I’ve been in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, for the last week, training the local journalists and government information officers (aka PR flacks) on how best to take advantage of the way that “New Media” is creating new ways of connecting with each other, and the world at large. I’m here as part of the same US Embassy program that has sent me to places like Chile, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Costa Rica, etc., to try to bring people the benefits of experience (aka the way newspapers & TV news has imploded in the U.S.), so they can start planning for the Great Digital Migration.

This is my class of TV journalists at Addis Ababa University (AAU). I tried to cram as much about online video and sharing into my short sessions as I could. Here, I'm showing how to use both professional tools like Adobe Premiere Pro CS5, as well as free alternatives like Windows Movie Maker.

The one thing that everyone here agrees on is that Ethiopia desperately wants to change its international image – c’mon, admit it. When you think of Ethiopia, what images come to mind? Deserts, starving people, vultures, Live Aid, right?

Well, it’s not like that any more. In fact, if you look around at the Addis Ababa skyline, you’ll mostly see cranes and highrise towers under construction. The real-estate bubble that burst and devastated the rest of the world never took hold here.

There are still many reminders that the ancient ways of living are still very much in existence here in Addis, but please also note all the other markers of modernity in this shot.

However, they are facing many of the same challenges as the rest of the world, at least when it comes to the emergence of the internet, and the struggles of newspapers, radio and TV stations to come to grips with social media, and the ability of anyone to become a publisher/broadcaster/internet troll.

The very first place I visited was Sheger FM, the one independent radio station in Ethiopia. This is the courageous owner, who is really struggling to walk the razor's edge here in Addis.

I’ve found many of the same behaviors and attitudes I’ve encountered in the other places that I’ve done web/online video/social media training sessions – stubborn insistence that things will never change, toxic skepticism, and even outright hostility.

After a bit of a rocky start, these guys really came around and appreciated the hands-on lessons I gave them on how to do live video stand-up reports and how to compress video into the best codec to upload to YouTube. The Nelson Mandela building is a challenge, though; between the thin air at this 8000-foot altitude, and having to haul my big carcass up 5 (five) steep flights of stairs, the first few minutes of every class were mostly spent huffing and puffing, and hoping that someone in the class had a particularly insightful comment.

Tbilisi Journalist Graduation, originally uploaded by Wordyeti.

These are the journalists from the smaller cities & towns outside of Tbilisi, Georgia. They’re all grinning happily, because they’ve managed to survive my intense one-week course, where I set them all up with their own blogs, and then sent them into the field to shoot, edit and post online news videos.

A crucial part of every learning process is making mistakes. They learned not to try to take on too ambitious a project when using makeshift multimedia tools. I learned not to use Adobe’s Premiere Elements 8. That has got to be the buggiest video editing system ever inflicted on an unsuspecting public. I use Premiere Pro all the time and love the rest of Adobe’s various iterations of the Creative Suites … but Elements is Satan on a CD. My students were throwing their headsets across the room in frustration as it crashed … lost work … necessitated a hard reboot of the system … crashed again … corrupted the footage … (rinse, repeat).

I finally installed Sony’s Vegas Video on their systems; not as user-friendly for beginners as the “Grandma-ware” that Elements is known as … but it at least would make a J-cut or an L-cut without locking up the system. Unfortunately, Vegas Video wouldn’t import the footage from the Flip cameras with the audio attached. So we had to export the audio tracks from Premiere, and then import them into Vegas and sync the audio with the visuals.

I was told that this was actually a quite valuable experience, because real-world conditions for indie journalists in Georgia are pretty much like this. Working on cobbled-together secondhand equipment in sweltering offices, where the electrical power is subject to sporadic outages. And when the wind shifts to blow in over the nearby market … well, you want to close the windows, no matter how hot & humid it is.

I just noticed – my arms look inordinately long in this photo.

I strongly urge you to listen to this great piece from This American Life about the NUMMI auto plant in Fremont.

They don't make 'em like this any more. Even so, the rear bumper had to be reattached.

It’s about how the U.S. auto industry could have saved itself by actually paying attention to the way its business was eroding, and listening to the people who came back from Japan and transformed the Fremont plant from a place that was “like a prison … with sex, drugs and alcohol freely indulged in during the working day … where the workers maliciously sabotaged cars, and the managers didn’t care, as long as they got their bonuses for churning out pure numbers…”

…into a place where the workers actually looked forward to coming to work each day, and where the quality of the cars they turned out was so high, that even now, 22 years later, many of those cars are still on the road. NUMMI stands for “New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc.” and there is an excellent Wikipedia entry about it, if you want to get a little more background.

The situation bears a strong resemblance to the newspaper industry, and the reason papers are in the same place as the auto industry. Let’s take a look at the places where the news industry and the auto industry screwed the pooch:

1. Starting in the 80s and going through the 90s, sales declined, as customers were turned off by the shoddy quality of the product

In the auto industry: anyone who drove a U.S.-made car in the 80s knows what I’m talking about. Everything about the cars sucked. The seats were uncomfortable to sit in, the controls made no sense and were hard to deal with.  I drove a lot of rental cars in that era, and I can’t tell you how many times the A/C control knob came off in my hand. Or the windshield wiper knob was installed upside-down. In one case, the bolt holding the steering column up on a Chevy Cavalier came loose and the steering wheel dropped into my lap. Which is minor, compared to the engines seizing and misfiring, the electrical system shorting out, the windows not rolling up (or down), the doors sagging on their hinges…

In the newspaper industry: the buyouts and mergers started by the relaxation of the cross-ownership rule, caused many papers to skeletonize their staffs, and run big colorful graphics in the papers. And lots more wire copy. I worked at the Arizona Republic during this era, and I saw what they were doing on “Zone Editions.”  We had the same cruddy stories for Mesa, as we did Tempe, as we did Scottsdale. They were feature stories about things like a guy with a trained parrot that would whistle and dance. We’d run it one week in the Mesa zone, and then the next week, I’d see it in the queue again for Scottsdale. Mostly, the Zone Editions were there to snarf up the advertisers in those areas, and make sure that no competition sprang up to challenge the big paper. “It doesn’t pay NOT to advertise,” was the slogan, and it was true, because of the package deals the Republic was able to offer, sucking the oxygen out of the local markets.  Most papers had a monopoly position in their markets, and could pretty much be assured of making a profit, no matter what they did. Meanwhile, the readers were starting to notice that their newspapers were lacking … how shall we say this … news.

