s self-deluding myths and the FTC’s dangerous ideas.

“[T]he current challenges faced by the news industry are business problems, not legal problems,” Google says,”and can only be addressed effectively with business solutions. Regulatory proposals that undermine the functioning of healthy marketplaces and stall the pace of change are not the solution.”

Google points out that newspapers’ circulation peaked between 1890 and 1920; that newspapers declared radio would kill them and only newspapers should hold the sacred and hallowed mission of news; that newspapers declared TV would kill them and characterized broadcast reporters as “parasites” (a lovely tip of the hat to Rupert Murdoch). We won’t buy that again. “The internet, rather than being the cause of journalism‘s downfall, provides a unique opportunity for news organizations to renew and reinvigorate journalism,” Google says.

Google lectures the FTC and the industry on internet business basics: “Unfortunately, the Discussion Draft does not acknowledge the basic economics of search engines and similar services and instead erroneously suggests that search engines are somehow cannibalizing newspaper advertising revenue rather than serving as an important connection to potential consumers.” Aggregators, Google points out earlier, send traffic and business opportunities to publishers. And Google does not make a significant amount of revenue from news … just as newspapers do not (subsidizing it with more lucrative verticals).

Google lectures the FTC et al on the unbundling of news. Fact o’ life. It then offers a primer on how publishers should be treating the readers who come to them via links.

Google restates the FTC’s dissection of newspaper revenue: 80% advertising, 17% newsstand, 3% subscriptions. “Pay walls,” it says, “could be an effective way to raise the 3% revenue figure.” A zinger for publishers. But Google’s fine with pay walls if publishers want them. It’s just not fine with government regulating them. “Innovating to create products and services that consumers want to pay for,” Google says, “is the only way to guarantee long-term subscription revenue growth, and none of the policy proposals are designed to foster that kind of innovation.” A zinger for the FTC (one I wish Google had dwelled on more since it does know innovation.)

Another zinger to the industry and the FTC comes as Google points out that classified revenue implosion had “nothing to do with copying or free-riding and everything to do with the emergence of a new, more effective and more efficient product into the marketplace. The FTC would ordinarily regard such a situation as a cause for celebration – consumers are getting a better product at a lower price – not an opportunity to slow down that innovation through regulation.”

Google salutes the flag the FTC raised on making government information more accessible — but then Google went the extra step to suggest “harmonization of state and federal law relating to copyrightability of government information.” There, the agreement ends.

Google decries proposals to extend copyright law and limit fair use and repeats its fine arguments against the antiquated notion of hot news from its FlyOnTheWall brief. “Facts, hot or cold, cannot be protected by copyright since there is no author of them,” Google instructs the FTC. “This has been the law of copyright since its inception….”

Google goes after proposals to establish taxes and fees to support legacy news operations. And it attacks efforts to let news organizations fix prices and charge aggregators. The doc makes the FTC eat its own words: “The FTC‘s long-standing position regarding antitrust exemptions properly subordinates a desire to advantage individual firms (here, print news organizations) to the need for a competitive, even playing field that offers the maximum good to consumers.”

Bottom line: There’s no need for the FTC’s meddling:

….Google continues to work with publishers to find ways to ensure that journalism survives and thrives on the Web. We remain optimistic about the future of journalism: The Fourth Estate is too crucial a part of a functioning democracy, and the Internet too powerful a medium, for journalism to die in transition to a Web-first approach. News organizations have more readers than ever, more sources of information than ever, more ways to report and tell stories than ever, and more potential ways to generate revenue than ever. Journalism will change, but the free market and free society will ensure that it won‘t die.

Amen and good night.

Comments to FTC 20 July 2010

Related: Here’s a segment of On the Media this week with me lambasting the FTC:

* bNet praises the anticipated Facebook Stories campaign about the service’s 500 million friends:

Stories of communities using Facebook to come together to help a family in need; stories of finding a long-lost love on Facebook; of finally being able to easily share photos with grandpa, and so on. It will be cheesy. And it will work. Facebook will always have its detractors, but this effort will reinforce the reasons why those 500 million people got on Facebook in the first place — to connect with their fellow humans in times of happiness, sadness and hilarity. (Oh, and because people they know in the real world pressured them into it.)

This campaign is hardly genius. In fact, Facebook execs seem a little slow on the uptake in finally sharing individual users stories now — the social net has been collecting them for years. As Facebook marketing honcho Randi Zuckerberg (yes, sister of that other Zuckerberg), told AllThingsD on Friday: “In the past, it’s been all about the numbers and milestones, and we realized we had never taken the opportunity to celebrate users.” Well, duh.

“Facebook Stories” may finally show Facebook that the best way to combat constant assaults from the privacy police and regulators is with stories of Facebook-inspired engagements, how it helped raise funds for causes important to some parts of its community, and, of course, with pictures of the new puppy shared amongst far-flung family members, replacing anger with “Awwwwww.”

The writer, Catharine Taylor, just can’t resist the snark. Why? Is that the new cool: diminishing rather than understanding the motives of 500 million people? Complain about Facebook’s execution at will, but there’s a phenomenon to be understood here, not dismissed.

* MediaPost reports that those suing Facebook over its privacy changes are going to have a problem: proving damage.

The main hurdle that plaintiffs in privacy lawsuits encounter centers on the difficulty of proving damages. Simply revealing information about another isn’t seen as causing injury — at least not the kind of injury that courts compensate people for.

Facebook now is arguing that a potential class-action lawsuit against it for having changed its privacy settings should be dismissed precisely because the members who are suing haven’t alleged any tangible injuries. “Plaintiffs fail to make a single factual allegation that specifies what information, exactly, Facebook has allegedly improperly disclosed or that Facebook publicly disclosed information that any Plaintiff intended to remain private,” Facebook argues in papers filed last week in federal district court in San Jose, Calif. “Instead, the complaint relies exclusively on vague, generalized allegations that say nothing specific about the named plaintiffs or how they have been harmed by Facebook.”

Right. I’m looking at that same issue in a broader sense in my book on publicness, wondering what the real damage is in privacy matters. Apart from identity theft and stalking — crimes in their own right — it’s sometimes hard to say what the damage is other than to spark fears. But fears aren’t damages.

MediaPost’s writer, Wendy Davis, also reports something positive for Facebook but then she, too, can’t resist the slap: “Facebook reportedly is ready to announce that it now has 500 million members. But if those members don’t repeatedly return to the site, their value to Facebook is limited. And with new social networking options in the works, Facebook could decide it’s in the company’s interest to rethink its approach to privacy.” That’s one of those on-the-other-hand remarks reporters make to inject faux balance: ‘Well, I’ve just told you how 500 million people use this service and the people who are complaining apparently don’t have a legal leg to stand on but I’m still going to say that they should change.’

* And then Forbes points to this video by Casey Neistat in which he says he loves Facebook and endeavors to explain it to the poor souls who can’t figure it out but at the end says using Facebook comes at the utter destruction of one’s privacy … though the video doesn’t back that up.

A Movie for Anyone On FaceBook from Casey Neistat on Vimeo.

Complaining about Facebook has become so hip it’s square. It’s knee-jerk, obvious, repetitive. Let’s move the conversation along. Facebook represents — no, it serves — changes in society and we journalists would be wiser trying to investigate the roots behind it than trying to root against it. Yes, Facebook has been clumsy about its changes lately. Stipulated. But 500 million people can’t all be wrong. Can they?

Here’s one example from Elizabeth Eisenstein’s book, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (recommended by Clay Shirky) about how errata in printed books led to collaboration.

In their early days of printing, books — and other publications — were not treated as temples of perfection, as they are today (which is why their contemporary producers — authors, editors, journalists, publishers — look down so on the ever-imperfect internet). Indeed, before Gutenberg, scribes had long entered errors into books as they were copied and recopied. Printing, Eisenstein says, both multiplied errors in so many more copies and also represented a “great leap” toward standardization because the errors were easier to find.

Print, at first, did not step toward perfection but away from it. “[A]n age-old process of corruption was aggravated and accelerated after print,” Eisenstein says. Errors could spread farther faster (sound familiar?). It was because of the fear of what this new technology could cause that printers were fined for publishing the “wicked Bible” of 1631 (which omitted the “not” from the Seventh Commandment … look it up).

But this process of error was turned to advantage by some. Sixteenth-century editors and publishers, Eisentein says, “created vast networks of correspondents, solicited criticism of each edition, sometimes publicly promising to mention the names of readers who sent in new information or who spotted the errors which would be weeded out.” So publishing became collaborative; that’s what printing allowed.

Eisenstein quotes Lloyd A. Brown from The Story of Maps about map publisher Ortelius:

By the simple expedient of being honest with his readers and inviting criticism and suggestions, Ortelius made his Theatrum a sort of cooperative enterprise on an international basis. He received helpful suggestions from far and wide and cartographers stumbled over themselves to send him their latest maps of regions not covered in the Theatrum.

