Sean B. Wolfe

Micropayments Vs. Leveraging the Backlist

2009-09-22T11:01:00.000-07:00

We've been arguing about this for better than a decade -- editors, publishers, journalists, micropayment facilitation companies, media pundits, and so on.
Can micropayments save journalism as we know/knew it?
Here's a decent overview of the dust-up, by Matthew Ingram over at the Nieman Journalism Lab.
The basic gist is that people will pay for something they can keep (iTunes), versus something transitory they can consume.
Of course, people can keep a newspaper -- which has limited shelf-life by design: The paper is cheap (by design), the ink gets on your fingers, and clipping articles these days for archival purposes is largely a past-time of the elderly, the homeless, and the shut-ins. Also authors.
I've worked for a number of newspapers, and at one point, was sitting in a meeting of staffers who had been at the paper for decades.
I was relatively new to the town, and had relied upon the archives of the newspaper to steep myself in the history of the city, as well as past coverage that I could leverage to offer my articles perspective.
These, traditionally, are kept in a place called the morgue. Where old news copy goes to die.
What's fascinating is how much good stuff is in there.
And how much of it is non-digital. At this paper, the digital archives went back as far as five years, healthy for a paper of that time.
To whom, other than a journalist, is this stuff still useful? Anyone doing research, one might imagine. Genealogists. Families. Crime writers. Historians. People looking to move there, perhaps.
It occurred to me that archival content, to which the news organization -- local, regional, or metropolitan -- still holds rights is a major unleveraged asset.
If news is not scarce, then it's commodity, and it must be free.
But OLD news (while there's a lot of it), particularly that material written by the boots on the ground IN a city, versus AP commodity content, is still valuable. May be valuable. To someone. Someday.
In publishing, Bob Stein (of Voyager/Night Kitchen fame) once told me: "The model is to have a deep backlist." Stein was looking toward the future. You can never know what will be a hit, and when, so gamble on covering your niche (in his case, really smart people) well.
Newspapers are already sitting on a deep backlist of content, some of it more than a hundred years old. That you can't find anywhere, except on 'fiche.
I was really happy sitting in the morgue, looking at histories of families that stretched back six generations. Old comics. Old Op-ed columns that capture the essence of the changing community over time.
Had deadlines not loomed, I could have been quite content to spend my weekends there, reading.
But I'm just one geek on a planet of 6.7 billion people.
Surely there are a few hundred thousand like me out there.
And that's a market.
And the content is scarce.
That newspapers have not digitized all their archives is a crime against history, historians, detail-oriented people, researchers, family-tree documentarians, and probably many more niches than I can attractively list in a blog.
Newspapers are institutionally-inclined to reject this idea as a potential market, because we're born and bred to focus on the next story.
The same is true (although decreasingly so) of TV stations. Radio stations and personalities seem to get it. Fresh Air by Teri Gross is a great example -- she bags the celebs on tape, and when they die or have a new book out (whichever comes first) she repurposes the interview, maybe tops it off with current content, and boom, there's a broadcast.
My past advocacy on this matter has been consistently ignored by multiple news organizations, both print and broadcast. It's either too expensive, or too big picture.
But I saw all the past footage at CBS -- it fills warehouses in NYC and New Jersey. All that friable film, and that inconsistently-labeled magnetic tape.
The morgues at newspapers are made of paper, or sitting on reels of 'fiche that even libraries don't have access to.
It could all go away tomorrow.
The archives are gold. Digitizing it and making it available behind a paywall is an awesome way to start a new revenue stream. Newspapers, magazines (Rolling Stone in particular, which is well on its way), and broadcast organizations should all do it.
Or a company should do it for them. Because otherwise, Google will.
If they're not too late.

The Attention Economy

2009-08-25T10:06:00.000-07:00

Michael Erard has a great post up entitled "A Short Manifesto on the Future of Attention," which deconstructs the advertising market and media saturation from an orthogonal perspective. It's particularly timely in light of recent news, namely:

A) Murdoch is serious about news content going behind a paywall. He's appointed a Chief Digital Officer to look into the matter.

B) The blogosphere is awash in commentary about newspaper paywall collusion.

C) The ad market remains soft (too many ads, not enough audience to sustain multiple media outlets.)

What I particularly like is his thinking about products and pricing organized around how much attention you care to spend on them:

A quote:

Imagine attention-based pricing, in which prices of information commodities are inversely adjusted to the cognitive investment of consuming them. All the candy for the human brain — haiku, ringtones, bumper stickers — would be priced like the luxuries that they are. Things requiring longer attention spans would be cheaper — they might even be free, and the higher fixed costs of producing them would be covered by the higher sales of the short attention span products. Single TV episodes would be more expensive to purchase than whole seasons, in the same way that a six-pack of Oreos at the gas station is more expensive, per cookie, than a whole tray at the grocery store.

Perhaps an idea whose time has come.

Crazy Like Fox

2009-08-06T10:38:00.000-07:00

As if the AP strangeness wasn't enough, now Rupert Murdoch wants to put all FOX content behind a paywall.
(blink. blink.)
I have two reactions to this:
a) Being a lifelong Democrat, I'm perfectly happy to watch all of FOX news disappear into walled-garden irrelevance. It hasn't enhanced the political dialog, much of it is wrong/jingoistic/wing-nutty, and frankly those who rely on Fox News for "news" are doing themselves a vast disservice.
b) My fear, however, is that others (CBS/CNN/NBC) will copy Murdoch out of desperation, or benightedness.
But again, this supports the theme of my last post: media companies tried paywalls in the late 90s. Only the WSJ was able to pull that one off successfully. Most others gave up.
So, this is how far we've come. In 2009, we're willing to try the SAME thing that DIDN'T WORK a decade a go.
Please, shareholders: It's time for executive regime change at the networks, and newspaper chains.

AP Idiocy

2009-08-05T12:15:00.000-07:00

In July, the Associated Press announced they would create a system to track where their content ends up, with an idea of charging for it. It's been roundly criticized by the blogosphere (here's a good example from the Laboratorium, a blog run by James Grimmelmann) and now AP has released a statement noting how its relationship with iCopyright is not targeted at billing bloggers for using quotes.

The bigger issue is how AP can charge for content it doesn't own. The statement doesn't address it, and Mr. Grimmelmann calls them out on it. Tip of the hat to him.

What defines fair use and what is and is not public domain have been taking a beating lately. First, fair use was thrown out as a defense in a Boston music downloading trial -- although I suspect this will be looked at again on appeal. Now this silliness from the AP.

I understand that record companies are looking at a dying business model and are lashing out with lawyers rather than innovation. I understand that the AP wants to make sure it doesn't get gypped. But how record companies are measuring their losses doesn't pass the laugh-test. And how AP is defining fair use of their content doesn't pass the smell test.

What this boils down to has been true since Bubble 1.0. Media companies (and I've worked at a LOT of them) are not software companies. When they build software, or new media products outside of their traditional scope, they fail more often than not. They fail to anticipate what their new audience will want. They fail to experiment aggressively to see what works and what does not. They tend to try to shovel their old approaches onto the new platform (just like in the early days of television).

Furthermore, this defensive posture about content that lives in a walled garden just won't work on the Internet. The understanding must be that the global Internet audience (and its hockey-sticking mobile component) wants what they want when they want it. DRM just turns everyone off. And they've turned a blind eye to the possibilities of the new platform as a marketing opportunity for their other (just fine thank you) products. And after nearly 15 years, the mossbacks in the boardrooms are showing few signs of waking up. The only solution I can foresee is a shareholder revolt, and some new management talent as a result. There's plenty of folks in Seattle, Silicon Valley, and New York who would love to take on the manifold challenges of bringing record labels, newspapers, radio conglomerates, and broadcast networks into the 21st Century. Lord knows I've tried. But invariably one encounters resistance at the topmost levels, products and platforms get nerfed, and the failure begins anew.

