BuzzMachine

Via JustHillary.comm, I find that WMAQ TV in Chicago is putting raw news video up online: 12 minutes of Hillary in Obama’s backyard. That’s great: giving us the raw video to see more if we want. The only thing I wish is that they let us embed and remix it. But I’ll take this as a first step on the right path.

Breitbart.com — from Andrew Breitbart, a confederate of online news kingmaker Matt Drudge — just launched its online TV channel: Breitbart.tv Over at Prezvid, I have their first big exclusive, an interview with Fred Thompson right after the Republican debate. Breitbart.TV is produced by two former TV pros, Scott Baker and Liz Stephans, whom I’ve befriended on the conference trail. At the Video on the Net conference, I sat for an interview in a dry run of their show using nothing but small technology: little cameras and Mac software that gives them a control room on the screen. They are pros who are exploring all the new ways to watch TV. And with the power of Breitbart, they’ll get the viewers. Keep an eye on them.

Jason Fry in the Wall Street Journal writes an excellent column summing up the suicidal impulses of the association of Belgian newspapers — and others — who try to shut off Google and think they are still in a position to make media’s rules.

These disputes are about money, of course — the newspaper groups think Google’s making some off their efforts, and they want a piece. But more broadly, Copiepresse objects to the idea that Google and other search engines should set the rules for linking, contending that such standards should be set by copyright laws, not technological standards. That’s a bid to turn back time and declare a do-over on the basics of search engines — a quixotic effort that flies in the face of the reality of how content is consumed today, and one in which Copiepresse has inadvertently lined up against its papers’ own readers.

Whether or not content creators like it, this is the age of fragmentation. In industry after industry, consumers are voting with their feet against old methods of packaging and distributing information. They want to pick and choose what’s of interest to them, without having to pay for or wade through what isn’t. That change, midwived by technology, has shaken or shattered content companies’ business models. It’s made everything they do more risky. And it’s stripped them of power they once enjoyed, forcing them to work with new companies and industries that somehow got to set the rules. Faced with such a situation, it’s understandable that content creators are angry. But the chance to set the ground rules passed some time ago, and it’s high time for content creators to realize that and adjust.

After reviewing the internet-induced upheaval that has struck music and television, he says:

The only surprise would be if newspapers were any different.

In moving online, newspapers have become collections of individual articles, each of which often stands on its own. Once, readers encountered articles by reading the paper a page at a time. Now, such readers are being supplanted by voracious online consumers who get their news in any number of unpredictable ways.

That’s a critical insight I rarely see in print but one that blogs understand because, as Meg Hourihan said in the dawn of blogging, the atomic unit of media is no longer the publication or the section or the page or even the article but the post: the nugget of information, the thought, the notion. That is what is really being disaggregated: the old unit of media itself.

I have no idea how you’re reading this column. Maybe you found it on the Online Journal’s home page or the technology page. Maybe you saw it because it includes Google’s stock symbol, or it hit your newsreader via an RSS feed. Maybe you followed a link from a blog, Google News or Technorati. . . . I can’t control any of that and wouldn’t want to — like any writer, the most-important thing to me is to be read. If the Online Journal started directing readers who followed third-party links to this column to the home page and left them to find their way from there, I’d be furious — because I’d be guaranteed to lose readers who got lost. And if WSJ.com said they were doing that because there were ads on the home page but not on this article, I’d not so gently suggest hiring a competent Web designer instead of suing search engines. . . .

Ultimately, what content creators face isn’t new technology, but a sea change in consumer behavior. Consumers don’t want to go back to watching TV at set times, buying albums or reading newspapers page by page. Trying to make them do so using laws that haven’t kept up with technology will fail. . . . At its heart, the Web is driven by users, not publishers. Whatever pain that causes content creators, opposing that fundamental idea became a revanchist fantasy long ago.

Well said. The problem for the controllers of media is that they still want to be and think they can be in control. But the obvious rule of nature is that we will be in control whenever we can be and we will cede it only unwillingly, only by necessity. So the key is to find out how to succeed by enabling us to do what we want to do. That is what the technology companies — Google, Facebook, et al — do. How can media companies do likewise? WWGD?

At the Murdoch clambake in Monterey, I tried to suggest that the real lesson these media men and women should learn from Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook is that he delivered enabling technology to the people and millions used it. How do we build news so it gets used? How do we succeed at that? How do we exploit Google?

