It’s been interesting to watch the incredulous reactions to The New York Times’ story on “blogger burnout.” The premise of the article is that the heavy content demands at media sites — and their reliance on page views to drive their business — causes hectic hours and a less than glamorous lifestyle for the journalists who write for these publications.
Such is the state of the media business these days: frantic and fatigued. Young journalists who once dreamed of trotting the globe in pursuit of a story are instead shackled to their computers, where they try to eke out a fresh thought or be first to report even the smallest nugget of news — anything that will impress Google algorithms and draw readers their way.
Unfortunately, an article that merely pieces together the lifestyle of many online journalists has been held up as an affront on New Media (i.e. Foster Kamer’s rant in The Village Voice). The problem with this now really hackneyed statement is that 1) It doesn’t factually refute anything about the lives of modern journalists 2) The New Media vs. Old Media argument is a completely separate issue than what’s described here.
If Mashable or the Huffington Post wrote this article, would we hear this kind of backlash?
No.
You don’t have to be anti New Media to understand that the content demands of sites (New and Old) are often unreasonable, especially when we haven’t worked out a business model to adequately compensate good content creators (New and Old) for the work they do on a proper scale. This makes life hard for many people who work in journalism, regardless if their outlet is two years old, or 150. One way the Times could have hedged against this was adding more examples of blogger burnout at its own company or one like it (it did mention The Christian Science Monitor in passing).
Good journalism — practiced on a blog, a magazine, radio or video medium — requires careful thought and (sometimes, believe it or not) time. I see it on the Times, and I see it on mom and pop blogs, too. But if your business model requires so much content and low common denominator page view metrics to help satisfy the revenue goals of the company (both New and Old are playing that game right now), it’s going to be a hard lifestyle for content creators regardless of the glamor that comes with a byline and a press pass.
Yes, burnout happens in many other professions, such as teaching, firefighting, medicine, and non-profit work. People do write about the intense demands of those professions, and I’m not sure why online journalists should be excluded just so New Media pundits can land a conference speaking engagement where they say “Old Media is so 1.0.”
What I can’t wait for is when the New versus Old media argument begins to blur. We’ve already seen it after Michael Arrington, the creator of one my favorite publications, TechCrunch, rightly lashed out at poor content creation, and I’m sure we’ll see it happen more and more in the future.
Whenever people ask me about my job, I tell them what you’d probably expect: I work for a company that takes technologies with social dynamics that you enjoy on the consumer Web, like Facebook and Twitter, and adapt them to the way we work inside companies. And lately, I’ve called upon activity streams to help communicate the value, focusing on Facebook’s News Feed as the best possible analogy.
Instead of interacting with the pictures you took during the weekend, I explain, you share what document you edited or a transaction you took in your sales system. This gives you and your colleagues the ability to take action on that information in real-time.
But even if the conversation progresses to that level of granularity, and the person I’m talking to agrees that activity streams represent a better way to consume business information and connect with colleagues, I’ve been often dogged by one important question, “Well, what you’re saying might be true. But in the end, how isn’t this just another tool for me to deal with at work? As it is today, I can barely get through my e-mail, which, as you point out, stinks.”
Overall, it’s a question that the Enterprise 2.0 industry — software companies that sell social technologies to businesses — has handled poorly. Even today, we still see blog posts that call for the end of e-mail or bombastic presentations that call upon companies to cast the “dusty” systems of record that they invested millions on into the corner.
We need a more pragmatic approach that tackles the “why isn’t this just another tool?” question more substantively. The phrases like “this is like Facebook for your company” or the “why aren’t your tools at work like the ones you have home?” are tired, old and not good enough. They especially don’t work in communicating the value of enterprise activity streams.
Ultimately, the real value with activity streams will be to provide a social layer on top of your current business systems. Before many companies get there, however, they need some more practical reasons why they need activity streams in the first place.
So let’s get a few things straight:
1. Admit Activity Streams Are Another Tool (It’s OK That It Is)
From a purely practical standpoint, various activity streams, and social software in general, are extra tools layered on top of the current systems a worker has in place.
This is inherently true because we’re not replacing systems of record; social software should be designed to complement them and make them more useful. Activity streams don’t replace your e-mails; it makes the e-mails you receive more relevant. As system updates flow to you and pass downstream more efficiently, and you put filters in place to catch what you want to examine later, your communications (including e-mail) can be for more focused and relevant.
2. When Done Right, Activity Streams Quell, Not Add To, Information Overload
The New York Times has been running an interesting series called “Your Brain on Computers.” In a recent article that detailed how much we tether ourselves to the devices and systems around us, we saw just how acute the information overload problem is at work.
