We got a group of geeks together, had a great chef come in and teach us how to cook, handed out some wine, and kicked off an interesting conversation. Come on along for a San Francisco geek dinner.
Geeks involved are: Barney Pell, CEO, Powerset; Mary Hodder, CEO, Dabble; Henri Poole, founder/director, Civic Actions; Kathleen Lyman, CEO, LaunchMedia; Steve Gillmor. Our co-hosts were Robert Scoble [of Scobleizer fame] and Fred Davis, co-founder of Wired Magazine. Videographers are Eddie Codel and Glenn Gullmes. Chef is Rozana Ogneva of www.AreYouBeingServedCatering.com. Our host is Jeannine Barnard.

I knew some of these folks before, in particular Mary Hodder is a friend of mine. I didn’t know just how expert Mary was about food. The food itself was delicious and we all gave our compliments to the chef. In addition to food, we covered several interesting (to us) topics. Here are a few that I remember after a month (I haven’t watched the videos yet).

• I brought up the question of whether the MySpace generation would grow up to regret sharing all their personal information, and shared my view that more likely they would come into power and reshape the mainstream perspective on private/public information so that is is no big deal.
• We had an unexpectedly long discussion about Powerset (in Part 2) with several good perspectives shared by the other guests.
• Mary talked about trends in personal video creation, mixing, and sharing.
• Fred talked about the early history of Wired magazine, and his later startup companies.
• And we learned about the long history of publishing in the computer industry.

I enjoyed the event and look forward to doing this again.
For folks who don’t live in the Bay Area, I think this dinner gives a pretty typical glimpse into how folks here in the tech industry combine work and play in social contexts. It captures pretty well the way that everyone is passionate about ideas, technology, and startup companies.

Group photo

Originally uploaded by Barney Pell.

This week I attended the AAAI Spring Symposium on Computational Approaches to Analysing Weblogs.
This photo is from a group dinner during the symposium. Present were Natalie Glance and Matt Hurst (from Whizbang, Intelliseek, Blogpulse, and now Nielsen Buzzmetrics), Niall Kennedy (most recently at Technorati), Nicolas Nicolov and Franco Salvetti (Umbria), Rada Mihalcea (U. North Texas), Kevin Burton (TailRank) and Barney Pell.

July 20, 2005

I thought it was an interesting
discussion. Here are the points I found most noteworthy:

• blog search: I agree with Marc’s comments about the growing importance of
  Blog Search, and his view that the aggregators will capture the market
  value from the long tail of blog search. I personally like
  www.blogpulse.com the best. Cuban’s new IceRocket seems to be direct
  knockoff. Blogpulse gets my vote for best blog search engine not just
  because my friends from Whizbang days were the founders of this service,
  but because it has the best analytics and, unlike Technorati, it hasn’t
  yet hit a scaling barrier.

• Releasing movies simultaneously in all channels: I think that’s a great
  idea, and it is exciting to see Marc Cuban in a position to lead the way
  here.

• Interactive TV and accountable TV advertising models: I agree with him that models for TV advertising are going to change, and that this will be enabled by interactive TV (and time shifting services like Tivo). The 30 second
  spot is dying (George Gilder made a comment about this in a preceding
  session at Always On), and new measurable forms of advertising are being
  developed to take its place. I don’t expect it will be as simple as
  pay-for-placement, but I do think internet and tv advertising models will
  come together in some interesting blend over the next few years.

• Dennis Rodman and Paris Hilton’s intuitive sense for media
  manipulation: indeed! (I hope that previous reference doesn’t cause my blog
  to become misclassified…).

Below are my (mostly raw) notes from this session.

Notes by Barney Pell

Marc Cuban: Government can’t do innovation. Hollywood is even worse
NBA general manager’s #1 job is not to win championships, but to keep his
job. Similarly, Hollywood managers #1 job is to keep their job, and meet
all the starlets you can. That friction helps.

No matter what DRM you do on content, it will still get cracked, and
they’ll say it’s not strong enough. For getting content out, the most
important issues are really about control.

For control on content: our NBA team tried to push out own branded
merchandise with own online store, whereas other teams were supposed to sell
through NBA store only. We sold on our own and did better than them. They
tried to wheel us back in.

q: There was a survey for average consumers, on “what is holding you back?” They said
the solutions being offered in the market are way too complex for the aavg
consumer to want to buy or figure it out and get value from it.

Cuban: I don’t agree. How many use vchip, PIP, etc? Tech is alwasy too slow,
too expnsive, and too ahrd to use. but then prices gets to the point where
as long as it does one thing it doesn’t matter. We used to look at someone
with cellphone as gauche.

