Facebook, in my book, has become the sin que non.  There are no end to the ways I can be informed, connected, entertained and affirmed (Brooke Likes This — insert thumbs up icon here).  As with many people, Facebook has supplanted a good amount of my personal email and when I go there I don’t have to worry about finding emails from someone trying sell me a watch, improve personal endowments that I don’t have or asking me to help him claim 42 million dollars from Nairobi.  I’m also more likely to use my IM tools within the Facebook environment.  For untold millions Facebook has become a Tool of Daily Life – possibly THE Tool of Daily Life online. (Go ahead, argue away.)

Facebook is also brilliantly designed to bring users in and offer its feature set in a way to not only start you on a path to reliance (nee addiction), but does it in a way that makes the user feel as though it’s his own idea. And for many of us over a certain age, there are paths to submersion that allow the user to get wet slowly – just a toe at first: Yes, I’ll be your friend.  Yes, I’ll watch the action first. Oooo, look at that, I posted what was on my mind and it didn’t sound dumb. Yes, I LOVE Bavarian Pretzels, of course I’ll be a fan. And so it begins. Pretty soon all your friends are on there and you’re making plans, snarky comments and sharing quizzes galore.  Facebook users come in as many varieties as there are individuals, there’s probably a whole blog post or PhD dissertation in there somewhere on the archetypes. For example, I marvel at my professional peers from the Internet world who are completely disciplined about only using it to develop their “personal brands” and “thought leadership.” You go guys!

I know that Facebook gets talked about to death (It’s a time suck. It’s vacuous. It’s a trend. It’s 24/7 TMI.) but there’s one aspect that takes it beyond all of these generalities.  With any successful product or brand, those that help us on a fundamental level (even beyond their actual performance level or delivery on value proposition) are the ones that we are both more likely to adopt, and more importantly, have the potential to ride the Evangelical magic carpet to untold success.  In fact, if you want to get really down to fundamentals, I can draw a directly line from those success stories to their ability to tie into our needs a la Maslow’s Hierarchy. But rather than bore you with that, let me tell you how I became a Facebook Evangelist. It’s short, sweet, simple and knocked my emotional socks off: I was able to find people whom I loved and missed; and whom I never thought I’d see again. And not just one, several. It’s been wonderful. A surprise gift.  I have been walking on clouds. I tell everyone.  The thing about Facebook is that, unlike almost any other product out there, it’s truly personal. Now you know, too.

I agree with Thomas Jefferson when he said: “The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers and newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to choose the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers, and be capable of reading them.”

OK that’s a bit overworked, but the gist is that an educated, well read populace is important to creating a functional democratic government. But the demise of newspapers, should it actually come to pass, will be felt even beyond our democracy – which given its lynch pin role is hard to imagine. Newspapers are not just the key to keeping the voting public informed, in a more fundamental way they have taken the place of story tellers in our tribes, weaving a cohesive thread of social narrative in a pluralistic country.

Clay Shirky in his recent post which was blogged and twittered about online ad nauseum (albeit completely worthy) http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/) talks about the new reality of walking in a forest of content  speaks to me a gluttony of riches, without only our personal world view for context. Newspapers as a mass media (with a flawed but necessary history and credo of being based in the pursuit of fact and truth) tell the big narrative while the Internet, more like magazines and channels on our cable, tell more niched narrative – allowing us to choose what most represents either who we are, who we want to be or what we believe.

One question has remained unanswered since I first asked it at a Screaming Content panel in 2000: Once we are all wandering in that forest of an abundance of online news, self selecting media that more than likely agrees with our individual world views, and there are no more “newspapers of record”, what will that do to our shared perspective any given day in terms of What Has Happened? What Does It Mean?  The entire forest of these web entities will each cover these events very differently, or choose to not at all. What would this have meant for Pearl Harbor, or D-Day or 9/11? What becomes of our shared societal narrative and understanding of who we are? Already, due to some erosion in journalism, every narrative is now considered questionable because every source is considered niched or written through left/right lens. In a post newspaper world, will we even be able to agree on historical record? Will all discussion of the facts be considered suspect? And what happens when our social narrative is no longer societal, but individual? What does it, will it do to what cleaves us together? More questions to which we have no answers. It may be that we may then live through even more interesting times.

This sentiment is captured best in a quote from blah from Mark Morford of the teetering San Francisco Chronicle:

“[online]…how the hell you’ll know which “truth” is actually the one you should listen to. Whom do you trust? How do you know? How the hell do you actually find anything resembling balance and context and through-line, when no one has an editor and anyone can say anything and the concept of ‘journalistic professionalism’ is nowhere to be found, because no one wants to pay for it?  This, to me, is the hoariest snag in any preachy ‘a mature blogosphere will supplant old media’ argument. In the howling absence of all the essential, unglamorous work newspapers now do — the fact-checking, interviewing, researching, all by experienced pros who know how to sift the human maelstrom better than anyone, and all hitched to 100+ years of hard-fought news brand credibility — what’s the new yardstick for integrity? On what do you base your choices? Some fickle mix of personal mood, blood-alcohol level, and how many followers your given source has on Twitter? Right.”