In 2008, people consumed three times as much information each day as they did in 1960. And they are constantly shifting their attention. Computer users at work change windows or check e-mail or other programs nearly 37 times an hour, new research shows.
Activity streams take information overload by the horns and pare it down to size by putting your employees in control of the information they consume. Rather than tab toggle to various applications all day, you can select what information from those systems you wanted pulled to you. You can check on it at your convenience, and it’s not pushed to you against your will like e-mail.
Filtering by tags, groups and transaction types from a system will create control that e-mail notifications (a popular refrain for Activity Stream skeptics) only does minimally, and badly.
3. You don’t have to stare at activity streams all day
Geeks stare at activity streams all day, but normal people don’t. Too often, we try to push the value of Activity Streams (and to a degree microblogging) by presuming in our argument that things would be better if people watched the stream all day. This is simply not realistic.
Someone who isn’t on Facebook all day still gets immense value from it, and the same is true with enterprise activity streams, mainly because:
- Activity streams encourage relevance. Today, if you went on vacation, you can return to work and go through all the e-mails you missed, but you’ll be limited to what information you were addressed on, and a good portion of those messages will be largely irrelevant. With Activity Streams and microblogging, you can seek out keywords and tags relevant to your job, and find out what happened while you were away that really mattered (you can also look at ranked content).
- Activity streams aggregate information from systems. Similarly, you don’t need to go to each system of record to see what you missed while you were away. Instead, you set up filters and aggregate the specific information you want from each of these systems, as well as the information generated by colleagues that matter to you.
- Activity streams and microblogging are reply-optional. The reply expectation we have with e-mail doesn’t apply. Although Activity Streams are persistent in their real-time nature, you can passively examine the information that’s relevant to you as many times a day as you find valuable. This, again, speaks to the power of pull (versus push).
4. They’re Cheaper and Easier
Some of the biggest winners in the move to enterprise activity streams are casual (or non) users of traditional enterprise systems. Today, to get information locked in an ERP or CRM system, you must be a licensed user of that system or be on an e-mail list that pulls certain information from them (that, most likely, someone other than you decided might be relevant).
Now, since companies have the ability to utilize open web standards to pull vital information into an enterprise activity stream, a company’s employees can get more from their systems of record, without having to be trained on one of these complicated systems.
Like many, I spend the majority of my day at work in a web-browser. I detest client-based e-mail like Outlook. I only begrudgingly use the locally installed iTunes because it’s a pain to circumvent it and still enjoy owning a Macbook and iPhone. During the day at work, I rely on social technologies to connect me with the people, services and information that help me make my life meaningful and productive.
For businesses who must purchase technology for their employees, then, this propensity that someone like me has should serve as an advantage. The employees should be able to launch a web-browser and get their day started with the newest and most up to date tools possible. Provided the necessary security and privacy requirements are in place, the company can then simply pay for it like it’s a magazine subscription, with little (if any) work in the background.
Check out this video, put together buy Box.net, Socialtext (disclosure: where I work) and a few other vendors, called I Choose the Cloud, that talks about the benefits of this better way, and how it departs from the ways of old.
While I’m a huge fan of Facebook Connect and its platform technology, I don’t like signing up for things that, well, I didn’t sign up for. Inside Pandora Radio, I can now see what songs and artists my Facebook friends liked (and I assume they can see what I liked). This isn’t necessarily bad in principle, but I would have appreciated having some say in the matter.
On bottom left, you can see my friend Diana liked this Phoenix song.
I tweeted a few days ago that I’d never set this up, and a fellow Twitter citizen informed me that Facebook basically just opted me into it. I’m sure they put out news about this (maybe at F8, and is lumped in the “Like” button announcement?). I’ve been insanely busy with work stuff, but if I haven’t read about this program, I’m comfortable saying that means about 99 percent of Facebook’s user base hasn’t heard about it, either.
To see if you’re opted into this program, go to Account in the top right corner of your home page. Click on “Privacy Settings” and then “Applications and Websites.” Click on the Instant Personalization Pilot Program, and you’ll be taken to this page (where, in my case, the box was already checked).
You might want to check.
Thoughts from Vampire Weekend Concert in Oakland
I had a great Monday evening in Oakland last night, seeing Vampire Weekend for the first time with friends and family. It’s rare that I connect with bands lyrically anymore, so this band has quickly become important to me during the past year.
