Newsless.org

This is the keynote address I gave last Saturday at the Twin Cities Media Alliance Fall Forum. Please excuse the bad audio quality, like the thumps every time I advance a slide. I might record a better-quality version when I’ve got a moment.¹ A transcript of the remarks is below the fold.

Transcript of remarks

Opening – The rise of mass culture

If you wanted to impose a narrative onto the 20th Century, you could do worse than telling the story of the rise and decline of mass culture. In industry after industry – telecommunications, energy, transportation, agriculture, finance – small, local companies spent much of the century consolidating into hulking behemoths, and then, as the century closed, began to crumble under their own weight.

Perhaps nowhere was this story more vivid than in the media industry. Minnesota began the century with almost 700 newspapers, three dozen of them daily, a thriving foreign-language and partisan press, journals for every trade you could imagine. A publisher in St. Paul owned the Farmer magazine and its necessary counterpart, The Farmer’s Wife. In Minneapolis, meanwhile, a journal for the milling industry had correspondents stationed in New York and London. At the turn of the century, seven daily papers served the Twin Cities alone.

And then the age of mass set in, and oligopoly became the order of the day. The papers that had been the Minneapolis Times, the Tribune, the Journal and the Star folded into each other, becoming the Minneapolis Star Tribune, fed by a fervor among advertisers to reach bigger and bigger audiences, the larger the better. When advertisers’ hunger for massive audiences outstripped the capacity of even the super-consolidated newspaper to deliver it, they leapt to broadcast media, which brought bigger numbers still.

Today, of course we sit amidst the burning wreckage of this ascent. But I don’t really want to dwell on what’s happening today; I want to talk about yesterday and tomorrow.

The transition from niche to mass

I started by talking about the 20th Century because I want to frame what’s happening and what I hope to see happen as in many ways a return, a homecoming, as well as a chance at a new beginning. And I want us to plumb the best lessons of the past as we construct the media ecosystem that will serve us in the future.

Most of us grew up right around the very pinnacle of the age of mass. It’s all we’ve ever known. We think of it as being the natural state of things. And seeing it changing, our first instinct is to worry.

But history tells a different story. The rise of mass culture wasn’t driven by our values or needs as participants in a democracy. It was driven primarily by a handful of boring economic and demographic factors almost outside our observation – the needs of advertisers, industrial efficiencies, urban sprawl.

And although today, our attention is concentrated on what’s being lost in the transition to the next media ecosystem, we forget that we lost quite a lot in the transition to the last one. As far as I can tell, we didn’t like it when the Minneapolis Times and the Journal and the St. Paul Dispatch and the Globe went away, even if the new superpapers that sprung up in their wake were a bit plumper than before.

In that flourishing cacophony of voices that existed before the rise of the mass media, there was something tremendously valuable. Coverage could be deep and rowdy and familiar. The coverage you followed said something significant about who you were, much more than being a Strib subscriber or a KARE-11 watcher does today. A vast variety of needs and perspectives and interests had consistent representation.

The pitfalls of niche and the value of mass

But don’t let me paint a picture rosier than the reality. This age of media had giant pitfalls as well. With many presses in the hands of rich and powerful men, information could be suppressed. Reading the newspapers of 1934, for example, you wouldn’t have read anything about the Citizens Alliance – the shadowy cabal of business owners that fought brutally against their workers’ ability to organize.

And there was much of tremendous value in the mass media ecosystem that followed. Perhaps the most precious artifact of that historical moment was the notion of the news commons – the Walter Cronkite broadcast – the voice popular enough to unite us and allow us to share a common truth. The further that voice reached, the more massive the organization behind it, the more powerful it grew.

In the late ’60s and early ’70s, as its own power and profits were beginning to crest, the press found a purpose as a check on the power of government and corporations. Metro newspapers could fund the types of lavish investigations that brought down a President. Well-staffed foreign bureaus could bring images of a faraway war into our living rooms, forcing us to confront the outcomes of our actions.

In your mind, you’re probably already forming the counterpoints to all the positives I’ve just laid out. This is good, keep doing that. Going forward, above all else, we need to be hopeful, we need to be skeptical, and we need to be knowledgeable about what’s come before us.

But having painted this historical backdrop, what I most wanted to address was what I hope we’re putting in place for tomorrow.

The three ages of modern media

If I could characterize the three ages of the media that my talk this morning covers, I might call the early part of the 20th Century (1) the Niche Media Era, the latter part of the century (2) the Mass Media Era, and I’d call the age we’re entering now the beginning of (3) the Networked Media Era.

A network is a terribly powerful idea. Kevin Kelly, the visionary co-founder of Wired magazine, gave us an elegant metaphor for that power in his 1997 book New Rules for the New Economy. (Note that I’ve adjusted the metaphor a bit to match my understanding of the underlying biology.) He describes the billions of years it took for unicellular life to emerge, and then the ensuing epochs it took for those unicellular organisms to bond together into colonies. In this second phase, all the cells stay close to each other, forming one monolithic sphere.

But then, after another ages-long interval, cells evolve the power to connect across a distance, and true multicellular life breathes into being. The cells within these organisms demonstrate two key traits that characterize all multicellular life – they specialize and they cooperate. And out of that simple linkage, that simple tie between cells in a network, the world as we know it is born. As Kelly puts it, “Butterflies, orchids, and kangaroos all became possible.”

In light of Kelly’s metaphor, then, let me recast my three ages of the media:

• The Niche Media Era is akin to the unicellular stage of life. Each of those hundreds of news organizations was its own outpost, its own silo, broadcasting to its narrow community of interest.
• The Mass Media Era folded all those cells into colonies - bulbous, all-encompassing organisms that can contain multitudes, but must remain monolithic.
• The Networked Media Era, of course, is the beginning of multicellular life. No longer are we merely the narrow outposts or the monoliths. We are an ecosystem of organisms of all shapes and sizes. We specialize and we cooperate.

