1. Everyone blames someone else for allowing the situation to get to this point. 2. Everyone regrets that we’re in this situation. 3. Something had to be done now — or it didn’t. 4. It will work — or it won’t.
I have no insight to provide regarding the current situation, however, when has that stopped me before? Here are three ideas that struck me while walking along a Maine coast beach this morning (right before getting ready to head back to Nashville):
Idea 1: The Economic Stabilization Plan Wiki:
I think a group of economists and bright students should set up a wiki that will capture and record the flood of hopeful and dire predictions flowing forth from major economists, advocacy organizations, political groups, high-profile pundits (including finance bloggers) and media sources. This group of economists and students should then track the plan as it is implemented outside of the glow of current media coverage. After establishing the benchmarks of what “the experts” have predicted, the wiki should then become the repository of the following: What is purchased, how the money is loaned or spent, how the loans are packaged and sold, what is the return on investment. Where the graft happens. What is wasted.
At some point, in two, five or ten years, it should then publish a report card of who was right and who was wrong among the experts who are claiming now to be all knowing. It should also report: How much did this plan really cost us? Trillions? (I’ve heard amounts equal to many times the annual GDP) or was there a huge windfall return for taxpayers on investment that will reduce the national debt or save Social Security? (I’ve heard both predicted in the past few days.)
I’m sure there will be a “National Commission on What Went Wrong” appointed. What I’m talking about is what is going to happen, rather than what someone (other than me) allowed to happen this time.
Idea 2: The “Too Big to Fail List”: In addition to the “National Commission on What Went Wrong,” I think there should be a “National Commission on Companies too Big to Fail.” If we are going to live in a land that claims to have free markets except for when — for whatever reason (that is someone else’s fault) — there are companies that need to play the “we’re too big to fail” card in order seek loans or other bailouts from the government, then we need to go ahead and set up a “pre-commission” on the topic.
I think if this commission determines a company is too big to fail — say, hypothetically, Wal-mart is determined to be too big to fail because it employs 2 million Americans — then such a company should be required to choose whether or not to opt into the “we’re too big to fail” category of companies. If the company opts in, it would be required to hold certain cash reserves and be subjected to a higher degree of fiscal transparency than most publicly traded companies. During good times, these too big to fail companies would also be required to pay into the Too Big to Fail Trust Fund. When bad times happen, only companies who have opted in can apply for a Too Big to Fail government bailout. If you’re too big to fail and haven’t paid into the Too Big to Fail Trust Fund, too bad.
Idea 3: Read this Brad Stone essay in yesterday’s New York Times on why we think it’s okay some people get rich (entrepreneurs and Tiger Woods, for example) while we think it’s crazy that others do (investment bankers and former Presidents, for example). Great article.
During the days preceding the landfall of Hurricane Gustav, I pointed to an online community and wiki developed by individuals, many of whom were veterans of the post-Katrina online efforts building on their previous experience and information. That effort has now evolved into Hurricanes08.org and includes:
The Hurricane Information Center: A social network utilizing the Ning platform. The site is aggregating information and content from many sources, including Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and an array of news sources and RSS feeds.
HurricaneWiki.org: This wiki — a great model for any agency that needs to put together an easy-to-edit evolving repository of information — is based on the earlier Gustav wiki which built upon the work of earlier efforts like The KatrinaHelp wiki and TsunamiHelp.
The wiki has a growing list of directories of all types of Ike-related information including weather tracking services and lists of bloggers, Twitter-users, news-media and government agencies who are providing on-going coverage of the storm.
A little less than an hour ago, I received a phone call from my 17-year-old son who is attending a month-long program at the University of Southern California. “There was just an earthquake” he said. “I’m okay,” he said. “It was legit.” I’m not sure exactly what the legit part was referencing. My mind was pausing on the “Okay” part. “Call Mom,” he said, “I gotta go.”
(If you have a 17-year-old son, you’ll recognize that phone call. “Hello, I’m alive, everything’s okay, gotta go.” It’s the same call he makes to us each night whenever he’s away from home. Earthquake or ordinary day, it works the same way.)
For me, however, this is a case where it’s great to be following lots of specific people on Twitter, not just a key word — people I know (via Twitter) who live in LA and who thought first to let those who follow them via Twitter know their status.