Which is sad for me, and a lot of other media guys who've bled to save these institutions.

Really? It's The Business Model?

2009-05-18T12:28:00.000-07:00

Sorry to momentarily feel prescient, but I was amused to read this morning so much crosstalk about the idea that newspapers, and other media, are starting to think about the ad model a little more seriously.
The FT has a nice article up relating to Rupert Murdoch's latest thinking about content, ads, and whether or not to make the Fox audience pay to receive.
The big idea, as always, has been to say, okay, the ad revenue isn't there (yet.) to go ad-only with respect to revenue, so what about subscriptions.
Content has always been a mix of sub vs. ads with respect to keeping reporters at the phones, so this is surprising.
What's struck me over the past 15 years has been the idea that micropayments haven't caught on.
We, who still buy papers from newsstands, have been well at the epicenter of the micropayment model, trotting out our silver in exchange for news, amusement, and other print-based delights. The ability to facilitate a $0.75 transaction through the Internet, however, doesn't seem to have caught on in the same way that AT&T's monopolistic relationship with Apple's iPhone. As a consequence, Internet news has suffered -- only to be supplanted or supplemented (depending on the vertical market) by the blogosphere.
So, now, Rupert's elected to test the micropayment sphere to address his empire's online revenue issues.
Well and good.
The pricepoint for online news is an area that has defied many analysts, thinktanks and whathaveyou.
I've long been an advocate for a living wage for journalists, since I think journalism is vital to a well-informed democracy.
I've blogged here about the notion that entertainment vs. information continues to be a struggle for major networks. I've also blogged here that local and regional journalism is more than a first draft of history -- it is also, when aggregated -- the rough draft of history, rich in footnotes, commentary, and primary sources. Also, I should say, that local and regional journalism OUGHT to be able to charge more for their archives than national journalism for the following reasons:
a) It's more granular.
b) And therefore richer in content and primary sources.
c) Obits, the first thing any serious journalist learns to write (because it teaches compassion and accuracy), are gold for avid audiences thirsty for genealogical information.
d) High school sports are so bloody important for people with skin (and bloodline) in the game.
e) Most people are regionally bound by blood, history, and the caretaking gene -- the one that says I should care about people, families, and events in my immediate contorno because that's what is immediate, accessible, and therefore important to my family, my friends, my contacts. Because for most people, still, geography is destiny, as well as community.
f) National journalism will always be ADD. Local and regional journalism is more OCD, and therefore inclined to follow stories. Local and regional offers depth. National will always cleave to those topics that are, with few variations, more surface-oriented. National captures the zeitgeist of the body politic, when they're right. But they're also more likely to aggregate around teapot-tempests that, ultimately, are silly, and manipulable (as in the recent Teabag party).
I don't, therefore, believe that national news markets should be able to charge as much as can local or regional newsproviders. I think the "give it away/freeware" model will benefit them much more than can micro-subscriptions (ie, pay per article). Whereas small news outlets can, and should, charge a premium.
Because local avidity should not be under-rated. It caters to an audience of enthusiasts that will show less price sensitivity, because they will always care more than "outsiders."
Hope this helps shape the debate.

It's the business model, stupid.

2009-05-13T17:47:00.000-07:00

So, Al Giordano has a post up entitled Black and White and Dead All Over over at his website, and frankly, it's tiresome, and simple-minded, in the extreme.
The basic gist: Newspapers are folding, becoming online editions, and generally exhibiting acute signs of suffering. And what that means, per Giordano -- who is out on the speaking circuit -- is that a thousand flowers will bloom in the absence of dead-tree media.

First, to be kind, let's stipulate where he and I agree.
a) The fall and trouble associated with papers is widespread, rampant, destructive of contemporary journalism, and the informed public will suffer as a result.

Okay, that was a short list. Here's where he and I disagree.
a) That journalists had it coming because we were all of us in the pocket of corporate media. That's simply not true at the local level, or even at the regional level. Most of us -- as in 99% were trying to do a good job.

b) That the Internet has now flanked print media. Also untrue. Newspapers and magazines continue to offer sound journalism because -- drumroll -- they throw resources after trusted reporters who know they're onto something. The blogosphere is great for opinion, often deep insight, and when it comes to breaking news -- sadly late. There are exceptions, but they prove the rule. Josh Micah Marshall over at TalkingPointsMemo.com is the exception for his tenacity in following the State Attorney Scandal. Individual journalists like Walter Pincus, and his contemporaries are the exceptions because they have deep wells of contacts. Most of the Internet blogosphere have a small network of contacts that are useful, occasionally, for breaking news. But not consistently. Moreover, the blogosphere has few resources to do vital things like file FOIA requests, go to meetings, network on the payroll, etc. -- the typical things journalists do when in the field that waiting for AdSense bucks has not yet been able to duplicate.

c) That the sooner the traditional media are gone that it will create a vast wellspring for the blogger to pick up stories. Actually, here, he and I agree, but only partially. Yes, if traditional media die, this will create an opportunity for the blogger. But only if they die, which implies that while traditional media continues to limp onward, that the blogger is shut out. Surely, if traditional media die, those with something to say will have to come to the blogger, and then the tireless blogger will receive a well-deserved scoop. But until then, sources (especially whistleblowers) will continue to gravitate to the news outlets where their statements can have the widest impact.

All of this cuts to the twin issues of audience and revenue model. It stands to reason that audience=dollars/n, where n is a four to ten digit number. What is important to note is that AdSense is not a revenue model for the individual contributor, unless they have a trust fund, live with their parents, or have become independently wealthy.

Nor have any other revenue models appeared that supplant AdSense, and until Google collapses -- of which it shows few signs -- there likely won't be any models that can supplant AdSense.
AdSense will always favor the momentary attention spike versus the truly valuable -- ie, first draft of history -- journalism, because most people would rather be entertained than informed. Don't get me wrong: I'd rather be entertained than informed, but I'm informed because I know I must be in order to be remotely valuable to society. Being well-informed is always a sacrifice of pleasure, although, I will admit that being even moderately well-informed is its own, twisted reward.

The other thing is that the fate of over-leveraged national media outlets is not necessarily indicative of the overall state of journalism. It's indicative of being over-leveraged.

Bottom-line, until a business model is found for individual correspondents to live on more than the ramen diet, the thousand flowers Mr. Giordano proposes will never bloom.

They'll never even sprout.

Don't Buy The Hype

2009-05-07T13:33:00.000-07:00

This is my 15th year in journalism, and I haven't spent 15 years doing anything consistently, other than eating, breathing, and making music where possible.
Since 1995 or thereabouts, it was clear that the Web was going to change journalism, and it has, but the evolution from print/audio/video to Web remains incomplete.
Which is why I like noting the changes.

So today, three things grabbed my attention: First, Walter Pincus' superb article on the Columbia Journalism Review site, which essentially summarizes all of my views on journalism in the electronic age, and dives deeper, with more historical context. It's a must read, and am very pleased that Metafilter picked it up.

Second, this news over at Techdirt relating to newspapers crawling to Congress for bailout privileges.

And third, this post at Gawker.com on David Simon's testimony on the subject before Congress, and how he has it all wrong.