But what about the business model?

In my mind right now I’m hearing the voice of [MinnPost CEO] Joel Kramer saying, “Thanks for the history and the biology lesson, Pollyanna, but how do you propose we pay for this quote-unquote ecosystem?” Money is, after all, a major theme of today’s convening. So I’ll make a quick digression.

Of course, I don’t have a revenue model hiding somewhere in my brief speech. But I do have a wish. I would love it very much if we stopped talking about the content we provide and begin talking about the value we provide. What I mean by this is that the pieces of content that compose our media – our articles, our broadcasts, our images – have never been what we got paid for. What that content delivered over time – understanding, expertise, perspective, entertainment, and yes, eyeballs – these things are what have been the foundation of the media’s support.

At some point in the last few years, overpriced coffee became the next great hope for media producers. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard, “If people will pay four bucks every day for a cup of coffee, why wouldn’t they pay that much every month for our content?”

There are, of course, many reasons why that’s a flawed line of reasoning. But my favored point is this – of course people pay four bucks for a cup of coffee. They can’t imagine getting through a day without it. The product is that valuable to them. When we’re producing something so consistently valuable our communities can’t imagine going a day without it, I suspect we’ll be able to feed ourselves.

Among the major changes since the mass media era is this new reality: selling the slivers of the attention of a vast audience of people to advertisers is rapidly becoming a cruelly low-margin business. Meanwhile, the desire and ability of advertisers to reach more focused communities continues to grow.

Among the major similarities to the niche media era is this old reality: a diverse patchwork of various funding models will continue to support the media of tomorrow. The rich and idle will continue to produce media for the authority it confers, activists and partisans will supply some out of pure passion. Wealthier niches will lure advertisers and poorer ones will lure charities. Fantastic talents will find their patrons, and some of us will make our living selling tickets, t-shirts and advice. There will be gaps and pitfalls, just as there have always been. But there will be media, just as there has always been.

Which brings me, at last, to my beginning: what I’d like to see us create.

The future of the Twin Cities media ecosystem

I want to see a flourishing of deep and focused media outlets that makes the vibrant and robust cacophony of the early 1900s feel like a monoculture. We have the capacity to produce information and tell stories of previously unimaginable depths and we’ve barely begun to tap it.

Because of the two realities I described a minute ago, the incentives are changing. Depth in a mass media age makes no sense. When your goal is to capture the attention of hundreds of thousands of people, you want to aim for shallow and broad, not narrow and deep. You create a general-interest publication with little snippets of information to tease every fancy.

But if a seriously engaged community of even a few hundred people is your goal, your incentives are very different. How does this look? Let me show you an example.

Robin’s book

After a few previous publishing experiments went rather nicely, my co-blogger, Robin Sloan, wanted to see whether he could get a network of people to pay him $3,500 to write a novel. He set up a pledge drive on a website geared towards this sort of thing. If he could raise $3,500 in 90 days, he’d do it.

That’s not a lot of money for a book, sure. But I think Robin saw this as making a bit of a return off of a fun project he might have done anyway. After all, November’s National Novel-Writing Month, during which otherwise sane people spend inordinate amounts of time writing hobby books for free. Compared to this, Robin’s experiment seemed downright capitalistic.

Here’s the thing – Robin met his $3,500 target in the first week, and the pledges didn’t stop there. He kept promoting his project, and by the time the 90-day period ran out last week, he’d completed the novel, and 568 560 people had kicked in almost $14,000.²

A fair sum for three months of work, sure. But when you throw in the fact that Robin now retains full and exclusive rights to his work, and he’s got 500-some enthusiastic marketing agents for it, that $14,000 begins to look better than your typical book deal.

I think it struck Robin that way too. Shortly after he began the project, he quit his job as vice president of interactive strategy for Current Television so he could work on his writing round-the-clock.

In the book publishing industry of the mass media era, 568 buyers denotes utter failure. In the networked era, 568 hardcore fans equates to pure possibility.

Specialists and curators

If we can supercharge the creation of this galaxy of niches, I want it to be connected by a system of curators – individuals and organizations that package the best of the specialized media and standout amateur content into delightful, serendipitous bundles, and trace connections between the stories others tell.

We already have the beginnings of this in sites like the Twin Cities Daily Planet and Bring Me the News. And Seattle will provide another early model of what this might look like. Already, the city has a thriving network of vibrant neighborhood sites and beat blogs – some are even scrapping out a living from advertising online – and now the Seattle Times has gotten foundation funding to partner with these smaller efforts in a networked news project.

The strength of these networks rests on the strengths of the nodes, the niches, within them. Before we can truly realize the promise of our multicellular moment, both characteristics have to be fulfilled. We must specialize, and we must cooperate.

If we do this right, we won’t merely be replicating yesterday’s model of the front page, the old news commons, where a select few set the agenda for the many. We’ll be exploring the possibilities of social curation evident in sites like Chicago’s Windy Citizen, where the community collaborates to highlight the most interesting information.

Conclusion and benediction

The upshot of it all is that we face a tremendous opportunity. Throughout this talk, I’ve stressed our agency – we really are engineering a media ecosystem. Gatherings like this give us the opportunity to reflect and share information so we do it right. And best of all, they give us a chance to confer on the endgame.

Hence, my hopes. May we carry with us the best of our history. May we create media so deep our communities can’t imagine going without it. And may the power of that media derive not from the vast numbers of people sitting in front of it, but from the vast numbers standing behind it.

Thank you.

1. Also, thanks to ScreenToaster, which I used to create this preso. [↩]
2. The total changed from 568 to 560 after I was compiling my preso. [↩]

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