Also, surveying people: it’s not the job of the consumer to think what best
solutions are to the potential needs in the future. People don’t think about
ultimate tech solutions. Consumers follow the path of least resistance. To
talk to yhour friends and family, the path is the cellphone and becoming
cheap enough to use it. Overall use complexity doesn’t matter as long as
you can do the one thing you want to do. So focus groups are always
misleading…

That brings us to blogs.icerocket.com. At this point in time in the
blogosphere, there’s all this discussion about ability to searchblogs, tag
blogs. technorati has been self-proclaimed for tag searches. we’re changing
icerocket name to blogscour. and there’s blogpulse and others. they allow
you to search for references in blogs. So I can search for myself,
mavericks, to see what consuemrs are saying as representative of consumer
consensus.

This is different from search, as the’re a real-time nature to blogs, and a
passion to blogs. I did a search on “Marc Cuban Pittsburgh pirates”. Or
track our movie about Enron, tracking consumer sentiment. When I search for
these on Google or Yahoo I see the same results every time. Icerock enables
me to know everyday what’s being added to the blog consciousness. That’s a
unique differentiating point going on in search right now. Depending on
where blogs go, how much traction and usage they get from readers, will be
interesing to see the balance between people searching for relevant info vs
timely info. Google has been able to handle one but not the other, so that’s
why we got into blog search.

q: blogging is growing virally, exponentially. do you see that becoming the
defacto way people communicate about breaking issues. how will my mother
become a blogger?

Cuban: people will still go to outlets they trust and relate to. Fox, CNN are
brands, trusted outlets. But there’s also a fragmentation or long tail
issue. More people watch cable than broadcast tv, as there are more
channels. For bloggers it’s more difficult to stand out as there are so
many choices. For bloggers to standout and become branded, you have to go
outside the medium, outside blogging, and promote yourself just like
everyone else. It’s easier right now, as it’s new and different. But soon
it will just be another medium where people have to compete and work to
stand out. This also really leads to aggregators. The individuals won’t
have a marketing budget, but on an aggregated basis they’ll have the
marketing muscle. The aggregated blogs will be marketed as a group. That’s
where I see a lot of value.

q: What’s your position on podcasting?

Cuban: I have 2 articles about podcasting on my blog. The economics are
analogous to streaming for individual podcasters. It’s different because
with streaming you’re tied to a device, vs podcasting you’re
mobile. Regardless, it’s a long tail phenomena. Podcasting for individuals
will be a labor of love and fun, but your revenue per hour won’t be minimum
wage. With that said, it’s a viable distribution medium for existing media,
like Howard Stern, etc who already have name and demand. We’ll take HDNet
world report and make a podcast, it’s a great brand extender. But for an
individual to make a business out of it, podcasting is hot, easy, cheap to
distribute, but you’ll be long tail so it’s difficult to make money out of it.

Marc Canter: This man is fighting the fight for us to change hollywood. talk
about releasing a movie on movies, theatres, and dvd at the same time!

Cuban: My partner Todd Wagner and I own several movie theatres, like Landmark,
geared toward more adult audiences (not disney films). And HdNet, multiple million
subscribers. And HDNet films, where our first move was “Enron: the smartest guys in
the room”, which was a real success.

Traditionally the gates are defined by hollywood. Most money made in the
first week. Studios then make a separate push when go to dvd window. Our
feeling was, why not just release in all forms at the same time and let
consumers decide how they want to receive it. HdNet movies, HdNet
subscribers, theatres, embarcadero, or on dvd on the same date. We’ll make
you pay a premium for the dvd as prefer theatre initially for costs, but
we’ll give you the choice. I don’t care if you buy a movie on a keychain,
flashdrive, etc: I want to provide it to you in whatever format you want.
Hollywood thinks they have the right formats for you, but we think consumers
want to choose. Some theatres say they won’t carry out movies as they
believe in day and date. I say: look at the Mavericks, every game is sold
out yet they’re on TV at the same time. People want to get out of the
house. Good things will happen.

q: IPTV, how fast to have it in my house?

Cuban: If you have direct tv or dish, you have it now. Not a question of will
you have it, but question of when. Over next 12 months will start to take
off, as Fox will really push it in direct tv. And you can experience it in
video on demand (VOD). Pay per click, cost per action, will translate to
TV. To fulfill that you need some form of interactive tv.

IPTV is just a diferent way of fulfilling demand. However you design your
network, as streaming, broadcast, or internet… Distribution over internet
won’t be as big as it could have been, as it fell apart with the failure of
the multicast initiative, which was far more bandwidth efficient. They all just
thought it wouldn’t be a big deal for a while. Now that while is here, and
having to deliver everything on unicast or p2p bittorrent type basis will
slow that down.

q: how many of your potforlio companies are showing up in asia?

Cuban: Zero. Complexity rises as travel rises. It’s easier to do deals closer to home
even though there are some cost savings working it remotely.

q: When will you make hdnet and hdmovies available on cable?

Cuban: They are available now. but not on comcast… so call comcast and ask them
to carry these! HDNet will also have the NHL in high def.

q: How was Dennis Rodman as a houseguest?