Pincus has it right. First, the problem for newspapers is debt, much as it is for other sectors of the country. Consolidation has messed things up. Over-leveraged consolidations has messed things up considerably. Second, Google is not the enemy. Third, journalism has lost its way, for a variety of reasons. Downsized newsrooms lack institutional memory, because freelancers are temps by another name, and spreading too few journalists too thin leads to bad coverage.

Techdirt backs up the financial issue, and a review of say, McClatchy (one former employer of mine which strapped itself to buy Knight-Ridder) versus Lee Enterprises (another former employer of mine) demonstrates clearly how Wall Street looks at stocks that are carrying too much debt-load.

Gawker in both the article and the comments upbraids Mr. Simon for a) not being a journalist, really, because he went off to write The Wire, and b) being a techno-Luddite -- both of which are, fundamentally, less-than-savvy arguments.

Newspapers and related, let's call them analog, media will not be saved by bailouts, nor by turning them all into non-profits. Analog media are going through a change period, wherein consolidation is not king, overwhelming debt is not a business model, and Web-based advertising for local and regional coverage is undervalued. On the Web, vertical models are rewarded because they can appeal to global interest groups. Horizontal (geographically-based models) are undervalued because the Web audience is global, and geography (at least for now) less important. This will ultimately, I believe, not stand, because geography remains important for everything that involves atoms, which are still harder to ship, see, and touch than digital items. The Web is maturing in this direction, but not swiftly enough to make up for the loss of classified advertising.

Not every merchant can afford to run a Fedex/catalogue/shipping-based business. Local businesses remain important to local people. Ditto with regional. As transportation becomes pricier, local and regional media will see an upswing in their importance. Ad values will rise accordingly. We're just not there yet, and this is an awkward economic transition for overly-leveraged businesses with loans to payoff.

It's the winter of journalism's discontent. How we manage this transition, and what recrudescence we are able to pull off with respect to journalism's core values will be important.
If you're a journalist like I am, this period of soul-searching and concentration on our core values will be important in the near-term.

Think of it as a mix between cognitive and shock therapy.
But we will get through this.

Hamstrung

2009-05-05T15:02:00.000-07:00

So now Disney has a deal with Hulu, which you've all probably read about in greater detail than I'll go into here. Media watchers are generally taking the view that this move leaves CBS in relative isolation, although some suspect that CBS execs are already in talks to figure out how to latch onto the Hulu revolution.

Well and good. We'll see how all that shakes out.

The thing I want to get into today is a quick discussion of the publishing business model, and how that applies to just about every troubled media business, including NBC and CBS, plus the music industry, and newspapers.

Ready?

So, here's how publishing works: You back a talent (to produce a book, a video, or some form of media), the talent produces the work, and you obtain rights to it. In the case of dead-tree publishing, this is practically in perpetuity. With video, the rights are a little more fragmented -- witness Hulu's ability to publish certain episodes of certain seasons for certain durations of time.
A microcosmic case: NBC's popular Heroes series had its season three finale, and the bulk of Season 3's episodes will be available on Hulu throughout the summer, after which, not so much -- a rotating group of five random episodes thereafter.

Taking this case as a microcosm, then, what are users to do to get Season 1, or 2? Well, there's plenty of sites that are hosting bootlegged/ripped episodes, or users can go to Netflix and rent the season compilations. What about NBC's own website? After all, they backed the series. Surely all the episodes should be there. Alas no. Not the case. And even more water-brained, NBC's own site lacks a search function that would allow the retrieval of full-episodes from past seasons, instead of the -- let's be kind, and call it extraneous, non-episodic material. Instead of, say, useless garbage, which is a tempting term for someone less genteel than I.

Let's establish a maxim: Users always want what they want and how when they want it. And now a corollary: If they can't get it from you, they will get it from somewhere else. In other words, viewers/users/consumers will follow the path of least resistance. Go hiking sometime where livestock roam. Follow the footpaths beaten into the hillsides by countless hooves. You'll find their routes are the most efficient for traversing the incline. Ditto with users. Therefore, if you (the publisher) fail to provide for a given device, a format, a time-shift, or a place-shift from your traditional business model, away go the hits, and next thing you know you're looking for remedies from law enforcement agencies to stop all the piracy. When, in fact, you could have simply anticipated the needs of your users with the content (that you had rights to) and made it available and monetizable.

Back to publishing: The one lasting fundament of traditional publishing (paper) is having a deep backlist. If you own the rights to Catcher in the Rye, you'll continue to make money until the world explodes, thanks to high school student reading lists. This applies to other media as well: Think of all the radio stations making money from music released in the seventies/eighties/nineties. Think of all the newspapers that are NOT making money off their non-digitized archives of every story since the dawn of the 19th century. Think of all the television stations that continue to broadcast material whose creators have long since shuffled off this mortal coil.

Back to NBC: If you own the rights to stream episodes of Heroes, you could theoretically also make money until the end of time. Providing you provided all of your episodes in an easily searchable fashion.

There is no reason why NBC can't do this right now. Ditto for all the other networks. It's a missed opportunity that is being flanked by overseas sites that are not governed by US copyright protection. With a global Internet, this is simply short-sighted and destructive.

Execs need to negotiate now for broadcast rights that take into account the new economic realities of time/place/device shifting. They need to take a note from the Gutenberg galaxy, and realize that all their programming (including all that tape/film they warehouse in New Jersey) is potentially important, should be digitized, archived, made searchable, and available for download or streaming.

I'm not trying to tear down the networks for their failure. I want them to succeed so they can continue to bankroll great programming.

I just wish they would stop failing so obviously.

News v. Entertainment

2009-04-27T11:59:00.000-07:00

Techdirt has a great piece on Newspapers, The Recording Industry And A Misplaced Sense Of Entitlement, which does a nice job of contrasting the various arguments surrounding the sense of doom looming over newspapers, but then spins off into trivial observations about how the old media might save itself. The comments section is also interesting.
What impels this post is the idea that without the internet, Susan Boyle (Britain's Got Talent phenom) would have remained an obscure (British) phenomenon instead of gaining a few hundred million hits, and that the news industry has something to learn from this.
This conflation of how entertainment content performs vs. how news performs online is upsetting, and is ultimately a misleading straw man.
Let's get things straight:
Susan Boyle is entertainment content that went global.
News is not entertainment, first and foremost. It's supposed to be a) new; b) informative at minimum, though actionable is better, and c) the first draft of history.
The idea that news can compete with entertainment content is silly, with a few notable exceptions, ala 60 Minutes.
On the broadcast front, news was cheap to produce, cheaper than entertainment, and often cheaper than soaps.
On the newspaper front, the idea was that it was good for local advertisers, and good for the local community to have a selection of the day's news (with entertainment content thrown in as well).
The national newspaper is a different model, and there's just a handful of those in the states -- or arguably one (NYT) now.
The issue is not that the old business model (ad vs. subscription supported) is broken. The issue is how local and regional stories of interest will be covered, and by whom, particularly when such news is of low hit-value but of long-term importance. Low hits mean low wages means anyone covering them will either be a) rich or of independent means; b) a part-timer, who may or may not be "professional" in the old sense of the word -- ie, has perspective, strives to omit bias and remain objective; or c) someone who does it for a while, then moves on, leaving a gap in coverage.

This atomizes local and regional coverage in a new way. There will be no central repository for stories, no archives, no continuity.

Also, I assert that newsrooms -- with experienced editors keeping their reporters sharp -- make for better journalism. It's the kind of thing that a community cannot do as efficiently.