2. The workers felt ignored and belittled, so they began to act out, and a “give a shit” attitude took over

In the auto industry: the line workers had no power to offer suggestions, and indeed, were punished for speaking up. All that mattered was churning out enough cars to meet the quotas, no matter how shitty the quality. Resentfulness led to workers intentionally sabotaging cars, which led to even greater expense down the line, when the shitty cars had to be fixed by workers who really didn’t understand what was wrong with them, and just used the “bigger hammer” method to make cross-threaded bolts hold, or quarterpanels stick onto the chassis.

In the news industry: a kind of rebellious fatalism took hold in newsrooms, both in print and TV. The reporters knew the bosses really didn’t give a shit about the news, they just wanted something that would get good ratings and not get them sued. Every TV producer I have ever met would, with little encouragement, go off about the corporate “suits” that were putting the vise on the newsrooms to “pop a number.” Reporters that dared to try to make suggestions about long-term changes (like less coverage of O.J. Simpson, and more of things like the erosion of middle-class opportunities) were ignored. Newsrooms have always been “simmering cesspools of cynicism,” but this morphed into outright nihilism and rage.

3. A temporary bubble allowed the industry to rack up easy profits and postpone change

In the auto industry: The Bush-Cheney “let’s consume as much oil as we can” faction pushed through a tax break in the early ’00s that meant that people who leased a “light truck over 6,000 pounds” could write off the cost of the car.  Free SUVs for Everyone! What this did was support the Big Three, despite their declining market share, because they were making so damn much money off producing big fat gas-guzzling SUVs and selling them for massive mark-ups.  The SUV was actually pretty cheap to make – but Detroit was able to charge about $10-$20,000 more for them. And, of course, when the tax break ran out — and gas prices skyrocketed — the end of the free cars on the taxpayer’s dime era left GM without a viable product to sell, as consumers looked for more efficient cars.

In the newspaper industry: the subprime mortgage/real-estate boom created a huge advertising windfall for newspapers. The Homes section of the LA Times was often larger than the rest of the newspaper combined.  Thousands of pages of expensive classified ads, paid for by realtors who were so awash in free money that they didn’t care what the cost was. Of course, the rest of the classified business was absolutely cratering at this time.  When the real-estate market imploded, and advertisers abandoned newspapers, looking for more efficient ways to sell their products, newspapers were also left without a viable product to sell. 

4. The industry blamed the people who were honestly pointing out the flaws

In the auto industry: the Detroit execs blamed Consumer Reports for pointing out that the cars they were inflicting on the American people were utterly without redeeming community value. They claimed that the Dirty F’n Hippies at Consumer Reports were biased towards the Japanese, were anti-American traitors, and were unfairly criticizing patriotic Americans. The U.S. cars were better, if only people would realize that.  The industry was in complete denial about how the auto-buying public had turned against it, after years of enduring an abusive and exploitative relationship, and how even Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers who fondly remembered their high school days when they got their first muscle cars, were fed up with cars that broke down or rolled over, killing their families.

In the newspaper industry: the newsrooms blamed the internet. They still blame the internet. They see the competition on the internet as being anti-American, that the public was deluded by web-based hucksters, and that imposing paywalls would make people realize how much they really needed to pay for news. No matter that the readers and advertisers have made their preferences clear – they must be MADE to come back and obey.

If this strikes you as over the top, please click over to the regularly scheduled media criticism & analysis; but let me have a moment here, please, because this has struck me at a deep & unexpected level.

Our Honeymoon Never Ended

I got Duce just before 9/11.  I have told the story often, because it explains a lot about our relationship.

I was looking for a cat as a companion to Faust; a snaggletoothed tabby I’ve had since 1994.  I went to a big pet adoption event at the La Brea tar pits, looking for a kitten, since Faust is a little timid, and I didn’t want to bring in a snarly cat that would fight with him and beat him up.

I saw a cage with a sign on it that said “Tommy.”  In it was a big gray tabby, who looked a lot like my other cat Mephisto, who had run away.  I opened up the cage and took out “Tommy,” and he put his big paws on my shoulders and looked me in the eyes. Then he started butting his big head against my chin and purring. I petted him for a few minutes, then put him back in the cage, intending to move on to find a kitten.

When Duce wanted your attention, you knew it. He would let nothing stand in his way when he wanted some special bonding time.

Duce immediately started yowling and biting the bars of the cage, trying to get back out to me, reaching through with his paws desperately.  It was absolutely touching.  The woman working that booth told me that he had been out on the street for probably six months, that he had been stuck in a cage for six weeks, and that this was his last chance. If they didn’t find him a new home, they were going to have to give him the needle the next day.  He was set to “walk the kitty Green Mile.”  He was not a wild street cat – he had been neutered and his front paws had been (clumsily) de-clawed.  He was a lovable, friendly cat, but most people were looking for kittens and that he had been stuck in that cage for six months.

He was miserable in that cage, and stared out at me, as he twisted and strained to reach out and touch me with his great big paws.

