Poultry Tribune, July, 1942

An article by Brian Stelter in today’s New York Times (temporary non-punitive URL: http://nyti.ms/xmYt1L) reports that Tumblr is hiring editors and writers to cover itself.*

Quote from the executive editor Tumblr has hired:

“Basically, if Tumblr were a city of 42 million (the number of Tumblr blogs that exist) I’m trying to figure out how we cover the ideas, themes and people who live in it.”

According to the article, Facebook and Twitter have recently announced efforts with similar goals. In my opinion, the mother of all “reporting about ourselves” has to be, collectively, the blogs Google maintains. However, in a nuanced way, those blogs are more neo-press release, than corporate-reportage (two terms that may already exist, but I just made up).**

Two things of significance to the 12 readers of this blog about Brian’s article (Brian, by the way, is the subject of several posts on this blog.):

1. The quote from the Tumblr editor reflects precisely the kind of point-of-view of what the internet is that I explained in the blog post immediately preceding this. The internet is people and place. (Because that post is a Rexplanation, I don’t have to repeat what I mean – you can read it there.)

2. Brian’s article, while appearing to some to be about a new phenomenon, fits into a century-plus old tradition that I have constantly blogged about for the past decade: Companies serve audiences called customers. Those audiences can be passionate about the products those companies provide and can create communities surrounding those shared passions (or work-related topics in the case of business-to-business companies). Creating media to serve and tie-together those audiences is something companies have done since at least the 1890s. I have now declared a 2011 post on this topic the Rexplanation on this topic, so if interested, please go there.

In other words, as I’ve said many, many times: What Tumblr is doing is not new. It is smart, but it is not new.

*Self-serving asterisk: They should have outsourced it to a company like Hammock.

**I’m considering a longer post on the topic of what I’m going to call “the press release parenthesis” in which I will explore how the advent of public relations as a “profession” (see: Ivy Lee) ushered in a period that the internet is now ushering out during which journalists who worked for corporations that made money from selling advertising were deemed ethically and professionally superior to journalists who worked for corporations that made money from selling airplanes or paper clips.

Related posts:

• The History of Media: Brands have been Publishers Since the 19th Century (I’ve now retroactively declared this the Rexplanation post on topics related to the quality and historic context of writers / reporters / editors / content creators at corporate / branded / custom publishing / owned / in-house media.)
• Are corporate journalists real journalists? Better question: Does someone actually call themself that?

In light of last week’s posts  about the entertainment industry’s effort to enact the legislation called SOPA (here and here), I saw a couple of items early this morning that reminded me that much of the reason that industry wants to out-legislate what it can’t out-innovate is the frightening future they face. And I’m not referring to the intellectual property they own being pirated. I’m talking about the way in which the talent that creates that intellectual property is, more and more, going to jump ship (to continue the pirate metaphor) from companies that attempt to hold on to business models created in the age of I Love Lucy.

Here are the items: First, an article in this week’s New Yorker about YouTube developing new “channel” relationships with content companies — a strategy that is laying the groundwork for original programming from artists, online news organizations and others who can provide a  steady stream of content appealing to a niche audience. According to the author of the article, when the studios and others wouldn’t work with YouTube for existing content (ala Netflix), YouTube developed a strategy to provide creators of programming access to unlimited airtime, rather than the scarce airtime provided them by traditional network and cable channels.

“But what’s the big deal?” you might ask. People are still going to want to watch programming on their big HD TVs and for that, you need cable and networks and the quality they can provide — not YouTube (he said, rhetorically).

Well, according to a worldwide study by Accenture released today, the number of consumers who watch broadcast or cable television in a typical week plunged to 48% in 2011 from 71% in 2009. Accenture says TV is losing ground to other devices – mobile phones, laptops and tablets. (And besides, you can stream video onto those HD TVs in dozens of ways, whenever you want the big-screen experience.)

Bottomline: When it comes to what video programming and distribution will become in the next decade and beyond, we’re about where network TV was when I Love Lucy debuted.

