Archive for local
Grasping at golden straws
Yesterday Barbara and I attended a panel discussion at the Kerrytown BookFest called “The Future of Print Journalism”. I’ll leave the details to others; what I found of particular interest was the thrust of the discussion among the panelists, who were all editors of one sort or another who’ve survived in transition from being old-fashioned newspaperfolk.
On the face of it, the narrative was about the future of print journalism in a world where the business model has been undermined by free online content. There was talk of aggregation by Yahoo! (and Google, though nobody mentioned them by name once) and how it undermines the authority of newspapers. There was a stern comment from the audience about how bloggers stealing content from papers without citing it should be sued. There was a lot of realistic-sounding exploration of paywall protection of content and the apparent failure of newspapers to fathom micropayment approaches. A lot of discussion of “free models”, and what came across as antagonism from the folks still at the big plop-on-your-steps papers at the notion of free content.
I started being bemused half-way through, though. Because four of the five panelists explicitly described the economics of their business, talked about it worriedly, and then wandered away again into how crucial good writing is, and how expensive professional journalism can be, and all the other stuff that justifies their special credentialled sociopolitical role in whichever Estate they used to be.
I’m sure the fifth panelist would have acknowledged the business facts in an instant… if it only been brought up explicitly: Modern newspapers don’t sell journalism. They sell advertising. During the 20th Century, newspaper revenue has come primarily from advertisers.
And from about 1900 to about a decade ago, newspapers sold print advertising at monopolistic prices. They were essentially a cartel. Ads in books never took off; ads in magazines reached only widely-distributed subscriber demographics. Only the local newspaper reached the walk-in traffic that retailers sought; coupons really don’t work well in telephone campaigns; TV is ephemeral, leaves no record.
Yet nobody says of the Internet, “Those unqualified online advertisers are undermining our professionally-trained crack advertising team,” or “Do you realize what it costs to pick an ad to run next to an article on a foreign war?” or “Photographs of ham can’t just be downloaded from some website you know; you need professionals on staff 24-7 to get the quality our customers deserve.”
No, the discussion was about “the economy being bad” and “readers out there expect content to be free” and bloggers and customer bases and the threats and uses of aggregation.
I’m sure if there had been time to drive the conversation my way, somebody would have jumped in and said, “Yes, of course we know print advertising pays the bills, but nobody would buy the advertising and get the bills paid if it weren’t for the high-quality reporting we generate using all that revenue.”
But: Maybe people are still buying advertising. Just not from you.
Here. We’re friends. I’m just as predictable as anybody else: I’m going to talk about history now.
Pick up an actual print newspaper from 1820, from 1840, from 1860, from 1880, from 1900, from 1920, from 1940, from 1960. From 1980. Count the ads. Think carefully and look at the books (if you have access to them) and estimate the proportion of the income of each newspaper that came from advertising revenue. Yes, I know in the early days they were small, local affairs with maybe a thousand subscribers each.
But they got their bills paid. What proportion of those bills were paid by monies coming from the sale of print ads?
I’ll bet you a Get Out of Disintermediation Free Pass right now that the earlier papers had almost no advertising (including the money from articles somebody was paid off to print), that the proportion bloomed into a majority in the days of Hearst and Pulitzer and the Great Syndicators, that it became a cash crop paying 80% or more of the bills in the latter-day cull that killed all second papers in cities.
Print advertising was a monopoly. Still is, one supposes.
You can’t buy ubiquitous home-delivered print advertising anywhere else. Sure, you can pay sub-minimum wage people to wander neighborhoods and rubber-band flyers to front doors, or wait a few days and send out coupons in the Clipper thingie.
And yet. And yet. Everybody knows (and for once I mean it unironically) we all love the visceral quality of print, the solidity, the ability to page back and check, the clipping, the passing it around, the crosswords, the comics. The biggest fuss when a newspaper shuts down comes not from the advertisers (who are already gone by then), but from the subscribers. The people with the blue paperboxes lining the country roads. The ones willing to trudge out to the roadside in winter, before breakfast, and take in the paper and sit and read it in their homes.
Physical paper. People love print. People live print. If they get sad enough at the diminishment of print journalism, do you think they will let it die?