We call that transparency and collaboration now.

Eisenstein goes farther. She says that publishers “often encouraged readers to launch their own research projects and field trips…. Thus a knowledge explosion was set off. The ‘fall-out’ from Ortelius’ editions, for example, encompassed treatises on topography and local history ranging from Muscovy to Wales.” (My emphasis) She argues, according to James A. Dewar and Peng Hwa Ang in Agent of Change (a book of essays on Eisenstein), that “this feedback reversed the slow degradation of recorded thought and ushered in the era of accumulation of thought on which the Scientific Revolution was built.” Says Eisenstein: “The closed sphere or single corpus passed down from generation to generation, was replaced by an open-ended investigatory process pressing against every advancing frontiers.”

Demonstrating that there’s nothing new that’s not old, when Cory Doctorow spoke to executives of Holtzbrinck in Berlin a few weeks ago (I also spoke), he told how he is doing similar things with his latest book, giving credit to readers who find errors and constantly making the book better thanks to them. And, of course, Cory’s BoingBoing is the product of sharing and collaboration.

This attitude — from the 16th century and from Cory — changes the way we look at books and media, not as sculpture cut out of rock but as still-wet clay. The problem we’ve had in recent history — from the industrial age to today — is that we made mistakes too expensive to admit and that cut us off from correction and collaboration with our public and from the free explosion of knowledge Eisenstein talks about. But the internet — always wet — begins to fix that, doesn’t it? We go back to the future.

In fact, Eisenstein argues that the printing press fixed this exact same problem vis a vis its predecessor technologies. “The sequence of improved editions and ever-expanding reference-works was a sequence without limits — unlike the great library collections amassed by Alexandrian rulers and Renaissance princes.” Their books were static, finished and done. Printed books had editions and readers who could improve them. We lost that advantage — and attitude — over the centuries.

We also lost the openness to collaboration that this new flexibility brought. It’s not just about technology, though. It’s about a worldview, a different relationship between producer and public. Eisenstein quotes David Hume writing to his publisher: “The Power which Printing gives us of continually improving and correcting our Works in successive Editions appears to me the chief Advantage of that art.”

This cultural attitude in the early days could have just as easily gone the other way (as eventually it did anyway). Ann Blair writes in Agents of Change that in the early modern period a few “humanists called for a system of censorship, never implemented, to guarantee that only high-quality editions be printed.” How often do we hear today suggestions to license or at least anoint quality in our new, uncontrolled press?

I don’t want to make it seem as if early books were all temporary and changeable. As Eisenstein next points out, the advantage of printing was that it made permanent knowledge that had been diffuse and was all too easily lost in a few hand-made copies that could be destroyed. It was printing, she said, that enabled Thomas Jefferson to collect all the laws of Virginia, adding (my emphases):

It seems in character for Jefferson to stress the democratizing aspect of the preservative powers of print which secured precious documents not by putting them under lock and key but by removing them from chests and vaults and duplicating them for all to see.”

Bringing knowledge together and making it public is what enables the public to add to it, to correct it, to be inspired by it.

Sound familiar?

More than ever, we are in the business where speed is key.

Look at how critical the speed factor has been in recent tech successes. To be sure, Google has been able to dominate search thanks to the quality of its algorithm. But Google’s win also came from its ability to deliver results faster than anyone else. This speed comes from the combined performance of three pieces of software: Map Reduce slices the request in multiple chunks and assigns the work to multiple CPUs, the Google File System at the core of Google’s distributed architecture and the main database, BigTable, all supported by an unprecedented hardware deployment of several million servers. (A Cornell University paper by a Google Fellow gives a comprehensive description of the company’s architecture, PDF here). All three components are dedicated to speed of service, one of Google’s edges and a must to conquer cloud computing, where waiting for a file update or data transfer is not an option.

Speed is also a key success factor for Amazon and iTunes — the two kings of the friction-free transactions — but also for the video streaming service Hulu, or for business applications such as Salesforce. As for hardware, Apple taught us that speed and fluidity weigh more than a long feature list. Look at the four iterations of the iPhone (leaving aside the antennae issue for once), most of the hardware improvements have been aimed at increasing speed and fluidity of use (OK, battery life as well).

Two of the reasons why the iPad is about to take over the netbook market are its near to zero boot time and its instant application launch. Both are a blow to the PC which remains stuck in its passé architecture despite huge increases in processing power (or perhaps because abundant power facilitates wasteful programming practices). This contributed to the pace of the iPad adoption by the customers: it took 28 days for the iPad to reach a million users, vs. 180 days for the netbook. Consumers love speedy devices.

And, as a final example of speed related services, we can mention classifieds websites derived from the highly successful Blocket in Sweden (Blocket is owned by my former employer Schibsted). The site is so huge that an equivalent about 5.5% of the entire Swedish GNP goes through it! As for the French version called Le Bon Coin (see Monday Note’s story), it delivers 2000 pages per second while relying on fairly small hardware. But the site is entirely coded in C language that provides lightning-fast data delivery (users see 40 pages per visits on average, eight to ten times more than any news site).

Let’s face it, consumers tolerance to latency is closing down to zero. They want ultra-fast boot time, quick network access, fast pages display or download.

Sadly, this issue that has yet to percolate to the surface of news media industry consciousness. Too many web publishers remain convinced that the quality of their editorial is far more important that the underlying technology that supports it. This is made even more obvious with the inception of the iPad and of its applications. The vast majority of news media publishers have not focused enough on speed and seamlessness. Let me repeat a point I’ve already made here several times: the digital news sector needs more investment in technology and techies.

This is a critical issue. As of 2009, in the US market, print represented 12% of time spent but still 26% of advertising spending, and those numbers are falling pretty fast. The internet shows a symmetrical pattern: 28% of time spent but only 13% in ads spending (both growing fast). For news medias, seizing up this opportunity means transferring know-how and content to the internet in the most effective way. This means developing services and applications offering top level speed and design. Otherwise, tech-driven pure players will inevitably fill the gap (and content quality might not be the main criteria of success…) at the expense of sluggish classical medias. No one wants content farms to crush quality news outlets.

Time is becoming the scarcest resource. Consider this: according to the US Census Bureau, time spent on various medias has remained stable since 2004, at around 3500 hours per year per person; the largest part is still taken by all forms of television, which absorb about 1600 hours per person per year. But things are not equal: over the last 6 years, newspapers consumption has dropped by at least 20% as video games shot up by 36%; so-called pure-player internet services rose by 31% and pure-player mobile services by 123%. (Those stats are imprecise: the exploding year 2010 is a projection).

Whatever the metric considered, access to mobile services is likely to grow. And it is directly related to the lifestyle of the population. In Korea and Japan, where people spend more time in public transportation than in any OECD country, the industry responded by developing large sets of mobile services delivered over fast networks. In the United States, time spent in cars (72 minutes per day on average, twice the European level) is more likely to stimulate Natural User Interfaces developments. For media applications, voice recognition systems are still in infancy: just think about a voice-activated digital radio that would allow the user to search and select any show, present or past, while driving.

For classical medias, we are just seeing the beginning of a vast catching-up phase. In doing so, the incumbents face digital native challengers that are way more skilled than they are in dealing with interfaces and with zero latency delivery.

— frederic.filloux@mondaynote.com

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Rewind the clock to June 7th 2010. Steve’s on stage at the WWDC in San Francisco. He’s introducing the iPhone 4 and proudly shows off the new external antenna design. Antennae actually, there are two of them wrapped around the side. Steve touts the very Apple-like combination of function (better reception), and form (elegant design).

And now we enter another part of the multiverse. Jobs stops…and after a slightly pregnant pause, continues: The improved reception comes at a price. If you hold the iPhone like this, if your hand or finger bridges the lower-left gap between the two antennae, the signal strength indicator will go down by two or even three bars. He proceeds to demo the phenomenon. Indeed, within ten seconds of putting the heel of his left thumb on the gap, the iPhone loses two bars. Just to make sure, he repeats the experiment with his index finger, all the while making a live call to show how the connection isn’t killed.

It’s not a bug, it’s a feature! It’s a trade-off: Better reception in the vast majority of cases; some degradation, easily remedied, in a smaller set of circumstances.

Actually, it’s a well-known issues with smartphones. Steve demonstrates how a similar thing happens to Apple’s very own 3GS, and to Nokia, HTC/Android, and RIM phones. Within the smartphone species, it’s endemic but not lethal.

Nonetheless, adds Apple’s CEO, we can’t afford even one unhappy customer. Buy in confidence, explore all the new features. If you’re not satisfied, do us the favor of returning the phone within two weeks. At the very least, we want you to say the iPhone didn’t work for you but we treated you well. If you fill out a detailed customer feedback report, we’ll give you an iPod Shuffle in consideration for your time.