Gawker covers the Newspaper Association of America publishers’ confab in New York. S.O.S. in both meanings (save our ship; same old shit):

This morning’s opening session of the Newspaper Association of America’s annual convention at the Marriott Marquis did not, for the most part, stray from the now-tired narrative about newspapers and their modern troubles. . . .

We are looking forward to the day when we don’t have these discussions about “the future of newspapers.” Every time, it goes like this: Journalism lives, but print is dead! Investors are, mostly, evil! Let us not forget that profit margins are still healthy! And most important: Newspapers are not losing readers! Remember the Internet!

Gawker also aptly sums up the industry’s real reaction to Craig Newmark, who was interviewed by Charlie Rose:

Perhaps what they find most frustrating about Mr. Newmark is his (so-far) almost total disregard for making a huge profit off of Craigslist—he’s a competitor, but he’s rejecting the cash that so many othes would gladly, desperately take.

You see, they think this is their money. No, it was our money once and now it is ours again. Simple rule of life, folks: You shouldn’t have to pay for anything you shouldn’t have to pay for. Just because someone manages to get that money out of us for awhile, that doesn’t make it theirs. Newspapers do not have some God-given right to classified revenue. Oh, yes, it was wonderful that house, job, and car ads subsidized journalism for many years. But those days are over. Get used to it. Rather still pining for business realities that are long gone, these people need to concentrate on finding and inventing new business models for news.

The Wall Street Journal has an incredible piece of Brigadoon on its op-ed page today: the editor of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, Walter E. Hussman, arguing that newspapers are killing themselves on the internet.

One has to wonder how many of the newspaper industry’s current problems are self-inflicted. Take free news. News has become ubiquitous, free, and as a result, a commodity. Anytime you are trying to sell something that becomes a commodity, you have lost much of the value in providing that product or service.

Not many years ago if someone wanted to find out what was in the newspaper they had to buy one. But not anymore. Now you can just go to the newspaper’s Web site and get that same information for free.

The newspaper industry wonders why it is losing young readers. Those readers might be young, but many of them are smart, not to mention computer-savvy. Why would they buy a newspaper when they can get the same information online for free?

Amazing. I thought that in the aftermath of Knight-Ridder’s and Tribune’s collapses, the American newspaper industry was waking up. But there are still Brigadoons that resist change at any price. Hussman thinks he can still hold his consumers by the throat and make them do what he wants them to do: ‘You vill buy my newspaper.’ He brags that he keeps his news behind a subscription wall. So I go to his site and click on this story and get only the first few graphs. But it’s a story from the New York Times wire and I can get a more current and complete version for free here.

Mr. Hussman, your days of being able to control your market as a news monopoly are over. Rather than trying to preserve the past, I’d suggest that you try to figure out how to prosper in the future.

The note slipped under my hotel room door read: “You have been invited to join Rupert Murdoch at his table tonight.”

What a hoot, huh? I was in Monterey this weekend moderating a panel for a worldwide meeting of Murdoch’s newspaper and online execs, plus folks from Fox News and Sky News, about 60 in all. As one of Murdoch’s own papers reported, this confab was called for the various divisions to get together to share best practices and plans in digital strategy. There’s nothing earth-shattering in that; any company should be doing this and I suspect what I heard at this gathering would be much like what I’d hear at other such meetings. But as one other outside attendee — a journalist who, oddly, wanted to keep his presence on the QT — said to me: If this were a meeting in his own company, he’d growl about having to go. But going to somebody else’s meeting is kinda fun: corporate voyeurism without the fear of saying something wrong and getting fired. Of course, the meeting was essentially off the record; I wouldn’t share any business details just because I was a guest, any more than I’d share a consulting client’s private plans. So if it was just a company meeting and I’m revealing no secrets, why blog about it at all? Because various of you, in comments and emails, wanted me to. It’s Murdoch, after all. Moguls are fascinating. And he’s all the more fascinating having just bid to buy Dow Jones. So here are a very few atmospherics and observations from my weekend with Rupert.

Murdoch began the meeting exhorting his executives to make a huge leap in a completely different world. I do believe he means it. As in any media company today, it’s not clear how much the rest of the culture yet means it. That’s why companies hold meetings like this, to make them understand that, indeed, the boss really does mean it.