“OK, OK, you got me,” I said resignedly. I signed the paperwork and put Duce into a cardboard cat-carrier and walked the three blocks back to my house.  To acclimate him to his new surroundings, I shut “Tommy,” who I quickly renamed “Deuce” – as in “Mephisto 2″ because he looked so much like the cat who had run away – in a spare bedroom.  I gave him food & water, and to settle him down to his new home, I slept in the bed with him.  Deuce, soon to be spelled as “Duce,” spent that first entire night sleeping on the pillow above my head, licking my hair and purring loudly.  He was so happy to be out of the cage, and I could feel the way that he appreciated the way I was lavishing attention on him.

A couple days later, still trying to acclimate him to his new house & brother, I went to check on Duce.  I had cracked a window to let some air into the room.  In my absence, Duce had jumped onto the narrow window sill, pushed the screen aside – despite the fact that it had been stapled into place – and squeezed through the narrow bars.  He was gone.  I was stricken with guilt and berated myself; I figured Duce had run off to wherever his old house was, following the homing instinct animals seem to possess.

Hard to describe his walk - not a strut, not that arrogant. Perhaps a stalk...

But the next morning, there he was, sitting patiently by the front door, meowing to be let in.  I rushed to praise him for coming back (rather than punishing him – which would send the message that I hated that he had come home), and he rubbed his big head against my leg and then sauntered inside, in search of breakfast.

I soon learned that there was no real way to keep Duce in the house.

Any little crack in a window, a door left unattended for a second – hell, he once tried to crawl up the chimney – and Duce would be gone, out in search of adventure in the wide, wide, fascinating world.

Duce refused to sit inside the house and let life pass him by.  No matter what the consequences, no matter how dangerous it might be, he never backed down.  Not an inch.

I tried to find a compromise – I got a little kitty harness, put Duce into it, and tried to see if he would just walk the sidewalk on the end of a leash.  Duce just laid down on the lawn, clearly depressed and uncomprehending.  I tried to be enthusiastic, to get him to explore the world with me standing by to protect him from it.  But no.  It was to be total freedom or nothing for Duce.

Catnip mice were considered quite tasty.

Eventually, we settled into a routine. He would wake me up as soon as it got light, I would stagger to the back door and let him out, hoping that he would stay in the enclosed back yard.  By the time I got back to bed, I would hear Duce climbing the 8-foot fence next to the bedroom window, teetering for a second to judge conditions, and then dropping over with a thump.

Later, as I got ready for work, I would hear Duce yowing from the front porch. I would let him in; he already had bacon on his breath, and I eventually figured out that he had established friendships with my neighbors, and a little old lady down the block was sweet on him, and gave him bacon every morning.  The little scavenger.

One day, when my parents were in town for a visit, my dad & I were sitting on the front porch, talking.  We stopped as we spotted Duce across the street, trotting down the sidewalk.  In front of him was a woman walking two huge, fierce-looking German Shepherds.  Duce paid them no heed whatsoever, weaving through her legs and past the dogs on his way to his spot, sleeping under a bush on the front lawn. “Would you look at that cat? Now that’s confidence,” my dad marveled.

I moved a couple of times, in the next years, but no matter where I went, Duce quickly became famous in my neighborhood. I would be jogging a couple of blocks from my house, and I would see Duce, sprawled out on the sidewalk on his back, as someone rubbed his tummy.  “Hey, that’s my cat!” I would say.

Duce would run ahead of people and do a curious shoulder roll on the ground, winding up on his back & exposing his belly for rubbing.

“Oh, Duce is yours? He comes over all the time,” I was told, over and over again. He had his own life that I could only guess at.

Not that it was always fun & games. Duce had a big sense of responsibility, and he felt it was his job to protect his house and his yard.  This, despite the fact that he had no front claws.

I found him on the roof of my neighbor’s house, because my neighbor had a raccoon living in his chimney and Duce thought that was just unacceptable.

I wound up taking Duce to the vet at least three times, all clawed or chewed up. “Fighting out of his weight class again,” is how Janine put it.

This is after we came home last summer; not only had our house been robbed, but Duce had been wounded, and his poor tail was hanging because of an abcess.

But no matter how much punishment Duce took, he never backed down.  I don’t know if it was courage or stubbornness, or some form of deep refusal to accept any limitations whatsoever.  In his mind, he was the King Cat, and trespassers had best beware.

But he was not just an ornery fighter. What made Duce special was the tenderness that he had with people. He was the most dog-like cat I’ve ever known. Wherever people were – that’s where he wanted to be.

Duce worked the room at parties like a veteran Hollywood agent, making deep eye contact, flattering guests with his wide-eyed enthusiastic attention that made you feel like you were a movie star about to be discovered, and leaving behind his calling card (a wisp of shed fur).   LA’s Westside Writer’s Group all came to know Duce and addressed thank-you cards to him after our gatherings here.

Janine said she knew the first time she saw Duce and I together that we could be a couple, because when I picked Duce up and cradled him in my arms, Duce responded by squirming in utter happiness, bumping his head into my chin.

Janine often showed off how Duce would “hug” her – he put his paws on her shoulders and clung to her, content to be carried around.  Well, at least until what we called his “Paw Pilot” went off and reminded him he had an urgent appointment kicking the ass of some pretender to his throne.  That, or a nap.

Duce loved to hug Janine, and vice-versa, obviously.

When I finally moved us into this house, I felt that at last I had found a place where Duce could simultaneously be free and protected.  We have a huge back yard (well, for Los Angeles, at least), enclosed by high fences and thick shrubbery on all sides.  I made sure that the kitchen door had a flap so he could come and go as he pleased; the lack of that in previous places had led Duce to mark his territory inside the house, ruining a couple of otherwise nice couches.

The yard was full of deep clover and I figured he would have more than enough to do here without going wandering. Besides, I had built high fences on all sides.

He was so excited to use the clover as cover to pounce on the birds nearby. He never got one, but that didn't stop him from trying...