One last thing. Knowing the downside of the improved antennae arrangement, we’ve designed a “bumper”, a rubber and plastic accessory that fits snuggly around the iPhone 4’s edges and isolates the antennae from your hands. The bumpers come in six colors—very helpful in multi-iPhone 4 families—and costs a symbolic $2.99.

The antenna “feature” excites curiosity for a few days, early adopters confirm its existence as well as the often improved connections (often but not always—it’s still an AT&T world). The Great Communicator is lauded for his forthright handling of the design trade-off and the matter recedes into the background.

If you can’t fix it, feature it.

End of science fiction.

In a different part of the multiverse, things don’t go as well.

Jobs makes no mention of the trade-off. Did he know, did Apple engineers, execs, marketeers know about the antenna problem? I don’t know for sure and let’s not draw any conclusions from the way Jobs avoids holding the iPhone 4 by its sides while showing it off to Dmitry Medvedev:

There’s a more telling hint. Apple had never before offered an iPhone case or protector of any kind, leaving it to third parties. But now, for the iPhone 4, a first: We have the bumper…at $29, not $2.99. (And which, by the way, prevents the phone from fitting into the new iPhone 4 dock.)

As usual for an Apple product, the new iPhone gets a thorough examination from enterprising early adopters, and many of them discover the antenna gap “feature”. As one wrote Jobs:

It’s kind of a worry. Is it possible this is a design flaw? Regards – Rory Sinclair

Steve’s reply:

Nope. Just don’t hold it that way.

Steve, No! Don’t diss your beloved customer. No tough love with someone who’s holding your money in his/her pocket.

A customer complaint dialogue is structured around a two-position toggle: a) it’s terrible, b) it’s nothing. The first one to grab a position forces the other person to assume the only one left. When Dear Customer calls, “Canon Law” dictates the first words out of my mouth: ‘This is terrible, how could we have let this happen to you!’. This forces the caller to concede: ‘Well, it’s not the end of the world, I just would like to…’ A cooperative conversation ensues.

However, if I argue that it isn’t the end of civilization, civility goes out the window. Dear Customer feels disrespected and insists things are awful. It’ll take time to lower the temperature and hear one another.

Steve Jobs’ cavalier dismissal worked as per the theorem: Dear Customer got mad. The media saw red meat, planted its teeth, and won’t let go.

Steve is an habitual offender. In the Summer of 2007, Apple abruptly (and rightly) dropped the original iPhone price by $200, from $599 to $399. Consumers who had bought their iPhones a few weeks or days before weren’t happy.

Steve Jobs’ first response:

“That’s technology. If they bought it this morning, they should go back to where they bought it and talk to them. If they bought it a month ago, well that’s what happens in technology.”

That pill didn’t go down well. A couple of days later, Apple granted early adopters a $100 rebate and the issue went away.

Recently, when a poor blogger kept pestering Jobs about porn and censorship, Apple’s CEO lost patience and lashed out:

By the way, what have you done that’s so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?

We can’t help but pity the poor schmoe who challenged Jobs to a verbal duel (full text here), although he should have known better. Sooner or later, Steve would call him an ankle-biter. But…now that Steve has risen to the very top of the world perhaps he could morph into a magnanimous sage—and a cautious one, knowing that these exchanges will be milked for all they’re worth in page views.

As I was traveling, I watched the whole Antennagate mess go on and on, including a longish letter from Apple ascribing the problem to the algorithm used to report signal strength. Too late. As in our sci-fi, the facts in that letter should have been part of the announcement.

With the advantage of hindsight, an obvious question arises: Why didn’t anyone in Jobs’ entourage—or on Apple’s Board of Directors—take Steve aside to reason with him, to remind him of a few customer relations tenets?

Well-meaning but not realistic.

We have to take the whole Steve instead of futilely hoping that he’ll shows us the “good parts” while suppressing his darker side. He’s a genius like our industry has never seen. That’s why, in January 2009, I wrote that we owe him seven statues.

With the possible exception of the Dalaï Lama, our highest achievers aren’t the most pleasant of people. It’s the darker side that fuels their creativity and their relentless pursuit of a vision.

If you want the life energy and the economy of his sublime drawings, you have to accept the real Picasso; you want Kind of Blue, make peace with who Miles Davis was; you want Saint-Laurent’s calligraphs on the Great Wall of Fashion, allow his behavior.

[For good Summer reading, get The Beautiful Fall, Alicia Drake’s amazingly felicitous chronicle of the parallel Lagerfeld and Saint-Laurent years. The book is so “good” Pierre Bergé, Saint-Laurent’s longtime partner, tried to quash the French translation.]

So, yes, I imagine Steve’s lieutenants and directors wincing, but they stick with him because they’ve made peace with reality: Steve is Steve, he’s leading us somewhere, with or without rationality and civility.

We’re now at this past Friday’s “surprise” press event in Cupertino. (You can watch it, minus the press Q&A at the end, here.)

Let’s start with the bad news. Instead of coming out with a simple: “We screwed up, I screwed up. Please accept my apologies. We should have acknowledged the issue when we announced the iPhone…”, Jobs went through a lame “We’re not perfect, smartphones aren’t perfect” routine. Make a clean breast of it and move on.

Second ugly mistake: Blaming the media. Claiming “this has been blown out of proportion”, and whining that “after 34 years you’d think we would have earned some trust” throws more red meat to bloggers and journos. Steve needs to accept there’s payback going on: You can’t dismissively lord over the media and not expect them to kick you when you’re down.

It was a welcome and disarming idea for Steve to play the Antenna Song at the beginning of the conference; less so to imperiously declare there was no Antennagate—that’s for the media to conclude.

The Magnanimous Steve would have said: “We’re proud to be held to higher standards, and we embrace them even if we sometimes fall short.” Everybody nods and moves forward. Complaining about the media when they’ve done so much for Apple (and for themselves in the process—it’s a codependent relationship) isn’t a winning move.

Now, the good news: The numbers. Moving past the sales volume (3 million units, despite the media storm) there are the returns and dropped calls. According to Jobs, AT&T’s retail operation reports a 1.7% return rate for the iPhone 4—compare that to 6% for the previous iPhone 3GS. The rate of dropped calls appears to be 1 percentage point higher for the iPhone 4, a statistically insignificant difference. (After the conference, a few reporters were invited to visit Apple’s on-campus $100 million wireless testing lab.)

More good news for Apple, the iPhone carries features such as FaceTime. This is likely to be the great sales virus that infects families, as Apple very well knows. They hired Sam Mendes, the director of American Beauty, for their first FaceTime commercial, the fifth in the gallery here. Pulling at the heartstrings, shameless, effective. I like Mendes’ last segment the best, two people using sign language over the videophone.

Eventually, Antennagate will be forgotten, leaving only a scar—or a bumper—on an otherwise accomplished product.

Let’s end on a poetic note.

I used to think Apple folks were atheists…until the Jesus Phone. Then they saw the path and the light: only a divine creator could have had the iPhone in mind when iTunes was hatched to bestow upon the iPod its lasting market power. The iPhone comes out and iTunes becomes the godsend that begot the Apple App Store with its five billion downloads. Erstwhile heathens, now believers.

Did that same god just sting Steve to remind him of her existence — and powers?

— JLG@mondaynote.com

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Some of the people he responded to were well-known people, others were not. One guy even used the Old Spice spokesperson as a marriage proposal.

This marketing program spread like wildfire on the web, and to me, it seemed to be an incredibly important example of how the web is changing marketing and how businesses connect with customers. Instead of the top-down one-to-many approach, Old Spice tried the opposite. They tried one-to-one.

In a single day, the marketing team behind the Old Spice campaign produced 89 videos. That’s crazy. And most of them were really offbeat and engaging.

When many businesses try to leverage the web to create an “innovative’ marketing program, they focus too much on the technology, and not enough on the people. They create complicated systems where customers earn ‘points,’ and ask customers to give before they can receive. (eg: opt-in, log in or sign up)

But what often works best are things that are simple. Things that engage real people in basic ways. And that’s what Old Spice did. These are the lessons I am considering from it:

Get Closer to Customers
What I loved most about the campaign is that it made consumers feel a part of it. While Old Spice clearly hoped for this to go viral, it was packaged as if the spokesperson was speaking to a single person.

Be Nimble
Producing so many videos in such a short period of time meant that the normal public relations folks within the brand couldn’t vet the material as they normally would . This took away layers of red tape, and put the creative folks in charge of connecting directly with the audience.

Target Influencers
The marketing team clearly targeted influencers and established a system to help them identify who to respond to. This helped the message spread, as each influencer would promote the custom video to their following.

Target the Little Guy
They also responded to people on Twitter who had small followings. This gave everyone the sense that they could be chosen, that they too could win the lottery.