It’s a scary time for the entertainment industry. No wonder they’d like to put off the future as long as they can.

Related Articles

• Comedian’s Web experiment no joke to entertainment industry (theglobeandmail.com)
• CES: Survey Finds Traditional TV Viewing Is Collapsing (forbes.com)

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, this year marks the 20th anniversary of Hammock Inc., the company that provides me the keyboard on which I type these blog posts. Since I don’t blog a lot about what we do at Hammock, I often get the question, “What exactly do you do?”

My short answer: “We’re a marketing services company that helps clients communicate directly with customers using different forms of media ranging from print magazines to online wikis.” If they still have a quizzical look after that answer, I’ll say, “We publish magazines.”

The one thread that runs through all our relationships with clients, and all of our projects and properties, is this: The services we provide are focused specifically on helping our clients create, deepen and lengthen their relationships with customers (or members, supporters, donors, etc.). Because building such relationships (vs., say, promoting a one-time clearance sale) involve long journeys, we don’t work with clients whose needs are one-time clearance sales.

As part of our 20th anniversary, Hammock is publishing a year-long series of eBooks called, The Hammock 20th Anniversary Guides to Content that Works. I wish I could say they are filled with wisdom we’ve learned from 20 years of successes. Unfortunately, some of the best lessons have come from failures.

The first guide in the series is being released today:

Originally, we intended to wait until next summer to explore this topic — more close to the time of year when marketing budgets are first being planned. However, we decided to release it now so that marketers could have several months during the first part of the year considering content marketing within a new context or framework. (And where they might look for money to fund it.)

It’s not a how-to guide, it’s more a thought-framework guide, a term I just made up, so don’t look for it on Wikipedia. Whatever it is, I think that if you’re in marketing and you’ve read this far down into a RexBlog post, you’ll probably like it.

You can download the eBook at this URL: Hammock.com/20

[Note: At the end of this post, I've added a link to information regarding the "end" to the current iteration of Apture.]

You know how it seems that now-a-days, it’s social media this and social media that? That’s getting dated. We need something new for the gurus of social media to call themselves.

For the past few years, I’ve been hoping contextual media would catch on among the guru-class, but perhaps contextual media has been too much conceptual content for many who like to keep it simple (or who don’t follow the writings of Jay Rosen, whose blog introduced me to the idea a couple of years ago).

Perhaps the concept of contextual content will get a boost with yesterday’s announcement that Google acquired the company, Apture. Apture is a nearly 4-year-old startup I first started writing about on this blog in March, 2010. Indeed, so enthusiastic have I been about Apture, that I once wrote, “I think Apture points to the future where both ‘real-time’ and ‘understanding’ can be presented together.”

Why do I love Apture in particular, and the concept of contextual content in general?

First, to see what Apture does, highlight any word on this post and you’ll see a “learn more” button. That’s Apture. It will display, without you leaving this page, some content from my blog or from another site (most likely, Wikipedia) that may explain something you may need as background to understand what I’m writing about. (On some browsers, if you scroll down the page, you’ll see an Apture bar at the top of the screen, as well.)

Here’s another reason I’m glad it’s Apture that’s getting some visibility today: I believe the idea for what it does — for the need we all have that it addresses — has a better chance for success if it comes from someone who has taken a very deep dive into the MediaWiki platform, something Apture CEO Tristan Harris has done in the past.

That’s because I believe that the MediaWiki platform (the software on which Wikipedia runs) is to contextual media and content what blogs and Twitter and RSS newsreaders are to chronological content.

But let me be honest: I don’t hold out much hope for there being a growing movement of people hanging out Contextual Content Guru shingles.

Why? Because most of us who are bloggers and reporters and marketers and tweeters and Facebookers are more obsessed with chronology than with context. Frankly, chronological content (that which is time-stamped and pushed out quickly) is exciting to create and publish. The faster we publish it, the faster someone can re-tweet it and comment on it — and the faster the Huffington Post can re-write it.