How Much IS a Link Worth, Anyway?

2009-04-20T08:28:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite venture capitalists, Fred Wilson of NYC-based Union Square Ventures, has initiated a fascinating discussion over the the value of links. Google may be the primary source of traffic for most websites, but how valuable is that traffic, versus say, links sent by email, Tweets, Diggs, etc. And how does a site (content or commerce) valuate links?

An even deeper question is how should sites derive user-intent?

I've been attacking this problem from a different angle in thinking about how news and entertainment content differentiate from one another. Entertainment will always get better traffic, because, hey, it's entertaining -- it is supposed to have mass appeal. News, while vital, will barely touch that. It's telling that when I worked during the CBS.com start-up days, about a third of our traffic came from Letterman, a third from soaps, and a third from Survivor. So all the work we were doing with news made little to no impact.

That experience was echoed at the Red Herring, where we measured our success by traffic, and one great way to bump traffic up was to find hooks that would snare popular traffic. This was troublesome to journalists who were trying to figure out a way to shoehorn a Britney reference into a story about server farms. While that strategy did work effectively, I'm fairly sure we didn't win a lot of converts (ie, repeat visitors, or subscribers to the paper edition).

Fred's post (and the many awesome follow-up comments) addresses this difference as well, but takes a 30K foot view by looking at how social networks assist in conversion. It's a must read.

Anyone seen a Hulu rate card?

2009-04-04T14:38:00.001-07:00

Just curious.
Over the past three months, Hulu appears to be getting its act together.
Ad insertions are increasing in their programming. The advertisers are getting more respectable. House ads are falling off. And new networks are pondering joining the Hulu empire.
I have no idea what contract details NBC has inked with Hulu, what the revenue sharing arrangements are, or how much revenue is coming in the door.
But I think the grammar of online television is being formed, and it looks like this:
a) Sometimes an intro ad.
b) 8-12 minutes of programming.
c) 15-30 sec. ad spot.
d) Lather, rinse, repeat until program close.
e) Sometimes a follow-spot (which is silly, because who watches these, really?).

That's a pretty good value proposition for an audience that has been weaned on 3+ minutes of ads during high-value time slots. And lest we forget, the new audience is happening online, and this is their emerging expectation set for all internet/tv-style/video programming, as the Brits say, in future. What's all this mean? It means that the traditional TV audience now has a format they will like better (since they typically hate/resent/grudgingly tolerate ads, and use the adblocs of traditional (let's call it legacy) programming. The new audience develops the expectation that this is the format.

This last part is worth some exploration. We know that music companies were too late to the game to realize they would be flanked by the internet, P2P, streaming, iTunes, etc. in terms of distribution. And thus, the audience (by this we mean the eventual global population of individuals with some connectivity -- let's assume 60-70% of the planet, or between 4-4.7 billion) did come to expect free music, and the Pirate Bay flourished, and many sites in former Soviet states got way more Web traffic than anyone projected.

When the expectation forms in the marketplace, it's very difficult to dislodge that expectation. Oceans of RIAA lawsuits haven't changed a thing, other than put heads on (legal) pikes that the rest of the planet blithely ignores.

So Hulu is now a leader in forming future programming formats, ad rates, and related elements. They are defining the business.

So what about the free sites? As much as I love them, there are numerous points of vulnerability to their business models.

a) They can only monetize banner ads.
b) They have no insertion capability into the video asset.
c) They rely too heavily on too few hosting sites. If Megavideo, Tudou, Youku, and a handful of others go away, there is no guarantee that others will step to the plate. Hosting is not a high-margin business.

If ads work for these sites sufficiently well, or experience rising value, then they'll proliferate. But they're drawing from a well they do not own.

All I can say is that Hulu (regardless of who owns or invests in it) may be the one thing the Internet can't flank.

Providing they do the following things:
a) Archival content is a weak point. The idea of having entire television seasons in exchange for ads is very attractive. Hulu's bottleneck is its licensing. They need to go big, deep, and fast. Because archival content, especially full movies and full TV seasons will make the mass audience beat feet to their door.
b) Pre roll and post roll (especially the latter) will never be as big as interstitials. They should lose post roll immediately. A 30 sec. interstitial is barely enough time to wander away. It's about enough time to find a cigarette, or check your email.
c) To make up for this loss, they should offer a 2 minute ad window at about 30 minutes of programming for bathroom breaks. That should net about a fifth of the viewing audience and offer "impressions" of a sort to those wandering around the house within earshot of the speakers. It's a granular point, but one I believe is worth making.
d) Make whatever deals they have to, in order to get more CBS, and much more Time Warner and Viacom.

A final point, and one I'll get into later: I have never seen a study of how people watch DVDs. We already know that Tivo users fast forward through ads. But for linear programming, when are the popcorn/bathroom/gotta take a phone call breaks? I raise this point because the other big, big, big difference between Hulu and network is the pause button feature. I think some people use it. I think many do not, because of the prior "media training" induced by network programming. If the ad is short, interesting, or maybe just really short, people will sit through it by merit of prior conditioning.

There will also be the control mavens in the audience who know, and use the pause in a way that says "I am not immersed. At all." I suspect this group is smaller, but as avid as any audience. After all, they sought out the programming, which in a control freak, is a good thing.

Hulu needs to study how people respond to non-linear programming and know it better than anyone in the world if they want to succeed. Because then, they can be even more adroit in figuring out their ad breaks, what kind of ads to insert and when, and take more control of the audience heatmap.

My assertion: Hulu is attempting to define the grammar of online video programming. My conclusion? They're succeeding.

Online Video, OTOH, Is Very Much Alive

2009-01-07T13:36:00.001-08:00

So, it's always lovely when industry pundits are proven correct.
Latest ComScore material here from our friends at CNET. ComScore's press release is here.
But here's a number to wrap your head around: 12.7 billion videos watched in the US alone during the month of November. That's up 34% from the year-ago month.
This touches on a number of thoughts:
a) Economic downturn means folks are cutting costs. Cable bill? Too spendy. And when you can catch the quality shows on places like Hulu, or better, TVShack.Net, then why pay extra. Video quality on these sites is tolerable, even with a DSL connection.
b) From a video quality perspective, cable television is becoming increasingly on-par with streaming and downloadable video. Hulu, Joost, and Slingbox being the poster-children for the streaming movement. This is a two-part problem: Cable TV compression and viewability is declining in quality, because HD gets compressed on the MSO's end to save bandwidth, so they can offer a welter of channels. That reduces overall quality for cable, and makes quality suffer. In the meantime, quality for Internet TV (also compressed), is improving as overall bandwidth capabilities of the Internet are expanding faster than cable can with its wireline infrastructure. This will only continue as new bandwidth opens up, Wimax rollout, and TV bandwidth becoming increasingly freed up as the world shifts from broadcast to digital. What's clear from the ComScore figures is that video-consuming audiences have decided that on-demand availability at an acceptable level of quality is just as good, if not better, than their existing cable bundles. Here in the Bay Area -- and this is anecdotal -- most of my friends (of all ages, and income brackets) use the television (if they have one) rarely, if at all. Most are leaving them on the streets.
c) Another consideration, because there are massive amounts of content available on the Internet -- more than one can consume in an evening, thanks to the Tivo age. Viewers, then, can watch what they want, when they want, as opposed to taking a premixed slew of content of dubious quality. All this means avid viewership is now more important than mass viewership. Which means that ad rates for these enthusiast audiences is in need of being reset. Upwards. When that happens (ie, when ad execs get a clue, and learn to sell this new reality, versus what they've been selling for years), we're going to see a thousand flowers blossom -- probably from the independent set.