Don’t Worry About Owning the Platform
Old Spice relied on two platforms they didn’t own: YouTube to post the videos, and Twitter to spread the message. The connection to customers was more important than owning the platform.

Real-Time is a Powerful Engagement Factor
The fact that the video responses came so quickly made the entire program incredibly engaging. It made consumers rethink their own expectations of how to interact with a brand.

Have Fun
Clearly, the creative team who worked on this had a ton of fun. And the consumer feels that two – it’s as if we are all in on it together.

And for the record, I’ve used Old Spice for years and years. Suddenly, I feel relevant!

Read more about the Old Spice campaign here, here and here.

If you feel I can help you out in your marketing evolution, give me a call: 973-981-8882. Here are some other ways you can connect with me:

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The latest raised palm comes from Columbia President Lee Bollinger in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal, of all places. This could send BBC-hater Rupert Murdoch to his grave so he can spin there. Bollinger proposes that we start an American BBC by pooling (merging?) the resources of the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, PBS, and NPR.

He repeats the old saw that American media is already government subsidized. Except postal subsidies are meaningless as print and the post office decline. Legal ads should be going to the web for free to save taxpayers money anyway. I wish PBS and NPR did not rely on any government money so it would not be put under government pressure and could operate with true independence. And I do think broadcast spectrum should be sold so it is not seen as public airwaves (broadcast itself becoming meaningless) and so it is not subject to government censorship (see today’s victory for the First Amendment).

Bollinger argues that we’re getting the BBC thanks to the British taxpayer. Well, yes, the BBC has funded its world service for years to extend its empire; their choice. But I pay a fee on Sirius to hear them. And its TV channels in the U.S. are ad-supported, as is its web site. As BBC budgets are attacked by the Tories, I’d say it’s more likely our marketing economy will subsidize their free news — if Murdoch doesn’t stop them.

When Columbia presented its plan to save journalism — which included government subsidy — I had this discussion with Bollinger and he pointed out that I am subsidized by government as a professor at a state university. Touché. But I’d rather raise money to support my work from foundations and companies and revenue-generating activities. “Indeed,” Bollinger writes in the Journal, “the most problematic funding issues in academic research come from alliances with the corporate sector.”

Bollinger then questions the editorial integrity of the American press he wants to save, saying: “To take a very current example, we trust our great newspapers to collect millions of dollars in advertising from BP while reporting without fear or favor on the company’s environmental record only because of a professional culture that insulates revenue from news judgment.” Who has mishandled BP more — the press or the government?

Shockingly, he mentions as models of state-supported media, not just the BBC but also China’s CCTV and Xinhua news and Qatar’s Al Jazeera. In what sane world is the Chinese government’s relationship with news a model. What would Google do?

Bollinger suggests taking down the prohibition on beaming propaganda broadcasters VoA and RFE into the U.S. “This system needs to be revised and its resources consolidated and augmented with those of NPR and PBS to create an American World Service that can compete with the BBC and other global broadcasters,” Bollinger concludes. “The goal would be an American broadcasting system with full journalistic independence that can provide the news we need. Let’s demonstrate great journalism’s essential role in a free and dynamic society.”

I think we can demonstrate and build that independence by teaching tomorrow’s journalists to build strong, sustainable, and independent businesses. We just disagree.

: SEE ALSO: George Brock of the other City University (London) and Roy Greenslade of the Guardian and City as well.

Brock and I agree. The rational Greenslade wants to agree but the emotional Greenslade doesn’t. He, like Brock (and me), respects the talent, value, and experience that is trapped in dying institutions and so he, unlike Brock and me, wants to overcome what seems to be his better sense and agree with Bollinger that we should consider government rescue.

With respect, I think Greenslade’s logical leap illustrates the problem with Bollinger’s thinking: They assume that the business model of journalism is hopeless. I do not. That is what needs discussion.

Quite to the contrary, I believe — based on research, which is one of the values we add from a university — that journalism could well be more sustainable, accessible, and accountable than before because of the efficiency brought by specialization (do what you do best, etc.), free platforms (see John Paton’s Ben Franklin Project), networks (see Growthspur), collaboration (or Alan Rusbridger would call it mutualization), not to mention the casting off of industrial ways and expenses (in the pressroom as well as in the newsroom).

Greenslade acknowledges that government support would be a regrettable idea and so he can come to it only if he believes — as he says he does — that the web is not sufficient “to act as a competent watchdog.”

Well, all four of us — Bollinger, Brock, Greenslade, and I — teach in universities. If we do not together believe that we can equip the next generation of journalists to build the structure that creates that competent watchdog, then perhaps we should not be teaching journalism, as it would be irresponsible to do so. But I don’t think any of us believes that, for we all teach or support the teaching of journalism. So I say the question we should be investigating with all the rigor and diligence we can muster is how to build that future. Perhaps Bollinger does indeed believe that the only solution is to seek government rescue but I say it is far too soon to resort to what Greenslade acknowledges should not be a first resort. We have a lot of resorts to go through first.

: AND MORE: Reason attacks, as do Mark Tapscott and Claudia Rosett, who says: “If, as Bollinger suggests, the provision of adequate news coverage cannot be entrusted to the market, then what about such vital matters as shelter and medical care?”

I’ll just bet we’ll soon hear from Bollinger or his allies that at least he sparked a discussion. But he sparked the wrong discussion. We shouldn’t be debating which desperate move to take having given up on the sustainable future of journalism. We should be discussing how to build that sustainable future, damnit.

The Social Science Research Center in Berlin brought together 225 students at the Technical University there and offered them the chance to buy the same DVDs from two different online stores. Each store required the customers’ name and postal and email addresses. But one store also required date of birth and personal monthly income. That store also offered a one-euro discount on every item. Of 42 purchases made by this group, 39 opted to give away the additional personal information to get the discount.

What puzzled the researchers is that even when the discount was taken away, the two stores attracted equal business. “Thus the more privacy friendly firm failed to attract more customers even though prices were equal at both stores,” the study says (PDF here).

In spite of all of this, in a post-study questionnaire, 75% of the participants said they “have a very strong interest in data protection” and 95% said they “are interested in the protection of their personal information.” So they say one thing and do another. The rhetoric about privacy should perhaps be judged accordingly.

At the same time, German media and government are quite heated about privacy. The New York Times separately noted the irony that Germans by their actions don’t show such profound concern about privacy. To which a German government official who’s going after Google and Facebook told The Times that “his agency was trying to protect consumers from themselves.”

Whoa. Any time a government says it is trying to protect its citizens from themselves, beware. That is a government that is trying to get citizens to behave the way it wants them to behave, whether they want to or not. Isn’t that exactly the opposite of what government should do? And beware media that keep telling the public what it thinks they should care about whether they care about it or not. They, too, are out of touch.

Yes, privacy matters. But we need to get past the rhetoric, past the heat, and examine what people really do, what risks they are really under, what benefits they pass up when they decide not to share. That’s what my book will examine.

(Here’s my presentation in Berlin on the German privacy paradox.)

No shit.

Fox is the official victor here. The other networks also win. But we all win whenever the First Amendment does.

The Appeals Court, to its credit, notes how much media and the country have changed since George Carlin first uttered his seven dirty words on radio and the Supreme Court blushed. Says the appeals panel:

The Networks argue that the world has changed since Pacifica and the reasons underlying the decision are no longer valid. Indeed, we face a media landscape that would have been almost unrecognizable in 1978. Cable television was still in its infancy. The Internet was a project run out of the Department of Defense with several hundred users. Not only did Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter not exist, but their founders were either still in diapers or not yet conceived. In this environment, broadcast television undoubtedly possessed lives of all Americans.”

The same cannot be said today. The past thirty years has seen an explosion of media sources, and broadcast television has become only one voice in the chorus. Cable television is almost as pervasive as broadcast – almost 87 percent of households subscribe to a cable or
satellite service – and most viewers can alternate between broadcast and non-broadcast channels with a click of their remote control. The
internet, too, has become omnipresent, offering access to everything from viral videos to feature films and, yes, even broadcast television programs. As the FCC itself acknowledges, “[c]hildren today live in a media environment that is dramatically different from the one in which their parents and grandparents grew up decades ago.”

Nonetheless, the Supreme Court’s doctrine in the Carlin decision stands. But this court is not reinterpreting that rule of law. Instead it finds that the FCC’s police is “impermissibly vague.” That is: “A law or regulation is impermissibly vague if it does not ‘give the person of ordinary intelligence a reasonable opportunity to know what is prohibited.’” And the First Amendment requires extra attention to protection from such vagueness. The court said:

We agree with the Networks that the indecency policy is impermissibly vague. The first
problem arises in the FCC’s determination as to which words or expressions are patently offensive. For instance, while the FCC concluded that “bullshit” in a “NYPD Blue” episode was patently offensive, it concluded that “dick” and “dickhead” were not. Other expletives such as “pissed off,” up yours,” “kiss my ass,” and “wiping his ass” were also not found to be patently offensive…. Thus, the word “bullshit” is indecent because it is “vulgar, graphic and explicit” while the words “dickhead” was not indecent because it was “not sufficiently vulgar, explicit, or graphic.” This hardly gives broadcasters notice of how the Commission will apply the factors in the future. The English language is rife with creative ways of depicting sexual or excretory organs or activities, and even if the FCC were able to provide a conew offensive and indecent words are invented every day….

