With so much attention being paid to newspapers and print, there is seldom talk of how viable and versatile magazines are. I am a firm believer in the magazine industry (perhaps because I write for one) so I was glad to see the ‘Annual Report’ on journalism show upbeat trends. (See “The State of the news media, 2004” report published by the Project for Excellence in Journalism)

As we head toward the PR Blog-Week in July, this will be one report would put into perspective what so many bloggers are doing and writing about.

Just 2 interesting facts:

The Big Three (Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report) have become less news magazines and more general interest. The Economist, and The Atlantic have seen readership gains, while the Big Three saw readers depart. Surprised?

Research/Fact Checking has reduced dramatically. In 1983, Time magazine had 76 positions in charge of researching and fact checking. By 2003, the report says, there were just 18.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism is part of Columbia University’s Grad School of Journalism, and is underwritten by the Pew Charitable Trusts.

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Following my post of May 11, I thought a few quotes on the failure of communication will make a better point than anything one can say.

“The endless spectacle of digitally preserved acts of depravity will have an equally endless series of damaging consequences.”

Frida Ghitis, in the Arizona Republic.

“..these folks have no clue how to export hope.”

Thomas Friedman, “Victory in November trumps all for Bush.” New York Times syndicate, May 17 2004

“He didn’t convince anyone or succeed in selling the U.S. line.” Unnamed Jordanian diplomat, quoted by Christomper Cooper in the Wall Street Journal; on Colin Powell’s lack of damage control. May 17, 2004

“We still treat our national politics like a combination sporting event and gossipfest. We’re still demeaning the national discourse with a steady diet of propaganda/spin souffle served up on a platter of triviality, with a side of slander.”

David Neiwert, a freelance journalist in his blog “Orcinus,” on why the media are culpable, too. May 7th 2004.

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Yesterday, following an earlier post, I asked Sonia (not Gandhi) to comment on the outgoing government’s use of negative PR that effectively caused a ‘black Monday’ in India’s stock market.

Q: The Wall Street Journal report (by an India Today editor) said two communist parties in the coalition are expected to ‘put their regressive stamp on economic policy’ of Sonia’s government. How ‘regressive’ do you think this is going to be?
A: These people don’t want secularism to replace their fanaticism. So they are going to any lengths to convince the voters that the Congress isn’t good enough and what better way to do it than thru’ the financial markets.

Sonia is surrounded by the best financial experts and lawyers, like Dr. Manmohan Singh (father of Liberalisation etc), Chidambaram etc who will make the financial decisions for her. Sonia Gandhi may be of foreign origin but she has Indian politics in her blood…The Congress has ruled India for years before and we didn’t do badly. Suddenly all this panic, only reflects the frustrations of the out-going party

People here, despite laptops and mobiles etc, have a very warped sense of thinking.
It is unbelievable how parties have used different platforms to target the Gandhi’s. One idiot says she will shave her head, sleep on the floor, wear white etc. if Sonia is sworn in. But she failed to react to a 10yr old boy being killed by her own alliance member to raise funds for his political campaigns. And these people claim to be more ‘Indian’ than Sonia Gandhi. Unbelievable.

Q: Is Sonia so anti-business?
A: Congress is not being influenced by the left parties, but yes they are drawing something up called the Common Minimum Program, which will consider all views and decide what’s best for the country. It is being drawn up by top leaders who have great records as Financial Ministers in the past. NO. THE CONGRESS IS NOT ANTI-BUSINESS.

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Ah, elections, dirty politics, and journalists getting into hot water. At least we’ll avoid having to blame the voting machines this time. Kerry and Bush have their counterpart in India, with Sonia Gandhi accusing the BJP leader of false propaganda and ‘betrayal.’ Ms. Gandhi was compared to, of all people, Monica Lewinsky!

Election antics, New Delhi and Washington.

An Indian friend, also called Sonia, sent me this report in the first week of May:

There was a lot of violence and booth capturing in Bihar. A few stray incidents in Kashmir as well. The NDTV group (a private TV station) actually showed us how their reporter walked into a booth and cast a fake vote. Unbelievable!
I was reading in the papers how the US didn’t like the concept of electronic voting. Pre election programmes showed us how tamper proof these machines were, but we saw a lot of them being tampered with, some with technical faults etc.

She ends on the note that it’s “a really filthy game!!!!” Elections can’t be very different.

(Sidebar on voting machines: Check Greg Palast’s book on ‘Voting Machine Apartheid’ that claims the machines in Florida were rigged! )

As of today, with Ms. Gandhi ousting the pro-business BJP, and the crash of the stock market, I am amazed at how the Western media is quick to cast Congress as a communist government. Today’s Wall Street Journal has an Op-ed piece on “India Dimming” suggesting that Gandhi’s coalition with Communist parties may put a ‘regressive stamp on economic policy.’ Tomorrow, I will ask Sonia to comment on Sonia, and the “India Shining” campaign of the outgoing Prime Minister that backfired. Stay tuned.

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Speaking of a street fight, it’s worth looking at the “Media Carta” of AdBusters, an organization that holds advertisers responsible for all manner of things:

Media Carta’s purpose is compelling: ‘know the media, change the media, be the media.’ However, as manifesto’s go, this one’s pretty much up there as a revolutionary tool, with battles, endgames, and a way to get to Michael Powell, chairman of the FCC. Consider this rant:

“In a totalitarian system, you aren’t allowed to talk back to the government; in the capitalist system, you can’t talk back to the sponsor.”