Don’t be a fool. They’ll pay somebody good money to pass it out to them.
Are people buying ads? Shut your stupid marketing department’s yammering up and look. People don’t want ads, they want printed information. Even the people who clip coupons would be just as happy to pay you if you just listed the prices of every item at every store in town. They don’t want the coupon, they want the information about pricing.
And so what’s the future of print journalism?
In many cities in this country, the one newspaper is facing financial crisis. In smaller towns and wannabe cities (like ours), “the one newspaper” is dying. Yes of course in all those places there is probably also a superlocal paper about high school lunches and church meetings, and an edgy counterculture free monthly, and a free coupon collector, and a free real estate listing in the supermarket foyer….
Like I said, The One Newspaper is dying.
You might think this is what it will be like: Like 1882. Or 1860 or 1900 or 1930, even. The Empire of news is dying, not news itself. Not journalism itself.
The advertising monopoly is dying. The ecological niche occupied by The One Paper is a goner, not papers themselves. Specifically, the One Paper’s national-scale ad revenues are a goner.
Printed newspapers will have to start relying, again, on the revenue streams they enjoyed in the 19th century.
And because it’s how I always do it, let me jink suddenly from historical analogy over into biological metaphor:
Big animals get big not because they are specialists in what they eat, but to take advantage of economies of scale in their eating. The biggest cats are obligate hunter-carnivores just like some shrews, but have very special characteristics of gigantism and complex lifestyles to keep from wandering around all day burning calories hunting. Big whales eat very special meals (giant squid, krill), like many other marine species do, but are huge so they can avoid flashing around in big schools all over the place. Big dinosaurs probably got big so they could reach or manhandle their very special meals, but littler species could as easily have climbed trees or ganged up. And marsupial lions and wolves? Giant carnivorous birds, or moas? Giant sloths and mammoths? Specialists, but big because of economies of scale in their diets.
In the big picture—in the course of evolutionary history—megafauna come and go. As a type, following a particular specialized strategy that depends on being gigantic, they’re often driven to extremes by the presence of a small fruitful slice of resources in their environment. Unlike their smaller cousins, they go out on a limb and optimize their energy use and lifestyles so they can spend as little as possible to get as much food as possible as easily as possible.
But eventually the limb is gone.
And there you are, you big pile of yummy meat. Surrounded by other kinds of specialists, who didn’t invest in becoming huge.
The future of print journalism is a feast, not a famine. The One City Newspaper, the national newspaper, the Inherited Newspaper Empire: that is the main course.
A decade ago I would have predicted we’d see the industry roll back all that expensive infrastructure the One City Newspapers have developed, in setting themselves up as megafaunal ad-eaters, and we’d end up back in a situation about like 1880. A dozen papers, each with a slice of the subscriber pie, with a little advertising revenue each to keep them afloat.
Now I’m older and not so sure. Now I see a lovely chaos, a bloom of strategies, a roil of useful collaboration and competition.
What I wonder though, is what was never asked yesterday: who will be the first to fire the marketing department and keep the writers and editors?
That’s the next wave. That’s the immediate future of print journalism.
UnitedTalk #001: The Wisdom of Fun workshop, September 19, 2009
Because some folks may not follow me on Twitter, and I’m probably not going to advertise on Facebook:
THE WISDOM OF FUN: HARNESSING GAMES & PLAY FOR USEFUL WORK
Humans are habitual problem-solvers, so obsessed with puzzles and patterns that for millennia we’ve posed riddles and created games to fill our “idle time.” But these obsessive problem-solving habits are traditionally seen as a distraction from the “real work” of business, scholarship and public policy.
That is no longer true… if it ever was.
This is the first of a series of three open-format workshops scheduled for 2009 & 2010, where we’ll gather to explore the new ways game play is becoming “useful” work—useful for people and institutions.