Which explains too, why CBS is cutting their overall content budget to $350M this year. Could CBS (full disclosure: I worked at CBS.com during its early days) finally find a way to appeal to the youth audience that's avoided it for so long? Only if they get busy curating the best of what's out there, and start folding solid, bold, Internet content into their online mix.

Fascinating stuff, and a great time to be an Internet video professional, I think. We will likely suffer for the next 18 months, so let's use that time to create great independent shows together.
And I've got more than a few ideas on that topic.

Print is dead. So very dead.

2009-01-06T14:42:00.000-08:00

Great article here at the Guardian with Clay Shirky on the shape of things to come vis a vis journalism across all media, except radio.
As if Sam Zell weren't bad enough for the LA Times (real estate uber alles), there's an impressive need for newspapers to make the move to the Web -- ie, bleeding ad market; single-digit rates of return; dropping fixed costs (and union print employees) out of the mix, and so forth.
One interesting insight I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere: What is more important in an audience? Numbers or avidity? Particularly applicable to television.
Old school dot-commers have been predicting the death of print for years. Shirky thinks '09 is the year It Will Finally Happen.
The open question, as always, is what is the most compelling form for online news and information.
At the Red Herring's online arm, we always tried to make whatever tech news we were covering be Diggable, or at least inject enough popular key-terms to make people seek out the story. So an average story on VC X plopping money into Startup Y -- no hits. But mention Apple, Google, or Brittany Spears (difficult to do in a tech story) and the thing would transform into a hit factory.
One point Shirky doesn't mention in this interview is what making a news or feature story "hitworthy" does to the job of the daily journalist. When management rates the journalists in the bullpen by how many hits their stories are getting, the guys (like me) that do the BBI (boring but important) stories end up getting called on the carpet for not producing traffic.
Never mind that the finance and venture capital beat only interest a small group of avid investors and startup watchers.
The other point not mentioned by Shirky is how journalists and bloggers get compensated.
If, as industry trends indicate, the method for compensating journos is hit-based, then invariably that will lead to the overall quality of news suffering.
Journalism is the first draft of history. And history doesn't necessarily bag the biggest audiences.
If it's exclusively an audience game versus and avidity game, then journos that put in the shoe leather will find themselves inexorably gravitated to the unemployment line, which is what is happening across the news spectrum as I type this.

Here's a Crowdsourcing F'rinstance: Photography is Better Than Drugs.

2008-12-08T13:33:00.000-08:00

Xeni Jardin. How do we love thee. Let us count the many, many ways.
So here's a project: Give (donated) cams to the homeless in order to document their lives, or whatever they see.
Photography is better than drugs, it seems. Also on this post, our old friend (from the NYC/1990s days) Clay Shirky has a spot.
BTW, really enjoying how BBTV is picking up big advertisers, ala Toshiba. SomeONE's willing to back online video. Thanks, Tosh!

Curatorial Journalism

2008-12-08T07:32:00.000-08:00

Caught NPR's recent On The Media broadcast while driving back to the Bay Area from a holiday visit to Oregon. A few great points were made regarding the bombings in Mumbai, wherein Twitter played an enormous role in getting on-site news out during Day One of the aftermath.
A series of questions was raised by the interviewer centered around whether folks sending Tweets from Mumbai were:

Unwittingly aiding terrorists
Contributing to the spread of inaccurate reports
Behaving responsibly (particularly with regard to posting images of the dead)

The answers were:

Possibly, but television stations were the worst offenders
Probably, but people quickly figured out who were reliable, and started following those "credible" sources.
Yes.

Then the interview turned to address matters relating to how mainstream media and new media were experiencing some synergy. At this point in the talk, the thought was journalists were acting as curators of what was happening in the social networking space.

Here's why that's interesting. Most US newspapers have truncated their foreign coverage -- witness the recent cutbacks at the LA Times. Television (CNN included) has always treated foreign affairs as optional. I once interned with Richard Roth back in 1994 who produced an international affairs show, with frequent guests from the UN, where he had an office. That show was typically broadcast at around 2 in the morning, and would occasionally get some play when something really violent was happening on CNNi. When it comes to so-called foreign coverage -- ie, anything that happens outside the lower 48 -- BBC, NPR, and overseas papers do it best, NYT's international coverage notwithstanding.

In other words, there's little left for many journalists to do anything BUT curate. Because they're not on-site.

That said, the curatorial role of journalists taking their cues from social media is likely -- I believe -- to be a continuing trend as news becomes increasingly crowd-sourced. News organizations can't (or won't) afford eyes and ears on the ground, but journalists can help separate the wheat (or the tweet) from the chaff, connect ideas, and in many cases better articulate them than your average online writer who doesn't write for a living.

Now is this anything new? Yes and no. Rank and file journalists covering matters of every sort have taken their cues from blogs as they cover their beat since the blogosphere came into existence. Certainly, as a tech reporter, I did. It's also a fast way to get a source, email being at least as efficient, if not more, than a telephone call. The struggle for journalists now is to be able to add more balance, insight, and voices into their coverage in order to continue justifying their existence as a mediator between events and publishing news/features in the various media.

That said, I think we can all do a hell of a lot more than curate.

Ad Softness

2008-11-24T08:20:00.000-08:00

Amuso co-founder Barak Rabinowitz has a nice little column over at VentureBeat on how social networks fall flat when it comes to generating ad dollars.
Two questions he doesn't address that I'm thinking about:
a) So banner ad revs are soft. That's what happens when you have a lot of spare inventory, and can't figure out ways to make that real estate more valuable to advertisers. And when your traffic is being measured against ad rates normally paid for television. What about ad rates for online video? It's becoming increasingly clear that there are some early adopters willing to spend for online video spots.
b) What about ROI from the perspective of marketers that are actually reaching into social networks to represent their products? IE, engaging in conversations.
Two things I'll be digging into this week.

Only This Will Soften Our Pain and Disgust

2008-11-19T12:30:00.000-08:00

Someone else gets it, too.
Monty Python. All their videos. A channel on YouTube. Higher quality.
Selling infinite goods for nothing, in order to sell scarce goods for something.
The freeware model in the age of Internet Television. Reloaded.
I've always loved these guys. I love them more now that they're codgers, and they still get it. Better than most.
Here's their announcement:

Denial is No Longer a Response

2008-11-18T11:24:00.000-08:00

It's become pretty clear in the last week that we now have a President-Elect that gets it. By it, I mean the convergence of the internet, and online video.
Today, President-Elect Barack Obama released his second YouTube video -- this latest one a bit of a surprise to some -- and this time, on the topic of climate change.

This is significant on at least three levels:
a) He understands that releasing to YouTube first gives him a bully pulpit to express his views on national and international events to both a national and international audience.
b) He gets the time format. Heatmaps of online video consumption start to drop off after 3 minutes. He tucked this latest one in with a 3:43 runtime.
c) He clearly knows that by doing this, he's flanking the networks, and making them address the newscycle on his terms.
d) When was the last time you saw a President-Elect be this proactive in addressing issues prior to taking power? My first presidential election was Reagan in 1980. This certainly hasn't happened in my voting lifetime.
An intellectually curious president to-be that understands technology and media. What Reagan was to the television, Mr. Obama will be to the Internet. Just watch.

Meter Running

2008-11-17T20:55:00.000-08:00

It's almost Thanksgiving, which brings us to the 1-year mark for Hulu, the joint-multi-million dollar investment by players like Fox, NBC, and Providence Equity Partners.