AdBusters, in case you don’t know, thrives on the militant approach. It frames this specific media debate as a “human-rights battle of our information age.” Maybe not for the soccer-moms targeted by CleanTV that I wrote about last week, but then again, who knows?

AdBusters says it is taking the battle to the UK, Australia, France, Italy, Mexico and Japan.

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Yesterday I wrote about why we shouldn’t get too upset at the direction Yahoo! And Google are taking.

There is another side to the search engine business that is fascinating. In the Web business, we call this ‘search engine optimization.’ This SEO business is a full-time operation, and it no longer involves plugging your URL into a search engine every two weeks, and hoping for the best. Let’s face it, Yahoo!, Google, Dogpile, Lycos, and Alta Vista are the Yellow Pages of the 21st century.

I attended an AMA meeting in March in Phoenix, and picked up some useful tips from the CEO/presenter of Cybermark. Listening to how big it’s got, I can see SEO companies morphing into a kind of ad agency you never thought you’d need.

Here are some gems:
• 87% of Web traffic comes from Search Engines.
• A ‘key word’ that you can bid for on Google can be a 4-word string.
• One smart way to get your web site found and indexed by a search engine, is to use key words that define your business on every page of your site.
• Use too many key words on a Web page and you could get ordered off the island by a search engine!

Good Tip:
Have a site map link on every page of your Web site. Search Engines love it!

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The lines between content and advertising have been blurring at an increasing pace. In the early days we called this product placement. But in the name of ‘integrated marketing’, typified by the Coca-Cola couch on American Idol, everyone wants a piece of the action.

Google, as we have heard, has just changed the look of its ‘sponsored links’ (those paid links on the right hand side of the search results page) so that they don’t look like down-played banner ads. Yahoo! shot back with ‘paid links’ confirming what many have always believed: that the links you get when you search for a subject are there by design, and not the result of an automated indexing system.

Yahoo’s new policy is to charge $49 (annually) if an advertiser wants a guaranteed place on a results page. Earlier it had a ‘sponsored listing’ policy. The model is actually very simple: Demand and supply. Media and audience.

In other words: Search and you will find. Pay and you will be found.

But it’s pointless to fault these two ‘engines’ for that. I always knew that Yahoo! and Google were media companies. They were not invented simply to make life easy. They were founded to make money, no different from AOL, a magazine, or Clear Channel Communications.

What surprises me is that a large percentage of people still think a Google search is the only way to conduct research! Anyone heard of that fabulous, powerful, search tool called “the public library?”

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Will newspapers become more and more like blogs?

I have been interviewing a few interesting people in PR, Communications, and Marcom, who have strong opinions on whether the mainstream news media will take the blogging route. We know that journalists have been doing it for some time now, and so are the academics, and news watchdogs. But is it a business model for the media?

The easy answer is: “it’s too early to tell.” But why play wait-and-see? Not considering blogging, would be akin to some companies in the nineties not wanting to believe that the Web would become an alternative news delivery mechanism. A long time ago Ithiel de Sola Pool observed that “networked computers will be the printing preses of the twenty-first century,” but few were listening then.

More recently, Susan Zakin, a former journo, writes in a February 8th 2004 issue of Editor & Publisher that:

“Blogs happen because newspapers and magazines aren’t doing their jobs — or allowing reporters to do theirs. Either blogs need to become financially self-sustaining and put newspapers out of business, or newspapers need to get with the program. Most of the current self-examination within the industry is far too shallow.”

What do you think?

I believe that there is another option. Bloggers will have to think about financial viability, not just to kill off newspapers, but in order to become an alternative medium. Journalism doesn’t need to rush to get with the program to become more blog-like, because soon there will be more ‘programs.’ An alternative to an alternative medium? Who knows.

Here’s my take on this:

If there is one thing that the news business –gathering and distribution– will learn from many of these disruptive technologies, it’s the need to collaborate. Newpapers, TV, and radio are built on the one-to-many platform, and can only feign collaboration. Talk radio is the notable exception. I’m thinking NPR, not Rush.

An alternative medium like a blog could replace the mass produced product, with an ever-evolving format, co-created by readers, journalists, opinionated columnists, and editors. These will be the new filters that don’t pretend to be objective, but diverse.

The old distinctions between hard news, opinion pages, letters to the editor etc will disappear. I know this is heresy from an academic POV, and I don’t think it is a great trend, but it is the reality.

Look at (a) what P&Gs chief marketing officer, John Stengel, has said about marketing being too infatuated by television. The unspoken subtitle to Stengel’s speech (which was delivered at a media conference, mind you) was ‘collaborate or die.’ They are mad as hell and won’t take it anymore, so to speak. Marketers like them will want to have more say in the media they commit to, and ‘collaboration’ is what every stakeholder wants.

Also, (b) check what journalist Dan Gilmore is doing posting chapters on his book Making the News, asking readers of his blog to check for factual errors, and omissions. Likewise, Larry Lessig asks visitors to his site to make audio recordings of chapters of his book, so that it can be listened to online. The 352-page book is free to download, anyway.

Also as mad as hell, even more so, is the public. People are better informed now about how the media conduct their business. They sense that the media’s balance/objectivity mission statement is the Potemkin village of the information age. And so, they subscribe to alternative sources of information: SMS in Asia, customized Google news alerts, distributing news via e-mail to their own family-and-friends network etc. It’s this that’s driving the demand for networks such as the peer-rated Stumble-Upon type, and RSS Feed Readers.

RSS is already becoming a popular way to bypass the newspaper/tv/radio consumption habit. We will subscribe to channels or feeds that only interest us. If you’re not already using a news feed, check out FeedDemon or Pluck!

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