The same vagueness problems plague the FCC’s presumptive prohibition on the words “fuck” and “shit” and the exceptions thereto. Under the FCC’s current policy, all variants of these two words are indecent unless one of two exceptions apply. The first is the “bona fide news” exception, which the FCC has failed to explain except to say that it is not absolute. The second is the artistic necessity exception, in which fleeting expletives are permissible if they are “demonstrably essential to the nature of an artistic or educational work or essential to informing viewers on a matter of public importance.”

That’s how Saving Private Ryan got away with “fuck” and “shit” while on The Blues, they were dirty. In other words: when white people say them, the words are clean, but not when black people say them. Says the court: “The FCC created these exceptions because it words would raise grave First Amendment concerns.” Yup.

The policy may maximize the amount of speech that the FCC can prohibit, but it results in a standard that even the FCC cannot articulate or apply consistently. Thus, it found the use of the word “bullshitter” on CBS’s The Early Show to be “shocking and gratuitous” because it occurred “during a morning television interview,” before reversing itself because the broadcast was a “bona fide news interview.” In other words, the FCC reached diametrically opposite conclusions at different stages of the proceedings for precisely the same reason – that the word “bullshitter” was uttered during a news program. And when Judge Leval asked during oral argument if a program aboutthe dangers of pre-marital sex designed for teenagers would be permitted, the most that the FCC’s lawyer could say was “I suspect it would.” With millions of dollarAmendment values at stake, “I suspect” is simply not good enough.

Importantly, the court recognizes that the FCC has chilled speech. CBS affiliates would not air a 9/11 documentary because it contained curse words — and I can’t imagine a better cause for them. As I argued in this column, bullshit is political speech. Sandra Loh was fired from an NPR station because she said a bad word. “Broadcasters,” the court says, “may well decide not to invite controversial guests on to t heir programs for fear that an unexpected fleeting expletive will result in fines.” A station did not air Pat Tillman’s funeral because of family members’ grief and language. Fix didn’t air a repeat of a That ’70s Show episode — a Kaiser Family Foundation award winner — that dealt with masturbation. They were no longer masters of their domain.

Sex and the magnetic power of sexual attraction are surely among the most predominant themes in the study of humanity since the Trojan War. The digestive system and excretion are also important areas of human attention. By prohibiting all “patently offensive” references to sex, sexual organs, and excretion without giving adequate guidance as to what “patently offensive” means, the FCC effectively chills speech, because broadcasters have no way of knowing what the FCC will find offensive. To place any discussion topics at the broadcaster’s peril has the effect of promoting wide self-censorship material which should be completely protected under the First Amendment.

All is not won. The Appeals Court says the FCC could create constitutional policy — this just isn’t it. And this could return to the Supreme Court. But for now, let’s all say a celebratory “BULLSHIT.”

Do I buy the new iPhone 4? Do I buy a new Android? Do I shift on Android from T-Mobile to Verizon? Do I move to one phone and platform? If so, which one? Do I get mifi? How do I convince my wife it’s not insane to buy new phones? (The last one’s the toughest because when she looks at me like I’m crazy, she’s right.) So here’s my rationale and rationalization:

I think I need to get the iPhone 4 to understand the impact of things like FaceTime and the things Jobs et al will invent (see my previous post). But I do think I need to see what develops on Android (see another previous post). T-Mobile just doesn’t work for me, though I love their unlimited month-to-month plan. So I’m thinking I may get the Droid X on Verizon and use it to tether as a mifi. I’d then cancel my T-Mobile account and my AT&T laptop card and end up almost even. Well, close enough for jazz and me.

What’s your advice?

Is it possible that the App Inventor could do to development what Quark did to publishing and Blogger did to the web: enable anybody to do it?

Dave Winer is skeptical and speaks from experience. He and I just made a bet: “that in two years Google’s Android app developer will not have any effect on the priesthood of programming.” If it does, Dave pays me — and he’d be a happy man if he loses. But I fear he’s right and I’ll end up paying him $20, making us both sad because in my view it’s a good thing when priesthoods get displaced. (Nick Carr, Andrew Keen, et curmudeonly al would disagree.)

As soon as I tweeted about App Inventor, developer curmudgeonliness erupted. @srmccoy said, “I’m afraid the WYSIWYG model is going to create a bunch of lazy devs who never bother to learn the skills of their craft.” That’s what I heard about Quark and design in its time. @fakebaldur said, “Quark was an exp. app for print designers, blogger free for amateurs and App Inventor a hideous monstrosity for geeks.” Straddling the fence, @thunsaker said, “I’m kinda scared of what this will produce. Glad that non-techies will bet a taste of development, though.” Now that’s the attitude.

Will App Inventor yield lots of crappy apps? Of course, it will, just as Quark enabled sinful design and Blogger wasted bits. That is true of all such technologies that lower the barrier to entry to a former domain of priests. That’s precisely what the printing press did. As much as the web breaks down priesthoods, it created new ones. Developers are merely the latest. They say that mortals can’t do what they do. But what if they could? What if they could translate a thought not just into words and design but into action?

I imagine Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com going positively batshit over this, enabling businesses to create apps for, say, their sales teams to manage and share information about and with clients. I imagine small businesses using App Inventor to create apps like Chipotle’s that enable customers to make burrito orders before they arrive. I imagine teachers being able to make exercises and quizzes in apps (forget the electronic textbook; give me the electronic workbook!).

More important, I imagine, as @thunsaker says, someone who never thought she’d develop picking up App Inventor to make the first step and then deciding to learn more using more sophisticated means. That’s how priesthoods really get destroyed. Oh, at first, the priests always lament that people can do crappy versions of what they do. But soon, they, too, start making good versions. And that’s when priests are displaced.

App Inventor is also a brilliant competitive shot at Apple. Steve Jobs would never tolerate this as he won’t tolerate crap. So those companies and small business and teachers I listed above will have to go to the free space of Google’s Android to create. There’s a clear competitive differentiation. Google believes it will win by having more devices running its free OS and more applications running on them.

But this also brings out a key challenge for Google and another key competitive differentiation: quality. There will be — there already is — more crap on Android. So Google has to do two things: invent better means to surface quality (if anybody can do that, they damned well better be able to) and encourage the creation of more quality (I think they need to invest in talent, as YouTube is doing with video creators). That’s what I said on the latest This Week in Google.

On Twitter @charlesarthur invoked Sturgeon’s Law. I’ll invoke another. What App Inventor really does is bring the new law of content creation even to development: In a world of overabundant content creation, value flows to the curator. Before, development talent and resources were scarce. Now, if their product is not scarce and if easy tools make the creation of crap easier, then there’s value in finding and enabling the good stuff. The trick is extracting value from that; that’s the problem journalists are having today.

As my son goes off to college to study computer science, this makes me wonder whether there’s a new opportunity and challenge here. Dave Winer’s right to question whether there will be any impact at all. We’ll see. I have $20 and more riding on this.

Now, of course, the video call only brings them closer together than a plain old telephone call could have — or an email or an SMS or (does anybody send them anymore?) a letter. That’s what makes Facetime so miraculous: it is finally almost like being there. They can almost touch. And that’s what’s tragic: they can’t.

This is to say that FaceTime is terribly intimate. And that’s what struck me, too: In an instant, the video of the people shifts from broadcasting to intimacy, from making a YouTube video millions may see to making a call for one. Is this how we’ll use video now, to connect two-at-a-time? Or will that now seem smalltime? Will we use the front-facing camera to face the world still? Will video be public still or private?

I don’t know the answers to those questions. We’ll know only when these tools get into the hands of enough people — and when developers use the camera to create new applications and when AT&T gets its act together so we can use the camera anywhere, not just on wifi.

Maybe the original video vision of Seesmic (before it became a Twitter app) comes to life: we hold video conversations. Maybe the camera only makes it easier for anonymous pervs to peddle their penises on Chatroulette. Maybe we walk away creation toward communication. Maybe we leave time-shifting for live. Maybe we invent new forms of phone sex. Maybe Leo Laporte uses them to reinvent the podcast and cable news uses them to reinvent vox pop. Or maybe nothing changes as we already have cameras everywhere; these are merely more portable.

Watch the commercials and see what visceral ping it elicits in you.

See MC Siegler breaking down the emotional appeal of the iPhone ads on TechCrunch here and here.

