I just don’t understand Julia Angwin’s scare story about cookies and ad targeting in the Wall Street Journal. That is, I don’t understand how the Journal could be so breathlessly naive, unsophisticated, and anachronistic about the basics of the modern media business. It is the Reefer Madness of the digital age: Oh my God, Mabel, they’re watching us!
If I were a conspiracy theorist — and I’m not, because I’ve found the world is rarely organized enough to conspire (and I found this to be especially true of News Corp. when I worked there, at TV Guide) — I’d imagine that the Journal ginned up this alleged exposé as a way to attack everyone else’s advertising business just as its parent company skulks behind its pay wall and surrenders its own ad business. But I’m not a conspiracy theorist. That’s why I’m confused.
The story uses the ominous passive voice of newspaper scare stories: “…a Wall Street Journal investigation has found…” As if this knowledge were hiding. Cookies have been around as long as the commercial browser, since October 1994. Or was that 1984?
The piece uses lots of scare words: “surveillance technology” … “tracking technology” … “intrusive” … “no warning” … “surreptitiously re-spawn” … “rich databases” … “so powerful and ubiquitous” … and my favorite: “targeted ads can get personal” (well, yeah, that’s the damned point).
The Journal acts as if it has discovered a conspiracy of its own: “Marketers are spying on Internet users — observing and remembering people’s clicks, and building and selling detailed dossiers of their activities and interests.” Gasp! Mabel, hide the kids, the Romans Huns Krauts Commies Marketers are coming!
There is absolutely nothing new — thus nothing newsworthy — in what the Journal promises threatens to be a series.
The Journal does measure its own cookies, finding its site moderate (I count 34 Journal cookies on my new Mac and I don’t use the site often) in what it ominously calls an “exposure index.” Mabel: Bring the Geiger counter!
Well, except the Journal is unique because unlike the other sites the story writes about, the Journal has my personally identifiable information! It has my friggin’ credit card number and name and address and phone number as well as my web behavior and it allows me to be tracked by third parties. The Journal has more information about me than ANY of the sites it warns about. And the Journal is owned by a company some people don’t trust. Hmmm.
It’s a fine thing that the Journal also tells readers how to “avoid prying eyes.” And if enough people do that, then the value of the advertising-supported web falls. Without cookies, the effectiveness and price of advertising would plummet as ads everywhere turn into remnant junk (smack the money), reducing revenue for media sites and reducing their content to junk. Hmmmm….
A story like this might also affect policy as the FTC is looking at regulating online advertising and marketing; its chairman, Jon Leibowitz testified before Congress on the topic this very week. Hmmm.
I think the Journal should have told exactly how it places and uses every one of its cookies and beacons and ominous tracking surveillance spying technology. It doesn’t. The story doesn’t even link to the paper’s privacy policy, which says that cookies and beacons and all that scary surveillance/tracking/spying technologies are used at WSJ.com and its affiliates and also by third parties over which the Journal has no control. Opportunity lost.
If I were an advertising-supported site, I’d be aggressively transparent. I’d tell you exactly what we track and what impact that has on what we serve in advertising and content. I’d create an app to read the cookies placed just for you and explain them. I’d give you the chance to correct information. I’d give you the chance to select your own advertising (now that would be valuable). I’d treat this with radical openness.
Otherwise the scare mongers like those regulation-loving, anticapitalist commies at News Corp. will win the day.
: Oh, and I neglected to point out that it was the very same Journal that had the wingnutty story about privacy and RFID tags on our pants, quoting as an expert a woman who thinks that RFIDs are — and I exaggerate not — the work of the devil. What the hell is happening there? Are they going out for drinks too often with their new neighbors at the Post?
: Oh and here’s more scaremongering from the commie Telegraph in London, which equates Wikileaks’ Julian Assange with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. Man, we are in silly season.
: MONDAY: The Journal campaign against digital advertising continues today with a shocking exposé revealing that Microsoft is a business-friendly business that chose not to release its browser with a default that would have killed ad tracking and targeting. Horrors!
Now if the Journal were really a business newspaper still, there’d be no news there. The news would be if Microsoft did not do what was good for revenue.
Here’s a too-metered Microsoft response to the weekend’s follies from the browser team.
One way to reset the relationship of government and the public — from constant complaint — is to make it collaborative — thus constructive.
In my pollyanna way, I imagine a day when citizens could take over some tasks of government to save money and do them better. How about this as a small pilot:
Politico reports today that Rupert Murdoch wants to charge the White House $600,000 a year for access to news clips. The White House now pays $100,000 a year to a clipping service and News Corp. want to charge them for access to WSJ news in an apparent bid to make the White House deal directly with its own Factiva.
Well, to hell with that.
I have no doubt that we, the people, could do a spectacular job of curating clips — links and excerpts — for the White House (and us all). Imagine Wikiclips. Start with news data bases like Daylife (full disclosure: I’m a partner there) or GoogleNews as well as key RSS feeds (original sources and curated collections like RealClearPolitics) and canned searches and then create a very simple tool atop that to enable volunteer citizen-curators to find and highlight the important stuff. The Washington Post or New York Times or Techmeme could create the platform for the benefit of all.
There’s no reason for this task to be done at taxpayer expense. There’s no reason for the results of this work to be private; we all should see it. How could conservative Murdoch argue with saving tax dollars?
I asked Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of the Guardian, whether his paper should have started Wikileaks. I wondered whether the Guardian was looking at WIkileaks the way it looked at HuffPo when it started (that is, ‘darn, we should have thought of that, so we will’ … and it started CommentIsFree). Is Wikileaks a tool for investigative journalism? Or is it better for Wikileaks to be separate? Would being associated with a news organization subject it to different standards of verification and transparency?