Contextual content is rarely considered to be exciting by the chronological content crowd. Bring up the topic of contextual content and most marketing and media people will dose off, believing that’s what librarians and historians and other academics do. Other than Kathy Sierra, I’ve never heard anyone deliver an inspiring presentation about documentation and user manuals, some the least understood and appreciated (by marketers) content most companies create — but perhaps some of the most vital and important content the customer will ever use in judging the relationship it has with the company that created the product. User manuals are contextual content — content people need to understand or solve something.

Apture and Tristan are among a small group of pioneers who are trying to marry the chronological content of the web with the contextual content of the web. (In a completely different way, the web service GetGlue can be described as another approach to addressing this opportunity. And, in a broader sense, both Apture and GetGlue can be thought of as part of a long tradition of participants in building what’s long been labeled, the Semantic Web.)

Here’s my simple way of explaining all of this (and one we use at Hammock):

There is know content and there is flow content.

Flow content is the river of information that washes over us daily: the posts, articles, tweets and endless stream of tid-bitery that our passions and work requires us to follow and process.

Know content is the type of timeless, background, how-to, definition, research-oriented, data, etc., content that we look for to understand everything from the background of a breaking story to the definition of a word to how to-dry-out an iPhone after we’ve run it through the washing machine.

I love the way that RSS and blogs and Twitter, et al, have made it easy for me to monitor the flow of news and information that is interesting or important to me.

I don’t live by flow alone, however.

Spending the past four years developing and hosting a major project that runs on MediaWiki, SmallBusiness.com, has made me recognize and appreciate the unique skills, discipline and mindset necessary to organize and categorize contextual or know content. It took me about two years to get over hating the byzantinian backend of the MediaWiki platform and to recognize its elegant simplicity and, at times, beauty (that’s right, you heard me say beauty) for organizing contextual content in a taxonomic and semantical way that can help a tool like Apture match up for a user the know content found on such a site with the flow content that people need to understand problems they are trying to solve — and, dear marketers, the products they want to purchase (or to use better, if they already own).

To those who can recognize it, Apture works now because the MediaWiki platform works. And because the collaborative (backed by benevolent dictatorship) approaches to taxonomy and data structure of Wikipedia work.

One day soon, librarians using the MediaWiki platform will take over the web.

[Update (November 12, 2011): After posting this, I learned that the current service provided by Apture that I described: the ability to highlight any word for a pop-up "learn about" box will be discontinued. Sorry to hear that.]

On Twitter last night, Dave Winer pointed back to a prescient* post he wrote in March of last year that includes a reference to the Chinese proverb:

“If you sit by the river long enough you will see the body of your enemy float by.”

When I read that proverb last year, my first thought was, “What if your enemy is sitting by the river also? Will it be long enough for them to see your body float by?”

I decided later, however, that the key to being the observer of the floating body (rather than being the floating body, itself) is to make sure your vantage point is, in the words of Ashford* and Simpson, Solid as a Rock.

Over the years, I’ve observed that many people confuse fads and evolving methods with those things that actually are important in life and work: The never-changing truths related to human nature, trust, respect, relationships and integrity, among others.

Dave and I share a constant amazement (bemusement or dismay might be better terms) whenever people become intoxicated over something they believe is new that we recognize as being built on a foundation that was created and set in motion decades ago, or longer. (And in many cases, if it involves the distribution of content, that foundation was something Dave played a significant role in creating and evolving.)

Yet without a solid rock vantage point on the side of that river, it is too easy to be swept away by the flow of buzzwords and platforms and new this-or-that presented to us as -killers of that which came before.

In reality, those of us who want to particpate in creating what the world (or our part of it) will be — and not just complain or react — will always be both in the river and on the bank, often at the same time.

When we’re in the river, we need a great understanding of the flow. When we’re on the bank, we need solid rocks.

Or maybe, like fly fishers, we need both at the same time.

*Prescient in many ways, but my reference is to the meltdown at TechCrunch.