With another year to go. And as a Hulu fan, it doesn't look like it's 12 months away from being cash-flow positive. Or 24. Maybe 36 with some optimism. That's just my guess.

Here's why I'm handicapping them. I watch Hulu. What's interesting is how few ads there are that are filled by anything that could be realizing revenue for Fox and GE. Most of it's Ad Council, as you well know, assuming you're among the few, the proud, the Hulu-loyalists.

There's so many soft spots in the Hulu model, it feels sadistic to lay in to them. But let's review the state of the Web-As-We-Know-It, with respect to the sub-universe of television/movie availability via the Web.

[BTW, we need a term for this. IPTV is too IT. Rich media content sounds like a promo for a candy bar. Linear media content on the web (LMC-OTW) leads to an unsatisfying acronym that sounds like a union local.]

So, let's say I want to watch 30 Rock, the Emmy-award-winning sitcom from NBC, where Tina Fey of recent election fame is charming, funny, and executive producing the whole shebang. Let's say I'm a late arrival to the show, being male. Let's say I want to catch up on the past three seasons. I can go buy the DVDs ($75 or better), go to Hulu and catch five episodes, or go out into the wild and wooly web, and in about two minutes have access to all seasons, and every episode. This will no doubt lead to a massive personal productivity slump, but I'm saying, by way of example, that IF I'm NBC, and I OWN this content, then why in the name of something passing holy can't I watch every episode on Hulu?

It's not like NBC and FOX didn't put in a cool hundred million to get this thing off the ground. And it's not like they're being flanked by players in China (Youku, which sucks), Tudou (which is awesome) and Megavideo (which is neutral on the suck/awesome scale: sometimes it's awesome due to ubiquity; sometimes it sucks because of a confusing time-limit policy that seems unevenly enforced).

Point is, if I'm FOX or NBC, the idea that I'm not posting all of my content (time-delayed past broadcast time, perhaps -- or better, simulcast to TVs & the web -- a breakthrough yet to arrive), then I am either timid (must preserve precious bodily fluids, or content rights, whatever), or I have a complete deathwish.

Okay. Clue-time. Forgive, please, my cutting to the quick.

Once upon a time, there was this thing called broadcast television. It thrived on ubiquity. There were three or four great networks. And the point was, you had content, you sold ads to brands that wanted to reach the demos you commanded, they paid top dollar, and everyone went home happy and mildly-buzzed on Scotch that, had it been a student, would have been completing his or her doctorate. Or retiring. Depends on executive level.

Then Ted Turner prior to meeting Jane Fonda decided that he would personally make cable important, succeeded, married and divorced Fonda, and retreated to a Red State where he raises bison by way of compensation. That took us from a three-channel universe into an N-channel universe where N represents a random two-digit number.

By now you think I'm talking down to you. That's okay. I was just throat-clearing, like Neal Stephenson does for 1400 pages.

(Kidding, Neil! I loved Anathem! Also the Baroque Trilogy. And you're right, Churchill's Marlborough is four volumes of throat-clearing, larded with awesome history-changing battles, lots of politics, and meditations on the idea of isolation, something YOU, Winston, suffered while you were waiting for Chamberlain to soil his pants on the international scene. Thank god that happened as you foresaw.)

What I want to get to here is the idea of what broadcasting is in the Internet age. It's ubiquity, son. If you are a content provider, and you are NOT on YouTube, Hulu, Brightcove, and a million sites that seem to have more content than we do in the good old U.S.of A, all at once, then you're not playing. Or rather, you are. You're just not playing to win.

If you're doing LMC-OTW, right now, and you're not available everywhere, then there goes a percentage of your potential audience. Now, you execs are thinking, "but we don't know who these people are, so how can we sell the fact that they're watching our shit?"

This, my friends, is a failure to recognize the global marketplace for content. Sure, broadcast networks -- you may not have hit these people with your content before, and so you don't know how to sell it to the brands that have been your traditional backers. Fine.

That's just a failure to market a market you already own. That's money you left on the table. And gave to your competitors, who have one fifth the burn-rate, and AT BEST, one-tenth the staff.

Plus ambition. To eat your fucking lunch.

Wake up call: Be ubiquitous. Be available for everyone, even unanticipated markets. Be ready to market those audience to advertisers. Get your metrics together. With ubiquity, you're not broadcasting. You're microcasting. And the sooner to get to monetizing that, instead of giving away ad space to senseless Ad Council gibberish, the sooner you're going to make your silent partners willing to buy you another round. Scotch. Financing. It's your choice.

Be smart. Get your ad people on their feet. And stop letting China and Korea eat your lunch.
Not by being litigious assholes in legal systems overseas (the 'they can't haz our content' strategy. Real winner, there). But by being smarter.

You have awesome content: SNL, 24, and I'm sure a variety of other under-appreciated shows. Prison Break, perhaps. Are you going to make it ubiquitous with some shot at monetization, or are you going to spend money to slow the bleeding.

In the future, there's a third of your audience that will watch TV. And 2/3 of your audience that will take content via some pipe that pumps to a computer with a really awesome monitor.

Cable is dead except for connectivity points. Telcos are dead for the same reason. Commodity market. Content companies are the value-added.

And why did it take Andy Samberg to give NBC a content-syndication-web strategy. Chronicles of Narnia blew up. Andy's huge on the Web. But you've restricted what HE can put on his website, and you still don't have everything he's ever done for you on Hulu. Remember that $100 million platform you invested in? Um. Use it and squeeze every cent from it.

Seriously. Make Samberg a VP already. The path is blazed. He blazed it. You're still wandering through the triple-canopy with a poison dart in your thigh, and cannibals waiting in the bush.

Change Up

2008-11-16T09:14:00.000-08:00

I got out of the habit of blogging when I had daily deadlines. When you write for a living, personal writing takes on a back-burner status with which I am no longer content. My current ambition for this blog is to comment on evolving developments at the intersection set of social networking, and online video -- two subjects in which I have some passing expertise.

What's happening right now, as I see it, are a number of converging factors that are going to make life for companies and content creators a little more challenging than in the past.

Journalism, as a craft and a profession, is imploding -- owing to softness in the advertising market, media consolidation, and no small amount of ineffectual hand-wringing on the part of media companies that find themselves unable, or unwilling to adapt to changing market conditions.

This has hammered my colleagues and I, content creators all (we used to be called editors, reporters and producers), who now find that wages for their prior job descriptions have fallen off, as has availability of jobs.

Blogging -- professionally, or semi-professionally -- is not a substitute for a salaried position with benefits for all but a few.

From the media company perspective, cutting costs -- adjusting to the current recessionary climate, plus ad market issues -- has led to sharp reductions in staffing, to say nothing of overseas bureaux, enterprise/investigative projects, and other "cost-centers."

This is a mistaken strategy, and I believe it exacerbates the death-spiral many media companies find themselves in today. Here's why. The value-added serious journalists provide to media companies is insight, context, and perspective. This is what distinguishes what I'll call commodity content (and by this I mean rewritten press releases, with one or two additional sources thrown in as a substitute for depth) from what I'll call real content (ie, something that leaves you wiser, and better informed than when you first loaded the page, opened the magazine, perused the newspaper, or turned on the television).

Commodity content has the advantage of being easy, and relatively cheap to produce. An intern could do it, and in some media organizations, is doing so as we speak. Even on a Sunday.

However, commodity content from the reader's/consumer's perspective is like a sugar-high -- momentarily interesting, but completely free of intellectual nutrition.