My role was to wrangle Gawker’s Nick Denton and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg in a panel that was meant to show these guys how we renegades look at the new world. Claiming moderator’s prerogative, I began with my commandments for the new world — basically, a four-minute distillation of all my blatherings about the strategic imperatives for newspapers in this blog and my Guardian column (lucky them, they didn’t have to read any of it). As I talked about the ability to grow through collaboration and links and the need to find new efficiency and to turn the newsroom inside out, I saw scattered head-nodding and brow-furrowing in equal proportion around the room. Murdoch himself was nodding a lot. As I ended my uncharacteristically brief spiel, he held his hands out to applaud, cocked and ready. Then he saw that no one else was going to do likewise, so he dropped them. I took that as an ovation.

Denton and I got into a few theatrical squabbles — show, mainly — over how new this new stuff really is; I’ll spare you. Zuckerberg impressed the room with his thoughtful focus, just as he did in a similar roomful of media executives at Davos. He’s clear and direct and that’s refreshing. I heard from many of the execs how impressed they were with him. Said one: ‘I told him that I think he’s one of the few who really understands just what he did.’ But Denton and I were also standing nearby as a newspaper editor asked Mark what Facebook is and then asked him whether anybody had tried to buy him. Denton practically spewed a spit take. Naw, nobody’s interested.

At that dinner that night, I might as well have been the waiter. Murdoch sat next to Zuckerberg and he was clearly enchanted; they stayed head-to-head all through the meal. Mark left to get back up north and in a flash, MySpace founder and now Murdochian Chris DeWolfe came dashing over, as if he were jealous of the attention Dad had given that other kid. Murdoch then moved down the table and I asked, only half-joking, whether he’d just bought Facebook, too. No, in Zuckerberg, I think Murdoch sees a fellow mogul in the making.

The next morning at breakfast, one of the execs leaned over to me and pointed to Murdoch at a table across the room. ‘I’d love to have a picture of that,’ he said as Murdoch pored over the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal. Oh, I, too, was tempted: that craggly brow peeking out over that staid masthead might have been the media picture of the year. But I resisted. If I didn’t, I’d never get invited back to dinner.

While we were there, newspapers — piled up outside the meeting room door each morning — were filled with stories about Murdoch and the Journal, each trying to guess what he’d do with Dow Jones and how the companies would combine. Which leads me to the only real point of this post: The News Corp. culture. It doesn’t seem to have changed much since I was there, at TV Guide, in the mid-90s. One senses the Australian roots. They’re direct, friendly, unpretentious. I don’t sense the same foreboding of death by dagger or high-heel I’ve seen at the other media companies where I’ve worked: the torture by task force of Time Warner, the palace intrigues of Conde Nast, the woodshed sternness of Tribune. The good and the bad of News Corp., I’ve long said, is that they fly by the seat of their pants: They make decisions quickly and decisively and some are brilliant and some are not but at least you can get a decision and move on. Now, of course, you can disagree with those decisions. But I would reassure the people at Dow Jones that this is not the News Corp. of fable. Murdoch is not an ogre. He’s a gracious and charming mogul. And the reason his people like working there is that he leaves them to operate more independently than I’ve seen in other companies — so long as they succeed, of course. Lots of them become lifers.

So I’m in league with Andrew Ross Sorkin in The Times today as he tries to allay the fears of DJ employees about their potential new boss. Is’s a rather remarkable endorsement of Murdoch’s bid:

With some hesitation, given Dow Jones’s storied place in American journalism, let me explore a contrarian view: Mr. Murdoch may be the perfect publisher of The Wall Street Journal. . . .

But an uncomfortable truth remains. The current state of financial affairs — caused by the continuing withering of print advertising revenues, shifting reader demographics and the seismic upheaval of the Internet — has made it extremely hard to continue “maintaining the quality” of The Journal (despite its clutch of Pulitzers) because sources of fresh investment funds are drying up. Dow Jones’s cash reserves have been further strained by the hefty dividends the Bancrofts have pushed for over the years. (Big dividends are in vogue in some newspaper quarters; The New York Times Company, for example, recently raised its dividend.)

So along comes Mr. Murdoch, who says he plans to invest more money in Dow Jones than anyone else imaginable. . . .

As they confront their continuing financial challenges, the Bancrofts can sit around and pray that a deep-pocketed white knight emerges — Warren E. Buffett, Bill Gates or The Washington Post are said by insiders to be favored choices — but it’s hard to think that even if such potential suitors did buy it they would seriously invest in the business the way Mr. Murdoch claims he would. It could result in just another holding pattern. . . .