**Until writing this post, I didn’t realize I missed the news that one-half of the prolific song writing couple, Nick Ashford, died last month after battling throat cancer. It’s astounding to see on the Songwriters Hall of Fame website the 17 pages listing all the songs they wrote for Motown artists, themselves and others. A sampling: “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,”"You’re All I Need To Get By,” “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing,” “Reach Out and Touch (Somebody’s Hand),” “Respect.”

If I had time, I’d write a post that would reflect on what Patricio Robles says here and what Khoi Vinh said here.

Short version (and, with apologies, some inside baseball): Condé Nast’s most successful magazine iPad app is the New Yorker — which eschews all the bells and whistles the company jammed into its other magazine apps. Add to that, the news that Facebook acqhired Mike Matas by purchasing his iPad publishing app, Push Pop Press (unless it was Al Gore they were acqhiring) and somewhere in there, there’s a wanna-be trend story bubbling up about magazine publishers discovering that iPad publishing may not be all about bells and whistles, but may be about good writing and the ability for readers to read it.

Who knew?

That was a rhetorical question. I know the answer: the 12 readers of this blog knew. (And the thousands who read Khoi’s.)

Starting with the first time I saw something called an iPad magazine app, I’ve been saying over and over and way-over, that simplicity and readability make for a great reading experience on a device people use for reading.

Yes, the iPad does all those bells and whistles splendidly. I use it for watching videos and playing games, and many other things. But that doesn’t mean that when I’m reading, I want videos and games in the middle of what I’m reading — nor the bandwidth required to download them. (Context, I could use more of, but that’s another post.)

Over time, publishers will learn that bells and whistles are stuff on the edge — not at the core —  of what makes a magazine (or any medium that, for a couple of centuries has been associated with that sub-set of “content” related to words arranged in sentences and paragraphs) app great.

Great writing. That’s the core stuff. Making it easy to download and read. That’s more core stuff.

The bells and whistles are best left to bells and whistles makers. At least for a while.

[Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons.]

[credit]

It’s somewhat ironic that “short” and “long” are both being used to describe a length of non-fiction writing that I believe will change book and magazine publishing as significantly as anything we’ve seen since Amazon.com first came online.

“Long” is used by those who are discovering there’s a lot of incredibly well-written “longform” non-fiction on the internet that can be enjoyed if saved to a friendly-to-read format (for extended reading on an iPad or Kindle) using InstaPaper, Readability or Read it Later. Those “long” articles tend to be in the 5,000-10,000 word range — a word-count cap that’s due, primarily, to the constraints imposed because they were first written and edited for print magazines.

“Short” is used to describe a length of ebook being marketed through the storefront of the Kindle Store called “Kindle Singles.” (I love their use of the term “natural length.”) Amazon describes Kindle Singles ebooks as, “well researched, well argued, and well illustrated books between 5,000 and 30,000 words.” (They don’t describe them as Spam.)

Another way to think of this: “Longform” is the length that certain indepth, non-fiction articles would be published if they weren’t edited originally to the length imposed by the constraints of a print magazine. And “Shortform” or “Singles” are the length that the same article would be published if it didn’t have to be bloated up to fit into the economic requirements (say, 75,000 words) of the print book publishing business.

So here’s the long and short of it: Somewhere between 5,000 and 30,000 words, there seems to be a new book format that is, to quote Goldilocks, “just right” for a marketplace that has been created by the success of the Kindle/iPad.

I know it’s right for me, as I have become a voracious reader (and purchaser) of this length book (and/or article).

And today, there is news that gives me even more hope that the economic potential of this format may be going mainstream.

Last month, I wrote a post titled, Why Jon Meacham’s ebook is better because he’s no longer at Newsweek. In it, I observed how Meacham’s obvious gift (for anyone who’s read his books“>read his books) for longform traditional book-length non-fiction is a natural fit for the emergence of an entirely new form of publishing that, despite being described by Mikael Blomkvist, hasn’t quite sunk in. Meacham’s intellect and editoria skills, timed with his landing at Random House after leaving Newsweek, along with the emergence of the Kindle Single format and store, is, in my opinion, a near-perfect alignment of timing, technology (specially, the iPad and Kindle) and talent.

