If you were recruiting for someone to manage a news organization in 2009, what skills or experience should you be looking for? What would the job description look like? (Since I know nothing about print, I’ll limit my questions to broadcast)
In my experience, most people who make it to “the top,” come from the sales side of the business. The men and women who made their bones in the newsroom occasionally wind up running the show but they are the exceptions. So we’re looking for sales and marketing experience, yes?
Someone who can figure out how to sell the advertising that funds company. Someone who can recruit and train people to sell 30 second radio and TV commercials?
What about this Internet thing? Do our sellers need to know how to sell banner ads (or whatever), too? Or does our manager have to manage two distinct type of sales departments? “Traditional” and online?
Strategically, do we manage the business we have today and hope it lasts a long time? Or, do we try to anticipate what our business will become in three, or five, or ten years? No easy task.
Clay Shirky says the advertising model that has defined and driven news organizations worked because advertisers didn’t have alternatives. Now they do.
But I’m getting away from my original question. Do we need a manager that is real good at “where we’ve been?” Someone with a good handle on where we’re headed? (if such a person exists) Or both? (tall order)
What if advertising –as we have come to know it– plays little or no part in funding news organizations in the future? Uh, let’s not go there. Too murky and scary.
As you can see, I have no answers… just questions. And I’m not sure they’re even the right ones.
Maybe it comes down to finding someone who knows how to build a spaceship, verses someone who knows how to build a bomb shelter. The spaceship has to get us to a very different place. The bomb shelter will protect us for as long as our food and water hold out.
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Clay Shirky,
newspapers
NYU professor and Internet thinker Clay Shirky on the future of accountability journalism in a world of declining newspapers.
On the advertising-based business model of journalism:
“Best Buy was not willing to support the Baghdad bureau because Best Buy cared about news from Baghdad. They just didn’t have any other good choices.”
On the death of the home page:
“The number of people who go to the Times’ homepage as a percentage of total readership falls every year — because you don’t go to the Times, you go to the story, because someone Twittered it or put it on Facebook or sent it to you in email. So the audience is now being assembled not by the paper, but by other members of the audience.”
You can listen to Professor Shirky’s talk here.
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Clay Shirky,
newspapers
Thanks to Michael Kruse, a staff writer for the St. Petersburg Times for one of the best stories yet on the challenges facing “media exclusivity” in sports. In the interest of full disclosure, the company I work for (Learfield) pays serious money for just the sort of exclusivity described in in this piece, which focuses on a recent change in the media policy of the SEC, one college sports premier conference.
“… earlier this month (the SEC) sent to its 12 schools an eye-opening new media policy. It places increasingly stringent limits on reporters and how much audio, video and “real-time” blogging they can do at games, practices and news conferences. But even more interesting is that the policy also includes rules for fans in the stands. No updating Twitter feeds. No taking photos with phones and posting them on Facebook or Flickr. No taking videos and putting them on YouTube.
A conference spokesman said this policy was meant to try to keep as many eyeballs as possible on ESPN and CBS — which are paying the SEC $3 billion for the broadcast rights to the conference’s games over the next 15 years — and also on the SEC Digital Network — the conference’s own entity that’s scheduled to debut on SECSports.com later this month.”
The reporters covering sporting events have always (well, at least since blogs and such came along) been under certain restrictions regarding blogs and how much audio/video they could put online. The new policy by the SEC is “the most stringent language yet in college sports.”
“Ticketed fans can’t “produce or disseminate (or aid in producing or disseminating) any material or information about the Event, including, but not limited to, any account, description, picture, video, audio, reproduction or other information concerning the Event. …”
Sounds like I couldn’t call my brother and describe a thrilling touchdown run. God forbid, I took a photo or video clip and emailed it to him. The Times story included some really good quotes, like this one from Mike Masnick, editor of the blog techdirt:
“If it reaches the point where it’s not just 15 people doing this, it’s 1,000 people, it gets more and more difficult to stop,” he said. “At which point you either stop letting fans into games or you figure out a way to deal with the fact that fans are going to do this.”
…and this one from new media expert Clay Shirky:
“The idea that people can’t capture their own lived experience is a losing proposition.”
I encourage anyone involved with collegiate sports (and related media) to read the full story. Here’s my take-away:
“The audience isn’t the audience anymore. The SEC’s greatest supporters are now also the SEC’s biggest competitors.”
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Clay Shirky
Re-posting as part of blog move
Clay Shirky is an American writer, consultant and teacher on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. He teaches New Media as an adjunct professor at New York University’s (NYU) graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). His courses address, among other things, the interrelated effects of the topology of social networks and technological networks, how our networks shape culture and vice-versa. [Wikipedia] [click to continue…]
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Clay Shirky,
newspapers
In a post titled “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable,” Clay Shirky provides some insight –and historical perspective– on what’s happening to newspapers. He starts with the question often asked by those committed to saving newspapers
“If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.”
“With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.”
“When someone demands to be told how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to. There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.”
I think this is the first time I’ve fully understood that old models can be broken before new ones are there to take their place.
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Clay Shirky,
newspapers
December 8, 2008
in Media
"The Tribune Company owns businesses (which) make money by placing ads in between (broadcast) or alongside (print) scarce content. That model, I’m afraid, is dying for two reasons. One, content isn’t scarce anymore. Two, advertisers have other, cheaper ways of reaching the people formerly known as the audience. I’m not sure there’s any form of government help that can protect traditional media from that." — Terry Heaton on Tribune bankruptcy
If you think Mr. Heaton is wrong on either point, I'd love to hear from you in the comments.
And this from Clay Shirky, guest blogging at Boing Boing: "This change has been more like seeing oncoming glaciers ten miles off, and then deciding not to move."
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Clay Shirky
I am part of the first TV generation. Thousands of hours of my life were spent watching. Just watching. These days, like many others, I spend many of my hours online, creating, sharing and consuming media. Clay Shirky explains why this "social surplus" is a very big deal:
"Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing."
If you are in any way connected to the business of "media," you need to read –and understand– what Mr. Shirky has to say.
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Clay Shirky
Some nuggets from interview at gothamist.com with Internet Technologist Clay Shirky:
"(Blogging is) headed everywhere, because the underlying pattern of cheap amateur publishing is what’s important, not the current manifestations. The word blog itself is going to fade into the middle distance, in the same way words like home page and portal did. Those words used to mean something relatively crisp and specific, but became so overloaded as to be meaningless.
So forget about blogs and bloggers and blogging and focus on this — the cost and difficulty of publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that increased pool of potential producers is going to be vast.
The thing that will change the future in the future is the same thing that changed the future in the past — freedom, in both its grand and narrow senses.
A lot of the fights in the next 5 years are going to be between people who want this kind of freedom in their technologies vs. business people who think freedom is a shitty business model compared with control.
The internet means you don’t have to convince anyone that something is a good idea before trying it, and that in turn means that you don’t need to be a huge company to change the world."
That last part… about not having to convince anyone before trying something? Probably my favorite thing about the internet.
If you haven’t ready Shirky’s book, Here Comes Everybody: The
Power of Organizing Without Organizations, I highly recommend it.
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Clay Shirky