Cuban: He just lied around and watched cartoon network. The two people I
learned the most about marketing from were Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Dennis
Rodman, and Paris Hilton. Dennis didn’t always know why what he did with
the media was the right thing, but when you listen to him you see he was
right. And Paris too. They played the media like a fiddle and know just what
do to.

[Tag: AlwaysOn2005]

backblog: a set of topics that must be blogged but are now behind in the queue.
backblogged: the feeling a blogger gets when life is happening so fast that you wonder if you can ever work through the backblog.

Now my question is: where to start — with the current or the previous items?
Since currency is everything in the blogosphere, I think I’ll start with today, and hope that new topics come in slow enough that I can hit the older, but hopefully a little timeless, topics.

Allen Morgan, managing director at Mayfield—a venture capital firm in Menlo Park, California—backer of Beatnik, PlanetOut, Tribe and Pluck —guides entrepreneurs on how to pitch ideas and get financing. The recent “10 Commandments” series on how to handle those critical meetings with VCs is a must-read.

I agree with Time’s endorsement — Allen’s 10 commandments series is great. I also agree with Dave Panos, CEO of Pluck, who commented to Allen, “I am particularly impressed that you pulled off such a feat with a mean-time-between posts of five weeks.” It shows that focus and quality can matter more than freshness even in the blogosphere; at least this true for media critics.
Allen was actually an inspiration for me to start blogging, right around the time he convinced me to join Mayfield. I imagined that I would have lots of content about insights from an Entrepreneur in Residence, kind of like an entrepreneurial undercover agent sharing how things really happen on the other side of the funding table. When I later brainstormed with Allen about how to achieve both substance and discretion in such a blog, Allen summarized along the following lines: “As long as you don’t specifically identify any of the companies, entrepreneurs, or Mayfield partners, and you only say good things about Mayfield, you should feel free to blog about anything you like!”

Bloggers are often touted as influential instigators, feeding buzz-worthy topics to the mainstream media they so disdain, and even guiding discussion in other communication channels. Not so, says a new study analyzing the impact of political blogs on the national conversation leading up to the 2004 presidential election. Indeed, Buzz, Blogs, and Beyond: The Internet and the National Discourse in the Fall of 2004 concludes that, while a force to be reckoned with, blogs are merely cogs in the meme machine.
… while the report acknowledges “there must be something special about the relationship between bloggers and political buzz,“ blogs were no more responsible for setting the issue agenda or sustaining it than were the other channels. Yet, the findings show that blogs do act as an Internet hub, positioned between the media and online chats in such a way as to act as a Web guide to the media.

This conclusion resonates with the points made in the blogger and mainstream media session at the D3 conference (see my notes from this).
The “blogs as internet hub” model describes one of the truly innovative possibilities enabled by digital media and low-cost publishing. But I think the “hub” notion misses some of the real power and impact of blogs. I think a greater influence will increasingly derive from the role of “blogs as fabric”. While each blog may be a hub for discussion, the blogs in aggregate serve to connect the fragmented information sources. Someone who reads a blog post can not only learn what the author and commentators thought, but also gets connection to the broader web of discussion from different blogs and other articles. New tools are enabling readers to integrate and comprehend the large-scale conversation on a given topic, including supporting facts and dissenting views. When mature and mainstream, I think this will change the nature of discourse. This will also realize the vision of the hypermedia pioneers like Doug Englebart, who views linking and integration as supporting capabilities required to increase our Collective IQ.

• Don Graham, CEO, Washington Post
• Tony Ridder, CEO, Knight Ridder
• Peter Kann, CEO, Dow Jones and Company

The rest of this blog entry contains my notes from the publishers panel.