“I think it’s better separate,” Rusbridger responded. Wikileaks does things the paper wouldn’t want to do or couldn’t do. And a paper is easier to attack by governments and companies; it has greater liability than a stateless news organization, as Jay Rosen calls them. “I think the Afghan leaks make the case for journalism,” Rusbridger said. “We had the people and expertise to make sense of it.”
Right. The Afghan war logs story is a case study in what Rusbridger would call the mutualization of journalism. I’d call it collaboration. The leakers and their medium — that is, their mediator, Wikileaks — did what they did and the paper’s journalists added value: digging through the data, giving it perspective, editing out dangerous pieces, getting reaction, and then giving it audience and attention.
That is the role journalists will continuously perform in the future: adding value. Wikileaks and the leaker didn’t need the Guardian, The Times, and Der Spiegel; as Wikileaks has proven many times, it can publish its information to the world without help. But they chose to work through those publications because of the value they would add.
Thanks to the internet, the marginal cost of sharing information today is zero. So the value of the journalist in merely distributing information is nearing zero. Distribution was just the stranglehold the journalists’ companies had on the market that enabled them to be supported by monopoly economics. They can no longer build their businesses on that barrier to entry. This change in market reality forces us to examine journalists’ true value to the public in the market.
In the war logs story, journalists added value. In the story of a town board meeting, journalists also need to add value, not merely acting as stenographers — a task most anyone could perform — but adding perspective (which might — horrors! — mean having an opinion), standards of behavior (you shouldn’t call the mayor an idiot without the links to back it up), and audience (which doesn’t mean distribution in the old sense of a stranglehold; it means the ability to get people to pay attention because you bring them value and they’ll click on your links).
If you don’t add value, then you’re not needed. And that’s not necessarily bad. When you don’t add value and someone else can perform the task as stenographer or leaker or reporter — and you can link to it — then that means you save resources and money. This means journalists need to look at where they add maximum value.
That’s the moral to the Wikileaks war log story: you never know what might be leaked. Of course, that itself is nothing new: Whenever we reveal information to even one person, we risk it being spread. The ethic of confidentiality (and privacy) rests with the recipient of that information.
So what’s new now? There are more means to get information since it is pooled and digital. There are more means to share information; Daniel Ellsberg had to go through media to spread his Pentagon Papers while Wikileak chose to go through media so they could add value (perspective and attention) but didn’t have to. And there are new means to stay anonymous in the process.
I’m writing a book arguing that we are becoming more public and that’s good — and that institutions (government, companies) have no choice but to live up to our new standards of transparency and openness. But I am also examining when transparency goes too far.
Is the Wikileaks story an example of crossing a line? First, we have to ask where the line should be. I think it has to move so that our default, especially in government, is transparency. Rather than asking what should be made public we should ask why something should be kept private. Imagine if all government information and actions were public except matters of security and personal and private identification. There will be pressure to head there.
I make the mistake of thinking that we’ll navigate toward openness via rational and critical discussion. But we’ll more likely move the line because of purposeful subversion of the line like Wikileaks’. The line will be moved by force.
Now that they’ve made the war log public, it makes us examine the impact.
We need to ask whether the knowledge that anything written down could be made public will cause less to be written — and we lose information in the long run. That is my concern about efforts to make *all* government communication, including person-to-person email, permanent and public. I imagine that people will stop saying important things in email and instead pick up the phone and we lose the record.
We need to ask whether an ethic of transparency can be expected when leakers can be anonymous and their leaks swift.
We need to ask whether the government would have been better off making more public so that the leaker’s selective publication does not solely set the agenda and the government is stuck reacting.
In the war logs, we are learning things we should know. It’s the leakers — Wikileaks and its three media outlets — who are deciding what not to make public (with some consultation, post-leak, from government) and what should be open. So government loses the ability to decide secrets. Now leakers do. Which side do we trust to decide?
The sane response to leaks, I think, is to open up as much as possible. Then there’s nothing to leak except the things that shouldn’t be leaked. If we had the faith that we knew more, there’d be fewer leaks, fewer reasons to.
I don’t think this is an inexorable process of opening everything, of making no secret safe. As much as I advocate transparency, I don’t advocate that. But when you don’t know how many secrets there are, when there are too many secrets, then everything can be a leak — in Afghanistan or in the Gulf of Mexico. Unless government and business take on a credible and complete ethic of transparency, they will hand over the job of transparency to leakers and no secret is safe.
ANOTHER THOUGHT: This story is a step to the end of access journalism. (NO, it won’t end. Whenever people like me declare the death of something, disbelieve and discount it; we’re just saying we’re heading away from something).
But Wikileaks didn’t need, doesn’t want, won’t ever get official, journalistic, beat access. The derailing of a general in Rolling Stone didn’t come from a beat reporter who cared about access anymore. ProPublica’s work isn’t built on access.
When I talk about how little is spent on investigative reporting in America — as a proportion of total editorial spending across all media, it’s minuscule … microscopic — editors remind me that my calculation doesn’t include beats and beats are the heart of reporting. True and not true. It’s true to the extent that we want ongoing coverage and want it performed by people who build up experience if not expertise in the subject. It’s not true to the extent that reporters who depend on access from the subjects won’t ruin the relationship by breaking the subject’s secrets or the access (and the reporter’s supposed value) ends. (This is why reporters aren’t supposed to blog their opinions about their beats, according to fresh orthodoxy: They would lose access.)
In access journalism, leaks come from the subject. In unaffiliated journalism, leaks come in spite of the subject. As more reporting is done through mechanisms like Wikileaks and ProPublica and bloggers and advocates, I think we’ll see more breaking of secrets, which reinforces my point above: the best way to fight leaks is transparency (not black-out paint).
