Tablets Still Not Here

I'm still waiting for this hole in the market to fill in. It's the tablet hole. The space for a viewer/reader/player about the size of a novel. It's easy to type on, it runs apps like an iPhone and everybody's going to love it. But it's not here yet.

Apple's iPhone, let's be frank, isn't that wonderful a piece of technology. It's a beautiful piece of sculpture: nice to look at and hold, and it's just the right weight. But now that I've had mine for a year it has such a lag in its response time that it's actually somewhat entertaining. You type, then sit back and after what seems like seconds you watch the keyboard apparently hitting keys of its own accord. Like one of those old pianos that plays itself, the keys moving in that wonderful ghostly way.

One impact the iPhone has had on me (and I'm sure I'm not alone) is that I now find myself touching screens everywhere and expecting them to do something. Of course by and large they don't, which is disappointing. David Pogue had an article in the Times this week about screens that play images and music, but aren't touch sensitive. He points out that one of the screens he reviews looks as if it was originally designed to be touch sensitive. But it isn't. Either the market won't bear the cost, or the technology won't bear the burden.

Manufacturers of tablet sized computers still seem to be stuck with the choice between power and portability. So you have a rash of e-readers that aim to trickle out their power over a long time, and so have slow two-tone screens that can't be asked to do very much.

Add to that the absence of a standardized platform for e-books and you've created an unmanageable mess of choices for users.

Somewhere on the heels of the Kindle and Sony's e-reader, you'll soon have Plastic Logic's business e-reader (see demo): a reader that's aimed at people who like to print out documents before they read them. This may sound a little bizarre as a business proposition, but the reader does have a touch sensitive (if rather slow) screen. This alone puts it ahead of other readers. But how will people with Kindle accounts use it?

These are murky waters, but they are turbulent with activity and they will clear one day. I hope it's one day soon.

Ancient Wisdom

Sorting through my desk I came across two articles from Fast Company, published in September 2003. They both seemed as relevant today as they did then.

The first was Contempt of Consumer: It's a Real Crime, by Seth Godin. He remembers the days of the Fuller Brush Man who knew how to treat customers with respect. Godin goes on to berate modern marketing tactics that attempt to force products on people who don't want them. "Instead of spamming the globe, market to people who want to hear from you."

The second was Becoming a Soft-Side Accountant, by Marshall Goldsmith. He argues that time measuring the soft-side values in the workplace is well spent. Such as "how often we're rude to people, how often we're polite, how often we ask for input rather than shut people out" and so on. He talks about measuring his own time spent with his children. It's an interesting article because it raises bigger questions about the importance of measuring, and knowing what you are measuring and why. Respecting customers and reading that in the numbers.

Fast Company must have liked these two articles about respect too, as the magazine republished them in 2007. No harm in revisiting ancient wisdom.

Barn Door View

The question of the moment is how to get people to pay for news. But everyone in the news business is looking at this from the barn door. The horse is out in the field, happily eating the grass, and we're leaning in the large airy doorway looking out and talking about ways to make this thing work.

There are still some people talking about getting the horse back in the barn. But the general conclusion is that the ways that will work leave the horse in the field. And the freemium idea, as described on Techcrunch by Erick Schonfeld, or Doc Searl's Emancipay, is the idea that seems to have caught the most attention.

The idea has been around for centuries, but it suits an environment where mass production and delivery cost are cheap. Think of your own use of a tool like the iPhone. When you first get one you swear you'll only use the free apps. But once you've got into the idea of using them you start buying. The same with software, or cloud applications like Flickr or Wordpress. If you like them, before you know it, you're paying for them.

Going back to the barn analogy for media: Forget all the trouble of making hay and hauling it into the barn for the horse. Grow the grass, let the horse eat it in the field and come into the barn of his own accord.

The barn still has value, because the horse likes to be there. You keep a bucket of oats for him to eat in the barn and focus on keeping the grass growing in the field and it'll be a healthy happy horse that walks into the barn, making it all worthwhile.

Ten barn door articles:

- Saving the Globe from a World of Hurt, by Doc Searls.
- Still at Newspapers I.x, also by Doc Searls.
- Chris Anderson talking about his book "The Future of a Radical Price."
- Freemium model for newspapers and other survival ideas, by Don Dodge.
- Jeff Jarvis, talking for 23 minutes: $10. Jeff writing 70,000 words: $13 by Josh Benton.
- Radio: The End is Near – Unless you heed Bob Garfield, by Mark Ramsey.
- Five tips on charging for content from Alan Murray of WSJ.com, by Zachary Seward.
- Ad Revenue on the Web? No Sure Bet, By Claire Cain Miller.
- 25 ideas: Creating An Open-Source Business Model For Newspapers, by Tom Foremski
- Out of Print, by Eric Alterman

Reinventing Radio

Steve Outing says he's pessimistic about newspapers, and that their CEOs haven't demonstrated the ability to save them.

He then writes a list of things that newspapers could do to confront the issues they currently face. Of course many of these items are equally true for all media. Such as "transform the company to digital first," allowing readers to support newsgathering, or Jarvis' mantra (here, in this post from two years ago): do your best and link to the rest.

Outing also suggests that newspapers create a membership model and accept that the Web is about free.

These last two sound a little like Public Radio's business plan: create something good then ask supporters to pay for it. (Disclosure: I work in public radio at WBUR in Boston. So I know this unlikely but successful business model well.)

Radio is perhaps lucky that it is forced to recognize that radio and the Web are two separate and distinct marketplaces with different value propositions, an observation that may have been lost on newspapers.