Note: While I’m pretty good at capturing sessions in real-time, so this almost looks like a transcript, I don’t claim that I was accurate in the notes — I did not capture everything, and abbreviated or interpreted as I absorbed the content.
Walt: biz model and readership issue. circulation declines. why are fewer people reading your newspapers?
Don: why are we here at this conference? I got 150 emails from Swisher in the last year insisting I be at this panel. I’m the least digital person who has ever been at this conference.
If we’re in trouble shame on us. our readership has doubled in 7 years (more readers online than ever). we need to make business now out of the combo of print and website. it’s harder but far from impossible.
Walt: why the drop in your paper readership? you had the highest penetration in your metro area of any paper in the country. some people said they wouldn’t even take it for free.
Don: despite which: most of the people in DC woke up this morning and read it in print. 82% of adults in DC will access our content. the readership of printed post is down for a variety of reasons. the growth in our area is now 50 miles from the capital building. people have to get up earlier to drive to work. immigrants aren’t always fluent English readers. young people
Tony: I would challenge biz in trouble. there are 2 businesses out there. our largest 8-9 newspapers have the biggest challenges. like the SJMN, but hasn’t had an impact on our smaller papers. those markets have revenues up 7%, don’t have the circulation issues. so this is a big city phenomenon.
but when you combine the readership of print and online, it’s actually up. the internet has impacted our paid circulation. some people who used to buy it were not frequent readers. now they can get employment info online. single copy sales in big cities are the most challenged.
53% of all adults each day read a daily newspaper.
Walt: when I hear a ceo say it’s not a problem it’s a challenge, that’s a way of saying it’s really a big problem.
Peter: web has had an impact. they key is do we capture the people migrating from print in our publishing franchises. DJ is a publisher or news and info however people choose to get that. we have a slightly different model, a paid subscription site with 730 thousand paying subscribers. so we’re monetizing whatever shift is taking place and protecting our franchise long term.
There’s a high degree of essentiality to business content. it’s a dynamic site with 800+ wire service reporters, minute by minute.
some of these may not apply generally. but we all have to figure out a good model to deal with an inevitable gradual migration from print to online.
Walt: I wonder if it’s just a transition in how people receive news (dead trees vs. screen). I think there are people who aren’t reading in either format, or as regularly as they once did. I go to my driveway and more than a few years I say I’m lucky there are 3 newspapers among the best in the country in my driveway. I spent hours a day on the web … 50 blogs, and other online only publications. But my kids, expensively educated, don’t read the newspaper regularly. My youngest son said “I stole a Journal from someone else in the office and saw your column”. He and lots of people in 20s and even 30s aren’t willing to consume long-form journalism that the best papers have long specialized in it.
Don: it’s definitely a problem. this room is full of people with businesses with problems. this one looks like it should be capable of human solution. we love what we do. when Peter Kann and I were on staff of Harvard crimson, at Harvard in the 60s one room out of 5 got any paper at all. So this is not a wholly new phenomenon.
We have got to look hard to what we’re publishing. We can make them readable in more ways for more people. But the other side, Knight Ridder’s business initiatives on the web. obviously we’re making more money on the print readers than the internet readers.
Walt: among the people switching to screens, you can’t make as much from them.
Tony: we don’t lose money on web advertising, it’s actually more profitable than print as you don’t have to buy print.
But you have to make it up with volume. I concede we have a problem.
Every generation has come in at a lower level. radio, television, etc. As people grow up, have families, and get involved in community, they tend to become newspaper readers.
Walt: are you sure that pattern still holds? I know people in their 30s with families, education and jobs, would be natural newspaper readers, but don’t have time.
Tony: when Don and I were newspaper publishers a long time ago, we used to go door to door and talk to people about taking the paper, trying to get them to subscribe. People would say “I’m sorry I just don’t care about the news, see this pile of papers, I just don’t read it.” Now there’s radio, TV, and internet. This has an impact, but just an accumulated impact.
Walt: monetizing the web to make up for money lost?
Peter: if we product content with high proprietary value, we can charge to the direct customer and parlay that into ad revenue. everyone told us some years ago the web has to be a freebie. my view was I don’t see why we should give all this proprietary content away for free in one medium while we charge a couple hundred in another medium. it didn’t make sense, so we went with a paid sub model. I can imagine a day where online addition revenue may equal the circulation revenue. we will have two revenue sources, print
and online.
what can print publications do? organize, index themselves better, and make the info more easily accessible. what we shouldn’t do: dumb down our publications in search of audiences we’re not likely to get anyway. (applause). a newspaper can’t compete with TV for visual impact. if we try, we’re chasing a different kind of medium we can’t
effectively compete with. I’d rather assume there is always going to be a sizeable audience of intelligent people who want serious info. present it effectively to them in print and online.
Walt: a certain segment, just starting to grow, in addition to reading
online and print are reading blogs (or some other entry in web publishing). blogs operate in a self-referential way, link to things that are interesting on the web, have conversations about them, etc. by putting wsj content in a paid sub form, people say we’ve cut ourselves out of the conversation, the network of commentary where people discuss things. if we have a terrific story, it won’t get linked to as much on the web as it’s a paid wall. how much does this affect relevancy of WSJ and New York Times, which has opinion columnists behind a paid wall?