The lead singer of Vampire Weekend, Ezra Koenig, writes songs that often read like short stores (check out this New Yorker article on him and the band). Vampire Weekend songs tell rich tales; the characters stick with you. Many of their songs have African beats that, coupled with Koenig’s bohemian cadence, draws comparisons to Paul Simon (a comparison that the same article says they apparently bristle at). Obviously, I’m not a music reviewer, so I’m keeping this brief and mostly for my own records. The show was great. I think they should take a few more risks on stage, but that’s based on my belief (not held by all) that songs played live should have a fun new layer added to them. Below, you’ll find the setlist from last night. They played my favorite song off the new album, “Run.”
Robert Scoble’s post pushing for more real-time “curation” could represent one of the greatest challenges facing people who increasingly rely on sites like Twitter and Facebook to communicate with friends, family and colleagues. As we attempt to chronicle our lives by utilizing those services, the ability to compartmentalize and organize information in a way that makes sense to us will be essential.
Everyday, we post content that conveys what’s on our mind, shows where we’ve been, or offers a glimpse into a particular moment in time. It could be a photo album you took on a trip to Big Sur, or a status message describing the jubilant moment of a walk-off home run at Fenway Park. If someone wants to ever say Facebook or Twitter doesn’t matter, they should look no further than these moments people capture. Because for every stupid YouTube video we might upload, there is also a piece of content that rings with meaning and depth.
Each of these information artifacts, piece by piece, tell a story about us. And right now, there’s no good mechanism that allows you to capture, make sense and arrange those moments in a digital scrapbook (at least, there’s not a tool that mainstream web users can see in front of them). As Scoble noted, blogs and e-mail don’t work well enough for this endeavor, and they certainly aren’t visually appealing enough.
Today, we can go back and find things we posted, but the experience can be overwhelming and inefficient. Search — and now social search — allows you to go back and find things you shared with friends, but you will likely have to sieve through tons of irrelevant content that might share the same keyword (especially on Twitter). On Facebook, it doesn’t seem to go very far back in time (I’d still like to know how far back it goes — I can’t find a reliable figure).
Some have contended that Clay Shirky’s theory of Filter Failture would solve the information overload problem that some real-time Web services create for people. Twitter hashtags, for instance, allow you to wall off tweets that people tag (#), such as #redsox or #sfgiants. But even though you have a filter and set up a column for it in a third-party service, the stream of information cascades down and eventually out of sight. Filter tools don’t stop the stream; they just slow it down for your eyes a bit. The real-time information stream of a Facebook or Twitter homepage keeps going. On and on. Relentlessly. Persistently. And that, I think, is the opportunity for real-time curation.
If things like tags and columns act as filters, real-time curation tools should act as a stopper or cork. A curation mechanism should let you bottle up moments that make sense to you. Unlike search, it doesn’t have to be linear, relevant to an algorithm, or relevant to anyone other than yourself and the people close to you.
But in order for real-time curation to be beneficial to normal people, I think it must have some common attributes and avoid some old traps for organizing digital information.
1. Let’s call it something else. I don’t think archive is the right word (too boring), but real-time curation is too abstract for normal people. Normal people who use social networking services don’t even call those sites “real-time” technologies. Something down to earth like “scrapbook” might work, but there’s not shortage of people in the tech community that love to coin phrases, so we should expect a better naming convention to emerge.
2. It must be easy to do later. The notion that normal people will want to do the heavy lifting for curation in the moment is unrealistic. While we can already “favorite” or “like” things on Facebook or Twitter, if you do that enough, it’s still creates a crowded laundry list of content that takes forever to sort through later. We need an easier way to save things to arrange or scrapbook later.
3. Facebook matters more. Since Twitter is not the stream of the mainstream, Facebook should realize that it has a tremendous opportunity to be the digital scrapbook of people’s lives. The information people share here is more scrapbook-worthy than most of the stuff they share on Twitter because the network people keep on Facebook is more private, the content mediums they employ more diverse (not only textual). Unfortunately, memories on Facebook today float downstream and eventually of out sight. The only thing Facebook has an organized system for is pictures.
4. Frame it as an opportunity for people who don’t blog. Most of my friends don’t have blogs, at least ones they actively update. They don’t care to hack that much prose all the time. But they don’t find it difficult to write a status message or upload an album. Real-time curation should be marketed as an opportunity to chronicle those events without blogging.
5. The big guns shouldn’t leave this to third-party developers. Facebook, Google and Twitter must do this themselves for it to be popular. Saying “look at how our developers leveraged our open APIs to build real-time curation tools” is a sentence that won’t see the light of day with 95 percent of social networking users. Of course, they might wait for a third-party developer to figure it out and then copy build it themselves.
My post last week about what the Reader Elite Means for Journalism Schools set off a stimulating and (at times) emotional debate about the future — and overall validity — of J-Schools, and the profession as a whole. It struck a nerve with professors from Toronto to Arkansas — many of whom dedicated their professional careers to traditional media endeavors and now pass that knowledge onto their students.