By now, I should have known what was coming.  Fences were made for other, lesser animals. I found Duce on top of the garage – I still don’t know how he managed that with no claws.  I would see him doing the balance-beam act on top of the 8-foot fence. He dug and burrowed little passages under it.  And he spent hours chasing critters around the bushes, sometimes bringing half-eaten mice into the house as a kind of “back atcha” offering to us.  Again, I made sure to praise Duce effusively for his presents, even if I discovered them by stepping into a squishy mess in the middle of the night.

But the most special bonding time we had happened in the hammock I strung outside on the patio we built.  Duce would wander over and stand on his hind legs, paws on the rim, eyes asking my permission to come aboard.  I would reach down and scoop him up, or he would jump on his own, and then would come the ritual. I rubbed his face until he drooled in pleasure, purring so hard he sometimes coughed. Then he would settle down into the crook of my arm as I read or talked on the phone.

I could go on and on – about the Japanese couple that lived next door to me in Culver City that wept when I moved and begged me not to take Duce away, and showed up with special salmon dinners in Tupperware for him.  Or my neighbor in the front half of the duplex, who showed me how he and Duce sat on the couch, watching Dodger games and eating snacks while I was at work.  Our dinner parties usually ended with us all sitting on the couch and talking, while Duce went from person to person, soaking up the love and attention before settling into my lap.

Duce represented for me all the traits I aspire to: loyalty, courage, unshakeable self-confidence and conviction, an unquenchable curiosity about the world, and the resilience to bounce back from the wounds and cruelties of the world and still maintain a bottomless capacity to love and be loved.

In the hammock with the phone; when Janine was off shooting videos, Duce wanted to hear her voice, and she wanted to hear him purr. I could never get him to take messages, though...

The trouble started a month ago.  Duce had started acting strangely aloof, spending all his time outside, hiding in the bushes. He came in for meals, but only ate a few bites.  We just figured he was acting moody, or that he had found another soft touch in the neighborhood, and was “eating out” again.

I thought this was cute, but it was actually a sign of trouble ahead...

It turned out that he had a blockage of his intestine, and while we were gone for a week on vacation, Duce spiraled into crisis. He lost about 8 pounds, and his sleek, silky fur was rough and matted.  Our pet-sitter took him to the vet, and they prescribed laxatives.  But within a couple of days, he was in crisis, and we took him in for an emergency operation.  His intestine had ruptured, and Duce was in agony from peritonitis, with big infections in his abdomen.  What we thought was a minor problem became life-threatening. Worst of all, it meant that Duce was in the place he hated worst in the world – back in a cage, far from the people he loved and trusted, unable to explore the world.

Janine & I kicked ourselves for spending so much money on a cat at a time when the economy is so unstable.  But when Duce came out of the hospital, and as we nursed him back to health, we started congratulating each other for rescuing our beloved cat once more.

By Thursday morning, we sat out on our back patio, as Duce ran around the yard, excitedly sniffing the plants.  “Our kitty is back,” we said, and it all seemed worth it.

But only hours later, on Thursday night, Duce made a noise unlike any I had ever heard him make. It was a shouted “AROOO!” that contained depths of pain and despair I hope never to hear again.  Duce then started vomiting all over the dining room floor.

We hoped that it was just a case of food poisoning, or maybe some kind of infection. But the next morning, Duce crawled on his own into the kitty carrier – an acknowledgment that he had given up, that he knew that something was wrong with him.  Normally, it was a struggle to get him into it, as he knew that meant a trip to the vet.

Duce had barfed up everything he had in him and more during the night. He was dehydrated and panting, and drool was coming out of his mouth. Not the good kind, that meant I was petting him in just the right way – but foam and awful gurgling.

This was in the hammock; rubbing his cheeks and then his head would make him purr and drool happily. A little gross, sure, but endearing.

Duce was still so thin from his previous ordeal that the x-rays couldn’t show what, if anything, had happened in his abdomen. The vet said she had felt a hard mass, and speculated that there was a tumor in there that they had missed in the first surgery a month ago.

I looked down at Duce. He had crawled onto our laps, and lay there, too weak to move, panting. He had put his chin onto my hand the way he had done thousands of times before, but immediately started convulsing in pain.

I knew he wouldn’t survive another surgery. And even if he did, it would mean weeks in the cage at the vet, IVs in his now-frail arms, pain wracking his guts. And that a couple of weeks after that, it was likely that we would be right back there again.

I gulped for air. “I think it’s time,” I rasped. “I just can’t put him through this again. No more pain.”

And so the vet gave Duce the shot and his breathing slowed and he relaxed in Janine & my arms.  I didn’t see him breathe his last, because my eyes weren’t quite working right at that point.

As I said, it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.  Duce was my friend, my constant companion, and, as far as a feline can be so, an inspiration to me.  Uncompromising courage. Boundless affection and loyalty. Resilience. Playfulness. Refusal to be trapped or caged.

What I tell myself is that by the end, Duce’s body had become the cage that he so feared and despised. He was trapped in there, in absolute agony. I had rescued him once eight years ago, from a life spent in misery.

I rescued him from that misery again.  All the stale, worn-out bromides that it was a mercy, that his time had come – they all are true, yes, but they fall short.

I set Duce, The Cat Who Would Not Be Caged, free.  It was the last gift I could give him, after he had given me so much.

If there is a heaven, I will surely see him there.

Rest in peace, big guy.  I love you and miss you.

Sleep in peace, kitty.

I asked the audience how many of them "got" the central image here, and could put it into its viral meme context.

Over at the Online Journalism Review, Robert Niles makes a compelling and far more comprehensive argument about why the whole concept of ownership of the news & the national conversation has been toxic to the mainstream media’s efforts at retaining its audience share.