Peter: one has to start with premise that we’re all in business, want to make money on what we publish. judging suggest by how many echoes from the echo chamber doesn’t seem the valid model. the business question is can we make $ with our web edition, which we do.
we do put a dozen stories on web edition, so bloggers can comment on them. Walt is in fact available for free (Walt: I’m cheap!).
Walt: I wanted people to feel free to link to my columns, tech in particular is echoed and discussed.
Peter: we actually have blogs; opinionjournal.com is free size, accessible by email. we’re not dismissive of bloggers, and that you want some content on the free web. but the most valuable content we have is the news. that’s behind a paid wall and seven hundred thousand plus are willing to paid to get it.
Walt: So why did you just spend $410M on Marketwatch, which is in the same business category we’re in but they’re free?
Peter: Marketwatch is a new brand, no significant print audience, aimed at a much broader audience of individual investment than WSJ. we think WSJ content, brand, and site dynamism is enough that we can charge for it.
Walt: what % of the WSJ subscribers are paid for by corporations?
Peter: the great majority are individual subscribers. we have very few corporate bulk buys. some put it in on expense voucher, but that’s not the determining factor.
Walt: (after polling the audience): most of the audience are expensing it.
Walt: how many Washington Post subscriptions are paid for by the government?
Don: the #1 url accessing washingtonpost.com is .gov
Walt: there is a massive infusion of new voices. is that a problem or a good thing for journalism in general? can anybody be a journalist?
Don: No thinking citizen can say the blogging phenomenon is anything but great. It takes us back to the beginning of newspapers, when one person was putting out a paper. Now somewhere out there is Ben Franklin, and one hundred thousand people who think they are Ben Franklin. Sorting them out is a problem, but it generates a forest of traffic who are reading a blog, which makes a reference to our paper, and make it to our site. It’s utterly different than what papers do in other ways, not edited, but it’s a good thing.
Tony: I think it’s a good thing; it opens up new ways to get info, keeps journalists honest. I’m all for it. I think it’s good for our business.
Walt: but in world where people are busier than ever, to the extent they find you a thoughtful blogger, or millions of blogs just for friends, family, people who quilt, etc, but whoever is spending 15 minutes on that has 15 minutes less to devote to the newspaper. isn’t that a problem for newspapers?
Tony: we’re trying to grow our internet biz as fast and successful as we can. we allow bloggers on our site to build more traffic.
Don: in those terms, Walt, anytime someone picks up a book it’s
competition…
Walt: but these blogs are additive to that…
Peter: There are better and worse blogs and newspapers. A broad range of publications as I see it. but there are some fundamental differences in what a traditional journalist tries to do and what bloggers are doing. when you open Washington Post or San Jose Mercury News or Wall Street Journal, you ought to have a certain degree of trust in things like: news and opinion are kept largely separate, not blended together. reasonable confidence there are
not hidden commercial agendas influencing the content. yes we run ads and news but the ad does not in fact influence the news in a good
newspaper. there are a certain number of reporters trying to compile facts to get source to truth. there are editors making judgments on quality of what goes into the paper, and what does not go into it. this doesn’t mean we don’t all do it perfectly and bloggers can’t produce quality content, but there are differences and viewing this as a continuum doesn’t capture them.
Walt: every public opinion survey show that increasing numbers of people in your target audience doesn’t believe what you just said. they don’t believe we don’t have an agenda, stories and editorial are separate, or a given individual story in the Detroit Free Press, Washington Post, or Wall Street Journal is any better than what they read on the web.
Don: I feel strongly about this. when Woodward and Bernstein were reporting Watergate stories it was intense. Today, our paper has 4 reporters in Iraq and one in Afghanistan as it happens. in the last month, two of our reporters have come within one vehicle in a convoy of getting killed or seriously wounded. harrowing experiences … those people are not over there because the mainstream media or anybody is telling them what to write, but because they want to tell the readers the truth. we are a community, and we try to bring in the news as truly as we can, period. [applause]
Walt: where do you stand on first amendment and legal issues that will
inevitably be raised by bloggers. right of reporters to find things out and print them. not just pentagon papers but tons of little things, libel suits, etc. the cases Apple has filed are one example, where they said trade secrets (one of which run by a 19-year-old Harvard sophomore). we’re journalists and should feel outraged. I don’t see newspapers lining up behind the bloggers.
Tony: we did file briefs for the Apple case, as did most big newspapers in California, for that very reason that we think it’s info that shouldn’t be suppressed. it gets into a tricky area how far you go. it’s the degree of responsibility on the blog. even though we try to be as accurate and unbiased as we can, have great professionalism in what we do. we felt in the Apple case it should be public info, not suppressed. I haven’t thought enough about it actually.
Walt: Ana Marie said something in the last panel that resonated with me (but none of her usual curse words). she talked about the gap between what reporters tell other reports is happening in a story, and what goes in a paper. if I go home at night and my wife asks me what’s going on, I’ll say to her “this guy is lying, this guy is right but he’s a coward, etc”. you can in 5 minutes say what you think. but you can’t write it exactly that way in the paper. you get it in kind of in the margins, because we have a formula for the way we write stories in papers developed over 100 years, where you write claims on both sides for event, even if it’s a staged event, then tell the readers what you think it means. but for that you have to
quote some other people saying what you want to says. it can be a puzzle how to tell the reader what you would tell your wife in 5 minutes. should we just tell the readers what we really think, in eth spirit of saving time?