Two years ago, Earl Wilkinson, the managing director of the International Newsmedia Marketing Association (INMA), produced a chart showing how the growth in the number of journalists employed by US dailies had not prevented a decrease in circulation:

A former journalist himself, Earl is a strong advocate of editorial differentiation; therefore, he is not against large newsrooms. But the fact remains: on the US market, the size of the newsroom isn’t a shield against readership erosion. With the possible exception of India, the era of big editorial cathedrals is gone. In France for instance, according to a 2009 study conducted by the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), the number of journalists almost tripled in two generations, about 50 years. For the same time period, the number of copies sold per 1000 inhabitants shrunk by 66%, from 360 about 120 per 1000 people.

I took the OECD report titled The Evolution of News and the Internet and fed it to Excel. The output shows the following trends:

#1: editorial workforce. If adding journalists has proven unable to reverse the trend in reader depletion, in any given market, the more numerous the journalists are, the better the newspaper industry holds. The chart below covers seven countries, with two superimposed data sets. First, in blue, the number of journalists per 100,000 daily copies sold; second, in red, paid circulation per 1000 inhabitants.

Sweden and Norway show the most favorable ratios: strongest readership and the biggest editorial staff per copies sold. Italy shows the worst numbers: relatively few journalists for the lowest readership.

One notable exception: with only 41 journalists per 100,000 copies sold, Japan enjoys the highest newspaper penetration with more than 402 copies sold each day per 1000 inhabitants. The reason is Japan has five of the world’s top 10 paid dailies; among them, the Yomiuri Shimbun has a daily circulation of 10m copies, and the Asahi Shimbun 8m. While Japan has 13 times less titles that the United States, its population is only 2.4 times smaller. As for the US, it has 112 journalists per 100,000 copies sold and a penetration of 159 copies per 1000 inhabitants. But those numbers are degrading fast due to a higher reliance on disappearing advertising revenue.

#2: Productivity depends on market density and concentration.

To produce a million copies per day, it takes

… 414 journalists in Japan, a record high dense market in which the average daily sells almost 500,000 copies

… but 1600 in Sweden and Finland where a daily sells typically 40,000 copies

…and 1122 in the US where, on average, a daily sells 34,000 copies

Trend #3: Profitability. In Europe, there are basically two groups:

- Those who have been able to maintain a decent profitability through workforce adjustments. This group includes Finland, Germany, Norway – a country in which companies can be quite decisive when it’s time to restore profitability.

- The others, who have made no adjustments and whose profitability lags (only Sweden suffers from both downsizing and weak profitability).

The chart below shows profitability and its main components.

Trend #4: Subsidies. The OECD data show too many subsidies lead to low operating profit, no workforce adjustments and decreasing readership.

Italy and France are the perfect examples. Compared to Sweden, Italy has 4 times less readers par 1000 people but 12 times more subsidies per reader.

For France, the numbers are slightly better: 3 times less readers than Sweden and 5 times more direct subsidies (according to a conservative estimates, 10% of the revenue of the French dailies comes from public funding). The latest OECD data shows that neither France nor Italy have undertaken any sensible downsizing.

In fact, in Europe, the soundest newspaper economy is the British one: no direct subsidies, only a VAT at zero (like in Finland and Norway).

— frederic.filloux@mondaynote.com

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Instead of spending your hard-earned dollars loading your Kindle or iPad with fictional potboilers, head over to Scribd and download the Department of Justice Complaint vs. Russian spies (June 2010).

Why submit yourself to the tedium of ponderous DOJ prose? Aren’t such legal documents boring, repetitive, written in an esoteric English argot meant to confuse lay people? Yes, and this one is no exception. But it also contains fascinating and, at times, amusing insights into the people, scope, and technology of the long term embedding of Russian spies into the US.

Deployed by the SVR, Russia’s spook agency and successor to the fabled KGB, the wannabe saboteurs used carefully built American identities and led “unremarkable” lives. Their exact purpose isn’t clear from the DOJ story. They didn’t seem to be engaged in active spying, they appeared to have been planted “just in case”. This could be evidence of Russia’s very long view, of the SVR’s willingness to make investments for a distant future, or of a plan to build a support base for other agents. We won’t know for awhile, and may never know. The agents have pleaded guilty to activities other than spying, such as money laundering and using false identities…and now they’re gone, handed over in a Vienna trade, just like the Good Old Cold War days.

For us geeks, the amusing part is the collection of hackerdom gems contained in the DOJ file. From social engineering to ad-hoc WiFi networking, MAC-address filtering, steganography, and unsecured passwords, these supposedly “highly trained” individuals looked more like Keystone Spooks than Hollywood superspies.

A good example of social engineering is described when one of the culprits experiences unspecified software problems with a laptop. (Sound familiar? We’ll refrain from the easy jabs.) Enter an FBI agent passing as a Russian Consulate employee, “I’m here to help”, who borrows the laptop with a promise to fix the problem. The machine is broken into, fully explored, and yields a rich trove of unprotected files.

In another case, the Feds, while “inspecting” a home (legally, of course), find a password left in the open, helpfully written down on a plain piece of paper.

Our spies thought steganography provided a safe and effective way to conceal messages inside innocuous-looking documents. Strong cryptography isn’t enough: If the folks at the NSA see an email message or a radio transmission they can’t decode, that alone will raise a red flag, bringing no end of trouble for the sender and receiver. One must have a way to exchange encrypted messages without being seen. Hence the slight of hand: Hide the message in plain sight.

The first known implementation of the idea was the microdot, the invention of the perfectly-named Professor Zapp. In today’s version, the message is embedded inside a picture that’s posted on a Web site.

A digital picture is made of pixels, say 3,000 by 2,000. Each pixel is represented by a number, 8, 12, or 14 bits. Let’s use 12 bits for our example. The picture is a 12-layer mille-feuilles, each layer containing 6 million bits. With a modest amount of software magic, you can replace one of these layers with a new set of 6 million bits—bits that hold your encrypted message.

What happens next? To the human eye, not much. The layer swapping business introduces a modest amount of noise that our eyes and brains easily overlook and correct. Your picture is now on Flickr or Facebook, to be downloaded by someone with software that can extract the right layer and retrieve the message.

It’s a clever technique—but it’s well-known to counterspies. What our brains see as forgivable noise looks like a man-made artifact, a statistical abnormality when it’s scanned by an NSA computer. The message might be inscrutable but the activity is detected. (This assumes that the NSA knows where to look, or that it can scan the billions of pictures—two billion on Facebook alone—that are uploaded every day. If Facebook can process such quantities, perhaps the NSA can as as well, or it can discreetly ask for help.)

The DOJ complaint describes another ingenious way of exchanging messages: An ad-hoc Wifi network between laptops. One spy sits inside a coffee shop, the other is inside a car parked outside, or even driving by. It seems safe because the computers are connected directly to each other—there’s no Internet involved, no public network that can be monitored by counterspies. To add security, they use Mac address filtering instead of the more mundane login and password process. Mac addresses date back to the origins of the Ethernet; every device gets a unique identifier, something like 01-23-45-67-89-ab. Our spies make sure that only two specific Mac addresses are allowed on their ad-hoc network.

(Un)fortunately, the counterspies are in on the scheme. With a simple packet sniffer, such as Nmap, the FBI out-geek the spies and monitor the exchange. This was made particularly easy because the Russians kept re-using the same Mac addresses for their “surreptitious” Wifi network transmissions. They were probably lulled into a sense of false security.

Techies roll their eyes: How gauche! They should have known better than to reuse the same addresses. Mac address spoofing is so easy! With address spoofing you can make up hardware identifiers at will. Nothing necessarily nefarious, here, Powerline Ethernet adapters do it all the time. A couple of command lines in Linux or Mac, or a few Registry entries in Windows and you’re done. You’ve created a different, unpredictable set of network addresses for each exchange. Bury these constantly-changing Mac addresses in an urban environment with its thousands of active WiFi networks…the counterspies wouldn’t know where to look.

The word is the same in Russian: Idiots.

My expert friends go further: Why did these bumblers use laptops? Today, you can easily create a bootable Linux system on a USB drive. With a thumb drive, almost any computer, public, private, borrowed can be used. There’s no need to struggle with “software issues” on an easily compromised laptop. Easy to use, easy to hide or destroy if needed.

These mistakes are strange, almost unexplainable. Russian hackers are considered world-class. Why didn’t the SVR enlist their help? Were the apparatchiks concerned about their native hackers being a little too free, or too clever, or too “market-oriented”? Did they rely on the “safer” but duller techies in their midst?

We’ll see if anything more comes to the surface in the coming weeks and months.

For more juicy espionage summer reading, look up Robert Littell’s books. Some of them are eerily consonant with the DOJ document.

