From Max Kalehoff:
One of the most innovative and addictive aspects of Tetris is the perpetual, intensifying stream of bricks the player must align without spaces. In fact, this very element foreshadowed howwe now consume most news content and personal status updates on the Web: in reverse chronological streams. Tetris’s layers of bricks fall with greater speed and complexity as you master the ability to arrange them in straight, crumbling rows. That is not unlike news feeds and status updates that funnel into your desktop and mobile interfaces, intensifying as your ability to sort and digest them increases. Indeed, there are classical elements of game mechanics in both examples.
It’s true. I was a Tetris addict the same way that I am now a Google addict. A former flame of mine used to complain about my Tetriholism,…until she started playing herself. Next I knew she’d bought a handheld Tetris gameplayer to keep at it.
The truth is Tetris—like Google—hits many of the same nerve centers. The increasing velocity. The sense that you are building something with each addition to your media profile. The simplicity of the color schemes. I’ve often wondered if there wasn’t some great flowering of digital culture before glasnost and perestroika. Not just Tetris, but Paragraph (a predecessor to Graffiti), and of course Triz, which is older (by a generation) but found a new wave of adherents thanks to digital technology.
Too bad Tetris is a locked and closed system…
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.
Remember the future of mass customization? Happy consumers, beaming with pride that the great masters of manufacturing allowed them the privilege of mixing their own batch of stuff from the rich storehouse of a brand? This happy, shiny future has been repeatedly trotted out for various industries over the past few decades, usually to be set aside because of the real costs to transforming manufacturing lines, and servicing millions of unique products. When it works, for example, in design objects, it can have interesting results; in technology, it’s usually a dodge from innovation. And now it’s being trotted out again, this time for media, by Time Inc., which—in mid crisis—has had the epiphany there might be potential consumer interest in letting consumers mix n match content from a bunch of its current titles.
The title of Time’s “experiment” in free, customized content: Mine, Here’s how it works. You go to the Mine website, pick five of eight offered magazines (Time, Sports Illustrated, Real Simple, Money, Travel&Leisure, InStyle, Golf, Food+Wine), and about six weeks later, get a magazine composed of articles poached by Time Inc. from those five titles, om print or digital format, customized to your zipcode. (Free info: mine were Time, T&L, Instyle, F+W, Money.)
Wow, you’re saying. That’s a lot of free content. Great value to the advertiser (Lexus sponsors the whole shebang). Geo-targeted. Wow, cool stuff.
Except, um, no. You can only get either digital or print edition. (You can also put an rss widget on your iGoogle page.) And the content, apparently, runs from 2005 to 2009—let’s repeat that too, shall we: from 2005 to 2009—and is organized less like a single magazine than a bunch of magazines each separated in its own tidy branded cordon sanitaire with ad pages marking it off from the other brands. I haven’t seen the digital edition, so I won’t comment on its execution, but I think I have something to say about its general concept. After all, I was part of the team that first suggested this idea back in 1995…
15 years ago
Turns out this is an idea that’s been kicking around at least since the days of what was known first as Time Inc New Media and then, after ATT and MCI failed to convince us proprietary X25 networks were tomorrow’s big thing, the Time Inc Internet Project and finally Pathfinder. Locked in a bake-off for the top job, Jim Kinsella and I set out our competing visions of Time Inc’s internet future for our boss, Walter Isaacson.
My vision was Calliope. Unfortunately that domain was already taken—already in 1994! (If the domain was available, who knows what would have happened!) Calliope was to be a unitary effort from all of Time’s (then) 35 brands. One article from here, another from over there, sometimes even on the same subject, with community comments and email underlying the whole shebang.