In the first radio finds itself with a value proposition that still works. That is: I'm in my car, I need to be entertained by something that doesn't require my hands or eyes to make it work. Equally: I'm cleaning the house, a task that requires my hands and eyes but not my concentration; I need something to occupy my mind. Radio is the solution for the many situations like these you find yourself in each day.

Staying alive in this marketplace is all about adopting new technologies. That's because any tool you can use like a radio, can replace a radio. That could be a computer, a smart phone or a Web audio player. These are eroding traditional radio's marketplace and offer a better product, because they're attached to the Internet and so can play audio from anywhere.

In addition to that, listeners who want to spend a little time figuring out how to create playlists from different sources and play audio when they want it, are changing the radio marketplace, slowly but inexorably.

So the "hands and eyes occupied, brain not so" value proposition is still valid but the marketplace is changing. It's changing because the tools that put the audio into that space are changing. Public Radio has changed with them by producing some of the most popular news and information podcasts in iTunes. But listening to podcasts has a high threshold of entry for the listener. You've got to really want to do it, to do it. Something simpler, like Stitcher, will come along, and radio stations have to be there when it arrives.

The Web is a different marketplace, a fact that newspapers might have missed because their stories, already in text, move so easily onto the Web. But news and information radio stations aren't fooled by this, because news and information radio clearly doesn't lend itself to the Web. It doesn't work, because it breaks the "hands and eyes occupied, brain not so" value proposition. If you're surfing the Web your mind is occupied. You can't concentrate on a Web story and a radio story at the same time.

So if news and information radio stations are to succeed on the Web, reinventing themselves is not an option, it's a requirement for success.

Current reported recently on Public Radio's advances into Web content, looking at The Argo Project, a public radio project that aims to produce Web content in verticals, led by NPR's head of digital media Kinsey Wilson.

"We’re beginning to see the reinvention of newsgathering and delivery at the local level," acknowledges Wilson in the article. The Argo Project responds to that not by producing the broad coverage you hear of the radio, but by selecting narrow verticals and providing narrowly focus in-depth coverage of those issues, establishing Public Radio as something more than audio.

Over the years newspapers have failed in attempts to produce radio stations, and it's hard to imagine there haven't been radio stations that have failed in newspaper projects. Projects like these die because they are trying to move what they do in one medium directly into another. They are not reinventing themselves.

Public Radio seems to be showing that it has the will to reinvent itself. Let's hope the old unlikely business model will provide the money, as Outing suggests it might.

Fixing Systems

Everyone fixes systems as part of their daily lives. It's what we do. A part of the human condition. But fixing other people's systems is a much harder thing to do, because they think they've already fixed their systems. Getting grandpa to put the dishes in the dishwasher in a new way. For some reason these things become intensely personal and create family arguments and resentments.

In business people who fix systems get nicknames like "the iron lady." That's because another part of the human condition is that people don't like change. But systems must be fixed and improved. Every day.


Fastcompany last August published an article on Fixing Washington D.C.'s School System. It follows Michelle Rhee, the chancellor of D.C. Public Schools and offers some timely reminders about managing underperforming systems.

According to the article she has her ideas written out clearly for everyone to see, she loves data, she hates inefficiency, she wants simple evidence of better performance, and above all she takes risks and decisive action.

In difficult times decisive and often painful action is difficult to take. For news organizations it's hard to imagine there's every been a time when it was more important to take decisive action.

Those who take action and succeed will be remembered. Those who take action and fail will be reviled by some and respected by others for having tried. Those who try to keep things going as they are will be forgotten.

Two Months Notice for Globe

With the Boston Globe in negotiations to save the paper over the weekend, The Washington Post reports on Monday "the Times Co. said that it will file today a required 60-day notice of the planned shutdown" of the Globe. The article notes that the move could be a negotiating ploy, but adds that the Times is also under pressure: "It recently mortgaged its new Manhattan headquarters, borrowed $250 million from a Mexican billionaire at 14 percent interest, laid off 100 newsroom staffers and cut salaries by 5 percent."

(UPDATE: WBUR reports that later in the day the Globe released a statement saying that having "reached agreement with six of the seven unions" involved, the paper would not be "making a filing today under the Workers Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act.")

Given that and the reported $85 million the Globe is expected to lose this year, it seems remarkable that the paper could survive even if it does extract $20 million in cuts from the staff.

The Globe reports more hopefully "Globe negotiations continue" and the Times sits on the fence with "At Deadline, No Deal Yet on Boston Globe’s Future".

Sree Sreenivasan tweets "AM STUNNED: Howard Kurtz reports NYT preparing to shut down Boston Globe. Was a possibility, of course, but still..." and links to the Post story, amid a flurry of Boston Globe activity on Twitter.

The Chicago Tribune (four paragraphs), the Los Angeles Times and the Philly.com (the story doesn't appear to have made it into the Inquirer) run stories from the Associated Press, which must make Bostonians wonder when this story will create the sort of national outcry that last year's collapse of the Tribune brought about.

Reinvention Means Real Change

Every manager in every news organization would do well to read Josh Benton's thoughts on what it means to reinvent yourself as an organization.

Everyone knows this has to be done, he says, but reinvention means a whole lot more than laying off staff and cutting your budget.

Then look at the Nieman's list of the top fifteen newspaper Web sites in 2008 and ask yourself: a) how many of these institutions have appeared in the news recently for being in financial trouble, and b) how many of these organizations are doing anything more than moving deck chairs around on the Titanic.

The answers are not encouraging.