— JLG@mondaynote.com

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So you’ve done a lot of research, worked through many different strategy ideas, analyzed the technological systems requires to make this change, and come up with a vision for your future. Maybe you’ve even created a PowerPoint presentation to communicate this change, and scheduled a roadshow to meet with each group in your company to get them on board.

But now, you are a few months into the shift, and finding it tougher to affect change. System rollouts are progressing, senior leadership has been working with you to revamp product and sales offerings, and others in your industry are impressed with your vision. And yet, the change comes more slowly than you would like, and at every turn, you find an entrenched business practice, a team that isn’t developing as you had hoped – a ship that can’t turn.

Organizational change is hard. It requires more than just the proper systems, technological savvy and strategic direction. Why? Because it’s easy to get a room full of 100 people to clap at a PowerPoint, but difficult to align and balance the needs, fears, motivations, and skills of those 100 people.

Sure, we try to pretend that this doesn’t exist. That every employee isn’t motivated by logic alone, but perhaps some deeper human emotions. I don’t mean that anyone has any ill-will, just that human beings are a funny bunch. And shoving them into a gray cubes and asking them to drink the PowerPoint Kool-Aid doesn’t always have the intended results.

Below are some ideas to help organizational change. I’ve utilized quite a few ideas I’ve heard from Simon Sinek, I highly recommend his book and blog.

• People Want Something To Believe In
  It’s true. Do you think that every mechanic is motivated by the repair sheet for your carburetor? Many believe in the value of machines, or transportation, or in problem-solving, or in customer service. Their motivation may go much deeper than the specific project in front of them.

  Michael Arrington shared a great quote: "It’s completely clear that humans need a mission to accomplish to be happy."

  How do specific tactics (eg: attend training on this new content management system) align to a larger purpose? Telling people they have to, or that it will have new features, or save 15 minutes a day may not be enough to motivate them. Getting them excited about being a part of a revolutionary shift in publishing and journalism just may.

  And it that doesn’t work, tell them that this is how The New York Times does it. Or whoever they want to align themselves to. Because we all have heroes, we all have a vision of who we are that not everyone can see. When you help your employees make those visions a reality, you have given them the life they dreamed of having.

• People Want To Be Involved, Not Managed
  That’s a quote I heard from Simon Sinek this week, and it’s so true. Maybe you did sit in a room with a few other managers and work out the PERFECT strategy, the PERFECT system, and the PERFECT way to get from zero to sixty as quickly as possible. Well, your project rollout shouldn’t begin until you make everyone feel involved, not just managed.

  An email announcing a shift in strategy or a new system they have to learn – that is not enough. Make the staff feel a part of the process. Even if you can’t integrate everyone’s ideas, at least give them the opportunity – the feeling – that they are involved in shaping the future. Everyone wants to be Willy Wonka. Nobody wants to be an Ooompah Loompah.

• Make It Seem Like Their Idea
  Sure, to motivate an audience, you must listen before you tell. But things tend to work when you make a group think that the path forward was actually there idea. This is not some form of trickery either, it actually helps you ensure you are not just "listening," but ACTING on what you are hearing.

  Don’t worry about who gets the credit. When you allow people to feel as though the idea is coming from them, and benefits them, then yes you share the credit, but you also make it 100 times more likely that the project will succeed.

• Personal Goals Must Be Aligned With Professional Goals
  In many organizations, there is an institutional illusion that each employees’ personal lives are somehow small and separate from their professional lives. When a company such as Google offers laundry service or nap space or healthy meals or child care or backrubs – it is seen as revolutionary, even though each of these things are reasonable solutions to basic human problems in our culture.

  People have their own personal goals. How does your plan for your company align to each employee’s personal and career goals? Telling people to "put in the hours" has ramifications that you won’t see: time away from family, perhaps there is a toll on morale, chores that can’t get done, maybe even an argument with their spouse. Just because you don’t see these things in the workplace doesn’t mean they don’t exist and don’t affect your business.

  But when you align business goals with personal goals, you will find employees jumping through hoops to achieve them, instead of feeling peer pressure to stay a half hour later.

• Make it Easy to Feel A Sense of Achievement
  While business leaders may have an ultimate goal of growing revenue, many line-level employees do not have a direct affect on revenue and may not understand how their contribution has shaped it. Also – most can’t wait until the end of each quarter to know if their effort is paying off. Break down goals by function and then into smaller tasks that can be measured and rewarded.

  Yearly ‘performance reviews’ and bonuses are not enough. How does each employee know they are on track, how do they know they are appreciated? Likely, they sit in a car or on a train for 45+ minutes a day in traffic to get to the office. Let them know what all that traffic is for.

  This is not to say that financial reward is required, most people value social rewards WAY more than financial rewards.

  Don’t make the measures and rewards few and far between. Find ways to recognize people every day, week, month, quarter, and year. Find a variety of measures to focus on so that not only one group (eg: sales) feels appreciated.

• Make It Fun
  How many offices have you been to where the C-Suite is elegant and professional and the cubes are filled with troll dolls, family photos, goofy objects, movie posters, inflatable objects and other items that employees add to make it feel more fun or familiar?

  Sure, most employees want to see that line chart with revenue going upward and to the right. But how else can you get them on board with strategic direction and the specific tactical steps needed to move forward? What makes people laugh, what inspires people, what gets people to step out of their shell? What gets them to reimagine who they are, their role, and how their contribution is measured? Hint: it’s not a chart, and not a PowerPoint.

If you feel I can help you out in your journey, give me a call: 973-981-8882. Here are some other ways you can connect with me:

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Wilson, Bronwen and Yachnin, Paul; Making Publics in Early Modern Europe: People, things, forms of knowledge; Routledge; 2010 (affiliated with the Making Publics project

Navx is a €1m a year French company whose business is speed radar location databases. In France, it is illegal to sell or use selling radar detectors, devices that pick the microwave or laser radiation emitted by speed guns and automated cameras. But providing speed trap location data is lawful. In fact, the French Interior Ministry maintains a public database for fixed radars. And companies such as Navx, or various GPS makers supply location information for mobile radars.

To sell its product, Navx relies massively on Google AdWords: the company buys keywords that guarantee a high ranking in search results associated to terms like “avertisseur radar” (radar warning). Over the years, Navx invested a large part of its revenue in keywords purchases, up to €400,000 a year. For Navx, like for millions of other businesses all over the world, the result was a massive dependency on Google systems. For Navx, Google worked very well: in October 2009, 69% of new subscribers revenue came from AdWords. The company was still losing money, but growth was promising. Then, Google pulled the plug, arguing Navx business was illegal. Google’s ukase came at the worst possible time: Navx was about to complete its second round of funding. The company lost most of its new revenue stream, causing investors to get cold feet, in turn causing Navx to lay people off, and so on. Navx argues the legality argument was a mere pretense: Google had a real, ulterior motive for the ejecting the speed trap location ads from its system. Navx believes its tiny but growing service came to be viewed as competition for Google’s own geolocation services. That’s a possibility.

Such a story is typical of Google’s opaque world. Countless examples are offered in books, in newspaper and magazine stories where businesses went belly up because some geeks in Mountain View turned the dials of an unseen algorithm, without the slightest regard for the impact on the very businesses that pay their salaries.

The Navx story is different, though. The company took its case to the French Competition Authority; last week, the regulator issued its ruling on the matter: a) Google acted in a monopolistic way (in France, it controls 90% of the search market); b) Navx business didn’t break French laws governing radar detection devices or services; c) Google did act in a discriminatory way, without any legal ground for so doing.

Google was given five days to reinstate Navx Ad Words account, and four months to clarify its Terms of Service. (The full ruling, in French, is here).

This landmark decision from the French authority should come as a warning to Google. It is the first time that a regulatory ruling defines Google as a clear-cut monopoly. It does create a precedent in a European Union that makes antitrust action the cornerstone of its trade policies. Several related cases have already been brought before the European Commission. For example, the British comparison website Foundem complained Google imposed discriminatory penalties. This also applies to the French legal search site Ejustice and to Microsoft’s online shopping guide Ciao! (See stories Reuters and Venture Beat ). In Germany, the Bundeskartellamt, the local competition authority, has been called in by two publishers and a digital mapping companies for the same motives; and the Italian regulator will rule by September 30 after a complaint from a group of newspaper publishers.

Such lawsuits — less and less isolated — will end up having a broader effect on Google’s business. In the past, many entities endured Google’s autistic practices in silence; in a network economy Googles “subjects” can now rise and regroup.

Many American companies suffer from vision impairment: they consider the Rest of the World as an aggregation of second-class people. What I called in a previous column the “Burundi Syndrome”, leads to zero delegation of authority. This leads to terrible results. Each attempt from a European subsidiary to adapt company policies to its local market conditions hits a wall of a soviet-like centralization, this time epicentered on the West Coast of the United States.