The Pentagon learned that lesson just a bit when it realized that giving more access would mean more control. Thus the embedding program in Iraq and Afghanistan. But news organizations can’t afford to have reporters embedded in the war zone. Coverage was too dependent on relationships. That honeymoon is ended.
The coverage of this war revealed much of what we know from the war logs. Alex Thomson says, though, that the logs validated what we know. They added facts we couldn’t get with access.
As news organizations shrink, we’ll be able to afford less access journalism — fewer beat reporters building relationships with their subjects — and more reporting — and subversion — from people who have a viewpoint and an agenda. The tone and means of journalism changes. It becomes more uncomfortable. But then, isn’t journalism supposed to be uncomfortable?
: MORE: Many notes from Jay Rosen here: “I don’t have the answer; I don’t even know if I have framed the right problem.”
Jay talks about stateless journalism. Dave Winer says the blogosphere is that. I don’t think the issue is that journalism is stateless but instead that journalism is becoming independent of organizations (pace Clay Shirky). Journalism lacks affiliation. Anybody can feed WIkileaks; Wikileaks can feed anybody. The organizational — nevermind state — point of control disappears. Journalism is everywhere and its up to the public to decide what news is.
Though from another perspective, stateless does matter as we’re seeing more of it across many sectors of society. Our enemy in this war is stateless. Businesses are stateless. Journalism now becomes stateless. I believe the tools of publicness — that is, the internet’s — enable us to organize new societies around states.
: MORE: Andrew Potter breaks down the discussion into four questions.
There are those in the press and government who don’t like or trust the public they serve. It is an unliberal attitude–which can come from Liberals, by the way–for it doesn’t buy the core belief of liberal democracy that the people properly rule. Two classic examples:
Here we have a German government official saying that it is his job to protect consumers from themselves. In other words, they don’t know best; he does. Nevermind what they do — giving up private data on Facebook or giving Google the highest market penetration anywhere — he says they should do something else. And so he’ll use his regulatory power to change their behavior to his expectation.
And here we have a columnist for the Observer (aka Guardian), Will Hutton, who says in a fit of journalistic hubris that the BBC is “the last bulwark against populist government by the mob.” So the BBC is what protects the public from itself. He further says, “The bile, unfairness and lack of restraint in the blogosphere is infecting the mainstream media and thus American politics.” Which is to say that the press and government were unsullied and free of bile and unfairness until these damned bloggers (read: citizens with tongues) came along to corrupt them.
In both cases, we simply see members of a power structure threatened by the emergence of a public with its own mind and voice. We thus see the conflict that arises out of the rise of publicness. That’s one of the topics I’m thinking through as I write my book.
Condé Nast is a house built on smoke and mirrors — that is, to say, on brand advertising. So it is astonishing to hear its CEO, Chuck Townsend, essentially toss the company’s business model out the window of the Death Star in what The Times frames as “a fundamental overhaul of the advertising-based business model.” This, folks, is surely the real product of the McKinsey studies undertaken at Condé, not a few magazines folded but a new strategy. In a phrase:
Advertising is fucked.
I’ve said that Rupert Murdoch’s paywall is also essentially his surrender of any hope that advertising can be grown or even maintained. He gave up and shrank like George Costanza’s privates. It’s one thing for the dirty digger to give up on car ads. It is quite another for Condé to go off its diet of Madison Avenue and Seventh Avenue in favor of a parking meter.
Photo: Flickr - wallyg
“We have been so overtly dependent on advertising as the turbine that runs this place, and that is a very, very risky model as we emerge from the recession,” Condé CEO Chuck Townsend told The Times. “In a company like ours where 70 percent of our margins are generated on the advertising side, we must develop a much, much more effective financial relationship with the consumer.” That is, get money from the consumer instead of the advertiser.
Good luck.
The company plans — like Murdoch — to try to suddenly get new money from consumers who for years — long, long before the internet — have been accustomed to almost-free content: $1-per-issue luxe magazines that cost probably four times that to produce and distribute (not to mention the tens of dollars it takes in marketing to acquire that subscription with advertising and schwag — a purse for Glamour readers or the fabled sneakerphone up the street at Sports Illustrated).
Condé promoted Bob Sauerberg, former head of consumer marketing (read: circulation) to its presidency. Bob is one of the good guys of Condé Nast (I don’t mean to damn him with faint praise there … sorry, couldn’t resist); he’s smart, mature, experienced. (I worked with him a good deal when I was at Advance’s parent company and he was at Fairchild; I should add that none of what I’m saying here comes from the slightest contemporary knowledge of the company; haven’t been in the cafeteria for many months.) Bob knows management and consumer marketing. The age of the ad sales guy is over because the age of the ad is over.
The problem is going to be that there is only more competition in content and so trying to suddenly charge more flies in the face of basic economics. The absurdity of the strategy struck me yesterday as Amazon tried to sell me a subscription to Time for 28.8 cents an issue while Time is trying to sell its iPad issues for $4.99 and I see no reason to buy either. In what world do these economics make sense? In their dreams.
“I want to collect income from the consumer,” Townsend told The Times earlier. “An annual magazine subscription may be something like anywhere bet[ween] $12 and $24. So I’m currently locked into a model that says I get a buck or two a month. How about I get a buck for a click?”
Dream on.
