Yesterday , A couple of days ago, I wrote about <cringe> “taxonomical narratives” </cringe>at the critical center of content strategy, how the velocity and arrangement of microchunks is reshaping the nature of story, and how this change is creating a new firm-based (not just functional) competitive strategy for content innovation down to the level of the bit.

This That morning, in a very smart piece about the demise of newspapers, Razorfish’s Michael Barnwell wryly blogged on Scatter/Gather, the Razorfish CS blog, how “content strategy has long been interested in the relational sphere of stories”  and now  visionary computer scientist David Gelertner’s idea of “lifestreams” might be one creative solution.

Then Upendra Shardnand, Daylife’s CEO, wrote Storytelling Is Stuck In A Rut—What Publishers Can Do About It, a quick essay about how newspapers seem willing to talk about changing their IT, distribution, and revenue strategies but rarely question “the actual craft of writing and telling stories.” “On one side you have parties that produce what were once finished products, but are now just data for parties on the other side who take that fodder and reconstruct it,” Shardnand writes.  ”It’d be much easier for everyone if the authors took matters into their own hands, and wrote stories in a new language, with new tools, for the web.”

Story? What story? Whose story?

We all seem to be pointing to the same stifling lack of new tools out there to help editors and writers integrate, aggregate, reconstruct and re-narrativize story from relatively random microchunks of data in many formats in real time, but each of us wants to assign different job reqs to the folks who would do this.

Gelernter (whose comments are taken from an interview in Edge with NYU/ITP prof Clay Shirky and NY Times uber-tech writer John Markoff), doesn’t really care much who does this job: For him, it’s all about the construction—and definition—of “lifestreams,” a key element in his thinking about computer interfaces that ultimately become mirrors of the mind. Lifestreams as he defines them are ”[sequences] of all kinds of documents — all the electronic documents, digital photos, applications, Web bookmarks, rolodex cards, email messages and every other digital information chunk in your life  …appearing on your screen as a receding parade of index cards.” For Gelertner, this is the newsroom of the future:

[Instead] of the managing editor, the city editor, or whatever, being a bigshot, there’s something more like a producer of the stream in real time. So the producer of the stream has lots of feeds. A reporter is posting a new story. Another reporter is posting a new story. AP is doing stuff. Photographs are coming in. Videos are coming in. But each person looks at one thing at one time. Okay, so I as the producer want to say, “Okay, put that on the stream now. And now put this on the stream. And now put two of these on the stream.”

In other words, a curator.

Barnwell says that this is good news for editors—and content strategists. He says that editors’ legacy role as curators—”assisted [of course] by an intelligent software agent to help in sifting the relevance of the news and discovering related stories”— will be one of the “bright prospects” for the continuation of journalistic organizations. As for content strategists, Barnwell says that their job is to  ”[maintain] the smooth functioning and insightfulness of the digital lifestream. In fact, content strategy has long been interested in the relational sphere of stories.”

Well, I’m not so sure this is as good for editors as Barnwell—in my experience, editors are good at curating the stories in their own magazines or newspapers, but they are rarely focused on aggregating context, especially from the web. That’s the writer’s job. And as for presenting that context to readers, for a long time—even now—many, many publications won’t link outside themselves. They still think a linking reader is a lost reader! (Way to show confidence in your product, editors!)

Not who but how

So is this what content strategists should be doing?

When I wrote yesterday about “taxonomical narratives” this is part of what I was thinking. Someone has to kick off, organize, strategize, and render author-side metatagging and data hierarchies for readers and match that to readers’ expectations and needs on a continual basis. Relevancy and related-story technologies from Daylife to Inform to Zemanta to Publish2 will all be useful.

But as Upendra says, it’s not enough. We still need someone to understand storytelling at the level of the bit—and please not by turning it into megabyte multimedia, constructing yet another metanarrative, this time built by editors instead of authors. (It also should be additively accesible to users in the form of user-side meta-tagging, ranking and commenting, but let’s leave the ugc side of this alone for a minute, ok?)

