Cyrillic Partners

No, it’s not a zen koan, it’s a trick of the mind. I wonder what this does to your liver?

Yay for the British, a magical people. All educated at Hogwarts.

Will news reporters have a job in the future? Professor Steve Boriss, who teaches a class called “The Future of News” at Washington University in St. Louis and writes on the subject at Pajamas Media: “We will continue to have news middlemen, but those that survive must create real value for their audiences. Editors can create value by aggregating, analyzing, adding opinions, and gathering like-minded audiences for advertisers. Bloggers do the same. But, reporters are repeaters. They, not bloggers, are unnecessary recyclers of news.”

Maybe Boriss knows better bloggers than I do. But I think the premise of his argument is flawed: namely that a journalist’s job is to transfer a record of an event to an audience that cares about it.

It assumes that there is too little information in the world and that a journalist’s job is to be the one that witnesses it. That may have been true thirty years ago, but let’s face it. There’s often too much information available today.

Let’s say you wanted to know if batteries were a good place to invest today. Where would you go for information on that? Going to Google is like sitting down in front of a fire hose and blasting yourself in the face. You could spend days and days sorting through all the different types of investment (public, private, mutual funds, etc…) then what type of battery (lithium-ion, nickel-cadmium, led-acid, lithium-polymer, thin-film, kinetic, etc…), or maybe what sort of company (developer, producer, distributor, integrator) then maybe which of the 100+ companies that do some sort of battery-related thing.

Moving from information to action requires throwing things out as you go along, getting from the fire hose to a nice drinking fountain.  This is what journalists may be best at in the future.

40 Years ago today Russia lost the hero Yuri Gagarin to an airplane accident. Gagarin, the first man in space, is commemorated across Russia, perhaps most notably with the huge titanium statue in Moscow measuring 40 meters high.

Some mystery still surrounds the pioneer’s death. A 1986 report on the accident that cost Gagarin his life suggested the crash was the result of poor weather conditions and the wake of a nearby jet plane hitting its afterburners.

A 2005 investigation suggested the cockpit of Gagarin’s plane may not have been adequately sealed before take off. The loose seal would have lead to oxygen deprivation.

A bill to reopen the case and examine the sealed remains of Gagarin’s training plane was vetoed by the Kremlin in 2007.

Conspiracy theorists have had a field day with the incident, as RIA points out. Some say Gagarin was killed at the order of Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader they say was jealous of Gagarin’s popularity. A Finnish source reports that he was abducted by aliens.

Whatever the cause of his death, Gargarin should be remembered for his bravery in making aviation history.

[Picture from Wikipedia]

Google announced it would add tracking software to its YouTube video product, a move that will give users a raft of data on who sees their videos, when they watch, and from where. The NYT has the story. Tracking software is a big deal to site designers, and will likely be just as important to video uploaders looking to test their marketing message or develop a clearer sense of their audience.

Nintendo released “The Legend of Zelda” in 1987 with a marketing flourish that any five-year-old might appreciate: a gold cartridge casing.

I got the game for Christmas in the late eighties and remember how cool it made me feel. The other kids on my street came to my house to play it and I felt like I had friends. It later became an object lesson in childhood fickleness when those “friends” left as fast as they had come.

The game has simple rules that lead to wide array of complex outcomes. The simple version is this: your elfin character tromps through a kingdom and beats monsters to eventually save a princess. Wikipedia has a lengthy discussion of the game’s plot, history and other intricacies.

Reviewer Dave Warmington has a theory on why people like the game and it certainly rings true with me. Most games of the time had a “quest” that directed you from one point to another and required certain actions be performed to advance. The quest was what you did in the game.

But Zelda was different. It has a quest, to be sure, but it also gives the game player a lot of freedom to roam around the digital world and explore its ins and outs undirected. It felt more like play than work.

Programmers caught on and have expanded the variety of potential interactions a player may have with the virtual world of a game.

If a little freedom is a good thing, than more of it must be better…but somehow it isn’t when it comes to an environment such as Second Life: a virtual world people participate in for reasons unknown to me.

I found a service that hosted a java-based emulator of the original Legend of Zelda game. The site hosting the service has since been taken down, but not before I beat the Second Quest–a feat that any player of the game will recognize as noteworthy.

I found something interesting in the experience. I wanted more of the game. I wanted a Third Quest in the same Legend of Zelda world with new challenges, puzzles and maybe even a new map to explore. Consider it an open challenge to any programmer/gamer out there. I’d pay $75 for a Third Quest.

[Image thanks to VideoGamesBlogger.com and Wikipedia]

Brian Caulfield, a mentor and friend, let me in on a secret to good magazine journalism: stories should be surprising and have a point of view.

There are two ways to come up with a surprising story. One may “break” news by getting a scoop, or unveil some hidden insight. Scoops are pretty straight forward and the providence of the best magazines and newspapers. Insight is a little trickier to grasp, however.

When we worked together at a business magazine, Brian and I came up with several basic flavors of insight that might be applied to any news story:

1.  Forward Spin: Come up with some analysis of what’s going to happen next. If one company buys another, what might be the next corporate pairing in their market? What will a company’s competitors have to do to counter its new measures? What is this news going to mean for investors down the road? Will the company be able to hit its earnings numbers next quarter?
2. Pearl Necklace: Is the piece of news one in a series of similar events? Is it worth pointing out that deal X is the third such deal that’s happened in the past month or that involved the same investors?
3. Bunch of Grapes: Is this piece of news fundamentally demonstrative of a much larger trend? Is it one particularly succulent grape from a much larger bunch?
4. Lessons Learned: Business person X just did amazing thing Y. If you want to do the same sort of amazing thing, you should take note of these key lessons.
5. Reality Inversion: Take what everyone believes to be true, turn it upside down and look for examples or proof. Everyone believes a recession is bad, for example. Invert this commonly accepted maxim to get that “a recession is good,” then find who that’s true for. Recessions are great for people in the repossession business and generally improve sales at liquor stores. Profile these thriving businesses when a recession hits.