Today, NYTimes.com’s Media Decoder blog reports that Meacham and Random House have signed a deal with Politico to “publish four e-books about the 2012 presidential campaign, the first of which is scheduled to go on sale sometime before Christmas. Each will be in the 20,000- to 30,000-word range and written by Mike Allen, Politico’s chief White House correspondent.”

Those who, like me, have come to the conclusion that the 10-30K non-fiction “book” (the novella of non-fiction) is a length that heretofore did not exist (for economic reasons, primarily), but is the Goldilocks of non-fiction, are going to devour these books (if priced in the $2 range like Meacham & Random House’s first book published in this manner, Beyond Bin Laden).

Whether through major publishers (like Random House or major magazine publishers) or direct from writer to reader, this is a natural formula for break-out success.

[Disclosure: I do not know Meacham, but as I always say when writing about him, his Tennessee and Sewanee (where my son is a student) connections earn him bonus points on this blog.]

When I read this Ad Age interview with Jann Wenner, I thought of all the iconic photography of him from the late 1960s and early 1970s, much of it shot by Annie Leiboviz.

Click on that photo of he and Hunter Thompson and you’ll see him in 1976 — nearly a decade after he’d started Rolling Stone. Changing journalism — including the gonzo variety. Changing publishing. Chronicling the changing world. But already wearing a business suit — a decade and a lifetime after that 1967 photo on the left was shot, when Wenner was 20 and Rolling Stone was just starting.

Back then, Rolling Stone was new media and the launch pad of new journalism. But one decade after it started, Wenner and Hunter Thompson were together in that photo on the right, at a party Rolling Stone was throwing for Jimmy Carter’s campaign staff. Really.

It doesn’t seem that long ago, just four decades or so.

The reason I thought of those photos was because after reading the AdAge interview I started wondering how, if that young Jann Werner were around today, he would react to the old Jann Werner using the interview to slam the big magazine companies he competes with, for obsessing over the iPad, describing such obsession as “just sheer insanity and insecurity and fear.” Print magazines, he says, are not going the way of the CD.

Sample:

“So I think that they’re prematurely rushing and showing little confidence and faith in what they’ve really got, their real asset, which is the magazine itself, which is still a great commodity. It’s a small additive; it’s not the new business…(On how long it will take for there to be a shift from print to iPad-like devices)…Not months. Decades, probably. People’s habits will shift, they’ll make improvements in the delivery system, the screen will change, it will get lighter, whatever, and new people growing up will find that as a habit. But you’re talking about a generation at least, maybe two generations, before the shift is decisive.”

That, from a guy who went from a $6,000 startup in San Francisco to throwing parties for campaign staffs of nominees for President of the United States in less than a decade.

Ironically (as I’m someone who blogs an awful lot about iPads and digital devices), I tend to agree with Wenner. A lot about how big magazine companies are obsessed with the iPad seems a bit insane to me. But then, when you are as old as he is (which I’ll point out, is a decade older than me) you think change takes longer than change did when you were in your 20s.

[via: Poynter.org]

[Note: By mistake, I posted an early draft of this item earlier. While no post on this blog has ever been more than a draft (finished stuff appears elsewhere in my "distribution chain," I have a feeling the earlier version made even less sense than this version.]

A NY Times article today has a wonderfully accurate headline, “Groupon Counts on Writers and Editors to Build Its Audience,” and gets to the crux of why I have a long-standing and well-documented unease with the use of the term “content” to reduce to one generic glob what teams of talented writers, editors, artists, programmers, et al., do at places like Groupon, or, say, Hammock.*

Listen to how the reporter describes one of the keys to Groupon’s success:

“Groupon’s breakthrough sprang not just from (offering customers deals) but from an ingredient that was both unlikely and ephemeral: words. Words are not much valued on the internet, perhaps because it features so many of them. Newspapers and magazines might have gained vast new audiences online but still can’t recoup the costs from their web operations of producing the material. Groupon borrowed some tools and terms from journalism, softened the traditional heavy hand of advertising, added some banter and attitude and married the result to a discounted deal. It has managed, at least for the moment, to make words pay.