Another point that I tried to make was that it is OK to use humor in your reportage, now and again. The relentless barrage of bad news these days is making us all a little crazy (see this excellent Newsweek article on this topic).  There’s a reason that John Stewart & Stephen Colbert are so popular – they report on the news, they give it the kind of context that is so often missing on these stories, and they do it in a way that makes us crack a smile.  It’s the voice that I remember from my early b.s. sessions at seedy bars with grizzled news veterans.  It’s a human voice. The voice that says, “Well, y’know, I hadda write the story about [local businessman X] getting the Nice Guy award for the paper. But the funny thing is that everyone knows that he’s a screaming tyrant whose wife tried to run away…”

It’s the kind of voice that can re-establish the trust that our audience has lost in us.  The one that doesn’t feel the need to kneel and genuflect at the altar of he-said she-said “objectivity.” The one that can make us feel informed, energized, and in control a bit – because things that we can laugh at are no longer quite so scary.

[And yeah, I know, my much-promised blog post about the effects of fear in the media on all of us is still in the works. Forgive me.]

So for all of you trapped in office cubicles, or just in need of a bit of diversion at the end of the week, here are the top viral videos:

1.  Top of the list is this hypnotic slow-motion camera capturing images at a soccer event in Europe, a field hockey game, bouncing koosh balls, jello bouncing – it all keeps you watching.  Let this one run, sit back and enjoy the slowcore techno beat, and feel the tension drain away. Aaaahhh…

[Note: Break has been a little annoying with its embedding function, so if this video won't play in the embedded window, just click on the link above.]

Amazing Cam Shoots 1000 Frames Per Second – Watch more Funny Videos

2. Next is a slightly more violent extension of the same concept – this is a commercial for Philips’ new extra-widescreen TV.

3. As an antidote to all the Twitter hysteria (and yeah, I know, by mentioning it I am just feeding into the hype), here’s a video of a guy seated in the smallest, most utilitarian room in the house, reading the Tweets of Connie Reece, the “Mother Nature of the Twittersphere,” one of the most respected social media experts in the world.

The tweets are punctuated by actual birds twittering their birdsong.  Nice touch.

Official Tweet Reading XII: Reading Connie Reece from Marcus Brown on Vimeo.

4. This is a little old, but it made me giggle, and then made me nostalgic. Great display of editing and syncing skills on the part of the creator, BTW.  Getting Bert & Ernie’s mouths to match up with the lyrics is a tough task.

5. OK, this one is very, very NSFW.  It stands in stark contrast with Scott Berkin’s blog post on Top Ten reasons managers become great. Seth Rogen channels the boss who is trying to convince himself that he’s still in control, but who spirals out of control, goes on a booze-fueled rampage and commits increasingly unspeakable acts upon himself and what appears to be a giant fish.

If the future of news is that it will live as a web-only play, then the InDenver and Seattle PI sites, which are (to use the horticultural metaphor) scions of the original papers are perhaps visions of what the future could look like.

Good luck and Godspeed. Selling information on the web is a business fraught with all kinds of unanticipated complexities.

The InDenver site has gotten some good & enthusiastic replies from readers eager to get good quality local news information, and who are seemingly frustrated with their other local options. Unfortunately, InDenver appears to be struggling with its e-commerce functionality – multiple readers are writing in to report that their sessions are bombing out, that they’re frustrated, that the interface is broken, or unwieldy.

Welcome to my world, folks.

We (i.e. Singleparentcity.com and Filmson.com – don’t bother trying to find them – they both folded) tried to do this back in 1999, back in Web 1.0, and there were a lot of lessons that we learned that seem to have been lost in the mists of time.

If you are going to try to be in the business of selling information (or the way we couched it, “a fulfilling multimedia entertainment experience”) online, the thing to remember is that things happen way, way faster than they do in the offline/print world.

E-Commerce for Former Print Reporters

A user subscribing to a print edition of a newspaper will fill out a 3×5 card subscription form, or mail off a check in an envelope, and patiently wait a week or so for the paper to start showing up at the front door.

A web subscriber will get halfway through filling out the form – and then a question (how old are you? male or female? what’s your zip code?) will piss them off because it seems too intrusive, and they will click away.

Or it will come time to enter their credit card information, and the process will be onerous enough so that they start to have second thoughts about it, and they will be gone.

Back in the day, we lost 80% of our customers during the payment process.  You absolutely HAVE to make this as smooth and quick and painless as possible, or they will start to think twice about it – and then they are GONE, BABY GONE.

Lingering in the ether, the Seattle P-I keeps trying.

Customer Service is More than Responding to Complaints

This isn’t just fixing broken links on the site, or making sure that your pages display the same across a wide range of browsers – although that is absolutely crucial as well.

No, you have to be really, really, REALLY responsive when your readers reach out to you.  You have to pay attention to what they’re telling you through their clicks, through the time spent per page, through the amount of clickthru you’re seeing on your targeted ads.  You have to pay attention to what they’re saying in the comment spaces, to the kinds of photos and videos they upload (just pray that they care enough to send you their material), to the way they forward your stories to their friends and family.

That is what customer service is on the web.

If you are going to try to make people pay for a service that you provide – if you are going to sell them something – then that thing damn well better be what they want. Or they will cease to buy it.  And they will do this far, far faster than they would with a print product.

The good news is that if you do manage to forge a connection to your audience, that if you do manage to get them committed to reading and acting on the information that you give  them – they will then fight like tigers to make sure that you survive.

Market Yourself Like Crazed Insurgents

You can’t just rely on the goodwill and lingering fondness of your former readership to sustain you.  That may work in the short term (if it works at all), but you have to make an organized, concerted effort to reach out to your market and GIVE THEM A GOOD REASON TO BUY YOU.

Take a look at the viral/guerilla marketing campaigns that were used by Bakotopia; your strategy may need to be a bit different, since you seem to be reaching out to a slightly older, more affluent demographic, but the underlying thinking is the same.

1. Go to the physical locations where your (would-be) readers are. Concerts, county fairs, farmer’s markets, coffee shops, playgrounds, whatever.