It doesn’t finally matter what you call this person. It probably depends on the company and agency. Like Barnwell, I suspect CS is more involved in systemic maintenance and strategy (d’oh) than storytelling itself, especially in journalistic situations. In agencies, it seems to me CS and creative need to be part of a collaborative effort.

The real question though is not who should do this, but what the economic incentives are for it. You can train editors or content strategists to think through these issues, but before any of that happens, you need new tools. As Shardanand says, the problem is “The tools haven’t changed. Whether it’s Microsoft Word or Wordpress, it’s all still word processing. The workflow in newsrooms hasn’t changed. Authors, rarely being software developers themselves, can’t develop the tools they would want. Usually some third-party CMS company makes it for them…Publishers haven’t committed significant R&D to the development of new tools. If they, did they’d have a competitive advantage, much like Apple developing its own chips or Amazon tinkering with its shopping experiences.”

Indeed, while publishers are committing tens of millions of dollars to installation of terrific end to end XML-based, network capable CMS systems such as Eidos’s amazing Methode, they aren’t much willing to innovate at the front end of a story. In other words, as Shardanand says, the story is still just words and pictures, with these bits over here isolated from those bits over there, both in terms of internal story structure and external links. (And yes, the Times is doing a great job with reporting stories with interactive components, but that’s not what we’re talking about here.)

So when will it take to make story change? Much as some CS people believe they have the ability to make it change, I very much doubt it. At agencies, content is typically held in the creatives’ silo; at magazines and newspapers, it’s the province of either editors or producers—over there on the “online side.” (Stage direction: usually followed by someone pointing across the floor to the other side of the newsroom.  ”Uh, those guys over there–can you see ‘em?” Oh yes we see.)

So what comes before a new job req and a rockin’ CMS? Probably this: Behavioral innovation at the brand level—the brand promise that these companies, either newspapers or media organizations or agencies (on behalf of brands or on their own) deliver—driven down to the level of customer service.

It’s easy to say aggregate. As Barnwell points out, you can aggregate with machines, rebundle by metatag. Smart aggregation is more though. As Umair Haque suggests in his in-depth, very toughly argued dek on the economics of new media—one of the few things I’d say is truly a must read in digital media analysis—it requires leveraging deep information about content including customers’ information, expectations, and preferences about content, then reflitering, altering, remixing microchunks into something new and different. A story. A new story. That’s brand in customer terms, not brand as grand narrative story, brand marketing. That’s is the difference that makes a difference for Google pagerank.

As Shirky and Markoff’s question to Gelertner implies—and as Haque, Shirky, Jarvis and a growing chorus of others  now say—this isn’t a matter of R&D anymore, but a struggle for the future existence of media. No innovation at the level of story is likely, as Haque says, to lead to abrupt hyperdeflation of news products by smart aggregators who don’t care about anything more than the revelation of new ideas and repackaging, remixing, and rebundling reportage to support their piratical ways. I hope we figure it out before that.

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Another dead magazine. They’ll blame the advertising environment, the economy, the bubble. But let’s get real: what brought Portfolio down was Portfolio. Here’s why:

1.   Saturation:  The first chart they show you in a b-school is a 2×2 of size v. saturation. Big unsaturated markets are where opportunity lives. Small unsaturated markets are where nichemakers rise. But big and small saturated markets are a waste of time—without marketing or disruptive innovation. Portfolio had neither. In magazines, “editorial” IS brand marketing, but when the editorial lacks positioning, it’s the same thing as torching money. And as for disruptive innovation—what’s the opposite of disruptive innovation? Conformism, imitation, similarity, an editorial idea unrelated to digital life, to a working business model, or to meaningful differentiation. Why bother? Readers didn’t. Advertisers didn’t.

2. Fragmentation: Trying to cap a fragmented media market with generalist coverage is either very bold or very foolish. You pick.

3. Print. D’oh. I still think it can be done, but not without a compelling digital strategy that would rethink the role of narrative journalism.  There was zero effort to do that here.

4. Money. What’s the ROI on a 600-day-launch prep, $4/word stories, $150,000+ contracts, $200,000+ editors, and no digital strategy? Can $100 millon launches really break even in this economy? Unlikely.

