The State of Journalism Is... Confused

The Project for Excellence in Journalism has released its third annual State Of The News Media report. The report is big, comprehensive, important and devoid of a single, easy-to-digest takeaway. It's worth spending some time perusing the whole thing, but if you don't have the bandwidth, don't worry.

For me, this stuff hits about as close to home as anything could, so I'm going to spend a bit of space talking about it. And at the end, I'll also give you links to some of the news coverage of the report.

So, let me address a couple of the major trends that relate to the parts of the media world I care most about.

Who's Gonna Pay?
None of this is news, exactly, but it's becoming increasingly clear that the old economics of the news industry just aren't going to fly much longer. Print revenue is declining fast, and while online revenue continues to grow, it's still a long way from making up for the print losses.

More to the point, imagine that all of a publication's print readers move over to that pub's Web site. Right now, that would mean economic disaster. Even though the pub is getting the same attention from the same readers, and can offer a much greater degree of interaction with those readers, advertisers simply won't pay the same amount of money.

The Report suggests one solution might be a cable TV model, where ISPs and aggregators (Google?) would have to kick in some cash for access to the content. Similarly, in the UK, users have to cough up an annual licensing fee for their TV, which helps cover programming costs.

I'm not sure that would work online, and it would be a wrenching transition at best.

A New Era Of Blogging
The report says

Blogging is on the brink of a new phase that will probably include scandal, profitability for some, and a splintering into elites and non-elites over standards and ethics.

Maybe so, but I'm hoping that The Freditor gets no more than a brush of scandal and lots of profitability. Not sure we'll be part of the elite, though. We've got ethics, but no standards, whatever that means.

Seriously, the question for me is where do you draw the line between a blog and a "legitimate publication?" Who is a journalist and who is just spouting invective? I have decades of experience, but without backing from a big publishing company, is The Freditor a journalist? And even if I am, who's to say who isn't? I simply don't have an answer to this one.

Conventional Wisdom Of Online Journalism
The Report goes on to say that online journalism is still in search of a clear model. Well, for me, that's the whole point. Way back in 1996 I left my job as editor-in-chief of Electronic Entertianment magazine to try out this thing called the Web for many reasons. Sure, CNET stock options were one reason. But the real lure was the chance to help set the conventions of a new medium.

In print, the conventions have long been agreed upon by journalists and readers. There's not a lot of confusion over what constitutes a magazine cover or a table-of-contents, right? But what is a Web home page? Is it a cover? A front page? A TOC? If it's a TOC, what should be in it? After all, the concept of an "issue" has little meaning online. And what if the page primarily delivers audio or video?

Questions like these often make online life perplexing, but they're also an editorial opportunity the likes of which don't come along every century. We journalists may end up unemployed, but we'll have great stories to tell our grand-kids.

There's a lot more in the report, and I may return to it in the coming days. In the meantime, check it out for yourself, or see what the news media has to say about the report on the news media:

San Francisco Chronicle
Long Island NewsDay
Poynter Online
Chicago Tribune

USA Today

I Told You So

To the surprise of no one, especially me, the Daylight Savings Time bug turned out to be a snore.

And snoring is exactly what I wish I had been doing at 8am (or was it 7am?) on Sunday morning. But instead I hopped out of bed and actually started my day on time. Whatever time it was.

Forget The Net, Google Is Really A Bus Company

For the last few months I've been seeing these ugly brown Bauer Transportation mini-buses wandering around my neighborhood in San Francisco. They're not marked with anything describing where they're going, and we all wondered what they were about.

My theory was always that they had to be taking Googlers to work -- nobody else could afford it -- and today the New York Times confirmed it. (Don't you just love it when you guess right?)

Turns out that the company schleps some 1,200 people a day all around the Bay Area. For free. With free Wi-Fi. And bike racks. And room for dogs. The Times' Miguel Helft reports that many riders see the buses as the best of the company's many legendary perks.

Hey, it's probably the only way they'd get ME to head all the way down from San Francisco to Silicon Valley every day (not that they seem interested). So what the heck, after my experiences hitching rides on CMP's commuter van from Great Neck to Manhasset back on Long Island, I'm wondering how hard it could be to impersonate a Googler...

Prediction: DST Bug Will Be Just as Lame As Y2K Bug

OK, I'm going out on a limb here. As of 3pm PST Saturday, I'm predicting that the big deal on the daylight savings time bug will be revealed by Sunday morning as yet another tempest in a technological teapot.

If I'm wrong, I'll own up to it. But this is one problem I simply refuse to worry about.