So am I anti-Internet? Absolutely not – it has its own virtues and role to play in our democracy. And it’s how I’ve made my living over the last 12 years.  No development has been so equalizing and exciting in over 150 years.

One of the most dynamic and valuable characteristics of the Internet is how diverse the content offerings are. In fact, content is no longer King; content is now Every Man. Though without newspapers to offer the universal context, it ends up being more cacophony than chorus and more diversifying than unifying.  That said, I do think the anger lobbed at the Internet (and blogs) by those in journalism is misplaced.  Neither the Web nor blogs is monolithic nor the cause.

Blogs are on their own evolutionary path. They can be a well-researched, well sourced column for a new style journalism – even breaking solid news once in a while. They can be a destination more like an ezine, and in many cases they are just the navel gazing meanderings of a guy in his dorm room. (Hey, who cares about the medium, at least he’s writing!) The fist shakers often warn that bloggers are no match and all they do is link to and comment on what’s in newspapers. Well, no they aren’t a match but they may be the mammal that’s left after the dinosaur is dead and as such they shouldn’t (and can’t) be dismissed as also rans or the cause of the extinction. The whining is symptomatic of the level of frustration and fear felt in the print business. It is sure to turn into howls of anguish as they fail in larger numbers. (Though some will successfully re-engineer themselves.) Stones will be thrown.

Make no mistake, though, we are treading on untried roads. In the past, media did not completely usurp any other – newspapers did not replace books, radio did not replace newspapers, cable did not replace radio and so on – we simply increased our capacity for information consumption. Replacement is not what’s happening now either. It’s just that after newspapers are a victim of commercial Darwinism, the Internet will simply be what’s left.

Images: HandsOn, Flickr osubeav

]]> http://www.r2integrated.com/blog/index.php/if-newspapers-are-so-over-whats-the-fall-out/feed/ 2 http://www.r2integrated.com/blog/index.php/the-day-of-the-newspaper-is-over-part-1-of-2/ http://www.r2integrated.com/blog/index.php/the-day-of-the-newspaper-is-over-part-1-of-2/#comments Thu, 26 Mar 2009 17:53:09 +0000 BrookeWarner http://www.r2integrated.com/blog/?p=338 If you are judging by Chinese standards, the newspaper industry is now clearly under the old curse, “May you live in interesting times.” At no other point in modern history have the storied institutions been so in flux; their future so uncertain. The recent move of the Seattle-Post Intelligencer to an online only status and the closing of the Rocky Mountain News (as well as several others less well publicized) is not only a milestone for the industry, but is also a harbinger of things to come.

If they are not the first of many dominoes, they are certainly among the first of the dinosaurs –
unable to figure out a survival strategy in the new landscape. The trend is not limited to the United States. Metro International, once the fastest growing newspaper publishing company in the world (70 daily editions in more than 100 major cities in 20 countries in 18 languages across Europe, North & South America and Asia for an audience of more than 20 million daily readers and 42 million weekly readers), has had to close its Polish, Finnish, Danish, Croatian and Spanish editions. Many more are expected to follow.

The list of newspapers under the threat of succumbing or scrambling to go completely online is beginning to pile up like body count after an unexpected invasion. The reasons for the decline are many fold; the threat the product of a perfect storm and a litany of sins and circumstance:

• Cost of reporting and journalism (it takes lots of people – reporters, editors, fact checkers, etc.)
• Cost of printing (one online issue of the LA Times costs as much as 10,000 print issues)
• Cost of distribution (which grows with population, sprawl and cost of energy)
• Content is ubiquitous (anyone can make it and sell it – or give it away)
• Moment to moment Internet news cycles means out date dailies or weeklies before they’re read
• Internet’s ability to constantly reinvent itself through innovation
• A fickle and economy-sensitive advertising market
• A down economy (several cycles within 20 year period)
• Leveraged debt among  survivors  gambling on getting ahead of the curve and have not

This all adds up to create a hyper-challenged business model with no immediate solution. The situation is also abundant with ironies: The number of people who read newspapers is up; while subscriptions are down (according to the twice annual independent National Readership Study, 2008). There is a rush to prop up the companies too big to fail, but not those too critical to fail. And, if the government were to prop up the newspaper industry, it would undermine the very role it’s meant to serve in the first place – an independent observer and provider of information.

But no one has any answers. No one. Why? Because the issue is unraveling in Internet time, which evolves so quickly it can almost not keep up with itself. For an industry, like newspapers, that has essentially stayed the same for the last 150 years, ten years is but a blip. While for the Internet, it’s its entire lifetime. In the time it took for the newspaper industry to see the Internet coming, consider the threat it brings and then devise a solution (or not), the Internet was miles ahead, its efficiencies acting as a big magnet for advertisers and content alike.

Images:  Flickr: Bostoncitywalk’s,  New York Times