It’s situations like this that help make Twitter easier and easier to explain.
Earlier tonight, I was curious how different business news websites were covering the breaking story of the JPMorgan Chase acquisition of Bear Stearns. As there are now plenty of heavily-staffed business news websites that represent traditional magazine and newspaper companies, I thought it would be interesting to compare how quickly they each jumped on the story on a late Sunday afternoon. I used the Firefox Add-on Screengrab! (thanks, Jon Henshaw) to record the front page of five business news websites and then posted them in a set on Flickr.
What did I discover from my two-minute exercise? Well, at around 8:15 p.m. EST, the Wall Street Journal and New York Times both had staff-written breaking stories — indeed, multiple breaking stories. And while Fortune.com and Portfolio.com had Bear Stearns stories in the lead position, they were not about the breaking situation, rather that story was relegated to “headlines” from wire services. Forbes.com didn’t even have a link to a wire story. (My apologies to my friends at BusinessWeek.com for not including them, but, I got distracted by NCAA tourney bids.)
This exercise also reminded me once more of one of the reasons I’m a fan of the reverse-chronological, perma-linked and time-stamped nature of blogging. As Scott Karp noted the other day, other approaches treat online content (and by content, I mean photos, video, articles, maps, etc.) with traditional editorial approaches and story-telling conventions. But by transporting the conventions of print online, traditional media sites provide no way in which to “follow” the timeline of a developing story. At least with print, historians can easily go back later and revive a day-by-day time-line of coverage of an event. Try that with a typical online news site.
There is a TV news archives at Vanderbilt University that has captured the ephemera of broadcast news since the 1960s. Is there such a thing for the Internet? (Later clarification: Is there such an organization that uses such a model of the TV New Archives that attempts to capture the day-by-day changes that occur on major news websites?) I know that the San Francisco-based Internet Archive, in a rather broad-sweeping way, is, it says, “working to prevent ‘born-digital’ materials from disappearing into the past.” However, when historians in the future try to dissect, for example, the 2008 Presidential Election, will the Internet Archives be able to help them?
Perhaps, but I think a more helpful source may be Flickr. For example, look at Patrick Ruffini’s Flickr set of day-by-day candidate websites. Or, click through Dave Winer’s photo-stream and you’ll be able to get a sense of what the campaign pundits were discussing on a daily basis for most of the past three months.
Until I noticed what Dave and Patrick are doing, I never really thought of Flickr as being a personal “Internet Archive.” However, now I do. And thanks to them, I plan to do more “snap-shots sets” on my Flickr account.
Sidenote: The blogosphere is chattering today about “video and Flickr” and how, when it is added as a feature, it won’t be able to compete with the dominant YouTube. Here’s a way it will compete: People like me will use it to archive in collections and sets the video that goes along with the photos already in those sets.
Last week, I wrote that while I believed it was brilliant, the animated Apple advertisement that appeared on the front page of NYTimes.com and, especially, the Wall Street Journal website, may have crossed some as-yet-determined line of what is okay — or not okay — with online advertising on news-media websites. In that post, I wrote: “The ad’s headline is in a little ruled box, but it’s in a font that is extremely similar to the actual headlines on the page…it’s obvious to you and me and probably 99% of the WSJ.com and NYTimes.com readers that this is an ad, but if this had appeared in a magazine, well, let’s just say it would have at least needed some clarification or a major ASME bruhaha would be taking place today.” Later, David Kaplan of PaidContent.org noted that the folks at NYTimes.com had decided to limit the giant ads to “once a month.”
I thought by displaying the current news-screaming front page of WSJ.com with last week’s “ad giant” front page may demonstrate why it’s a challenge to experiment with editorial real-estate and conventions that you have trained readers to believe are reserved for only the most major news story. In this case, I think the experiment — despite its brilliance as advertising — needs some re-thinking.
In the previous post, I linked to Kevin Rose’ post about the WSJ.com adding a Digg button to the bottom of pages throughout the site. Obviously, the real news in Kevin’s blog post is that every story that is “dugg” becomes “free” if accessed through Digg. In other words, if you’ve ever wanted to link to a WSJ.com story but couldn’t because you didn’t have a subscription — or you don’t link to articles that most people can’t access, you now have a hole through their paywall. This means that people like me, who have never before clicked on a Digg button, will be doing lots of clicking (I have a subscription) so I can help the WSJ.com executives “free” WSJ.com while not really “flipping the switch” immediately.