They’re not wrong that they need to get money from consumers but they’re not going to get it for content. Sorry guys. But as Google schooled the newspaper industry (I’ll substitute appropriate words):
The large profit margins [magazines] enjoyed in the past were built on an artificial scarcity: Limited choice for advertisers as well as readers. With the Internet, that scarcity has been taken away and replaced by abundance. No [dreaming] will be able to restore [magazine] revenues to what they were before the emergence of online [content]. It is not a question of analog dollars versus digital dimes, but rather a realistic assessment of how to make money in a world of abundant competitors and consumer choice.
Instead, I suggest they have to get new revenue through commerce — through selling the things they once advertised now that advertisers are deserting them to sell direct. Problem is, that’s hard, as Condé knows best from its experience with Style.com, which started as an attempt to create a high-end store (I worked there then). They created it in partnership with a retailer and the retailer bagged the effort when times got tough in the first bubble; it then became another ad-supported site. But the strategy wasn’t wrong. Problem is, there is no retail expertise in the company.
More recently, Condé should have bought Net-a-Porter but instead luxury conglomerate Richemont snarfed it up. (Disclosure: I spoke at Richemont’s corporate retreat recently.) Condé should buy Gilt to establish new skills, a new relationship with customers, and new revenue. Its content then becomes just added value: the Cinnabon’s in the mall.
A media company going into retail and selling in areas held by former advertisers has precedent: Media News’ Salt Lake City paper became a real estate broker and undersold the entire business in town. The Telegraph, as I like to point out, sells everything from hangers to wine to betting to its readers.
But if Condé and other media companies are going into retail, they need entirely new skills of merchandising and sales, an entirely new financial structure to cope with inventory costs and tight margins, the ability to cope with entirely new competitors and suppliers (that is, former advertisers — but, worse, Amazon), and an entirely new efficiency (forget the cafeteria; they’d be lucky to have a Wal-Mart lunch room with vending machines as a profit center).
They also have to defeat a calcified, entitled culture. For that, I’d suggest they buy Gawker Media to get the incredibly popular competitor Jezebel and to infuse the company with a new culture. Make Nick Denton editorial director and COO and then watch the fun.
I doubt they heard any of this from KcKinsey because in the few encounters I’ve had with them they remix known models rather than invent new ones, which is what is called for here. I’ll bet they proposed cutting some costs (done) and remixing revenue (started) when what’s really needed is a complete restrategizing.
Or maybe I”m wrong. Maybe 4 Times Square will become the world’s lushest mall, with one helluva food court.
Nevermind my advice. The moral of this story remains that advertising is next to fall into the black hole (as a Time Inc. president once dubbed this damned internet thing). Welcome to Bob Garfield’s Chaos Scenario.
I’ve been looking for a classic example of so-called, self-appointed “privacy advocates” gathered by the press going off the deep-end (if you have any, please send them to me).
And then this dropped in my lap: a reputed outcry by these putative privacy advocates against Wal-Mart putting RFID tags on pants.
What could possibly violate our privacy with tracking pants in a store to make sure there aren’t too many extra-large sizes on the shelves? (That was my experience with Wal-Mart when I tried to buy sweats before my surgery; I wish they’d restocked the mediums.)
Well, say the advocates the Journal found: “While the tags can be removed from clothing and packages, they can’t be turned off, and they are trackable. Some privacy advocates hypothesize that unscrupulous marketers or criminals will be able to drive by consumers’ homes and scan their garbage to discover what they have recently bought.”
Yeah, and then what? So they find out that I bought 33/34 jeans. And with that precious personal data they will do what? Blackmail me because I’m no longer the svelte 32 I once was? Sell me illegal diet aids? Sell me ice cream? Target advertising for medium jockeys to me? Subject me to public ridicule as a pencil-necked geek?
Don’t the reporter and editor at the Journal stand back and laugh at the absurdity of this worry? Don’t they ask the next, obvious question: “Yeah, and…?” Isn’t that their job?
Ah, but they report more and find further cause for worry:
“Some privacy advocates contend that retailers could theoretically scan people with such [encoded] licenses as they make purchases, combine the info with their credit card data, and then know the person’s identity the next time they stepped into the store.”
And that would be worth the trouble and risk for the store how? That would give them more data than they already have from credit cards and other means?
So often, articles calling on “privacy advocates” leave them unnamed — anonymous and private, you understand. The Journal digs up one Katherine Albrecht, “founder of a group called Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering and author of a book called ‘Spychips‘ that argues against RFID technology.” Group? Just how many people go to her meetings? And does the book come with tin-foil underwear? The “group” was founded to oppose grocery-store loyalty cards. Yes, we see the damage they have done to countless lives.
Her own site says that she has “earned her accolades from Advertising Age and Business Week and caused pundits to label her a PR genius.” I dare say. She next got the Journal to swallow her silliness.
Listen, I’m all for privacy. I’m working hard to define it in my book on publicness. I will vigorously defend the need and right to control one’s information. There are plenty of serious and difficult issues to discuss. But this kind of idiocy does not serve the cause. It only finds a spy under every leisure suit. In the long run, it turns the cause of privacy into an object of ridicule. And that’s wrong.
But this is often the case with technology and privacy. Technology spawns fears — and worries these advocates — because it introduces change and it’s really change that they fear. Here’s a tidbit from my manuscript illustrating the point:
* * *
Alan F. Westin, in his influential 1967 book Privacy and Freedom … found many devices to fear: LSD “may greatly affect the individual’s daily personal balance between what he keeps private about himself and what he discloses to those around him” and could again be used for government surveillance. Westin worried about radio pills, miniature transmitters, and even about fluorescent powders and dyes—not to mention radioactive substances—that could be applied to “hands, shoes, clothing, hair, umbrella, and the like, or can be added to such items as soap, after-shave lotion, and hair tonic” to track the unsuspecting person.