YouTube Caves On Turkey Spat

In a recent post, I talked about all the challenges facing YouTube. Well, it seems that the site has backed down from one of them.

In response to a ban from the Turkish Governement, YouTube has pulled a video involving Turkey's founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

It seems that corporate parent Google's commitment to "do no evil" doesn't translate to standing up for free speech.

As TechCrunch points out, this sets a terrible precedent. Pretty soon YouTube will be THE place to go for video that doesn't offend anyone. How exciting, huh?

China Discoves Sarcasm. No, Really!

According to an article in today's SF Chronicle (I can't find it online, please let me know if you can), China has finally discovered sarcasm. And the government isn't happy.

The piece, by Craig Simons at Cox News Service, discusses the concept of egao (pronounced "uh-gow"), which is news to me anyway.

Apparently, the idea is that Chinese government censorship makes it difficult and dangerous to express direct criticism, so clever Net users have discovered truthiness.

The examples in the story don't seem all that hilarious to me -- a magazine claiming that the country has instituted universal healthcare and that sweatshop workers were happy and respected -- but I still like the idea.

Chinese officials don't seem to see the humor though. One city has banned the practice with stiff fines.

Now I'd like to see people make fun of that!

Don'Cha Wish Your Hard Drive Was Hot Like Mine?

Do you care what your hard drive looks like?

I don't.

But according to today's NY Times, the latest external hard drives are being marketed as eye candy.

Don't get me wrong, I swear by external hard drives. I've got so many of 'em connected to my laptop that I had to buy a USB hub just so I could use 'em all at once. I've got a big one for video, a portable one for work stuff, and another one for music. I've even got one that I can't use most of 'cause I pulled it from an old computer that died and the user files are password protected.

Only the SimpleTech 2.5" portable has anything approaching design, but I bought them all because they offered the most gigabytes per dollar. I might pay a little extra for a smaller size in a portable, but not for style, I don't think. And for a regular 3.5" external drive, style is completely irrelevant.

I understand that vendors want to get away from selling hard drives like commodities, but, uh, that's what they are.

Oh, and despite "price wars, component shortages, and competitive upheavals," drive shipments still grew 15% last year, according to research firm iSuppli, as quoted by Antone Gonsalves in InformationWeek.

Is YouTube Going Down The Tubes?

Sure, YouTube sits at today's absolute nexus of technology and culture. But it’s also at a major crossroads of its own.

On the one hand, Google's $1.6 billion toy is credited with everything from rewriting the rules of video entertainment to influencing the outcome of presidential elections. The NBA now lives on YouTube, for example, and the site made Macaca the key word of the 2006 mid-term campaign.

Yet YouTube is also the key battleground in the fight over digital copyrights and permissions. Viacom (owner of MTV) is battling with the video service over the value of letting its content be posted there. Movie studios are trying to subpoena YouTube to learn the identity of the people posting unlicensed content. Many people speculate that YouTube sold out to Google just to get access to its team of big-league lawyers.

All this means that the very nature of the beast is changing, and not necessarily for the better. As YouTube moves to make nice with rights holders, the site risks losing the grass-roots user participation that made it a phenomenon in the first place. If the site ends up with only the content for which it can cut deals, the service will be much the poorer. While the NBA and the BBC may be in, for example, tennis has been ruled out.

There are political risks as well. YouTube has just been blocked in Turkey - over a video deemed insulting to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey.

If all this means that YouTube ends up just another tightly managed outlet for big media, cutting-edge users may look elsewhere for their video fixes. That would be a shame, but it wouldn’t be the first time that big media stomped on its audience. Don’t get me started on the record companies!

Worse Than A Trip To The DMV

Making fun of the endless drudgery involved in getting a new driver's license has become a hoary cliche.

Well, here's a new approach: something worse!

Massachusetts officials are warning of a new scam that plays on the fact that the state calls its agency the RMV, not the DMV. According to InformationWeek, "The malicious sites are set up to closely resemble the official site, duping users into inputting personal information, along with credit card payments. They also purport to charge users extra for doing business online."

Apparently, the state had to shut its official RMV site until it figured out what was going on...

Best Buy May Not Be

This one is rich!

Apparently, Best Buy is under investigation by Connecticut's attorney general for maintaining a "lookalike" internal Web site that employees could use to deny in-store shoppers the prices posted online at BestBuy.com.

According to a company spokesman quoted by AP, it's all just a misunderstanding by the employees. But she added that it may be time to redesign the internal Web site so it doesn't resemble BestBuy.com.

You think?