You also have a way to get the “free” headlines delivered to you via RSS.
As Digg offers an RSS feed of search terms, I tried out a search for the term WSJ.com with the “sort-newest-first” option selected. With an RSS feed of that search result you can, well, do all the RSS tricks you want. For example, in addition to the obvious thing you can do — add it to an RSS newsreader — you can display WSJ.com headlines on your Google/ig (or iGoogle) page (or the gazillion other Ajaxy personalized home pages out there) like this:
I’d really rather be sending any traffic directly to WSJ.com and not to Digg. If, for example, they started their journey to free by removing the paywall-filter from several of their category RSS feeds….
[Here's a test: If you don't have a subscription to WSJ.com and you can click this link and end up there, then, well, the WSJ.com is free. See the "update" below for the secret to this trick.]
“A top business-side executive at Dow Jones & Co. said it is premature to assume that The Wall Street Journal Web site will definitely drop its paid subscription model, despite comments by Rupert Murdoch that the change is expected. “It is jumping the gun, people are jumping to conclusions here very quickly. We haven’t even closed the deal yet,” said Michael Rooney, senior vice president and chief revenue officer for the company’s consumer media group. “Mr. Murdoch would like to have the largest, most robust site in business. Free is a way to look at that. But there is a lot of detail behind that. You have to work that out. You don’t just flip the switch.”
Mr. Rooney, who, no doubt, is a wonderful individual, nonetheless, sounds like a Presidential press secretary trying to explain what the President meant to say. However, Rupert Murdoch said what he said. Clearly, he didn’t say “everything that is paid for today is going to be free” and he didn’t say, “We’re going to flip the switch on this as soon as the deal closes.” But according to the AP, he did say this: “We are studying it and we expect to make that free, and instead of having one million, having at least 10 million-15 million in every corner of the earth.”
My speculation (based purely on reading and listening to news reports of what Rupert Murdoch and WSJ executives have said over the past 90 days) is this: Almost all of what we today know as the news, features and opinion content of the Wall Street Journal and the “general business news” of WSJ.com, will come out from behind the pay wall. However, access to certain real-time financial data, corporate research, background and other business mission-critical and industry-vertical information and data will continue to be available via subscription — in some cases, a very expensive subscription.
Update: Well, geez, louise. According to Kevin Rose (the Mr. Bigg of Digg), starting tonight, anyone can make a particular story “free” on WSJ.com by merely clicking a Digg button. Of course, that means that someone with a subscription, say, someone like me, would have to click that button first.
Here’s what Remote Digg, WSJ.com style, looks like:
“Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of the News Corporation, said today that he intended to make access to The Wall Street Journal’s Web site free, trading subscription fees for anticipated ad revenue. “We are studying it and we expect to make that free, and instead of having one million, having at least 10 million-15 million in every corner of the earth,†Mr. Murdoch said, referring to The Journal’s online readership.
This ends (at least, it’s the “end of the beginning”) the longest-running media debates of the online-era. I’ve blogged about this topic extensively and speculated recently that Murdoch’s savvy numbers-crunchers had helped make this decision months ago. I’m sure there are some “rest-of-the-story” details, but the facts have been pretty much laid out over the past 90 days.
Indeed, in many public venues, including last month’s Future of Business Media conference organized by PaidContent.org, both WSJ Publisher Gordon Crovitz and WSJ.com’s Alan Murray, were coy in their remarks (publicly and privately) regarding the topic, but clearly telegraphed its inevitability. Publicly, Crovitz indicated there was a clear path to making more content freely available, as a way of expanding readership. The corporate line has been fairly transparent that it was all a matter of when, not if.
Earlier tonight, I was curious how different business news websites were covering the breaking story of the 
My speculation (based purely on reading and listening to news reports of what Rupert Murdoch and WSJ executives have said over the past 90 days) is this: Almost all of what we today know as the news, features and opinion content of the Wall Street Journal and the “general business news” of WSJ.com, will come out from behind the pay wall. However, access to certain real-time financial data, corporate research, background and other business mission-critical and industry-vertical information and data will continue to be available via subscription — in some cases, a very expensive subscription.
