If you do yoga, you probably already know the word means union. Breath and body. Twist and turn. Stretch and release. All at the same time. Sounds impossible but that’s the whole idea: moving, stretching the whole body together to reach beyond.

How about yoga with media? To stretch beyond—for real innovation to take place—you need new business models. But not just. You also need an innovation culture that creates living, breathing media experiments across business and editorial and technology. All of them together. All-One, as Dr. Bronner likes to say. In an agile, networked world where attention is scarce and most news is just randomly filtered data, change in any one of these three chakras by itself won’t cut it. Good content disconnected from context—people or data—is just data. If you want to be seen, you need to do the yoga that twists business requirements together with editorial and technology. And you better get down with the data baby because if you don’t know your XML from your HTML, your metatags from your master narratives, you ain’t going nowhere.

Unfortunately most media companies today are stuck when it comes to innovation. Newspapers still assign writers a single story a day instead of putting themon a beat over the course of a day with constant mini-updates. Business folks are still struggling to balance selling brands and search; seo still seems like a naughty word. Selective inkjet printing and supposed mass-customization are stand-ins for developing products that really embrace context. Designers are still more interested in pretty designs than persona-based user architectures. And although it’s changing,  lots of companies (media or otherwise) are still stuck with five year old content management systems that don’t give them the power of end- to-end XML, seo, metatagging, and multiple outputs to web, mobile, whatever.

So yoga: union. If you want to swim the blue oceans, innovate beyond your competition, the only way forward is to twist together. At the end of the day, editorial unsupported by business strategy and tech is just random data. You’ll be lucky to be spidered.

As I’ve written before, part of what holds back innovation is the rudimentary silos of static church/state (business/edit) relationshp of most media companies. But it’s not just at the operational level. Even the pundits don’t do yoga. Even now, even when there is more momentum to innovate across the wall than ever before, few if any, of our friends are connecting business model to content model: yoga.

Jeff Jarvis has been putting the pedal to the medal with his New Business Models for News project at CUNY. It’s a brillaint study, interrogating the financial dynamics of news companies, asking the fundamental questions of customer acquisition costs, pricing, bundling, net ROI of Googlejuice vs other measurable audience and advertiser metrics (churn, linking, etc.) Jarvis wants to collect the data, model it, and see what implications it has for news companies. Bravo. But it’s still business modeling. Jarvis isn’t reintenting the wheel—nor should he; his objective is to bust out the numbers in order to figure out how news organizations make money.

“The question is not whether content should be free or whether readers should pay; “should” is an irrelevant verb. The question, very simply, is how more money can be made. What will the market support?

The other question, then, is how much journalism the market will pay for? What kind of journalism will it support? This doesn’t necessarily start with the current spending on current newsrooms. Part of the equation, especially in the other models, will be new efficiencies (e.g., do what you do best, link to the rest) and new opportunities to work in collaboration and in networks.

The question Jarvis is raising is what those new efficiencies will consist in: what’s the value of user participation and increased collaboration, inside and outside the newsroom. What’s the value of innovation? His book, What Would Google Do?, provides many examples of media innovation but without the economics; his study will presumably provide financial ballast for new business models. But Jeff’s post begs the question of how you’re supposed to model stuff you haven’t built before. Again, what’s the value of innovation? If you’ve been reading this blog or Jarvis’s post on what he calls The Great Restructuring—or Umair Haque, the guy that inspired both of those posts—you’ll know another answer here is to put monetization (or at least overt monetization) beneath innovation, beneath community. But that’s not yoga either.

So what is media yoga? Wednesday’s FT had a piece about Freakonomics economist Steven Levitt’s new teaching gig at the Univ. of Chicago’s Booth called “Using Experiments in Firms.” I’m a little afraid that Levitt and  his co-teacher John List, both economists, will scientize this, but I suppose it’s a start, and it’s interesting that it’s taking place in a B-School. (Where’s similar focus on innovation in J-School?) There’s a giant world of innovation methods—from the Bass Diffusion curve to Christensen’s Disruptive innovation theory to Kaizen and TRIZ and beyond (way beyond)—some of which emphasize incremental increases in value and others (Christensen and Blue Oceans) that go for more profound leaps in value and technological transformation. We’ll see what comes out of Levitt’s new class, but I’m a little skeptical—economists and business modelers tend to get caught up in scenario setting, and what we need now more than ever is yoga. Left brain, right brain. Business and editorial and tech together. (Which is why, I think, supple management practices such as Agile and Scrum—and disciplines that look across the entire breadth of the media value chain such as IA/UX and content strategy—are beginning to get a bigger toehold today.)

So do media yoga. Fail often. Fall occasionally. And make sure you warm up all your muscles before you get on the mat. Otherwise, it’s savasana for you, bud.

Om.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Ideals are the New Business Models (upendra.shardanand.com)
• “Forget business models. Focus on ideals. Reconceiving value creation depends on new ideals. Ideals…” (stylman.tumblr.com)

Tagged: Blue Ocean Strategy, Business model, Christensen, Disruptive innovation, Economics, Freakonomics, innovation, Jeff Jarvis, media, Steven Levitt, Umair Haque

blog comments powered by Disqus