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Tuesday, August 14, 2001
The continuing end of Media as Usual 
| | ...news and information has become a commodity business in which consumers are unwilling to pay and proprietors don't know how to make them. |
| | In case you missed reading Burn Rate, or Wolff's column in New York magazine (linked above), this guy is one of our best writers on any subject. Also one of the nastiest. "You don't need depths with surfaces this vivid," he writes about Gary Condit and Lizzie Grubman in "The Perfect Storm," his most recent New York piece. |
| | Wolff is not optimistic about Big Media, and covers it like a color commentator on the Fall of Rome. But the Guardian piece reminds me that the media business is not only profoundly conservative — in the literal sense — but failing at approximatley the rate at which global warming is taking down Greenland. Linux Journal, for example, survives the passing of many Linux dot-com companies, including more than a few that advertised in the magazine. The newsstands are still chock full of specialty publications with both subscribers and advertisers; and most of those magazines would be diminished for lack of the paid editorial matter that the best advertising actually is (can you say the same about TV?). I don't think this is gonna change a whole lot, no matter what becomes of Tina Brown and the Murdoch family. That's because Big Media has a degree of importance far exceeded by its value as an editorial subject. |
| | Big Media's big problem is that it has bought into a distribution model of itself. The moment it relabeled writing as "content," it commoditized its primary virtue. |
| | I buy New York (when I'm there, and sometimes even when I'm not) because it has indispensible listings and Michael Wolff. The value of the former evaporates with the next issue. The value of the latter goes up every time Wolff's current item goes into the Web archive, where anybody can link to it. |
| | Currency may be the currency of newsy journalism, but its fungible value is maximized by its authority, which goes up with every reader who refers to it. Not by its scarcity, which is where Big Media goes when it thinks about it as a commodity, as content. |
| | Better to think of the Web is a nice big reference section in civilization's own library. |
| | When your real content is your authority, you don't need to worry about any commodity other than what you do with that authority in your next issue. |
The names of the game
| | In the mid-seventies I spent some of my happiest young adult years in a commune-like rural North Carolina enclave called Oxbow. In places like that, dogs are common as squirrels, and nearly as anonymous. One particularly awful-looking dog was a mangy white creature with one eye and some obviously bad history with humans, whose company he still trustfully sought. God knows why. Perhaps he was aware of no condition other than ownership and desperately yearned to restore his place in that system, no batter how badly he had suffered under it. |
| | Anyway, we named him "Cringe," because that's all he did. He had no other personality traits. If you came up to him, he'd cower. If he came up to you, it was at an uncertain angle, with his head down like an anteater, whining. This of course endeared him to nobody, which is maybe why he eventually disappeared. But for awhile there Cringe was a neighborhood fixture. |
| | Anyway, every time I read the name "Robert X. Cringeley, "I'm reminded of that dog. I hated the fact that good writers, most notably Mark Stephens, were forced to write under that pseudonym as the "gossip columnist" for Infoworld — and worse, that Stephens, of all people, would set up a homestead on it, claiming it ultimately as his own. Today he's all over the place. There's I, Cringeley, a new PBS program, apparently. It is no doubt a follow-on to his earlier efforts, to which the late Kozmo.com presented a deserving Tribute last year. His Pulpit Web site is also contained at the PBS site, which I never seriously visited before. Now I have, and it kinda creeps me out. Maybe it's just knowing that a main feature of the I, Cringeley home page is a big fat link to a big fat site with the oughta-be oxymoronic title Shop PBS and the URL shop.pbs.org. I can't find a tongue in a cheek here, but maybe I'm checking the wrong cheeks. |
| | Anyway, Cringeley comes to mind because Deborah Branscum mentions that Laurie Flynn and other fine journalists were Cringeley before Mark was. And presumably others still are, because Stephens/Cringeley is no longer in the employ of Infoworld or its parent company, IDG, the bunch of them having gone through a legal wrangle over the name at the end of which some judge, following the example of Solomon, gave the baby to both parties, leaving the world with an ambigoous profusion of Cringeleys, all but one of whom are presumably Mark Stephens. The exceptional one would be the writer or writers who continue to write under the Cringeley byline for Infoworld, expressing weekly IDG's fully compromised claim to the name. |
| | So maybe you're wondering how I came up with "Doc," a name no parent would ever give a child. "What do you say we name the child after a dwarf, honey?" "No, I'd prefer a gambling gunslinger." "Or how about a Haitian dictator?" "Hey! We can cover them all by naming the baby 'Doc!'" |
| | They named me David. So did the parents of David Hodskins. And, when David Hodskins, Ray Simone and David Searls got together to start a company called Hodskins Simone & Searls, there was a quorum of Davids. As fate had it, I was then known in that part of North Carolina as "Doctor Dave," who was both an occasinal radio persona and the byline over a lampoon column in one of those weekly give-away art calendar newspapers (a sort-of blog before its time). My two partners took to calling me "Doctor Dave" in a formal sense, and then finally just "Doc." Eventually it spread around the social network. |
| | But when we opened a new office in California, I became the only David in the place. Should I drop "Doc?" I wondered. I wasn't sure, so I did a marketing test. When I went to Comdex that Fall, I had two badges made. One said "Doc Searls" and the other said "David Searls." I wore each one on alternating days for the four days I was there. When it was over, nobody remembered David and everybody remembered Doc. So I decided to quit fighting it, and here we are. |
We're heading for land! Our gills and fins are ready!
| | Here's Chris Locke in Red Herring on the evolutionary state of the VoIP "industry," such as it isn't. |
Still pushes Cluetrain, too
| | Amazon has moved Jeff Bezos' open letter on patents to a new URL, but the old one still transfers there. That's good. I was worried when it disappeared a few weeks back. |
Projuxtapositions
| | I'm not sure what I mean by the headline, but it makes some kind of sense in respect to several grooves I'm digging right now — |
| | Phil Agre's Welcome to the Always On World, from IEEE Spectrum, which I always liked yet hadn't read in way too long. He talks about the theater, which "in its very architecture, reflects a set of social relationships..." Which are changed radically by radiation of a very social sort. "The cell phone blows this picture up," he writes. "Suddenly a whole world of activities and relationships can insert itself into the controlled spaces of the theater." |
| | Stig Hackvän's site, which I also hadn't visited in too long. A treasure trove of Good Shit. Looking around Stig's place, I found How to Enjoy a Conversation, authored by Dan Ryan and passed along by Agre, whose work I began to search, also again after too long. |
| | Learning these two defaults from Verizon today: number publishing, OFF; caller ID, ON. Most people, the Verizon person said, prefer to remain anonymous yet knowable to the people they intend to call. White pages for residential phones are like AM radio: an old system that's still around but long since past its popularity peak. There is no directory service for cell phones, and none are seriously contemplated. Maybe this is because of the system's chaotic multicompany origins, but the more significant matter is the absence of a demand for a master directory. Telephony is more personal yet more social than ever. Also more pervasive, more always-on. |
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