On September 19, 2009 please join us for an open-format meeting in which the attendees set the schedule and specific focus for each session. In this first of three workshops, we hope to discuss
- immersive economic games and MMORPGs with developing social norms and virtual economies larger in actual value than some real nations;
- serious games designed to use humans’ innate skills to support search and optimization;
- prediction markets and related collective intelligence systems that harness the wisdom of crowds for robust business decision, forecasting and policy-making;
- crowdsourcing systems that divide up otherwise insurmountable complex problems so that thousands of distributed human solvers can incrementally attack them;
- agent-based simulations used to understand emergent behavior, and game-inspired classical artificial intelligence systems for exploring decision-making and analytics;
- changes in the business and technology of game design within the entertainment industry;
- Second Life and similar game-like virtual platforms, and the social worlds developing there, in which real institutions are struggling to discover their role.
…
Full information is available at the EventBrite registration site. Please consider passing it along or joining in if you’re able.
Watching things come together
You’ve not heard much from me recently because I’ve been busy volunteering and helping Mike Kessler and Matt Lewis set up the Workantile Exchange, a new coworking membership organization in downtown Ann Arbor.
I’ll have more to say on that in a few days. Still some work to do.
Meanwhile:
- Flickr feed of photos tagged “Workantile” or “WorkEx”
- Twitter feed of tweets including those terms
- Vimeo feed of time-lapse imagery of self-organizing open workspace
- Google Blog Search results for “workantile”
There will be more, soon. That’s a promise.
When isn’t it a nice day to be nice?
Seems to me, if you
- had a roll of dimes and
- a spare half-hour when you were walking to and from lunch, or coffee, or a bar, or a meeting
- in downtown Ann Arbor,
…you might be a nice person if you dropped a dime into an expiring parking meter.
Especially if you were to see the parking enforcement person walking along with their little ticket thing.
Mike Kessler’s Ann Arbor Coworking
I think Mike Kessler can actually do this. He’s already overcome the worst barrier to entry we faced when we were exploring a local coworking facility: the tendency to dilute your decisionmaking by being too communitarian. And I have a feeling he might even beat the second-worst barrier to entry: the cost of commercial real estate in downtown Ann Arbor.
Not by having a lower cost. If that were to happen, the local world’s tangible power structure would collapse, and those well-regarded wearers of finely spun black wool coats who hold the city in their black leather gloves would fly into a panic. Heaven forfend anything renting in such a prime abandoned building in the quiet part of Main Street nobody walks down for less than $23/foot. Mike’s overcome the barrier by having a bird in the hand: Ed Shaffran.
So I’m committing to paying my share for six months, for whatever that’s worth. I’ll hold court there during the days, take my business and planning meetings there, use it as a base of operations when I wander Main Street and Liberty and State to other meetings, do my genetic programming and complex systems training sessions there, set it up as a permanent base for our Scanning Bee distributed digitization projects, have after-hours parties and user-group meetings there.
Whatever. I’m in. I like it.
Five questions for the Ann Arbor SPARK
Five simple questions. Somebody should be able to answer them.
- What fraction of the tax base of local folks work in small family businesses, DBAs, individual contractors, consultants, and ad hoc for-profit partnerships are there in Ann Arbor and Washtenaw County? [Best you don't step across the line into the neighboring counties, just for this particular question.] I don’t mean people collecting unemployment insurance, nor people on the rolls as W-4 employees; I mean actual self-employed and contract workers. What fraction?
- What proportion of the people generating useful, lucrative work in the region give a damn about more startups? In other words, what is the proportion of actual human beings involved in your “entrepreneurial” ventures, compared to what one might call, oh, I don’t know… going ventures maybe?
- What is the median rent paid by a company in Ann Arbor for office space, per square foot, as a function of company size (in real people)? I’d like to see charts or tables, at least, and not some list of lowest possible prices in the airport light industrial ghetto. Downtown is where people talk to each other.
- Where is one supposed to host a fucking business conference, if you [SPARK, the Economic Development People in the Address of Fucking "Innovation"] don’t have room for a paltry 120 people in your damned “headquarters” downtown in the County Fucking Seat? You think the basement next to the bums is too crowded, you should try a damned restaurant balcony sometime.
- What have you done, recently, to inform people who are (strangely) starting or running businesses in town? I don’t mean pimping for angel investors and fucking landlords, or even starting folks “meeting and greeting” one another in the appropriate khaki attire. I don’t mean trying to pick up sexy young programmers next to the park. I mean what have you actually done to help people understand how to produce a 1099 for a friend, or file trademark applications, or protect intellectual property, or set up a website for themselves?