Peter: we should publish what the reporter knows to be true. the fact that you have sexier stuff you don’t know for sure to be true is a reason not to publish that. are readers interested in the opinions of journalists? clearly there are hundreds of people here interested in Walt’s highly informed opinions about personal technology. but I don’t think hundreds of thousands of people are interested in what a reported is covering. the job of reporter is to come up with facts, not opinions.
Walt: telling what you think is really going on, in a way that is quicker and more direct. are we trapped in a kabuki formula for writing stories that has evolved in order to be objective.
Don: there are all kinds of formulas and ways of writing newspapers that we should not be trapped in any of those formulas. I hope people listened word for word to what Peter was saying. Peter is the one great reporter on this panel. In his journalism he did a couple of different things. he told you what happened and he told you how it felt. newspapers can do both of those things.
You don’t have to go back to the 1920s where every paper sent its reporters to describe the trial, how the witnesses testified and flinched. In the post today, Dana Milbank is writing a regular A section feature called Washington Sketch where he tries to describe not his opinions about the event but how it felt. I hope he’ll write about what went all night during the filibuster. There are lots of ways for newspapers to do this. I agree people don’t want all the opinions of all the writers in the Washington Post. But that’s not the same as not describing what happen, that’s something we can
do.
Q&A
q: Jesse Hornbluth: Great praise for Knight Ridder’s coverage of the war. Q for Don:
I’m a fan and have written for Washington Post. Salient fact about
Washington Post on blogosphere is that you held the Downing Street memo for 2 weeks and buried it on A14. Which troubles you more: that is the impression of Washington Post of a large number of thoughtful people, or that you held it for two weeks?
Don: I’m not a scholar of the why’s of that story. you can read a good
reprise of the incident in a column on Sunday. How the post is received is not the first thing on our minds, it’s did we do our job. We should have gotten to the story earlier. We’re trying to bring you as straightforward and honest and truthful an account as we can. We will make mistakes but that will be an error of human accountability. When we can bring a paper devoid of mistakes, we’ll charge much more than 35 cents per paper.
q: Esther Dyson: you are news guys, but investors see you as a media
company. if you had a great business strategy you’d get rid of the guys in Iraq and focus on movie and gadget reviews.
Peter: someone said yesterday that if they were still running CBS they’d probably get rid of the news department. that’s not my view. we are serious content companies, not entertainment companies. so the challenge for us to to keep investing tin the news resources, not cut back, as it is the content and talented people that are the asset of our companies. invest in content and it is from that that the business model proceeds.
Tony:
Don: we’re in the business for the long term, not the next 3 months.
q: Howard Morgan: you haven’t talked about local. the blogs are doing the best job of really local news, which you should be covering more offline and in print. how do you integrate the greater amount of info online for local into your products?
Tony: in Philly we try to do a great job on local. we are going to
incorporate 8 or 9 of our columnist blogs. I think blogs are a source of info, way to find out things you might miss from reporting.
Walt: new company starting up backfence.com. Don: local is everything for us and we have to cover local news more authoritatively than anyone else out there.
q (La Tribune writer): in France, national newspapers have the same
problem. The risk is none of them have done like KR buying and publishing free newspapers, because the risk was to dilute the value of the brand and content. Don’t you see the same risks?
Peter: we don’t publish any free newspapers and aren’t about to do so. I think publishers by and large have underpriced their products, newspapers. Nobody in this room thinks twice about spending $2 buying a bad cup of coffee, but most newspapers are wary of getting their single copy price up to $1, doing something you’d pay FedEx much more to do, getting overnight delivery to your doorstep. if you think about the value in our product, we probably ought to be more aggressive about charging the individual customer and putting less burden on our advertisers.
Walt: you raise prices when demand falls?
Peter: there is a core audience for any of our publications. that audience by and large is willing to pay more than we charge (and pay online too). we’re not selling to our advertisers a rate base, but an audience, demographics, sense of community, environment of trust in the paper. we’re much better off if you have 40K fewer people but those who are with you are even more loyal and paying us more.
q: Richard Warman: if I assume every story in every newspaper is accurate and truthful and well-written, my concern is with issue of separation of fact, good writing, and opinion, when my fundamental concern about opinion with every newspaper, magazine, and TV, is choice of what to report. that choice is the biggest form of opinion we have in our news: what gets in the paper or TV. So news and opinion aren’t really separated, as it’s a form of opinion when
you decide not to publish.
Tony: Humans have to decide what are important issues. nobody has figured out how to do all this by machine.
Walt: Google is getting there… editors at the San Jose Mercury News have meetings to decide what goes on page 1 and what won’t make it in the paper at all. They decide which are the least and more important. That’s a statement of judgment, part of what you’re selling.
Tony: People like that, they like the judgment of WSJ editors.
Peter: It’s also not done in a total vacuum. I go out frequently to
subscribers and non-subscribers and ask them story by story, page by
page, what did you read or not and why. that can inform the editors. if you discover that few people are reading one topic area which we’re devoting lots of space to, you can rectify that balance. all newspapers are trying to do that.
Don: In newspaper, the hardest decision each day is what to leave out. In the web the decision is different — you can include it all.