There are Web-based market dynamics that feed this tendency. Many news organizations have an atavistic theory that more stuff equals more traffic. It's a more-is-more idea, but it is fundamentally flawed when one considers the idea of reader retention, product differentiation, and the shift in reading habits that has happened over the last 6000 days (tip of the hat to Kevin Kelly's recent speech on this topic) since the advent of the Web.

In the old days, ie, 1993, people still had these things called subscriptions -- which viewed from the perspective of stickiness -- was a kind of guarantee for publishers and cable television: whether or not they watched the program, or opened the newspaper -- there was a presumption that if the person was paying for it, they were looking at the ads, which in turn gave the media companies a statistic they could use to sell ads.

Then those models were exported to the Web (WSJ, et. al.) where they largely failed completely, the WSJ being a somewhat notable exception. Salon flirted with subscriptions, then had to capitulate and adopt the daypass (watch an ad as a price of entry), then they capitulated further, and now readers can simply click through one interruptory screen.

So subscriptions have gone the way of the coelocanth (perhaps not extinct, but damned rare: the last one was found off the coast of Madagascar), and now we -- content creators and media companies -- operate in a sphere where readers/viewers are fickle and flighty, but also able to swarm over content that is genuinely good or interesting. So the relationship has been reversed. William Randolph Hearst once said "you give me the pictures, and I'll provide the war." In short, media companies were the kingmakers. Now readers and consumers make the hits, often to the complete surprise and befuddlement of media companies.

Andrew Sullivan recently remarked that this moment is the best time to blog. I'll disagree with him on one point in an otherwise fine article. He gets a salary for blogging. But the great mass of us do not. So yes, it's a wonderful time to become a subject-matter expert, blog ubiquitously about that, and use it to fuel your own career ambitions by any means possible.

For the media companies, however, it's yet another wakeup call, following a decade of howling alarms in a similar vein.

To adapt to this not-so-brave, not-so-new world, media companies have to get just three things right to survive.

1) Give up on the idea of being first. Just be best. Fretting over whether you broke news isn't as important anymore. Someone will get the story. In a cloud of bloggers, amateur content producers, and a world of interested citizens, someone will beat you. It's okay. Where you can add value is by digging in, and not losing the story through a kind of institutional ADD that seems to pervade many news organizations. Josh Micah Marshall's TalkingPointsMemo DID break the US Attorney scandal -- bully for them. But then they stuck with it until it became a major news meme. News organizations could have done the same thing -- even if they weren't first, they could have been better. But they were timid. And now Josh owns the story, and the blog wags the dog of the MSM.
Return to fundamentals. Digging into a story and owning it is what you do best. Engaging with your readership and airing their views and concerns by generating content around those passions is what you have done best since the dawn of the printing press, and the advent of radio.

2) When you focus on cost-cutting, look not to the newsroom unless you believe eating your seed corn is the best way to survive a long winter. Look instead to the advertising sales department. This department has failed you for better than a decade. That softness in the ad market comes from them, not from the buyers. They have failed to persuade your advertisers that an ad on your website, your podcast, or your web TV program is free from value. Persuading is their job. Creating market demand is their job. If they can't do it, fire at will.

3) Convince your investors that historical returns of 2-5 percent will have to do, or buy them out and find other, more patient investors. The double-digit return mania of the 1990s on the part of investors has served neither party well. It's time to file for divorce, or renegotiate the relationships. Some of the most stable newspapers and television stations have been family-owned, or owned by a small circle of people that cared about democratic values (ie, a well-informed electorate). It may well be time for a return to that model.

Dude, finally.

2008-04-02T13:35:00.001-07:00

11/05 -- if you can remember back that far. That was the date I started at the Red Herring magazine, ostensibly to cover venture capital finance.

It was, I'll admit, a tenuous foothold to establish on the West Coast, but I was eager to get out of Oregon, with its radically strange wage-base, high unemployment, and with the exception of a few companies dotted around the I-5 corridor, virtually free of interesting technology companies.

For those who don't know me that well (Why are you reading my blog then, stalkers?) I've been covering business, science, and technology since the early 1990s. Started up Interactive Week, MediaCentral.com, CBS.com, and a variety of other media shops -- all in New York City -- and that was great, for a time. Then the Bubble popped, I got a divorce, and at the time, it seemed like the 212 time was over and done.

So I moved to Oregon, taught at Southern Oregon University, worked at a few local Oregon papers, and wondered when the tech market would recover.

In spring of 05, my friends told me it was time, things were again happening in the Valley, which remains the richest epicenter of venture capital for technology companies on the planet.

Red Herring said yes, and the drama began.

In April of last year, I got the opportunity to start up RedHerring.TV, and over the course of the past year, I and my team created, posted and hosted more than 300 videos featuring CEOs, venture capitalists, and thought leaders throughout the technology space.

However, Red Herring is now terribly troubled, and the drama of remaining there seemed more taxing than the drama of looking for new work.

I will miss all my former compatriots. The Red Herring has been unique in that it has attracted so many great people over the past 29 months, only to lose the bulk of them owing to mismanagement, unsteady payroll, and a working environment I can only describe as deeply troubled.

Tone is set by leadership, and permeates the organization.

Troubles at the top don't trickle into the trenches. More like a torrent, really.

So as of April 1, no joking, I and the rest of the RedHerring.TV video team -- all of whom are fantastic, capable, intelligent folks -- upped sticks and re-entered the job market.

If you need a low-cost, high quality video team, we're ready to entertain offers.

All best, and happy to be free of the Red Herring drama,

Sean

What's Cooking?

2008-02-16T18:36:00.001-08:00

Okay. So it's been a while since I've updated. Part of that is a company policy that prohibits us (journos) from blogging, because it might conflict with...the time we spend at work. Okay.
I'm cool with that. What's missing from the contract of course, is the idea that we might PROMOTE what we're doing at work (Check out my work at RedHerring.TV). But let's leave that issue for a moment.
What's on the stove?
Yeah. Some people say I know how to cook. I certainly do a lot of it. And tonight's dinner promises to be something special.
So. Spring is coming. So there's one last chance to kick out a nice, slow-cooked pork roast before the spring veggies are on, and slow-cooked meats are, well, so last season.

I wanted a dish that looks at pork, plus winter vegetables, but also, a little different.
Here it goes: Let's call this:

Last Chance Pork Roast
2 lbs. pork shoulder roast.
1 celeriac root.
As many boiler onions as you feel comfortable with. I also threw in a few shallots, and some undersized cippolini onions.
A few carrots.
Some celery (I used 3 stalks).
3-15 cloves of garlic (I used 7).
Beer, pearl sake, and a nice white wine. You could probably narrow this down. I'll give my reasons for the combination in a moment.
1/3 stick butter
Olive oil, probably 1/4 cup scant.

Here we go. Get your Griswold dutch oven or other heavy duty piece of deep cast iron with a lid. Your La Creuset marmite would probably work. If you have neither of these things, improvise, go on E-Bay and wait a week, or cook something else.
Okay, time to brown that roast. Butter and oil go in the pot, wait for the foam to subside a bit, and brown the meat rotating at about 2 min. intervals. Incidentally, this is about 4-5 boiler onions prepped. YMMV.

Okay, sucker's browned. Dispose of most of the cooking fat. Leave a tablespoon for taste, or, if you're on Weight Watchers, dump the whole nine yards if it makes you feel better. You're eating pork tonight, for heaven's sake.