2. Have a persistent object that you can give away that will remind your readers that you exist. It can be a cheap 1-sheet flyer stapled to a lamppost, like a punk band playing an underground club. A t-shirt, hat, keychain, whatever with your logo and URL on it.

3. Reach out to your readers on regular intervals with updates as to what your new content is via email, instant messaging, SMS, whatever.

4. Enlist your readers in the effort to recruit more subscribers. Give them some kind of prize – free subscription, or exclusive merch.

Yeah, I know. This sounds like the way that rock bands run their fan clubs.  It is.  It also works.

You gotta be shameless. It feels like you’re a carnival barker, and that is not entirely inaccurate.  But if you are going to sell this thing you’ve created, you have to prepare yourself to get your hands dirty.

Christ, I hope you guys succeed.

Meanwhile, here’s the video of the final days of the Rocky Mountain News.

Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.

This video had my class rolling with laughter – it’s slightly NSFW (mainly with the cussing in the subtitles, although if your office has Russian speakers, they might object).

This is the mayor of Kharkov, and he was trying to record a TV campaign commercial, but couldn’t manage to string enough coherent words together to spit out a sentence. Apparently, he’s notoriously stupid – “The Sarah Palin of Ukraine” – and is the subject of much mockery & head-shaking.

I was particularly impressed by the torrent of expletive-laced abuse hurled at this guy by the director (who we see in some of the early shots). I think this must have come at the end of an exhausting filming session, because the director is just going off on him in a way that would put Joe Pytka to shame.

Gems include: “Try to have an expression. Come on, at least try. Let’s go, let’s go.” “Misha, stop this crap.  Really, stop it.”

D: “Why the fuck did you take your hand away?
M:”I finished?”

D: “So fucking what. You finished! Sit one second, motherfucker. OK, we have to do this all over again. From the top…”

D: “Your face is boring. Nobody is going to give you any money.”

Please, can anyone out there who has access to the footage of Palin campaign commercial filming post the outtakes to the web? Because I think the wolf-shootin’ turky-genocidin’ Caribou Barbie must’ve had sessions like this.  Then again, maybe she had the offending directors fed to polar bears.

But – two items this week converged (yeah, there’s that word) to illustrate one of the powerful, emerging lessons about New Media.  It’s one that I learned years ago, when I first rode a couple of dot-bombs all the way down into the crater.

Big site traffic numbers do not necessarily mean big money.

First, let’s hear from apostate blogger Dennis the Peasant, who was one of the founders of Pajamas Media until his partners chucked him overboard a couple of years ago.  The news this last week that PJM was no longer going to write fat checks to its bloggers was met with screams of rage from said suddenly unfunded right-wing bloggers (and joygasms from left-wing bloggers who had long derided the PJM checks as “wingnut welfare” – a POV now seemingly shared by said wingnuts’ former employers).

So Dennis had schadenfreude & Cassandra-vindicated moment, in which he flipped off the camera & did a Snoopy dance.  And then, he got around to some actually interesting stuff about the economics behind blogging:

The thought in everyone’s mind is If only I can get enough traffic I can make money. If I have the traffic the advertisers will pay for access to it.

Everyone assumes site traffic is the key to blogger riches.

And, everyone is wrong. It is that simple.

(snip)

… what we discovered seemed to suggest we were sitting on a goldmine: Large household incomes, very well educated, disposable
income out the blowhole… what we assumed advertisers wanted.

Well, by January of 2005 Roger and Charles had disappeared in a cloud of pure bullshit, and there I was, left waiting to hear about the
“new model”, the “new partners” and “the new” what not… Being the curious sort, I arranged for a friend of mine to introduce me to the
managing partner of a small, but prestigious, advertising firm in Columbus. I packed up our survey statistics and headed to a luncheon
engagement that I assumed was going to convince this guy I was on to something.

Well, I spent 20 minutes explaining our idea and the business model as I envisioned it, and then, as the capper, whipped out the survey
statistics and showed them to him. He looked at them for a moment, laughed, and then threw them down on the table in front of me.

“Worthless,” he said, smiling.

DtP goes on to talk about something that New Media folks take for granted, but that Traditional Media people still have problems wrapping their heads around. See, newspapers, radio, TV, billboards, direct mail, etc. etc. — they all base their ad rates on the pure numbers of eyeballs on their content.

While have a big audience is nice, in web terms it can actually be more of a hindrance than a help.

Which is where Facebook comes in. Today it celebrates its 5th birthday. And it is hemorrhaging money from every orifice, with no clear business model in site. (Here’s an interview the BBC did with founder Zuckerberg last fall)

The perennial question for Facebook has been how to monetise the site and cash in on its 150 million users who critically spend more than two hours each day on-site. Analysts Neilsen compared that figure to the 90 minutes users spend hanging out on MySpace.

As the pressure mounts on the Facebook team to make money, the job becomes harder amid the present economic downturn.

(snip)

the clock is ticking fast.

“At some time the economic model has to grow with the rest of the firm.

“Investors will want a return on their money and in this market, investing in vapour can be very difficult. Their time is up for doing this without making money.

“They need to develop a business model soon before they find their funding sources start drying up,” warned Mr Enderle.

The Facebook Advertising page, like its obvious model Google AdSense, tries to make it easy for an individual or small-biz owner to buy an ad. Contrast that with all the hoops you have to jump through to buy an ad in traditional media.

The numbers that came our recently show that Facebook has among the lowest click-through scores on the web – 400 clicks for every 1 million page impressions. This has not gone unnoticed. The pro-Facebook & social media mavens claim that the demographic information that has been amassed by Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, etc., is going to pay off with highly targeted ads that garner higher CPMs. And they have an easy-to-use frontend that is quite obviously modeled after the AdSense DIY concept.

Facebook’s experiment with tying ads to your personal information was, however, a disaster. And critics have started pointing out that maybe Facebook doesn’t know all that much about you…

And the stories are starting to come out about how desperate they’re getting – despite the impressive raw traffic numbers, time spent on site, and user engagement indices — all numbers that media companies try to pay attention to.