Bonus question: What use are you? Not to me. To the actual community.
Here’s what I think, frankly: I think you believe in the sad, inbred population of “successful” entrepreneurs around here, who for the most part sold their companies just before economic downturns, or surfed their way to success on University-funded research spinoffs, or who come here to rent cheap office space subsidized by ridiculous tax credits without ever planning on interacting with the actual community. I think you believe the middle-aged white men who made their bucks did it because of “skill” or “diligence” or maybe even (among the more literate of you) “acumen”, instead of being lucky and ruthless and warming a corner office seat while actual people did actual work down the hall in their cubicle warrens. I think you believe that the local hyena’s pack of angel investors and coast-connected VC are the way to foster “innovation” around here (just like back in the early 1970s), the way to “bootstrap the economy” around here (just like the commercial realtors “bootstrapped” on the back of dying family businesses), the way to “transfer” “innovation” somehow to “local” businesses, just like Larry and Serge might do someday.
In other words, I think you believe their stories, the mythology concocted by normal people whose rewards were won because they stood in the right place at the right time, or told the right sucker the right story under the right economic conditions, or just looked right. I like the cut of your jib too, but I’m not stupid enough to think you have a better chance of running a real company than that ugly fellow over there.
And you know, I don’t mind you falling for that claptrap. I don’t mind you believing things informed more by survivorship bias and received wisdom than actual facts.
What I mind is you passing that crap on to useful, earnest, diligent, kids, and leading them to believe they’ll be the next Google if only they work harder. That they need to find somebody to borrow money from, to leverage their ideas so they can grow and launch a startup and execute their exit strategies.
Why, instead, aren’t you teaching them to have reasonable, comfortable lives? To work no more than eight hours a day, to invest wisely and foster collaborations widely, to speak respectfully with their elders and seek insight from their peers, to share and build persistent and supportive social and cultural networks locally and abroad?
I know why. Because you don’t value them. You value your investors, your angels, your landlords and insurance agents. You count the number of asses warming chairs in properties other people own, the number of dollars moving up the hierarchy and into the measurable tax base.
What gets measured gets done. The problem is, you measure a myth.
Typically we don’t use the word “languishing” when we’re describing economic development efforts
And yet here we have a screenshot of the Ann Arbor SPARK’s commentless, noninteractive “blog” taken on 6 January 2009, trailing edge of the Year of the Earth Rat.
About 90 days since the last “news”.
Redisintermediation exemplar: John Cope’s Toasted Dried Sweet Corn
When we lived in Hanover, PA a few years ago, we started buying boxes of a Lancaster delicacy: John Cope’s Toasted Dried Sweet Corn.
It’s good, and difficult to replicate. No other cornmeal or bready preparations are substitutes. There are no doubt a number of delicious recipes possible, but the one that is printed at the top of the box (or bag, these days) is still best, just as using Jiffy Mix for corn muffins is better than the supernumerary suggestions of waffles or even johnnycakes.
Also, in re John Cope’s effort: it’s cheap.
Zingerman’s Deli, here in lovely Ann Arbor, charges more than $11 for a single 7.5 oz tin. Because it’s artisanal, no doubt. Or maybe the tin is worth the effort, since it’s made by hand by Russian Amish people specifically for Zingerman’s, and flown here sustainably or something. Because that would be a $7 metal tin, I guess.
Plus shipping, if you don’t live in lovely Ann Arbor.
And if you search for it at Amazon, you can pay a mere 100% markup. Plus shipping and handling. Or for some kind of odd bulk repackaging I’ve never seen before, slightly less.
Let’s just sit ourselves down a minute, in these days of local communitarian sentiments and economic crisis and belt-tightening and thoughtful economy and direct compensation of artists and craftspeople for their intelligent work and sustainable transportation and stuff… and think about those alternatives.
Less than $3.50 per unit, net, for twelve you could share among friends. Said money sent direct to the manufacturer, I assume. At least closer to them than any alternative in the supply chain.