Secret, miniature cameras, infrared film, microminiature microphones the size of match-heads, battery-operated tape-recorders, hidden “television-eye” monitoring, telephone tapping, “truth measurement” by polygraph tests, personality testing, brain-wave analysis, dossiers of personal data, and the means to steam open envelopes and measure TV audiences—these all concerned him. He speculated about “invisible magnetic-ink tattoos [that] might be applied (for example, to babies at birth)” and transmitters that could be implanted and “wireless, battery-operated television ‘eyes’ the size of buttons,” not to mention U-2 spy cameras from above as well as the ability to read brain signals.
Westin warned of the dangers of computers. In 1966, he wrote, there were 30,000 computers used in the U.S., 2,600 of them in the federal government. What happens, he asked, when we come to the day when “computers in the field of health will eventually establish total medical profiles on everyone in the country ‘from the hour of birth’ and updated through life. Each record will be almost instantly accessible to medical personnel.” Oh, if only.
Westin listed his fears of technology’s impact on privacy 45 years before you read this. How many of his dreads came to life? Few if any, I’d say. That is not to mock him nor even to diminish his warnings, only to put the fears technology fosters into context as we grapple with the concerns attached to our more-modern sciences.
* * *
LATER: I looked at all the coverage I could find on Google News and I found but one piece that, like me, dared to question the “Cassandras of the privacy movement.” CNBC’s Dennis Kneale wrote:
One day RFID tags will permeate the U.S. and global economies, cutting costs for manufacturers and retailers and letting them better respond to consumer tastes. A whole new stock-sector boom could loom as well, in companies that cash in on this inevitable tech trend.
That is, unless the Privacy Police gets in the way. . . .
Um, so what is it I should fear that Wal-Mart will do with this new data horde showing that I just bought a pair of boxers? (Alright let’s stipulate: We’d be less keen on Wal-Mart’s knowing we just bought Spanx.)
The privacy guys always do this—raise well-intended but fear-provoking possibilities at the advent of most any new, promising technology. It is part of what the 1990s Internet sage, Nicholas Negroponte, called the “demonization of bits.” If a salesperson follows us around a store watching our purchases, fine; but use technology to do it and suddenly it’s Orwellian.
Playing the privacy card seems a bit antiquated in this exhibitionistic era of gleefully revealing your inner-most foibles and fetishes to potentially millions of other equally indiscreet folks on Facebook.
: LATER: RFID Journal blasts “privacy nonsense” around chips.
: UPDATE: The WSJ’s RFID expert believes that the chips are a fulfillment of an end-time biblical prophesy. Did I say wingnuts?
I agree with Devin Coldewey at CrunchGear that Andrew Wylie’s deal to publish big authors’ backlists exclusively on the Amazon Kindle is bad for readers (and for authors and for the industry).
Fragmenting content such that one has to buy one device to read one author and another to read another is blind to the needs and realities of the market. It’s dealmaking for dealmaking’s sake.
If I were one of those authors, I’d squeal like a columnist put behind a Times paywall (either one). Random House is right to stick it back to Wylie and refuse to do business with the now-niche agency. And Amazon is putting itself in a dangerous position to be the enemy, not the friend, of writers, publishers, and readers. But Amazon’s no fool. It is driving a wedge into the heart of the industry.
The real upshot of this deal, I think, is that agents and publishers alike will find themselves locked out as big authors make deals directly with Amazon.
Yes, the Kindle reader is available on laptops and phones and iPads and coming Android tablets. But it won’t be available on other eBooks, and that’s going to hurt the eBook market’s growth, which could affect Amazon, even as it announces that its Kindle book sales exceeded hardback sales last month.
This is the same fear I have about the appification of content with magazine editors gleefully slapping their stories onto iPad apps in the belief that it returns control of the experience and business model to them when, in fact, it cuts them off from every browser user around the world. Nose. Face. Where’s my knife?
In the early days of content on mobile, we saw this game play out: Carriers made exclusive deals to get content in hopes that would get users to buy their phones instead of the other guys’. Didn’t work. A phone’s a phone. A browser’s a browser. A book’s a book.
And an e-book better damned well be an e-book, or books and authors and publishers and agents are all screwed.
Google just issued a response to the Federal Trade commission’s staff discussion draft on potential recommendations to support the reinvention [read: preservation] of journalism [read: newspapers]. (here was my reaction). It’s a wonderful document that takes the FTC — and the news industry — to school on the First Amendment, copyright, fair use, antitrust, media history, business, and technology. The government and publishers should be embarrassed to need such remedial education.
Highlights:
This says it best:
The large profit margins newspapers enjoyed in the past were built on an artificial scarcity: Limited choice for advertisers as well as readers. With the Internet, that scarcity has been taken away and replaced by abundance. No policy proposal will be able to restore newspaper revenues to what they were before the emergence of online news. It is not a question of analog dollars versus digital dimes, but rather a realistic assessment of how to make money in a world of abundant competitors and consumer choice.
Google’s doc leads off with promotion of its efforts to work with news organizations: Living Stories, traffic sent to news sites, technology help, and so on. They might as well just have linked to James Fallows’ paean and Eric Schmidt’s Wall Street Journal op-ed. You’ve heard these points before. My problem with them, as I’ve said, is that Google is trying to make friends with an industry that only wants enemies to blame for its failures. But at last, Google stops pulling punches and slaps down the industry’s self-deluding myths and the FTC’s dangerous ideas.
“[T]he current challenges faced by the news industry are business problems, not legal problems,” Google says,”and can only be addressed effectively with business solutions. Regulatory proposals that undermine the functioning of healthy marketplaces and stall the pace of change are not the solution.”