I can tell you from my experience with a succession of dot-bombs, big page traffic without the proper monetization scheme is actually a detriment to your survival. Especially in the video space.

While bandwidth charges are a small fraction of what they were even six years ago, they still rack up quickly.  And if you have a million people watching a 10 meg video on your site (as can happen if you get a viral hit), and your monthly service contract with your hosting service starts charging you after, say, 250 gigs … well, work the numbers.

1,000,000 users x 10,000,000 megs downloaded = 10,000,000,000,000 (10 terabytes aka 10,000 gigs) of page traffic, just for that video.

Depending on your contract, your site will either crash and you’ll have to wait a month or whatever before you can bring it back up … or they just act like a cabdriver and flip down the little flag and start the meter running.  At the end of the month, just like with a cellphone company when you go over the minutes, you get charged up the wazoo.  Say it’s a $.10 a gig, the way DreamHost does it.

10,000 – 250 = 9,750 gigs

9,750 x .10 = $975 overage charge for the month.

Now, there’s no way that Facebook is paying that much for its bandwidth – economies of scale and all that.  BUT.  The bandwidth still does cost.

DtP makes the point that 400 dedicated readers in a well-defined niche space, such as photography, beat the hell outta 40,000 drive-by users in an amorphous mob. Advertisers will want to reach those 400 people, because they know them, know what their interests are, and know that the ads served to them are going to the right people.

General interest sites, however … well, let me put it this way.  Check out the sode aisle in the supermarket next time you’re there.  Diet Coke, Diet Coke with Lime, Diet Coke with Splenda, Diet Vanilla Coke, Diet Black Cherry Coke, Coke Blak, Regular Coke, No-Caffeine Coke, Coke Zero, Diet Caffeine Free Coke, Vanilla Coke, Cherry Coke, Diet Coke with Vitamins.

Each of those products exists because there is a niche out there that wants to drink them. Why would Coke want to waste its ad dollars for health nuts that want a soda that has vitamins and that they can delude themselves into thinking that is “good for them” … on a site that has an audience of cigar-smoking red-meat-eaters?

The advertisers have had to fragment their products. Those fragmented products have to be marketed just to the people who are going to buy them, or they are not viable.  That means that the platforms that those products advertise on have to be similarly well-defined.

The root of the problems with mass media isn’t that there isn’t interest in the information – it’s that the advertising money is shifting away to places where the audience is better defined & targetable.

Technorati Tags: Facebook advertising, Pajamas Media implosion, blog, advertising, monetization, web economies, click-through rates, audience, segmentation, marketing, demand

LA Times - No Shit, Sherlock?

This came in through the comment threads, and is thoughtful enough that it merits more attention:

It sounds like both media channels worked as I would expect them too. The mainstream media sticks with the low risk stories that are easy to substantiate and defend while New Media takes risks on radical story ideas, digest the story in the public forum, shares the discoveries with its readers and lets the readers decide when it is time to move on to other issues.

Very true, and a very good observation. However – my worry is that as the mainstream media increasingly dissolves, their filters grow ever weaker.  Evidence of this can be seen in the big bounce in the amount of glaring errors in print editions – this last week, I noted big, bad spelling errors on the front page of the LA Times.  The jump pages aren’t where they’re supposed to be.  The same paragraph gets printed twice.

Apparently, the editorial guidlines have changed at the LA Times... or, to put it more colloquially, "the shit has loosened up."

Basically, the cuts in editorial positions have left the papers so stressed that they are vulnerable to the kinds of errors that would previously have been unthinkable.  And if papers can screw up on something so simple as whether or not the word “Shit” should be put in a headline for a book review (as it was today), then a complex story that demands that reporters and editors pay close attention and follow a thread to its logical conclusion – well, that capability may not longer be in the traditional newsroom.

I have hopes (perhaps naive & unwarranted) that there will be a disaggregated Newsroom of the Future, where reporters and The People Formerly Known As The Audience all work together to separate truth from spin.  The Look&Feel of this Newsroom of the Future is being chiseled out of the raw WebChaos on sites like TPM, Firedoglake, ProPublica, Publish2, RedState, and even on Michelle Malkin (hey – she called the “B on the face” girl out as a fraud).

It looks kinda like the same model that’s been in existence for hundreds (maybe even thousands) of years:

1. The reporter/blogger/town crier/social media collective identifies a trend or event as significant, and communicates that to the people in their circle of influence (make up a term – audience, listeners, readers, lurkers, etc.)
2. Those people take in that message and react. In the traditional media models, a positive reaction would be to buy more papers, tell their friends to tune in to the next newscast, and discuss it around the watercooler.
3. Positive feedback means the originator keeps doing more – that is, follow-up stories, sidebars, looking for more stories like that.
4. In the online world, positive feedback can mean that the audience self-deputizes and starts haring off on their own, trying to add their efforts to expand the narrative.
5. Negative feedback – the audience not caring about or responding to the story – means that the reporter/blogger/town crier moves on to the next story

The only change is that the web makes all this happen much faster, and allows the audience to get much more involved than was possible before.

And yeah, I know, this kind of thinking is hardly original.  But we’re seeing the dissolution of the traditional media happen much quicker than we had anticipated.  And yeah, I’m aware that history is replete with examples of traditional media being used to perpetrate Big Lies & Big Mistakes – from the Spanish-American War of 1898, waged because newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst wanted a cause to boost circulation (where we get the famous quote “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war”) to the yellowcake uranium and 18 words in the State of the Union address.

