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| Tuesday, April 24, 2001 |
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Just spin me: Here I am in Santa Barbara, listening to KQED-FM/88.5 from San Francisco, about 200 miles outside its analog range, even though it's by far the biggest FM signal in the Bay Area. I have a 16-year KQED habit that's hard to break: I've been a customer since I moved to Palo Alto from Chapel Hill in 1985 (where my old pal Joan Siefert Rose is now running WUNC-FM/91.5). The voice on the radio is Robert Siegel, with whom I'll share a stage next month at Media Relations 2001 in Washington, D.C. His topic is "Selling the Truth: How the 'Corporatization' of Media is Shaping Public Opinion." Sounds a lot like what Bill Moyers is talking about here.
Anyway, I'm putting my talk together right now. My speech is titled "Markets are Conversations (or, Everything You Know about PR is Wrong)." One of the things that's blowing my mind right now is that the ideas I want most to share are the ones that are also the least fixed, and that especially includes the "markets are conversations" idea, which languished from the moment I thought it up in 1990 until it was adopted by Chris Locke, David Weinberger, Rick Levine and then everybody else who read and ran with The Cluetrain Manifesto. I'm only beginning to lean what it really means. And that's just one idea.
It's so obvious to me that the most powerful ideas in the world are rhetorical music: tunes being shared and re-shared on a massive scale. They aren't being mediated at all.
How do you "relate" to what's going on here? And here? And here? How do you spin a free-range journalist like Dan or Deborah? How do you "own" a conversation between agents this free? What spin has more torque than its very opposite?
We're all re-learning what we mean by journalism, and it's beginning to look a lot like what the Founding Writers were up to in their correspondence, books and personal publications. What we're doing here is certainly not compliant with the Webster's definition (there's no link to it, so you have to look it up — to save you the trouble, here it is):
| | Main Entry: jour·nal·ism
Pronunciation: 'j&r-n&l-"i-z&m
Function: noun
Date: 1833
1 a : the collection and editing of news for presentation through the media b : the public press c : an academic study concerned with the collection and editing of news or the management of a news medium
2 a : writing designed for publication in a newspaper or magazine b : writing characterized by a direct presentation of facts or description of events without an attempt at interpretation c : writing designed to appeal to current popular taste or public interest
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Well, fuck that. You're reading a journal right now folks, and it's none of the above.
I'm so glad the Sixties are finally here.
Coolness squared: Thanks also to Marek for introducing us to Ann, who blogs the perfectly titled now.weblogs.com.
More from Marek:  The soapbox phantom gets real in a huge way. What a great character! I knew the guy had to be interesting, but ... this? The guy left Poland literally under the gun (a friend of his was shot to death at the crossing, just before The Wall came down), and he writes terrific stuff, subtle and knowing stuff, in what appears to be his fourth or fifth language. Jeez, I'm still working on my first. (Well, I took 3.5 years of German, but I flunked one of them, dropped out of another and gave them all back when I was done.)
Here's a hmm: If software is writing — a form of expression — can we swap it for "journalism" in everything we've all been saying about that subject? Even if we can't, it's an interesting exercise.
Decontaminating money: I want to test the idea that money doesn't always equal influence.
| | It is Received Truth that as soon as we get paid for something, our interests are conflicted. I disagree. When people hire me, they want my truth, not my varnish. That's the difference between what I do as a journalist and what I did as a PR guy. Essentially all I yield — okay, sell — is my time and attention. Is that dirty? Maybe it depends. But on what? Food for thought, no?
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| | I think Dave challenged this a bit yesterday when he wrote, "Once you get paid for doing something, you're not an amateur. The term has become dirtied by the assumption that somehow amateur is lower quality than professional." I think it depends on who's applying the dirt, and why.
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| | I think the "depends" question can be answered by deciding whether the market we're talking about is described in terms of accounting or relationships. Again, as my friend Sayo tells me, the First World tends to think about markets strictly in accounting terms (morality too, by the way — think about how we owe and repay favors), when what truly grows and matters far more deeply are the relationships by which markets make culture.
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| | Of course we think money (or its equivalent, in the form of favors) contaminates relationships to. Does the fact that Dave and Userland give me space and tools to write this very stuff influence me? Maybe. But in a bad way? Am I less myself — do I have less integrity — because of it?
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| | I have one friend who doesn't want to write a Manila-hosted weblog because he doesn't want to operate in the context of an "avuncular" relationship with Dave. I can understand that. But I was friends with Dave before Manila existed. That relationship is a much bigger, deeper and more complex thing than money alone can describe — and, forgive me, account for. Same goes for all relationships, including Dave's and Userland's relationship with Microsoft. It happens at a human level — or perhaps at the polyhuman level we call "social." Is everything social also economic? Maybe. But only if we pry economics out of accounting.
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| | Think about this one: The whole dismal science, from Adam Smith (in whose work the term "consumer first appears) on down tho the present, has grown and defined itself in a purely industrial context: one in which the supply side has had a preponderance of power — and is so completely in control that it can set prices and tell its "markets" what they will buy (to the degree that this state is idealized). What happens to that science when all companies melt into their marketplaces — social environments where what matters most is the ability to talk to each other and form the relationships on which persistent business constantly depends? Dismal economics doesn't go away, but rather becomes like Newtonian physics in a Quantum age. There are other truths, no less fundamental, that we need to start discovering and talking about. And sure enough, here we are.
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He's everywhere: So I'm on a conference call, telling these other folks about how every subject worth talking about already has a blog driving the topic's conversation. So I guess that there must be a blog about... what? How about 802.11? So I put 802.11 in the address line of my browser, hit return and find myself at 802.11b Networking News, a blog by none other than the peripatetically ubiquitous Glenn himself.
Heeeerrre's Marek! The mystery is revealed. Amazing story, too. Thanks, Marek!
Bad David: I love the way Dave refuses to play David to Microsoft's Goliath. For the last four thousand years or so, David vs. Goliath has been the default script for every Underdog vs. Overdog story, regardless of what's really going on. When Goliath was IBM, David was played by Ken Olsen and later by Steve Jobs. After Microsoft stepped into the Goliath role, David was played by Marc Andreessen and then by Linus Torvalds. Now BigPress wants to cast Dave in the role he was named for. But he won't play. He knows the script better than anybody, and he's writing a new one. And why not? He's the Goliath of scripting.
In a much more blatant way, Steve Jobs did the same thing when he got Microsoft to help with Apple's recovery. Remember how the Apple faithful reacted to Bill Gates' appearance at Macworld when Steve, freshly returned from his long exile, announced Microsoft's investment in Apple and its commitment to continued Office developement for the Mac? They booed and moaned. They didn't like it becaue it wasn't in the script. But that deal was totally in character with who Steve and Bill really are, and what Apple and Microsoft really are — and the fact that they'd been doing business together, quite profitably for both companies, for nearly two decades.
Way to roll: Eric Norlin has a new blog. He jumps right into the fray. I love it. Eric is smart, funny and fearless. Dig him.
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