Google points out that newspapers’ circulation peaked between 1890 and 1920; that newspapers declared radio would kill them and only newspapers should hold the sacred and hallowed mission of news; that newspapers declared TV would kill them and characterized broadcast reporters as “parasites” (a lovely tip of the hat to Rupert Murdoch). We won’t buy that again. “The internet, rather than being the cause of journalism‘s downfall, provides a unique opportunity for news organizations to renew and reinvigorate journalism,” Google says.
Google lectures the FTC and the industry on internet business basics: “Unfortunately, the Discussion Draft does not acknowledge the basic economics of search engines and similar services and instead erroneously suggests that search engines are somehow cannibalizing newspaper advertising revenue rather than serving as an important connection to potential consumers.” Aggregators, Google points out earlier, send traffic and business opportunities to publishers. And Google does not make a significant amount of revenue from news … just as newspapers do not (subsidizing it with more lucrative verticals).
Google lectures the FTC et al on the unbundling of news. Fact o’ life. It then offers a primer on how publishers should be treating the readers who come to them via links.
Google restates the FTC’s dissection of newspaper revenue: 80% advertising, 17% newsstand, 3% subscriptions. “Pay walls,” it says, “could be an effective way to raise the 3% revenue figure.” A zinger for publishers. But Google’s fine with pay walls if publishers want them. It’s just not fine with government regulating them. “Innovating to create products and services that consumers want to pay for,” Google says, “is the only way to guarantee long-term subscription revenue growth, and none of the policy proposals are designed to foster that kind of innovation.” A zinger for the FTC (one I wish Google had dwelled on more since it does know innovation.)
Another zinger to the industry and the FTC comes as Google points out that classified revenue implosion had “nothing to do with copying or free-riding and everything to do with the emergence of a new, more effective and more efficient product into the marketplace. The FTC would ordinarily regard such a situation as a cause for celebration – consumers are getting a better product at a lower price – not an opportunity to slow down that innovation through regulation.”
Google salutes the flag the FTC raised on making government information more accessible — but then Google went the extra step to suggest “harmonization of state and federal law relating to copyrightability of government information.” There, the agreement ends.
Google decries proposals to extend copyright law and limit fair use and repeats its fine arguments against the antiquated notion of hot news from its FlyOnTheWall brief. “Facts, hot or cold, cannot be protected by copyright since there is no author of them,” Google instructs the FTC. “This has been the law of copyright since its inception….”
Google goes after proposals to establish taxes and fees to support legacy news operations. And it attacks efforts to let news organizations fix prices and charge aggregators. The doc makes the FTC eat its own words: “The FTC‘s long-standing position regarding antitrust exemptions properly subordinates a desire to advantage individual firms (here, print news organizations) to the need for a competitive, even playing field that offers the maximum good to consumers.”
Bottom line: There’s no need for the FTC’s meddling:
….Google continues to work with publishers to find ways to ensure that journalism survives and thrives on the Web. We remain optimistic about the future of journalism: The Fourth Estate is too crucial a part of a functioning democracy, and the Internet too powerful a medium, for journalism to die in transition to a Web-first approach. News organizations have more readers than ever, more sources of information than ever, more ways to report and tell stories than ever, and more potential ways to generate revenue than ever. Journalism will change, but the free market and free society will ensure that it won‘t die.
Three examples of back-handed positive coverage for Facebook:
* bNet praises the anticipated Facebook Stories campaign about the service’s 500 million friends:
Stories of communities using Facebook to come together to help a family in need; stories of finding a long-lost love on Facebook; of finally being able to easily share photos with grandpa, and so on. It will be cheesy. And it will work. Facebook will always have its detractors, but this effort will reinforce the reasons why those 500 million people got on Facebook in the first place — to connect with their fellow humans in times of happiness, sadness and hilarity. (Oh, and because people they know in the real world pressured them into it.)
This campaign is hardly genius. In fact, Facebook execs seem a little slow on the uptake in finally sharing individual users stories now — the social net has been collecting them for years. As Facebook marketing honcho Randi Zuckerberg (yes, sister of that other Zuckerberg), told AllThingsD on Friday: “In the past, it’s been all about the numbers and milestones, and we realized we had never taken the opportunity to celebrate users.” Well, duh.
“Facebook Stories” may finally show Facebook that the best way to combat constant assaults from the privacy police and regulators is with stories of Facebook-inspired engagements, how it helped raise funds for causes important to some parts of its community, and, of course, with pictures of the new puppy shared amongst far-flung family members, replacing anger with “Awwwwww.”
The writer, Catharine Taylor, just can’t resist the snark. Why? Is that the new cool: diminishing rather than understanding the motives of 500 million people? Complain about Facebook’s execution at will, but there’s a phenomenon to be understood here, not dismissed.
* MediaPost reports that those suing Facebook over its privacy changes are going to have a problem: proving damage.
The main hurdle that plaintiffs in privacy lawsuits encounter centers on the difficulty of proving damages. Simply revealing information about another isn’t seen as causing injury — at least not the kind of injury that courts compensate people for.
Facebook now is arguing that a potential class-action lawsuit against it for having changed its privacy settings should be dismissed precisely because the members who are suing haven’t alleged any tangible injuries. “Plaintiffs fail to make a single factual allegation that specifies what information, exactly, Facebook has allegedly improperly disclosed or that Facebook publicly disclosed information that any Plaintiff intended to remain private,” Facebook argues in papers filed last week in federal district court in San Jose, Calif. “Instead, the complaint relies exclusively on vague, generalized allegations that say nothing specific about the named plaintiffs or how they have been harmed by Facebook.”