This is true for Google, but also for Apple, Amazon or Microsoft. The people they maintain on this side of the Atlantic are powerless – and, often, frightened; they will constantly defer to the HQ, “la corp” in French parlance, for any decision. Such rigid stance is actually good news for alternative, more flexible players. There are local companies willing and able do what it takes to capture the markets left open by their inflexible US competitors, in digital advertising or contents delivery. One customer at a time, big companies undermine a customer and partner base that was once largely sympathetic.

In the long run, ignoring these trends can only have adverse effects.

First, regulators shouldn’t be underestimated. In Europe, they are getting more technology savvy, better organized and more able than ever to develop cross-country cooperation.

Second, such practices ultimately damage revenues. Take Apple’s eBooks Store, for instance. Using of a French-based iTunes account prevents a customer from buying books in English on the US eBooks store, this without offering any legal reason for the prohibition. Now, turn to France: perhaps as a surprise to US-based Apple execs, a significant number of French iPad users want to read books in English. The result of Apple’s segregation of iTunes accounts? These users flock to Amazon Kindle’s application. A similar lack of flexibility applies to e-newspaper prices; Apple set two levels: €0.79 or €1.29, nothing in between. These numbers don’t fit the needs of local publishers. But Apple Europe gives only a deaf hear to requests for adaptations — even if these won’t in any way harm iTunes’ margins.

Google’s black box or Apple’s access and pricing policies provide the fascinating spectacle of great brands letting their lazy condescending behavior hurt their customers and partners. “Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black“: the old Henry Ford motto no longer applies in a global, connected economy – which also happens to be an extremely creative one. In many sectors, collective creativity will provide new ways around the bunker mentality that plagues large American corporations.

—frederic.filloux@mondaynote.com

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I’m not completely naïve, however. In the end, I’ll agree there is little chance we’ll settle on another word.

Once upon a time, philosophers held thought preceded words: you thought of something and then struggled to find the right words for that gem. Later, psychologists of the twentieth century persuasion, came to think, no, to say words preceded thought: one could only think of thoughts for which they already possessed words for. As much as I like our dear Lacanians, some of whom hover around the Valley, the word ineffable leaves them… speechless.

Devoid of a clean theory, we can wallow in examples.

The most visible one is the PC, the personal computer. Derivative thought first gave us “microcomputers”, because they were “like” minicomputers, themselves “like” the only serious computers, mainframes — only smaller. Next, because size matters, we’d get nano computers, pico computers, femto computers…

Fortunately, the gestalt, the user experience won: This is my computer, as opposed to the institution’s. The beginnings weren’t always easy: I recall a book called “You bought a personal what?”, published in the late seventies. I also remember our collective indignation at Apple when, in 1981, IBM boldly misappropriated the concept and introduced The Personal Computer and proceeded to win the market, that is until Microsoft gave it to the clones. The P word worked and won.

Decades ago, Motorola was the king of cell phones. Cell was a good word because it pointed to the amazingly powerful innovation of cellular telephony. Previously, mobile phones called a radio station and kept using the same frequency as the user moved around. This severely limited the number of users and forced mobile phones to have powerful radios to stay connected over long distances. With cellular telephony, frequencies were reusable as users were magically handed over from one lower-powered radio station to another as they drove around, leaving the frequency behind, ready for another user.

The Motorola name came to be associated with radios of all kinds, from cars to the Moon. I recall Motorola execs calling their successfully miniaturized cell phones of the late eighties “little radios”. They were rightly proud of their technical prowess, I owned several StarTacs and MicroTacs. But when cell phones gained PDA features, Motorola’s clock got cleaned by the likes of RIM (Blackberry) and Palm (Treo). For a long while, Motorola’s culture remained backward-focused on the phone part of the customer experience. The new phone boss, Sanjay Jha, is now an Android convert: a couple of impressive Droid devices have put Motorola back in the race.

I recently spoke with carrier executives. One individual used the word “terminal” to designated their customers’ handsets. A revealing choice of words. Customers, on their side, think of themselves as being at the center of the world and of connecting their devices to an almost infinite number of sources of information, entertainment, social connections, email, navigation… With a mindset like this, no wonder Google wants to disintermediate carriers and turn them into bit pipes. True, cellular networks are technical wonders, complex, delicate and, because of the explosive growth in data usage, overtaxed. But imagine BMW executives calling their cars rolling computer networks. True, modern cars are stuffed with dozens of computers, some producing amazing feats of engine management. The Ultimate Driving Machine slogan or, more recently, the Joy campaign better relate to what their customers really look for.

One way to think of what besets Nokia is they still are the king of phones. The game changed under them. This isn’t about phones anymore, it’s about a new, different as opposed to “like”, generation of personal computing. How do we otherwise explain Apple’s success in spite of its “phone” problem, whether related to AT&T’s network or to antenna design, or to signal strength indication software? I know, it’s called iPhone. And, when the iPad came out, the joke went you couldn’t make calls with the iPad either… But Apple recently moved away from the iPhone OS designation to the better iOS moniker.

We’ve seen what happened to Windows Mobile, bad focus, the spastic clinging to the Windows franchise. Or to Mobile Linux, a.k.a Moblin, Maemo, Meego. Who cares about “Linux Inside”? Customers, apps developers or corpocrats?

That’s why I feel the -phone suffix can lead to focusing thoughts, feelings, desires onto the wrong target. Like gazing at the lace curtain’s beautiful patterns instead of ogling the good-looking humans animating the street.

This said, what are the chances we’ll abandon “smartphones” for something like RPC (Really Personal Computers) or MID (Mobile Internet Devices) covering what we call today smartphones and tablets?

None, zero. Usage wins. We got used to Apple or Google, because success pumped meaning into the words.

JLG@mondaynote.com

[More fun with smartphones: Brian S. Hall blog, The Smartphone Wars. Not the most politically correct collection of posts, always opinionated, very often insightful.]

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Here’s their VP of content, Jon Cooper, reporting on the work of the project in each paper (my emphasis):

The difference between how these stories are usually written and how they were written for today is the process. In many cases the stories reported as part of the BFP began with the audience. The people who are usually last in line were moved to the front of the process. Rather than just being able to read the finished product, the audience – through town hall meetings, social networking sites, direct requests via email and in person and more – was asked to help determine what the editorial staffs should cover.

This took the in-company collaboration to where it needs to be – collaboration between the audience and our organizations. To truly serve the communities in which we live and work we must be part of those communities. We must be connected to those communities. We must listen to those communities. And, we must be help accountable by those communities.

And here’s their CEO, John Paton praising his staff for their accomplishment:

On this Independence Day, you have declared that our Company’s future will be freed from expensive and restrictive proprietary publishing systems but more importantly that our Company will be freed from the old way of thinking about how we do business. You have ensured we will become a Company with a future and one that will continue in its mission to serve our communities with compelling local journalism.

And while the tools you have found and adapted are an achievement, it is our new approach to journalism which is the true revolution here. The Ben Franklin Project is the beginning of a new era of an open and transparent newsgathering process. Our publications harnessed the power of their audiences to tell stories of importance to their communities. Those stories ranged from childhood obesity to property taxes.

This is all the more remarkable because Journal Register is an oft-bankrupt, long-neglected, poor waif of a newspaper group that is suddenly seeing new life under the leadership of Paton, who is bringing his precepts and success from Spanish-language publisher ImpreMedia — digital first, print last — to this company. I’m advising him (along with my friends Jay Rosen, Betsy Morgan, and Jim Willse).

It was only a few months ago that John and I sat in my office at CUNY and he told me about the laughably deplorable state of technology in the company he’d just taken over. He said they still have VDTs. If you came into the news business after about 1980, you’ve probably never heard the term and assume it’s something cured with a shot. Video display terminals hooked into old mainframe publishing systems were how we published starting in the ’70s (I’ll date myself badly and say that I started on them at the Chicago Tribune in 1974). They were replaced in the ’80s and ’90s by PCs. But JRC still had them. That’s how bad it was.

Paton told me he was looking at having to spend $25 million just to get the company’s technology up to date. Hold on. We took to the white board and brainstormed how one could publish a paper today using Google Docs, Flickr, and WordPress. Paton, as is his habit, took my bull(shit) by the horns and ran with it. His staff found other, better free tools to do everything (even advertising). He printed one test edition of a paper to prove it could be done. Then he decreed that all his dailies would do this on one day, on July 4. More important, he used this as a means to get the staffs to think differently about their relationships with their communities, to act differently in how they made journalism. And they did it. Theyr’e not dealing in some theoretical future of news talked about by consultants and professors. [cough] They are building it.

A friend of mine who’s met Paton [that's Mark Potts] asks why it took the newspaper industry 15 years to get a Paton, a leader with the guts to see a new future for the business rather than merely trying to protect the past. I don’t know but I tell news executives around the world to watch what’s happening at humble JRC. There’s a future there.