Or $8 or more for retail pricing of the same volume. In a metal bin, if you’re really fancy.
I note, by way of a fucking point: It is not illegal, to date, for purchasers to enter into informal agreements with one another to collaboratively seek bargains by sharing informational or practical costs.
I’m going to spend December thinking about that, OK? The whole damned Black Friday of a month.
And my mind may wander from dried sweet corn to beer, or other foods, or books, or magazine subscriptions, or toys, or DVD rentals, or copy-editing one another’s writing, or consulting referrals, or newspaper article writing, or photography, or design, or gardening, or building houses and communities. It might make a bit of sense for me to look at cartoonish John Cope, with his stereotypical bushy beard, and think a minute.
Just one minute. Especially if I’m tempted to play at Black-bumper sustainability, and conspicuously consume artisanal foods without thinking about the supply chain that got them to me.
My personal acceptance test for a community development effort
There’s a lot of local chatter lately (local in my social network, here and afar) about community development as opposed to tribal consolidation. That is, developing meetings and infrastructure that bridge between disparate groups who otherwise never meet and interact, vs. team-building and strengthening the internal cohesion of well-formed groups themselves.
Here’s an acceptance test I’m thinking of using for a long-term project of the bridge-building type (the one I call “real” community development). It’s hard to know whether your notion of how to run things actually fosters and enhances diversity rather than just consolidating pre-existing barriers, so I’m musing about a general-purpose challenge that discriminates them. Maybe:
- Pick up a local Yellow Pages.
- Open to a random page. You may want to slice the book up into chunks to ensure uniform sampling.
- Randomly select an entry on the page, maybe with a blind stab, and note the category it’s in. Plumbers? Lawyers? Dentists? Libraries? Landscaping? Escort Services? Restaurants? Used and Rare Books? Knitting? Jewelry? Wedding Planning? Septic Services?
- Repeat the previous two steps to select a second category at random.
- If you can create, announce, and populate an open-format unconference-style meeting that will attract at least five people who actually work in each of those two categories professionally, your community-building effort may have a chance.
You don’t need to ever repeat with the same two categories. But it might be interesting to walk ahead by adding a new category and dropping the oldest category in each successive meeting.
This may be a bit of a stretch. Wedding Planners plus Shoes I can see a path to; House Painting and Office Supplies, less so.
But what’s a test without a challenge?
Upon finding our “sister city” folks are here
Apparently the Ann Arbor Chamber of Commerce and the SPARK have decided to host a tour of our city for the inhabitants of our sister city in Chapel Hill/Carrboro, NC.
This comes as a surprise to many of us who might be helpful. Not because the Chamber of Commerce is a useless echo of the city’s political machine, nor because the SPARK doesn’t signify much beyond traditional economic development old boys’ networks of “investors” looking for the next Google. Those are givens.
But because we’re headed into the “Creative Cities” time of year, and the city hasn’t even got the brains or social capital to think of us. Whoever “us” is.
It’s not the Chamber or the SPARK, let me tell you.
Barbara pointed out some of the comments coming out of the meeting via Twitter today, and I have to say I’m saddened by the implications. It’s clear that the fools broke it. Standard conference, standard list of suits, standard “address of innovation” bullshit, standard “welcome to Wonderful Wolverine City your high-tech research powerhouse monopoly” kowtowing.
I wish somebody from ArborWiki were there, or it was at least mentioned.
I wonder if any of our visitors will be able to attend a2b3 on Thursday, or will even hear about it. They’re invited!
I wonder if anybody’s deigned to mention ArbCamp 2007, or ArbCamp 2008, or Startup Weekend Ann Arbor—all the unconferences we (the folks who live here and do the work, not the obsolescent city fathers) have put on ourselves? Doubtful.
Or any of the dozens of other useful, interesting things going on here that are the only path to life in the city (or the region) in the coming years.
I doubt it.
I’m writing off the cuff here. Comments and reminders would be welcomed as a way of filling in the other gaps in our guests’ experience.
In any case, let us (us, not The City) have these folks back again, someday soon, and show them the city itself, not drive them on a bus tour of the prospects of Future Development Projects.
And we won’t charge them $1500 for the privilege, either.
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