Curmudgeons skip directly to 7:50 or so, for the juicy bits. If you are in a crowded place, please allow at least 10 feet of safety space in all directions for when your head explodes.

This is the first part of the rather incendiary keynote speech by Jason Calacanis, founder of Mahalo.com, at the OMMA Hollywood 2009 conference. The keynote’s title is “Advertising, Riots, Twitter, Facebook and the Depression,” and in it, Calacanis cheers the death of newspapers and “Old Media,” and lauds paid search as the “most powerful advertising medium ever created.”

Not coincidentally, Mahalo is a paid search company.

Along the way, Calacanis also trashes social media advertising, showing screenshots of drunken parties to “prove” that all advertising on this platform is unwelcome, intrusive and doomed to die.

Highlights:

“Gosh, newspapers didn’t see this coming, did they? I mean, the newspapers were reporting on their own demise for a decade. And they still couldn’t change it.

It’d be as if you’re the Titanic and you haven’t even left port yet.  And they’re like, “By the way, there’s a lot of icebergs to the north.” And you’re like “OK, thanks.” A day later, it’s “Icebergs are still there.”

They’re like, “Full speed ahead! To the icebergs, as quick as possible!”

They did nothing. They deserve to die. Don’t cry for newspapers, it’s great that they go out of business, because new things can take their place that are better. Much better.

(snip)

Don’t cry for journalism.  Rejoice, because a new journalism is being built, today, as we speak. And it’s going to be better than the last one.

(snip)

“They deserve to go away. Goodby, good riddance.”

The keynote was obviously designed to provoke a reaction (more than one conference attendee muttered “linkbait” after listening), and it certainly did that, as every other session after this opened with the panel trying to refute Calacanis’ claims. I’ll post John Battelle‘s rather more measured keynote tomorrow.

I have a few reactions to this, and I’ll post some more with the other three videos in this series.  But to start with, the notion that newspapers did nothing at all about the internet is absolutely false.  The industry has tried to engage with online since before there was an internet (you’ve probably all seen those videos from San Francisco, showing the early paper over video screen tech of the 80s). The problem is, that the battlefield on which newspaper have been trying to engage has shifted radically.  First, it was the fight between portals – Prodigy vs. CompuServe vs. AOL.  Then it was Netscape vs. Internet Explorer. Yahoo vs. Google. Facebook vs. MySpace.

Newspapers are a $50 billion a year industry, with tremendously expensive production and distribution infrastructure, grown up over centuries.  If the Tribune chain had just splashed kerosene over the presses back in ’92, and declared in the flickering light that they were shifting every penny over into becoming a competitor to AOL … well, they probably still woulda wound up about where they are.  But along the way, there would have been tremendous dislocation – millions of readers not getting information.  Millions of readers turning to competitive print products that would have made billions.

So the newspaper industry has tried incremental solutions. Right up to this point, where, as we see in Seattle & Denver (despite what Jason sneers at, there are plenty of people who want to read what he dismisses as “boring” stories about local government, taxation, schools and crime) the papers are being forced to migrate to the web under conditions that are nothing short of brutal.

It’s all very well and good to talk about the exciting news products that are “being built today, as we speak.”  But I know many of the people that work at these small, struggling web news outfits. They are up against the wall, just trying to keep the broadband bill paid.  They are not going to be able to devote thousands of man-hours to digging through documents and making connections, and going out and doing original research (i.e. interviewing people to get things that are not archived on the magical, all-seeing web). Maybe this will be solved someday – but it ain’t the case today, and that’s when we need it.  We need this kind of enterprise reporting, or this country is going to implode, because society is angry at the economic collapse, and nobody’s really been able to dig deep enough to explain it. At least, not in a way that holds up & makes sense for more than a month or so…

If I sound like a bit of a curmudgeon here, well, it’s hard to watch this and not get a bit grouchy. I agree with Jason on the broad points – that Big Media has sinned, and is paying the price; that ad dollars are shifting to where the consumer eyeballs are, and that this trend is only accelerating.

But dude? Less of a gleeful grin.

First, Ron Rosenbaum unloads on Jeff Jarvis for being “increasingly heartless” about newsroom cutbacks, layoffs & the general death spiral.

A sampling:

Not all reporters had the prescience to become new-media consultants. A lot of good, dedicated people who have done actual writing and reporting, as opposed to writing about writing and reporting, have been caught up in this great upheaval, and many of them may have been too deeply involved in, you know, content—”subjects,” writing about real peoples’ lives—to figure out that reporting just isn’t where it’s at, that the smart thing to do is get a consulting gig.

But Jarvis believes the failure of the old-media business models is the result of having too many of those pesky reporters. In his report on his recent new-media summit at CUNY, he noted with approval one workshop’s conclusion that you’d need only 35 reporters to cover the entire city of Philadelphia. Less is more. Meta triumphs over matter.

It makes you wonder whether Jarvis has actually done any, you know, reporting.

Oh, that’s nasty. Shorter Rosenbaum: “Jarvis is an substanceless, fluffy airhead, taking advantage of gullible publishers, peddling his New Media snakeoil & banking fat stacks while real reporters who actually work for a living are being thrown to the wolves.”

The dodo, too, frowned and squawked over its fate.