If the family cares about preserving the Dow Jones legacy and seeing the company continue to flourish, it’s time to be financially creative. Rupert Murdoch is knocking on their door.

Yes, that’s what this meeting and the last week were all about: investing in the digital future of journalism. Someone has to do it.

: LATER: Media Bistro FishBowl went about 10 miles too far with this headline. I thought I couldn’t have been clearer that I was joking with my question.

CNN does the right thing with the presidential debates. Details at Prezvid.

In the new millennium, we are seeing not only the rise of environmentalism but also of environmental correctness. Like political correctness, we’re bound to see this new green gospel — well worthy in its origins — being taken too far by both zealots and corrupters. The advocates of this good cause had better beware or they will see it hijacked. Consider:

: For sometime, I’ve been wondering when we’d see a scandal over the rush to buy carbon credits, asking who’s auditing these companies. Now the Financial Times’ Fiona Harvey has investigated and found something stinky here. Her impressive package found:

. . . widespread failings in the new markets for greenhouse gases, suggesting some organisations are paying for emissions reductions that do not take place.

Others are meanwhile making big profits from carbon trading for very small expenditure and in some cases for clean-ups that they would have made anyway.

The growing political salience of environmental politics has sparked a “green gold rush”, which has seen a dramatic expansion in the number of businesses offering both companies and individuals the chance to go “carbon neutral”, offsetting their own energy use by buying carbon credits that cancel out their contribution to global warming.

The burgeoning regulated market for carbon credits is expected to more than double in size to about $68.2bn by 2010, with the unregulated voluntary sector rising to $4bn in the same period.

The FT investigation found:

■ Widespread instances of people and organisations buying worthless credits that do not yield any reductions in carbon emissions.

■ Industrial companies profiting from doing very little – or from gaining carbon credits on the basis of efficiency gains from which they have already benefited substantially.

■ Brokers providing services of questionable or no value.

■ A shortage of verification, making it difficult for buyers to assess the true value of carbon credits.

■ Companies and individuals being charged over the odds for the private purchase of European Union carbon permits that have plummeted in value because they do not result in emissions cuts.

Francis Sullivan, environment adviser at HSBC, the UK’s biggest bank that went carbon-neutral in 2005, said he found “serious credibility concerns” in the offsetting market after evaluating it for several months.

“The police, the fraud squad and trading standards need to be looking into this. Otherwise people will lose faith in it,” he said.

: Meanwhile, travel is taking on more cooties. I heard an NPR report the other day on Germans who are starting to vacation on their own northern shore rather than spit out more soot.

: And yesterday’s Times of London reports that in a case of enviromental big Brotherism, local governments in the UK are employing spy planes using infrared photography to identify homes that are letting off excess heat, putting up maps of the offenders to shame their neighbors into lowering the heat.

Thermal images of homes have been taken by a light aircraft fitted with military spy technology to record the heat escaping from people’s houses.

Maps identifying individual homes have now been placed on the internet to encourage occupiers to reduce their wastage and carbon emissions by fitting insulation and turning the thermostat down.

Haringey Council, in London, has become the first authority in England to place house-by-house thermal maps on the web, after the example of Aberdeen in Scotland.

Making the information available to the public is intended to raise awareness of how much energy is being used needlessly, putting up bills and contributing to global warming. . . .

Officials from the authority shrugged off suggestions of a Big Brother-style invasion of privacy by prying on people’s properties and then publishing the information.

Again, somebody’s using this to make a quick buck pound:

Robert Wilkes, the owner of hotmapping.co.uk, which conducted the thermal surveys, said: “I think it is less intrusive than Google Earth quite honestly.

“It’s not a photograph; it’s merely a measure of heat loss. I think everybody should find it very useful – particularly businesses, schools and hospitals.”

Well, Google maps are not publicizied for the express goal of shaming people. Why not send them a friendly letter? It’s an exercise in environmental correctness.

So two more mondo media deals are simmering: Reuters said it has had an offer; there’s speculation that Thomson is the suitor and even speculation about Google (but I don’t see them buying a content business). And Yahoo and Microsoft — whose media strategies have both tripped and stumbled in the race with Google — say they’re thinking about lashing up or possibly merging again.