Now, if you haven't finished prepping your veggies for slow-cooking, i.e., 1.5-2" segments, get busy.

Done? Great. Heat up that pan again, dump some beer in -- half a cup is good, more is better.
Replace roast, top off with veggies, and let it sweat a bit on low.

Now hit it with that pearl sake. Smell the sweetness? Oh, that's going to be good. Top it off with half a glass of white wine for acid.

Wait 1.5-2 hrs, rotating at 15-20 minute intervals.

Eat.

You probably should have thought about what you're going to have with it. I baked some yams, and briefly considered an eggplant dish, but ultimately went with garlicky greens (stir fry garlic until golden, add onions if you like, sweat greens (chard, spinach, etc.) for about 90 seconds, cut heat, remove wok from burner, cover, and allow to sweat away from heat until read to serve. Easiest best greens on the planet) for your meat-remedy.

Enjoy, and thanks for looking at an outdated blog.

The Web's melting point

2005-08-12T12:32:00.000-07:00

I'm not one to sift through the past all that much, especially with respect to my prior work in journalism. There's something about reading past news articles I've written that leaves me a bit flat. It's as if, well, it happened, so what of it?

But there is some coverage I'm proud of, in retrospect. Most recently, the work I did in unearthing what Hewlett-Packard's (their Corvallis, Oregon operation) were likely to be in advance of any real announcement: That was picked up by the AP, and went statewide.

Also unusual stories, like Hydration Technologies, Inc. in Albany, OR, which makes these bladders that use osmosis to convert tainted water to a drinkable substance that is currently in use in Iraq.

Other stuff, too: interviews with veterans of the Pacific War. Coverage of a pair of murder trials. Stalking the wildfires that swept Southern Oregon. A retirement complex with tainted water. Stuff that matters to people on the street, more than the tech stories I've covered throughout my working life.

In the Bay Area job search, the past keeps returning. For example, I'm down here to cover the tech market, as I have at IPInferno, and as I did in the past at places like CBS.com, Cowles New Media, and Interactive Week.

All that means having a clip file, which I do -- but the fact is, I haven't maintained it as assiduously as some of my colleagues. A woman I worked with, Cathy Ingalls of the Albany Democrat-Herald, was quite meticulous. As each issue came out, she would remove a large pair of shears from her desk, and eviscerate the paper in quest of her copy. Where it went, I don't know, but each clip was painstakingly taped to a piece of 8 1/2 x 11 paper, and from there disappeared into the Ingalls archive.

Of course, I have a comprehensive set of Interactive Week clips from my time there. But my work on the Web? I've saved little to none of it. Why? Because I always thought it would be "out there."

Well it's not, as my recent quest of a good tech clip file has proven. And even archive.org hasn't captured it.

Here's a few cases in point:

Interactive Week: It launched in 1994, and I was the first reporter hired. Not the first editor, there were plenty of those. But first reporter. It started as a controlled circ. of 70k, and grew to 300k. I was its first Web guy as well. Long story short, it had a good run, but was ultimately folded into eWeek in 2002.

What happened to its content, much of which predated archive.org's existence? Near as I can tell, some of it was ported to ZDNet, which was ultimately acquired by CNet. After that? I don't know. All I know is the hundreds of articles I wrote are not to be found. I'm calling around at CNet to get some answers, but so far, no calls back.

Cowles New Media: I wrote for Media Daily for close to three years, reporting on things as various as News Corp's wars with Kirsch for digital satellite rights in Europe, to how the Internet ad market was doing. Two-three articles a day, plus a weekly column called Media Central Digest. Then Cowles New Media, subsidiary of Cowles Business Media was bought by McClatchy, and then the New Media division was spun off to K3, now Primedia, which also owned Inside Media. What happened to all that content? No clue. Archive.org still has my Digest columns, but no dice for the bulk of my work there.

CBS.com: The site's still up, but all the work we did in the way of feature content has been completely nuked. When they pulled the plug, they did it right.

In the end, that's about six years or so of my working life utterly vanished.

So I'm writing a piece about it. Something dealing with the ephemeral nature of data, and that while a single piece of email can have a nearly immortal existence on the Web, for good or ill, the flip side of the coin is that ultimately, the Web is an amnesiac space to put intellectual property.
Paper may not be forever, but it's a far less volatile medium.

As Bradbury noted, books burn at 951 degrees Fahrenheit. For the Web, all it takes is a judicious absence of voltage.

Manchester memories

2005-08-05T10:37:00.000-07:00

It was one of both the pleasures and embarrassments of my life to have spoken with one of my author idols briefly on the telephone just months before he died.

That author was William Manchester, who wrote among other books, American Caesar, a biography of General Douglas MacArthur, as well as biographies of Winston Churchill, JFK, and others.

There was some controversy over whether he would ever finish the third volume on Churchill, the first two books of which I enjoyed greatly. Manchester, sadly, had suffered a stroke, and as he put it to me, couldn't think and organize like he used to.

He was an inveterate journo, and was as comfortable as it is possible for a Fourth Statesman to be in the corridors of power. I was more than a bit starstruck on the phone, and after I sensed I was irritating him with my questions, which happened quickly, I wound up the phone call by telling him that he had been and was still a tremendous inspiration to me.

We hung up, and I wanted to die, so mortified was I at what was my own rank stupidity. Of course he couldn't finish the trilogy. Of course he'd had a stroke. What was I thinking.
In my heart, I wanted to say to him, let me help you finish it. I admire you so much -- I'd do whatever it took. But here was a man at the end of his powers, and I knew saying such things would do no good.

I first encountered Manchester in print when David Reid, my long-time mentor, and author of West of the West, and Sex, Death and God in L.A., handed me a first edition of Manchester's The Arms of Krupp -- which is a lengthy tale about the Krupp dynasty, who were for three generations the armorers of Germany. It's a fantastic story about a family, three empires, and the bedfellows of capitalism and outright criminality.

Here was a man who felt that history couldn't be written without passing judgement on the actors. To do otherwise would be pretentious on the part of the author, and I have come to agree with him.

I now read that the third Churchill volume is being assembled from his notes, and put together by others working for his publisher.

I have no doubt I'll be able to find Manchester's spirit embedded somewhere in those pages, but what a loss that there are no more like him populating the shelves.

He died last June, and the world is the poorer for it.
Despite my own embarrassment at being starstruck and tongue-tied, I'll treasure the fact that at least I spoke with one of my idols before he passed on.

There's a wikipedia entry that sketches his life to be found here. One day, I hope someone will endeavor to do a biography of this giant among men.

Oregon memories

2005-07-29T13:34:00.000-07:00

This is a shot of me from 2002, when President Bush came to visit Medford, Oregon, in order to tour the site of the Squire Fire, which I covered extensively for the Ashland Daily Tidings. Security was extensive. Snipers were posted on the roof of the airport. Marine 1 -- that's the code name for the President's chopper -- swept the area prior to the arrival of Air Force One. Jackson County Sheriff's Office provided hundreds of men in riot gear. And protesters were cordoned off in a "designated free speech zone" that the President wouldn't have to look at as he exited the airport to tour the fire site.

What I'm up to

2005-07-29T13:19:00.000-07:00

After wintering in Oregon since 9/11, I've now returned to the Bay Area after an absence of 11 years to again eye both the editorial sphere as well as look for interesting companies innovating completely new things.

The hot areas, as far as I can tell, are RSS, VOIP, and security protocols to make these emerging technologies safe for consumers.

While I'm doing the job search, I'm also using the time to take a "book break," and developing pages on an upcoming novel.