Seriously, if you're crazy enough to actually buy anything in a brick-and-mortar store these days, be sure to bring along a smart phone and check the Web to make sure you're not being taken advantage of.

The Secret Pitfalls Of Online Office Suites

Not long ago, I was at an Industry Insider party at a swanky art bar in downtown San Francisco. (Nice, intimate event, except for the cash bar! Sometimes I miss the boom years. Oh well.) It happened to fall on the evening that Google announced the premium edition of its Google Apps online productivity suite.

The pros and cons of the product was a big topic of conversation, especially with Raju Vegesna of Zoho.com, which makes its own browser-based office suite. We discussed Google’s $50/year pricing (more than free, less than Microsoft), and how Google’s offering will “validate the market.” (Isn’t that what every small company says when a giant competitor muscles in?)

Here’s the interesting part, though. Both Google Apps and the competing Microsoft Office Live Premium both actually store your documents online for you, which is a great convenience, right?

Well, in Google’s case that means they “read” everything you’ve got up there and then most likely try to sell you ads based on its content. (Unless you pay for the Premium version, where they'll just remember it forever and use the info to try to sell you something else down the road.)

That’s nothing though. If Microsoft’s past behavior is any guide, Bill’s boys will slap some nasty DRM on your data, and then try to license it back to you – for use on only one computer at a time!

Oracle Strikes Again

A few years ago, I wrote a column for TechWeb about Oracle's buyout of PeopleSoft. I speculated the takeover ploy was originally designed to roil the markets and sow FUD, but somehow ended up a done deal. And I wondered whether Larry Ellison would eventually regret having fought so hard to acquire PeopleSoft in the first place.

I shouldn't have bothered. Larry shows no signs of buyers remorse, and followed up his PeopleSoft snack with the almost as big gulp of Siebel Systems. And now Oracle has announced plans for dessert with a $3.3 billion deal to buy business intelligence software maker Hyperion.

While this deal will likely reshape the business intelligence software market, I can't seem to muster the same level of outrage. Sure, Oracle is still an evil empire, but these days everyone is more afraid of Google than Oracle, Microsoft, or any other company perceived as a traditional software vendor.

Somehow, these deals, though huge, seem a bit like dinosaurs bulking up to do battle with other dinosaurs. Not to overstretch a mixed metaphor, but Google got to be dinosaur-sized by eating the eggs of other dinosaurs.

Beware The Killer Internet

Apparently, the Internet really is as dangerous as all the talk show pundits say. At least if you're a really, really fat Internet addict.

For a 330-lb man from Jinzhou, in northeasternChina, though, the danger wasn't from online bullying, sexual predators, hate groups, or pornography. No, according to news reports, the 26-year-old Zhang passed away after a 15-day marathon online gaming session over the Lunar New Year holiday. According to the story, there was nothing else to do while all the market and cafeterias were shut down.

I Googled away, though, but couldn't find any information on what, exactly, killed Mr. Zhang.

Nevertheless, the Chinese Government is worried. Surveys classify 2.6 million, almost 14 per cent, of China's teenage internet users as addicts and the government has started electrocuting them to try and shock them out of the habit.

Live Locally, Work Globally

I had lunch (yum, bonito!) this afternoon with fellow CMP alum Rusty Weston, who is busy launching his new project, My Global Career. I was impressed, for a couple of reasons.

First, global employment is a hot topic these days, and one that Rusty is well qualified to address. (I should know, I helped him put together the Global Services Media site back at CMP.)

Millions of people now work in countries different than the ones they call home, and even more work for companies based outside their home country. This community desperately needs information and perspective developed just for them, and My Global Career is already starting to give it to them. In addition to the blog entries, check out the My Global Career 500 and my personal favorite, the World Business Holidays tool.

Just as important, I was impressed with how Rusty has created his site and his company - Third Set Media - so quickly and with such a limited investment. He's outsourced tasks to virtual contributors across the country and around the world.

Stay tuned, in the spirit of online log rolling I may be writing a piece for him soon based on my own personal taste of a global career...

Not So Fast

OK, so maybe I was a little overoptimistic in yesterday's post. Seems like the market slide may not be over quite yet. The market ended up only about 50 points in the black yesterday, and it's just about erased that gain so far today.

At least no one is blaming "computer glitches" today. (In fact, I heard some NPR commentator say that given the volume of trading on Tuesday, the computer problems were actually less severe than might have been expected.)

In addition, it's important to note that while technology companies have been losing value along with everyone else, this is not a technology-driven selloff. According to BBC News, it seems more about a new Chinese tax, slowing housing activity in the US, and a general sense that equities were over-valued.