The point is, that as it is now easier for smaller & less powerful groups to take on the mantle of the MSM, it is also increasingly possible for smaller & less powerful groups to drill into the national narrative for their own purposes…

I’ll leave you with this, from the Hearst link above:

Hearst upped his circulation by producing a new kind of paper, one with mass- market appeal. His papers used lots of pictures and illustrations, large headlines, and the like. Reducing the cost of a paper to as little as a single cent a copy, Hearst made his newspapers accessible to nearly everyone. Because he controlled so much of the market for newspapers, a market that was rapidly growing because of his newspapers, Hearst could practically dictate what the country would think the next day.

The whole point of yellow journalism was to produce exciting, sensational stories, even if the truth had to be stretched or a story had to be made up. These stories would boost sales, something very important in this period, when newspapers and magazines were battling for circulation numbers. In regard to the situation in Cuba in the mid-1890s, yellow journalism sought to exploit the atrocities in Cuba to sell more magazines and newspapers.

The papers depicted Spanish behavior as exaggeratedly bad, and political cartoons depicted “Spain” as a nearly subhuman and brutal monster, while “Cuba” was usually depicted as a pretty white girl being pushed around by the Spanish monster. Once US opinions were inflamed over Cuba, Hearst in particular tried to do everything he could to whip the public into such a frenzy that a war would start. Once the country was at war, Hearst had little doubt his papers would have no end of interesting and sensational articles to publish.

The other gang strike force cops protested that it wasn’t Pacman that had done the bad, stupid shooting – it was actually a cop who was Pacman’s enemy, and that they should tell the gangs the truth.

Bob Hodges (Robert Duvall), the grizzled old cop, says basically, “What difference does it make? If they think he did it – he did it.”

What does this 20-year-old gang movie have to do with the much-maligned Republican vice-presidential candidate?  Well, stick with me here. 

After watching Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live, and in the interviews airing this week on NBC, it’s becoming increasingly clear that she’s not a complete and total doofus. Yeah, maybe she’s not a total policy wonk, able to spout off the import-export stats on Burkina Faso off the top of her head, but she’s clearly not as bad as her public image would lead you to believe. 

She can talk coherently, when she’s not so over-coached and micro-managed – it’s the panicking handlers’ fault that she comes off as a malfunctioning robot, spouting nonsensical phrases.  She’s never going to be one of our leading governmental minds, never going to have a memorial dedicated to her next to Jefferson or Lincoln … but she’s also not quite the drooling, babbling dimwit she appears to be.

It’s also clear that that doesn’t matter.

Palin arrived on the scene, basically a blank slate, tabula rasa.  The rollout of this new product at the GOP convention was greeted with a lot of fanfare – and initial euphoria.

In product marketing terms, the packaging was great.

The problem was that McCain’s handlers had nothing prepared beyond the initial product rollout.  Big initial marketing push, lots of glitz & glamor, the American people take the product into their homes …

…and that’s when the troubles began.

See, they really hadn’t thought this whole thing through.  They hadn’t prepared for what was going to come next.  In much the same way that the invasion of Iraq was botched because nobody who was (allegedly) in charge stopped to ask, “And then what? After we destroy the Iraqi army and take over the country … then what?  What’s going to happen next?”

In retrospect, this all becomes sickeningly clear.

Again, in product terms – the American people took this into their homes and tried to figure out what made it tick. The media, doing their jobs, tried to figure out what this newcomer to the scene was all about.  And, in response, the Republican party had prepared … nothing.

You’d think they’d have the equivalent of what NBC does for the Olympics for the athletes – little pre-shot segments of the athlete at home, in training, interviews with family and coaches talking about the dedication that was needed for this underdog athlete to brave the odds and pursue her dreams… c’mon, you can see this in your mind’s eye already, right? All leading to a flatteringly lit scene with the athlete sitting in a loveseat with her adoring husband in front of a cozy fireplace, talking about the day she almost succumbed to her self-doubts, but (choking up a bit here), her faith in herself and the support of her family (stifled sob) carried her through…

If that had happened in the three weeks after Palin was introduced to us, we’d be having a completely different conversation about this election right now.

Instead, there were the disastrous interviews with Katie Couric, which led to the skits on Saturday Night Live.  After the first skit, there was still a chance that Palin might be able to turn things around.

And then came this little gem from last night:

This pretty much sealed it.

Palin’s image is now cemented.  She’s a doofus who, along with her fellow odious doofus, George W. Bush, is costing McCain his shot at the presidency. 

It doesn’t matter anymore if she’s not what we think she is. In much the same way that it no longer matters whether or not Al Gore invented the internet, or Dick Cheney personally subjects prisoners to torture. 

We think they do, so they do.

A lot of this damage was caused by the ham-handed way the McCain campaign dealt with the New Media. They’ve been late to that party this entire campaign. I don’t know if that’s because McCain doesn’t understand this medium, doesn’t care, or if the handlers that were so adept at playing the media back in ’04 have gotten fat & lazy with their successes.

And yeah – the selection of Palin without having a plan to deal with What Comes Next is indeed an indictment of McCain and his decision-making process (one of the key objections that just won’t go away). Snap decisions that later wind up being disastrous? I think we’ve had just about enough of them these last eight years…

In the movie Colors, Pacman is saved only because a prisoner rats out the plot to kill him, and the gangs attention then turns to silencing the rat.  I don’t see any possible equivalent on the horizon that can save Palin, particularly in light of the recent revelations about her shopping habits, the cost of her makeup person, the fact that she and her husband are having to testify under oath today in “Troopergate,” and damn, just about everything else.  Her image has been set, the die is cast, and from this point forward, all information that comes out that affirms our collective perception of Palin as a moron will get accepted and spread around, while contrary information is buried under the weight of all the “Can you believe what just came out of her mouth this time?”

Oh yeah – for safety’s sake – here’s the segment from Colors that I linked to above – damn YouTube links have been kinda sketchy lately.  Enjoy the cheesy party scene.  I can’t figure out if the redheaded kid is Carrot Top, or the villain from “Children of the Corn.” Both?

Technorati Tags: Palin, Colors, image control, SNL skits, marketing, new media