Next, Jarvis fires back at Rosenbaum, mocking him as a petulant, immature child who can’t deal with the New Reality of Media. Sample:

Sadly, Rosenbaum doesn’t debate the idea and history and fate of journalism, which might be productive or at least provocative. Instead, like a pissy third grader, he attacks me. Because of my opinion, he says he doesn’t “like” me anymore. Take that, Jarvis! You can’t sit at my lunch table ever again! He reminds me of that same third grader who, when he doesn’t study for a test and sees the results of his inattention, whines, cries, and stomps his little feet, declaring, “It’s not fair.” No, kid, life ain’t.

Shorter Jarvis: “You can’t handle the truth, you sissy. Your whole industry is doomed.  Doomed, I say!”

These powerful beasts once dominated the landscape.

And then the catfight continues down in the comment section, where web luminaries like Seth Godin chime in with support, reactionary trolls addicted to the right-wing media victimhood meme blame press declines on the liberal bias that tricked America into electing Obama, and most of the self-identified print reporters want to know where their next paycheck is coming from.

This whole slapfight is actually quite timely for me.

The dinosaurs eventually became useful again.

Just yesterday, I cautioned my writers that we have to tread very carefully while making our recommendations to the newspaper industry. Anyone still working at a newspaper has to feel somewhat like the grognards at Verdun: starved, exhausted, trembling from incessant shellfire, and depressed at seeing way too many of their comrades-in-arms fall.

I’ve fallen prey to the digital triumphalism. I’ll admit it. It’s really easy to hang on the rim and hoot, when you’re on the outside looking in.  This provokes a reaction much like the one we’re seeing here.

The digital enthusiasts feel like the crews on lifeboats, trying to pick up survivors after the Titanic has gone down, only the survivors are shooting at them with pistols, yelling “You smug bastards in the lifeboats! You don’t know what it’s like here in the freezing water! Sure, it’s easy to be warm & dry when you’re in a lifeboat! Aaaaaggghhhh! Bang!” (blows own head off)

Meanwhile, to the guys in the water, what they see is the lifeboat crew saying “Sure, we’ll give you a hand up. But first you have to sing a tune apologizing for how stupid you were while we pee all over your head. And maybe we’ll smack you around with the boathook. But you have it coming.”

And what both sides are missing is that while the lifeboat is a good stop-gap solution, the oars seem to be missing, and the crew in the lifeboat is arguing amongst themselves as to which direction they would row in, should the oars ever be found, while others say that rowing is so old-school, and that what we should concentrate on is inventing a nuclear reactor that would provide endless propulsive energy, while still others think that the whole lifeboat thing is wrong, and we should jump back in the water in the hopes of evolving  gills.

OK, I’ve abused that metaphor enough for now.

I think this guy is flipping off the oncoming dinosaur-killing comet. Or perhaps posting on Slate.

The larger issue here is one that only tangentially gets addressed: how do we support expensive “good journalism” in the New Media, when the biz model there is so stripped-down and bare bones?

A clue comes from a poster who says that assuming that big, heavy NY Times-like investigative reporting is necessary to cure social ills is proceeding from a false premise.

A commenter known only as “Mike” quotes Lippman, who 80 years ago wrote about the dangers inherent in conditioning gov’t and society to depend on newspapers/media ginning up “public outrage” to effect needed societal course corrections.

Nut graf:

My guess is you want a more responsive, well run gov’t. And apparently to get there you want newspapers to report on things, and then for those things to magically to get better. You and people like Ron’s wet dream is for Obama to read their article and be so moved that they will be driven to action. And that’0s the best case scenerio. That’s the expert, closed approach of the past.

What I am saying is maybe instead of spending a month reporting on something and then running one article that I may or may not read, why don’t you build something that interested people can engage with and actually solve problems with?

The Long Island rr and everything else needs to run itself, and when a problem there arises we need citizens who are informed and can solve the problem themselves. We can’t depend on the New York times to report on everything-they can’t do it and we can’t expect them to.

OK, now we’re getting somewhere.

The whole justification for why we need great big newsrooms full of specialists keeps coming back to the argument that if we don’t have them, then Big Stories are going to go unreported, corruption & malfeasance will flourish, and our whole way of life as we know it will collapse.

Reality check: Look outside the window. Collapse currently in progress.

We have had the Big, Well-Staffed Newsrooms. Hasn’t stopped the U.S. from disastrous invasions. Hasn’t stopped corporate corruption and greed.

Hmmm.

Let’s look at this from the Newspaper Next POV – if the “job” we want to accomplish for the public is getting better gov’t, then how do we go about doing that? Is it through producing 110-inch, multipart stories that cost tens of thousands of dollars, man-hours, and that are read only by those most interested in the industry/agency being spotlighted.

As Skip Taft, editor of the Shelby Star said to me, ““People won’t read those 60-inch takeouts anymore.
Maybe on Sunday, but you know people go to work on Monday.  “I mean, what the hell? They’re going to sit there and be late to work just to read some story?  I don’t think that’s realistic.”

I’m working with the NAA on a project aimed at helping newspapers to come up with a way to preserve journalism; new businesses that people will actually read & use & interact with — and that MAKE MONEY.

I’m open to ideas.