While I’m pretty good at capturing sessions in real-time, so this almost looks like a transcript, I don’t claim that I was accurate in the notes — I did not capture everything, and abbreviated or interpreted as I absorbed the content.
All Things Digital Conference
Blogging and Mainstream Media Session
May 24, 2005
Part 1: The Bloggers

• Mena Trott, Cofounder & President, Six Apart
• Dan Gillmor, Founder, Grassroots Media
• Ana Marie Cox, Editor, Wonkette.com

(I missed the first 10 minutes of the session, as it started really early in the morning.)
Blogging is an ongoing dialog…
Dan: we have a battalion of critics. journalists are fairly insecure people
by definition. it’s important that we develop thicker skins and
listen. people who think I’m wrong tend to be people I learn from more than
people I think are right.
Kara: attack on bloggers is that they’re inaccurate, like a raving mob of
lunatics.
Ana: Tina Brown called it: the new “stazi”. One of the things interesting about
Bloggers are attack mob on journalists: they hit them where it hurt, caught
CBS news getting it incredibly wrong. The more that political bloggers
(formerly “warbloggers” as came out during Iraq) are becoming more like the
mainstream media. Cliquish, arrogant, get things wrong.
Hive mind effect. The blog “powerline” was where people sent their
information about typewriters used in 1972 to disprove bush’s claims about
national guard service. with Terry Shiavo there was a memo claimed to be
from the administration, but Powerline folks thought it had to be false.
Mena: everything I write about is viewed through the lens of how does this
affect the product. I can’t write on my personal blog about going to a trip
without it affecting six apart. If I go to DC our company is going to get
bought by Microsoft. But I believe truth bubbles up to the top.
Kara: do people have to rise to the top?
Dan: there does seem to be some shaking out into an A list, and Chris
Anderson’s Long Tail which tends to be further down. the best new things
are not what people with 100,000 readers are writing. sorting out truth and
falsehood will be tough. people need to use and calibrate their internal bullshit
detectors. There are quite a few bloggers I trust at least as much as I trust the Wall
Street Journal (except the editorial pages, which I do trust to do its thing).
We’ve gotten pretty good at credibility judgments in the analog worlds. we
know that supermarket tabloids to be false…
Kara: … although they’re often right…
Dan: … but I’m not talking about news that is often right.
Mena: more people are getting their 15 minutes. we’ll see bloggers saying
various points that are inaccurate. the journalist should be able to reply
with their own corrections.
Kara: if we (Wall Street Journal) had used those same documents, Steve Jobs would have been
hesitant to sue us.
Dan: (Apple) is suing employees…
Ana: it will impact the future of freedom of press. Jobs seems to realize
this. what struck me is if it’s true he wouldn’t sue WSJ
but would subpoena the bloggers. it’s what you actually do with the info
you have to tell if they’re a journalist. not where you print it.
Dan: in the actual case, the judge ducked the question of what is a
journalist. he said if Apple has a stamp that says “Apple confidential” on
a press release, than a journalist can’t put it out until Apple is
ready. that’s a real threat to journalists.
Kara: what will be the future tools for doing this: right now it’s printed
word. where is it going to be delivered in the future, e.g. podcasts?
Mena: feedback loop. need tools to make it possible. you see messaging with
blogging (alert when an article is written). people like to skim, parse
things quickly. audio … being able to listen to people you count on is a
powerful thing. but people want to skim. I don’t want to listen to a 4
minute audio clip of a blogger, period. most people who are using it
successfully are professionals. if my mom is doing it, it’s phone, if she’s
online podcasting it’s great. Adam Curry is now podcasting on Sirius: but
he’s a radio personality broadcasting on radio…
Dan: podcasting on radio seems like broadcasting.
Mena: you can’t call everything blogging.
Kara: wsj is a blog every day…
Ana: when my friend figured out podcasting was a downloadable mp3, she said
“that’s all it is?”
written word has proven effective medium for many years. it’s the way most
of our info gets transmitted. with blogging we’ll need to find different
words.
I don’t say “I’m a blogger”, but “online columnist”.
blogging is like albums: people at the top will get bought out, but there
will still be people in garages.
Mena: photos… I have two blogs; one is personal for small groups of my friends. I
take a picture every day, including one of myself every day. I need to
slow down my life every day. I can look at a day and know exactly how I
felt.
Kara: you’re talking about a diary…
Mena: mobile blogging is the future, everything will be done through a
mobile device. all of us our doing it that way.
Dan: in context of journalism, we don’t have a good way for people to follow
a conversation. we need tools to let us track conversations across sites
and across common threads and make better sense, and help us with
reputation systems.
Yahoo is leading.
an: search is the killer app. not sure if it’s a central site. the biggest
breakthrough for blogging besides moblogging is introducing keywords to
pre-index what you’re writing so people can find it easily.
reputation also important.
I’ve tried feed consolidator services. they put al info on one page, but