5. Mission: Conde would have you believe Portfolio invented the genre of business mag with style. Vogue Business? Not quite. So was there a market here? Consider: Only 10% of the WSJ’s readers are women. That’s why Lipman’s hiring made good sense: she launched the WSJ’s Weekend Journal. But the proof is in the pudding, and Lipman showed she didn’t get it, in just the same way Weekend Journal didn’t really change the pickup with women or younger readers until Murdoch. Even Tina Gaudoin hasn’t figured it out yet, and she knows style in her sleep.

6. Editorial: Long-form business journalism? Hello? See above. Despite 600 days of prep, Portfolio never had a well-thought through editorial positioning to differentiate in saturated markets. Yvette Kantrow writes in The Deal that Portfolio wanted to be the business magazine for people who don’t like business, but that doesn’t seem right to me: I think Lipman just had a shallow idea of business journalism that was distinguished solely by the idea that longer pieces could explain the complexities of business better than business magazines with known business writers. But it turns out that Lipman hired the same people, writing more or less the same kinds  of pieces with the same kinds of spin. Sure she won a few awards for this, but even a stopped clock is right twice a day. You could have put almost any competent business editor in Lipman’s job and won a few awards if that person had CN’s resources  (see number 4 above). I defy anyone to tell me what Portfolio stood for except a committment to spending money on long-form journalism.

7.    Credibility: From day 1, Lipman gave readers all the wrong signals. She put all her marbles on long form journalism when everyone was talking about digital journalism, then chose many of the same old prize-winners from Michael Lewis to Tom Wolfe. Her covers showed a complete lack of comprehension about her audience and the economy. Remember the golden skycrapers, the gears, the hairy apes, the spy—one cliché after another—followed by Dov Charney, Sarah Palin, and the fallen bull? What’s that you say?  She shouldn’t have been expected to cover the Zombieconomy when she was hired to celebrate it? Rubbish. She could have covered everything from recession economics and its style to derivative disasters  to Obama and his style—right from the start.  (That fallen bull was apparently stuck on the cover after Lipman feared she’d be seen as a Barry cheerleader, a copycat, or both.) She could have signalled outrage. Instead she signaled that she was personally offended by the fallout and incapable of explaining it. And flying to Davos first class didn’t help. (Gawker really excelled on its coverage of this point.)
8.    Digital strategy: Did I say strategy? (Disclosure: I interviewed with both the business and edit side before Portfolio was launched; it’s one of the few times I was happy not to get the job.) Yes, Ari Brandt and Chris Jones attracted talented bloggers—Jeff Bercovici and Felix Salmon were doing great work. But to what end? Despite a well-designed site, there was never any thought to how Portfolio would deal with its competitive set in the digital space, whether the competition was NYT DealBook, WSJ, TechCrunch, Seeking Alpha, Dealbreaker, Bloomberg, or even Slate’s The Big Money, which has no resources but is constantly working to distinguish its tone and positioning.

Portfolio had all the resources money could buy but no competitive strategy, no editorial strategy, no content strategy, no technology strategy. In any sector —fashion to rocknroll, tech to celebrity—there is a wealth of web-based data to be aggregated, scraped, curated, ranked, and regurgitated, but nowhere more so than in business media where data streams run the gamut from rich to richer. To have failed even to consider what that opportunity—the opportunity to deliver real reader value—means—and to have spent an estimated $100 million over two years on this ignominous failure—is just shameful.

Even as I write this, I’m reading media critics who are saying that Portfolio’s failure is merely an example of the failure of advertising or the failure to reinvent advertising. It’s the economy’s fault: “From an advertising standpoint, the goal was advertisers new to the company and new to the category,” David Carey told AdAge. “Strategically, check the boxes on all this stuff: a different voice, a different style, a different type of advertiser. All of that was on its way to being accomplished, and then of course, a significant hit to advertising from the recession.”

But none of that is true. Portfolio is simply the story of yet another media venture convinced that having a few digital trends and tactics—a blog here, a feed there, water as often as you can—is the same thing as having a real digital strategy. Well, here’s some news, friends: That’s merely another brand advertising outsert stuck on the web, and it doesn’t work. Even if you pour money into it.

Bye-bye Portfolio. You won’t be missed.

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