I particularly like the “Reality Inversion” principle for coming up with interesting stories and like to use it to test out various theories and try to use it as frequently as possible.  In a recent conversation with one of my coworkers, I started off by saying: “Well known investor X isn’t really that good.” Which lead to a very interesting discussion of what makes a good investor based on a very different point of view. Even if you end up throwing out the inversion, it forces you to think in creative and different ways.

My team met with Chris Ahearn, a manager at Reuters, who put us wise to Reuters Labs. The site highlights some of the new, experimental tools and services the media giant is playing with.

There’s a lot of pie-in-the-sky technology on the site. I haven’t had a chance to plumb each different technology, but my initial take is that maybe a third of it will catch on with early adopters. Maybe 1/12th of it will ever get into the hands of journalists or consumers.

I’ll be looking at it in depth in the coming weeks.

Howell Raines, former managing editor of the New York Times, opines on the newspaper’s dubious business future unconvincingly in a column in Portfolio Magazine.

He lays out a thin case against being bought out by Rupert Murdoch citing the “jolly pirate’s” use of newspapers and broadcasting “…in a broadly unprofessional way—as political muscle to advance his commercial interest.” There’s no mention of any examples of such behavior, of course, Raines assumes that everyone following the debate feels the same way he does.

I submit this counter argument: If Murdoch is so bad for journalism, why do people still read the papers his company put out? Does he really have the time to throw his weight around by strong arming journalists and editors?

At least one may still trust stories in the Wall Street Journal to be accurate. Raines, as readers may remember, was fired from the NYT for his inadequate oversight of the Jayson Blair fact fabrication and cheating scandal. His “argument” against a Murdoch buyout demonstrates the same loose attitude toward facts that got him fired.

But maybe I’m being to harsh on the guy. It’s obvious he’s living in an outdated paradigm where the New York Times still anchors information trafficking. He writes: “There is no more important question in American journalism than the future of the Times…”

I offer five other, more important questions for American journalism.

Ignoring the fact that ethics and accuracy should have been a more important issue for him during his tenure at the NYT, it’s worth pointing out that the NYT ($2.93B) is smaller than The Washington Post ($6.28B), USA Today publisher Gannett ($6.99B), or Reuters ($7.42B). To be sure, lots of people read it, but fewer than USA Today or The Wall Street Journal. It’s important to journalism like Ford Motor Company is important to the auto industry.

It’s barely worth eviscerating each of his suggestions for an anti-Murdoch NYT future: sell to Google, sell to Bloomberg, focus on just the New York Metro area, replace the board, or go private.

• Google isn’t buying the world’s information, it’s organizing it.
• Why would Bloomberg want the NYT? His company has been focused on data and real-time news: not stuff the NYT has a real lock on. Better bet for Bloomberg would be spinning out some of the financial data assets from McGraw Hill, such as its CapitalIQ product.
• Focusing the Washington Post on Beltway politics makes sense for D.C. but what would a New York-focused publication focus on? New York is too diverse for such a parochial scope. Still, focus is good and the NYT might profit from doing it.
• Replacing the board with pro-journalism people might be an interesting short-term strategy for preventing a takeover, but it doesn’t seem to be a long-term tenable strategy.
• Raines is right when he says going private would have been more likely two years ago. It’s no secret that the buyout business is taking a hit thanks to the credit crisis. But the buyout business isn’t just about leveraging businesses anymore, or streamlining by selling off unnecessary assets. There’s got to be some operational opportunity for growth that somehow can’t be realized under the scrutiny of quarterly earnings. I’m not sure what that would look like for the NYT, but I can’t imagine a PE firm giving the company more free reign than the Sulzberger family…

Raines needs to get off his soap box and exit his echo chamber.

1. Is it worth fighting content commodification? Most local papers feed on content pulled from the Associated Press newswire and offer little in the way of context or local significance. Do people still need a local spin or a verticalization of the content to reflect its impact on their interests?
2. How do you make investigative journalism work now? It’s harder to allocate resources to do the work of investigation with staffs shrinking and budgets tightening. Investigative digging takes time and lots of effort. There’s another factor at work here too. The journalists that remain in the business are often viewed with trepidation instead of trust by would-be sources. The profession regularly ranks just above used-car-salesman on trust polls. A journalist’s best scoops typically come from someone whom she or he already knows and trusts. Maybe this is a sub-point to number one of this list, since it might be considered a side effect of commoditization.
3. What’s the best way to separate signal from noise? Traditional advertising has been, for many companies, supplanted by spending on “public relations.” A large corporation may have more PR executives on staff than any one of the business magazines that cover it. How do you pick out the real news from the processed and packaged crap that’s pushed out to already over-extended journalists? Citizen journalists, bloggers, pundits and others now weigh in on everything, often without adding any new details or context.
4. What’s the best way to monetize online content? Every news publication struggles with this. People don’t want to pay for things online. Online advertising is growing, to be sure, but many small publications are left out when the cost of securing advertising outstretches the benefit. Studies show that most people don’t even see the advertisements served online.
5. What community does a news organization target and how does it interact with that community? The internet has radically changed the way many people classify themselves into communities. Left-handed lovers of Dungeons and Dragons may find others online with whom they have more in common than the person who they live next to. The comment thread underneath stories and social networks aren’t adequate for one major reason: they don’t make money.