it’s still too much info.
Mena: there are bloggers who find stuff for you. I read 100 feeds. some
bloggers I can count on as having the info I want to read.
Ana: some kind of search engine with keywords, and reputation function.
Dan: a tool where I designate 3 people on any topics, plus 2 people they
designate on that topic… doesn’t exist today.
tagging also interesting as it’s a Dewey decimal system of what’s important
to people.
Ana: del.icio.us: you can subscribe to someone else’s bookmarks.
Kara: advice to big publishers?
Ana: there is a way to feel like you’re part of the readers life. it’s the
conversation, feedback. different pockets of readers want different tone
from you. some people want talk back, or sassy, or caring way.
Dan: competition is good for journalists; we react well and work hard. the
problem is that the business model is if not unraveling getting very
difficult. we should think of things as an ecosystem. it’s not bloggers vs.
journalists but it’s part of an ecosystem and we should adapt to that.
Mena: start small; you don’t have to get blogging right overnight. they’ll
get criticized by the best bloggers and that’s ok.
if you start in less controversial, e.g. dining section where people write
rest reviews, and pair those with community people writing about the same
restaurants. start in sections where it’s not about war or politics to get
your feet in the water.
Q&A
q: you’ve said so little about bush administration which has had problems
with the press and aversion to the truth. then blogs represent a Maginot
line. could government try to regulate, intimidate, or stop the impact of what you
do?
Ana: hot issue is regulation of blogging by campaign finance reform (if they’re taking advertising money).
but blogging for all the great things that it is it’s very hard to do
real solid reporting as a single person out there. you don’t have the
resources and the context. so you won’t see a blogger take down the
administration unless they’re having sex with someone.
q: … but you can link to foreign press who may be authentic
Ana: you have started seeing Americans reading foreign press much more
recently. people will have to get used to knowing that no one source will have the truth.
Dan: if you want to see how governments are attacking people for doing this:
china is going after bloggers. that’s a taste of what happens when governments get
worried. I still believe first amendment is intact in this country.
I’m worried about trend of some credentials of journalists by Washington
q: I’m involved with an audio/ video search engine. what’s the timeline on video
blogs?
Mena: there’s a product out where you have a green screen teleprompted with
your video. you can attach your script to the video. getting these things to
bloggers is a step to higher quality. this tool is that media elite will
use.
we can’t get too bogged down with the great tools as there are all these
people who have things to say that don’t have the tools.
q: mainstream media model falling apart, but what about evolution of
bloggers business model? Brad Felding said he has 3000 subscribers and
makes about $500/month off Amazon etc. what role will ads inserted by 3rd
parties in blogs?
Dan: the biz model for mass media is troubled, but would be a tragedy for
our society if big media were to die off.
the bottom up stuff is starting to get traction with advertisers, with
people pointing you to services (e.g. CNET points you to things and gets
some revenue for it).
advertisers are used to writing really big checks, not lots of little checks
to small people. intermediaries are forming to handle pieces of it.
on the long tail aspect, there will be models evolving to get some
advertising out. whether it will support a lot of people doing it
professionally I don’t know, but I’m certainly assuming there’s a business.
q: made my living working for dinosaur media, we agonize about being right
and ethical. for all the bad things about big journalism there are really
good things about the way we’re supposed to lead our lives.
how do we know if those positive attributes carry over to bloggers?
Ana: the same way. you read the blogger and get to know them.
Steve Jobs is impugning a vast amount of people. you are a journalist if you
practice journalism. just because you’re putting it up on a weblog doesn’t
mean you’re no longer a journalist. Gawker media: Nick Denton was an idiot
savant. All the unhireable people he recruited were extremely
conscientious.
Kara: I agree rap on bloggers is unfair
q: (Quentin Hardy, writer for Forbes): Ana should get together with Steve
Jobs and start something called “Star Orifice” bloggers are
self-righteous. blogging is an echo chamber that lives and dies by traditional
media. the internet has lowered the cost of entry for people with another
business model.
bloggers are creating echo chambers. personalization is hurting a sense of
community. people read the blogs they agree with for the most part.
Dan: Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo. this is often new stuff. people
are doing journalism out there often, it’s just there is a lot of noise too.
q: … “Swift Boat Veterans” had a good run with nothing to stand on.
(Ana: that was a book, and bloggers brought them down…)
Ana: the combative relationship helps people know who to trust. real
reporting is very expensive. Powerlines was example of real (micro)
journalism: they brought together evidence.
bloggers won’t bring down main stream media (MSM), but what they’re doing is worth figuring out
your own opinions about.