Now’s the time to jump. Murdoch’s bid for Dow Jones raises depressed media prices and a bidding war for one company or another could raise them further. So if there’s a strategic prize to get, it’s time to go courting. I don’t think we’ll see any overall buying binge in media; too much of the sector is just too troubled. But I do think we’ll see smart strategic combinations. Dow Jones and Reuters both have competence and brands in data and this is the age of data. In the right combinations, they become more valuable.

As for the Yahoo/Microsoft combination, I see that as Yahoo trying to surrender and go hide under Gates’ skirt. In some ways, it’s like Time Warner being bought by AOL; I said at the time it was their admission they didn’t have an internet strategy so it went to buy — or be bought by — one. I don’t see what Microsoft bring to Yahoo or vice versa in strategic terms. Oh, there’ll be lots of chatter about synergy but I wouldn’t bet my lunch money on it.

The home-page headline for a fine Richard Siklos story wondering what kind of proprietor Rupert Murdoch would be over the Wall Street Journal doesn’t reflect the article underneath but does reflect the Times’ attitude toward Murdoch:

Wall Street Journal Weighs Life Under Rupert Murdoch
The media baron is known to take a hands-on approach to his politically barbed and sometimes racy properties.

Yes, I can’t wait to see how he makes the Journal racy. Something to do with glass ceilings, I’ll bet.

: By the way, I’ve shocked a few reporters this week when I told them that I got far more editorial interference due to business interests while at Time Inc., as a critic for People and the founder of Entertainment Weekly, than I ever got as TV critic for TV Guide in News Corp. At People, the head of HBO would regularly trying to behead me, back in the early days before HBO became the best network in TV, when it reveled in cable’s freedom to show bare breasts. A business exec also made a point of telling me that my bad review for a treacly Hallmark Hall of Fame show cost the magazine its advertising. My editor, Pat Ryan, protected me from that corporate pressure; other executives did not. At Entertainment Weekly, as I’ve recounted here before, top editors at Time Inc. — all gone now — complained, just as the company was merging with Warner Brothers to become an entertainment conglomerate, that we were being too mean to entertainment; they actually sat down and calculated the grade point average of our reviews. But as the TV critic at TV Guide, I never received pressure to be nice to any Fox shows.

(Disclosure: I’m headed to Monterey to run a panel at a Murdoch meeting of newspaper execs.)

The Times today had a quite predictable piece wringing hands over local newspapers getting rid of book critics and editors. A few things they didn’t say:

Most times, when I read local book reviews, I end up unimpressed. The Times tried to sniff at book bloggers, but lots of them are well written, considered, and passionate, and the lot of them together is more comprehensive. I’d say a paper would do well to link to the best of them.

And what makes book reviews necessarily local, unless the books are local? Do we need a review of Harry Potter from that unique Cleveland perspective? No. Just as movies and TV shows are not local, neither are most books.

Finally, the story goes after the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which “has recently eliminated the job of its book editor, leading many fans to worry that book coverage will soon be provided mostly by wire services and reprints from national papers.” But let me ask: In a time of shrinking newspaper revenue and budgets, which would you rather keep: a book editor or a local reporter or editor? You can now link to lots of book reviews — more than ever — but if the AJC doesn’t give you local reporting, who will? If it doesn’t give its readers local news and reporting, then what is its real value?

You have to love the open-minded curiosity of novelist Richard Ford, quoted at the end:

Mr. Ford, who has never looked at a literary blog, said he wanted the judgment and filter that he believed a newspaper book editor could provide. “Newspapers, by having institutional backing, have a responsible relationship not only to their publisher but to their readership,” Mr. Ford said, “in a way that some guy sitting in his basement in Terre Haute maybe doesn’t.”

Is it really the proper duty of ABC News to look up the phone numbers of the alleged Washington madam’s clients to expose them? Is that journalism? Is that news? Is that their proper role? Oh, it’s certainly gossip. It’s entertainment. It’s comedy (see Jon Stewart tonight). But news that affects our lives? Oh, come now. I guess ABC News was just jealous of NBC News catching/entrapping all those predators, even getting a book deal out of it. Where will this escalation end? Will CBS be forced to hunt down foot-fetishistic cross-dressing boy-loving porn-downloading judges or football players or anchors and get a CSI out of it? Seriously, I wonder about the propriety of ABC News taking this active role in helping the reputed Madam out her clients to save her skin. And I wonder whether this is the best use of their investigative resources. No, I know it’s not. It’s pandering, pure and simple.