Right. I’m looking at that same issue in a broader sense in my book on publicness, wondering what the real damage is in privacy matters. Apart from identity theft and stalking — crimes in their own right — it’s sometimes hard to say what the damage is other than to spark fears. But fears aren’t damages.
MediaPost’s writer, Wendy Davis, also reports something positive for Facebook but then she, too, can’t resist the slap: “Facebook reportedly is ready to announce that it now has 500 million members. But if those members don’t repeatedly return to the site, their value to Facebook is limited. And with new social networking options in the works, Facebook could decide it’s in the company’s interest to rethink its approach to privacy.” That’s one of those on-the-other-hand remarks reporters make to inject faux balance: ‘Well, I’ve just told you how 500 million people use this service and the people who are complaining apparently don’t have a legal leg to stand on but I’m still going to say that they should change.’
* And then Forbes points to this video by Casey Neistat in which he says he loves Facebook and endeavors to explain it to the poor souls who can’t figure it out but at the end says using Facebook comes at the utter destruction of one’s privacy … though the video doesn’t back that up.
Complaining about Facebook has become so hip it’s square. It’s knee-jerk, obvious, repetitive. Let’s move the conversation along. Facebook represents — no, it serves — changes in society and we journalists would be wiser trying to investigate the roots behind it than trying to root against it. Yes, Facebook has been clumsy about its changes lately. Stipulated. But 500 million people can’t all be wrong. Can they?
One of my great joys researching Public Parts, my book about the benefits of publicness, is finding parallels between today and the early modern period of the 16th and 17th centuries (aka the renaissance) with the introduction of tools — the press, the stage, music, art, maps, markets — that enabled people to create publics and how that changed how the world operated (the way we are changing it again today).
In their early days of printing, books — and other publications — were not treated as temples of perfection, as they are today (which is why their contemporary producers — authors, editors, journalists, publishers — look down so on the ever-imperfect internet). Indeed, before Gutenberg, scribes had long entered errors into books as they were copied and recopied. Printing, Eisenstein says, both multiplied errors in so many more copies and also represented a “great leap” toward standardization because the errors were easier to find.
Print, at first, did not step toward perfection but away from it. “[A]n age-old process of corruption was aggravated and accelerated after print,” Eisenstein says. Errors could spread farther faster (sound familiar?). It was because of the fear of what this new technology could cause that printers were fined for publishing the “wicked Bible” of 1631 (which omitted the “not” from the Seventh Commandment … look it up).
But this process of error was turned to advantage by some. Sixteenth-century editors and publishers, Eisentein says, “created vast networks of correspondents, solicited criticism of each edition, sometimes publicly promising to mention the names of readers who sent in new information or who spotted the errors which would be weeded out.” So publishing became collaborative; that’s what printing allowed.
Eisenstein quotes Lloyd A. Brown from The Story of Maps about map publisher Ortelius:
By the simple expedient of being honest with his readers and inviting criticism and suggestions, Ortelius made his Theatrum a sort of cooperative enterprise on an international basis. He received helpful suggestions from far and wide and cartographers stumbled over themselves to send him their latest maps of regions not covered in the Theatrum.
We call that transparency and collaboration now.
Eisenstein goes farther. She says that publishers “often encouraged readers to launch their own research projects and field trips…. Thus a knowledge explosion was set off. The ‘fall-out’ from Ortelius’ editions, for example, encompassed treatises on topography and local history ranging from Muscovy to Wales.” (My emphasis) She argues, according to James A. Dewar and Peng Hwa Ang in Agent of Change (a book of essays on Eisenstein), that “this feedback reversed the slow degradation of recorded thought and ushered in the era of accumulation of thought on which the Scientific Revolution was built.” Says Eisenstein: “The closed sphere or single corpus passed down from generation to generation, was replaced by an open-ended investigatory process pressing against every advancing frontiers.”
Demonstrating that there’s nothing new that’s not old, when Cory Doctorow spoke to executives of Holtzbrinck in Berlin a few weeks ago (I also spoke), he told how he is doing similar things with his latest book, giving credit to readers who find errors and constantly making the book better thanks to them. And, of course, Cory’s BoingBoing is the product of sharing and collaboration.
This attitude — from the 16th century and from Cory — changes the way we look at books and media, not as sculpture cut out of rock but as still-wet clay. The problem we’ve had in recent history — from the industrial age to today — is that we made mistakes too expensive to admit and that cut us off from correction and collaboration with our public and from the free explosion of knowledge Eisenstein talks about. But the internet — always wet — begins to fix that, doesn’t it? We go back to the future.
In fact, Eisenstein argues that the printing press fixed this exact same problem vis a vis its predecessor technologies. “The sequence of improved editions and ever-expanding reference-works was a sequence without limits — unlike the great library collections amassed by Alexandrian rulers and Renaissance princes.” Their books were static, finished and done. Printed books had editions and readers who could improve them. We lost that advantage — and attitude — over the centuries.
We also lost the openness to collaboration that this new flexibility brought. It’s not just about technology, though. It’s about a worldview, a different relationship between producer and public. Eisenstein quotes David Hume writing to his publisher: “The Power which Printing gives us of continually improving and correcting our Works in successive Editions appears to me the chief Advantage of that art.”
This cultural attitude in the early days could have just as easily gone the other way (as eventually it did anyway). Ann Blair writes in Agents of Change that in the early modern period a few “humanists called for a system of censorship, never implemented, to guarantee that only high-quality editions be printed.” How often do we hear today suggestions to license or at least anoint quality in our new, uncontrolled press?