Kinsella’s idea was Pathfinder: a home page designed to send you to each of those brand’s websites, and minimal editorial resources under that. Just what the name says. As I said to Jim (who ever let me forget it), Calliope was centrifugal, Pathfinder, centripetal. Kinsella, who has had an amazing career and is now chairman of Interoute, one of the largest European network providers, was right though: by pledging to keep Pathfinder limited in its intent and range, he could cobble enough resources to build the ostensibly decentralized brand into a strong centralized organization. (A brilliant corporate insight, I came to recognize much later.) My way would have meant the brands wouldn’t have had a base to build from without spending their own money (which they didn’t have or didn’t want to spend online) and would have created a new editorial hierarchy, presumably with Isaacson as king. (To his credit, he didn’t go for that, and 15 years later, he’s still just as savvy, kicking off the recent debate about micropayments with a TIME cover.) One publisher flatly told me to go F myself. Isaacson didn’t support me. And as for getting the brands to collaborate? On his way out the door, Curt Viebranz, who came to TINM from HBO (and was later president of Tacoda and a top exec at AOL until Falco etc. pushed him out), famously said that working at Pathfinder was like trying to herd a group of cats. (A lot of this ancient history is in John Motavalli’s rather misguided Bamboozled at the Revolution.)
One more person should be mentioned in all of this: Bruce Judson, a talented exec who came to Pathfinder with dual JD/MBA degrees and the rep of a Time Inc superstar thanks to his championing selective inkjet printing—the same (or very very similar) technology they’re using to print Mine.
Dumb and dumber
So why is a dumb idea from 1995 any better regurgitated fifteen years later?
It’s not. It’s even dumber.
Here’s why: in the Google era, mass customization, giving consumers the choice to design their own product from the limited set of a firm’s products, is not customer service for the masses. If anything it is the opposite—it is innovation with a limited set of consumers—and healthy margins—in mind. If you love Time Inc magazines more than all other content and think it deserves a privileged place in your home, then perhaps this is media for you. Of course if you really thought this way, you’d subscribe to all the magzines independently. As Scott Anthony says, this is innovation through the wrong lens: the lens of the guy who works at Time Inc and grabs copies of all the magazines that used to be given away free to employees in the lobby; he reads a few articles and chucks the rest in the john and the garbage. This is innovation to help himself, not the customer. As Anthony writes:
The general point here is to make sure you evaluate innovations through the proper lens. The trap companies often run into is they think their view of quality is the same as the markets’. That’s not always true. If the innovation isn’t perceived to be better by the consumer, customer, partner, or supplier to whom it is targeted, then adoption could slow and frustration could grow.
If Time Inc’s poobahs—the url says timecmg.com, so this is likely some consumer marketing group Ann Moore has lashed together including her publishers, Time Inc Custom Solutions, and somebody in online (i.e., the rump of Pathfinder)—were truly interested in innovating customer service in the media context—and if their CMS was up to it—they’d be looking for taxonomical matches between articles and metatagged subjects and user metatags. They’d be taking a page from the New York Times, specifically Times Extra, which lets you see the Times’s own headlines and stories right on the same page with external links to competing versions of the same stories. They’d be hackging the hello out of the Daylife API, creating filtered news programs running across the range of all Time Inc. content and affiliates. Or maybe they’d just do Time’s Mahalo, allowing search under the banner of high touch contextual curation. Yeah, I know it’s an experiment, but it’s not a good one. What’s the next experiment? Subscriptions for your customized magazine and micropayments for the online version?
This is how a dumb idea from 1995 is being made even dumber in 2009, relying on the hubris of publishers who think customers want customized magazine content over and above context created from across the entire web of news resources. What was innovative—but wrong in 1995—is no more innovative in 2009.
Some people never learn.
CODA, 4/19: The AP reports—and Time Inc is now apologizing—for botching the personalization of Mine’s first issue. Apparently few readers got the five titles they actually picked; most of the articles were evergreen, dating back to summer 2008, and at least one person, Joshua Benton, director of Harvard University’s Nieman Journalism Lab, found the personalized ads—all featuring Lexus— “’slightly creepy’ because they referred to where he lives, included his name and described him driving one on Route 6 to Cape Cod.” Argh.
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