While I might disagree with the ingredient that was Groupon’s breakthrough (my vote is for the amazing cash-flow generating discovery that people will buy pre-sold vouchers if you call them coupons, and that they could hang on to that cash a few weeks before giving the merchants their share), I completely agree that Groupon has experienced an epiphany that more internet marketing companies need to experience: It’s not “content” that’s king. It’s the way in which the correct content fulfills a specific business objective that’s king. It’s the talent and skill of the people who create and understand how to use that content that is king (or queen).

In my opinion, far too many otherwise savvy marketing professionals have bought into the notion that success on the internet comes merely by deciding to embrace the next, new tools and platforms and distribution channels and “social-anything.” Moreover, they display a childlike belief that salvation (in the form of more website traffic) comes if large sums of cash for keywords and inbound links are burnt at the altar of The Great God Algorithm of Google.

Far too many people seem to believe that internet marketing is something akin to voodoo — but too embarrassed to use that word, they choose words like “content” instead. Sobeit. If that is the case, the Groupon story provides an example of why it is important to understand that all content is not created equally. As much as some “gurus” would like us to believe that out there, somewhere, are “Top 10 Content Marketing Ways to Spread Pixie Dust and Solve All Your Problems,” the reality is (at least based on my 25 years of experience): Content is usually the least important part of what is being called “content marketing strategy” these days.

What’s the hardest? The exhausting, expensive and incredibly detailed work that goes into understanding the essence of a client’s true business objective. More importantly, a similar journey in understanding everything there is to know about the person on the other side of a transaction — and fulfilling their desires, not just the marketer’s. The hard part is having the willingness to tell a client that no amount of content is going to make a bad product good. The hard part is knowing what can and cannot be accomplished with carefully planned and skillfully executed media that include excellent words, design, art, video, audio, code, etc. — with skillfully executed being king.

The hardest part is finding talented people who understand enough about words to know why they don’t want to be called a “content creator.”

*Begrudgingly, the term “content marketing” in used by Hammock to describe the services it provides. Why do I say begrudgingly? We use the term because it is the term used more-and-more by people looking for our services. If that’s what clients want to call it, I’m not one to put up obstacles between them and us based on my personal linguistic prejudices. But I also say begrudgingly because I believe the word content belittles and commodifies the incredible talent necessary to do what the people I work with do: helping clients achieve specific business objectives, most notably building deeper, long-lasting relationships with the customers or members. I described why I don’t like the term “content marketing” in this post in 2008, in which I wrote: “I believe using the word content voluntarily to describe what I do insults the talent, skill, creativity and craft that goes into the media my colleagues and I create and manage in collaboration with our clients. I believe the term content marketing makes it sound like I’m marketing a service to shovel out some commodity created primarily to fill up space or time. Creating content is not what we do. Helping tell brand stories. Adding value to products. Encouraging loyalty or involvement. Educating. Activating. Those are the things the talented individuals at our company do with and for the talented individuals who are our clients. Generating content is, frankly, merely a tool in what we do. Helping clients build stronger relationships is our business.

On the walls of most newspaper newsrooms I’ve visited over the years, there are displayed some framed front pages of issues reporting historic events. The term “second-coming type” is the phrase I’ve heard to describe the screaming headlines that dominate these framed mementos. (The Newseum.org website has a gallery each day of newspaper front pages.)

I wonder if the newsrooms of online papers print-out such home pages. Below are screen grabs (screen shots) this morning of the websites of the five largest circulation daily newspapers.

I’ve included, at the bottom, screen grabs from two online news sources, Huffington Post and The Drudge Report. Drudge, however, looks like that a couple of times every week.

WSJ.com

USAToday.com

NYTimes.com

LATimes.com

WashingtonPost.com

HuffingtonPost.com

DrudgeReport.com