I don’t want to make it seem as if early books were all temporary and changeable. As Eisenstein next points out, the advantage of printing was that it made permanent knowledge that had been diffuse and was all too easily lost in a few hand-made copies that could be destroyed. It was printing, she said, that enabled Thomas Jefferson to collect all the laws of Virginia, adding (my emphases):
It seems in character for Jefferson to stress the democratizing aspect of the preservative powers of print which secured precious documents not by putting them under lock and key but by removing them from chests and vaults and duplicating them for all to see.”
Bringing knowledge together and making it public is what enables the public to add to it, to correct it, to be inspired by it.
I just don’t understand Columbia University’s apparent obsession with handing over portions of the press to government subsidy, giving up on the free market. I haven’t given up on it. Have you?
The latest raised palm comes from Columbia President Lee Bollinger in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal, of all places. This could send BBC-hater Rupert Murdoch to his grave so he can spin there. Bollinger proposes that we start an American BBC by pooling (merging?) the resources of the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, PBS, and NPR.
He repeats the old saw that American media is already government subsidized. Except postal subsidies are meaningless as print and the post office decline. Legal ads should be going to the web for free to save taxpayers money anyway. I wish PBS and NPR did not rely on any government money so it would not be put under government pressure and could operate with true independence. And I do think broadcast spectrum should be sold so it is not seen as public airwaves (broadcast itself becoming meaningless) and so it is not subject to government censorship (see today’s victory for the First Amendment).
Bollinger argues that we’re getting the BBC thanks to the British taxpayer. Well, yes, the BBC has funded its world service for years to extend its empire; their choice. But I pay a fee on Sirius to hear them. And its TV channels in the U.S. are ad-supported, as is its web site. As BBC budgets are attacked by the Tories, I’d say it’s more likely our marketing economy will subsidize their free news — if Murdoch doesn’t stop them.
When Columbia presented its plan to save journalism — which included government subsidy — I had this discussion with Bollinger and he pointed out that I am subsidized by government as a professor at a state university. Touché. But I’d rather raise money to support my work from foundations and companies and revenue-generating activities. “Indeed,” Bollinger writes in the Journal, “the most problematic funding issues in academic research come from alliances with the corporate sector.”
Bollinger then questions the editorial integrity of the American press he wants to save, saying: “To take a very current example, we trust our great newspapers to collect millions of dollars in advertising from BP while reporting without fear or favor on the company’s environmental record only because of a professional culture that insulates revenue from news judgment.” Who has mishandled BP more — the press or the government?
Shockingly, he mentions as models of state-supported media, not just the BBC but also China’s CCTV and Xinhua news and Qatar’s Al Jazeera. In what sane world is the Chinese government’s relationship with news a model. What would Google do?
Bollinger suggests taking down the prohibition on beaming propaganda broadcasters VoA and RFE into the U.S. “This system needs to be revised and its resources consolidated and augmented with those of NPR and PBS to create an American World Service that can compete with the BBC and other global broadcasters,” Bollinger concludes. “The goal would be an American broadcasting system with full journalistic independence that can provide the news we need. Let’s demonstrate great journalism’s essential role in a free and dynamic society.”
I think we can demonstrate and build that independence by teaching tomorrow’s journalists to build strong, sustainable, and independent businesses. We just disagree.
: SEE ALSO: George Brock of the other City University (London) and Roy Greenslade of the Guardian and City as well.
Brock and I agree. The rational Greenslade wants to agree but the emotional Greenslade doesn’t. He, like Brock (and me), respects the talent, value, and experience that is trapped in dying institutions and so he, unlike Brock and me, wants to overcome what seems to be his better sense and agree with Bollinger that we should consider government rescue.
With respect, I think Greenslade’s logical leap illustrates the problem with Bollinger’s thinking: They assume that the business model of journalism is hopeless. I do not. That is what needs discussion.
Quite to the contrary, I believe — based on research, which is one of the values we add from a university — that journalism could well be more sustainable, accessible, and accountable than before because of the efficiency brought by specialization (do what you do best, etc.), free platforms (see John Paton’s Ben Franklin Project), networks (see Growthspur), collaboration (or Alan Rusbridger would call it mutualization), not to mention the casting off of industrial ways and expenses (in the pressroom as well as in the newsroom).
Greenslade acknowledges that government support would be a regrettable idea and so he can come to it only if he believes — as he says he does — that the web is not sufficient “to act as a competent watchdog.”
Well, all four of us — Bollinger, Brock, Greenslade, and I — teach in universities. If we do not together believe that we can equip the next generation of journalists to build the structure that creates that competent watchdog, then perhaps we should not be teaching journalism, as it would be irresponsible to do so. But I don’t think any of us believes that, for we all teach or support the teaching of journalism. So I say the question we should be investigating with all the rigor and diligence we can muster is how to build that future. Perhaps Bollinger does indeed believe that the only solution is to seek government rescue but I say it is far too soon to resort to what Greenslade acknowledges should not be a first resort. We have a lot of resorts to go through first.
: AND MORE: Reasonattacks, as do Mark Tapscott and Claudia Rosett, who says: “If, as Bollinger suggests, the provision of adequate news coverage cannot be entrusted to the market, then what about such vital matters as shelter and medical care?”
I’ll just bet we’ll soon hear from Bollinger or his allies that at least he sparked a discussion. But he sparked the wrong discussion. We shouldn’t be debating which desperate move to take having given up on the sustainable future of journalism. We should be discussing how to build that sustainable future, damnit.
I just don’t understand Julia Angwin’s scare story about cookies and ad targeting in the Wall Street Journal. That is, I don’t understand how the Journal could be so breathlessly naive, unsophisticated, and anachronistic about the basics of the modern media business. It is the Reefer Madness of the digital age: Oh my God, Mabel, they’re watching us!