Blogging in response to my post, the Dean of UNC’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication made the case that her school had moved their curriculum firmly and confidently into the 21st century to position students for successful careers. She invited me to visit, an offer I hope to take her up on sometime.
We are creating a student-led news lab where students can experiment and apply their considerable creative talents to production and dissemination of news–to wherever audiences are. Faculty, too, will use that new lab to study news and communication issues that will pay off in better and more effective ways of communicating.” — Jean Folkerts, Dean of UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
Others were just plain mad. Conrad Fink, the Morris Professor of Newspaper Management and Strategy at the University of Georgia, commented that the “author of this column knows nothing of what modern, progressive colleges of journalism teach, and until he has done his homework, he should sit down and be quiet.”
One disclosure for Professor Fink and others who commented in a similar vein: I’m a graduate of the Northeastern School of Journalism, walking away with high marks and a great relationship with many of the professors there. While four years have passed (yikes!) and the revolution of social technologies and the further deterioration of traditional media organizations have been even more rapid and profound, I have kept up with the state of my school and others.
But more importantly, the responses of the past few days spawned some great ideas about the future of people whose full time job it is to create interesting and compelling content, and here’s the ones I thought were the most interesting (and happy to hear more).
If Journalism Schools Survive….
One of the central arguments I made against journalism schools in their current form is that they fail to teach kids a specialty that they can call their own with any credibility. Luckily, some people have laid out possible solutions.
The best one I saw is from Dan Gillmor, who suggested I read his February 2010 post on “The Future of Journalism Education.” He picks up on this expertise and credibility problem of non-expert journalists who really don’t understand the professions and mechanisms of the markets they cover well enough. In my mind, this whole post is required reading, but a few excerpts worth sharing on what he thinks one of these schools should look like.
Encourage, and require in some cases, cross-disciplinary learning and doing. We’d create partnerships around the university, working with business, engineering/computer science, film, political science, law, design and many other programs. The goals would be both to develop our own projects and to be an essential community-wide resource for the future of local media.
Teach students not just the basics of digital media but also the value of data and programming to their future work. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they need to become programmers; but they absolutely need to know how to communicate with programmers. We’d also encourage computer science undergraduates to become journalism graduate students, so they can help create tomorrow’s media.
Require all students to learn basic statistics, survey research and fundamental scientific methodology. The inability of journalists to understand what they’re reading is one of journalism’s — and society’s — major flaws.” — Dan Gillmor, Mediactive
One of my former colleagues, Tom Wailgum, suggested we require a journalism major become a double major in another topic, an idea I think could be a temporary solution for the next few years.
I graduated from J-school 16 years ago, and I often wonder what my school and others are actually “teaching” students these days, given everything that has happened. In retrospect, I wish I had perused a dual degree in journalism and business or technology….it would be hugely beneficial if J-schools required dual degrees (or heavy concentrations) in industries, fields or whatever specialized area students find most interesting. And then pushed the students to intern or work inside those industries or corporate departments, for instance. It’s clear that the end of the “general assignment reporter” era is here.” — Tom Wailgum, Senior Editor, CIO
On Writing and communicating…
I think the strongest argument I heard for keeping journalism schools alive was the deterioration of kids’ ability to express themselves in clear, succinct sentences. If this becomes a dying skill — which it is — then there will always be jobs for journalism students at companies where people don’t want to look stupid in communicating to the public.
Nancy Hanus of Journalism Junkie wrote:
So journalism schools help ensure that students who do want to communicate for a living have the tools. Yes, some students can get by without that training, just as some people have become business owners without going to business school or become marketers without getting a marketing degree. But I believe the skills being taught in J-schools help students have the tools to be as successful as possible in any area of communication.”
This argument also brought up an important point about my personal background in the context of my anti-journalism school rant (raised to me privately by my brother, who keeps me grounded and honest): Prior to arriving at Journalism School, I had been blessed with an education that isn’t enjoyed by most around the country (like, say, 95 percent of the country or more). Before J-School, I was mentored by some people whose prose I could never hope to emulate, and I’m in my parent’s debt for giving me that opportunity. As such, my argument that you should already have writing skills down pat by the time you get college is a weak one, especially when you consider the state of public education for many in this country. This is something Tony Rogers of About.com rightly called me out on.
Well, as someone who’s actually run a college journalism program for more than a decade I can tell you that there are a great many students who do need the kind of training found in such programs. These students are often bright, capable and enthusiastic, but to expect them to somehow pick up the skills they need on the fly is both unrealistic and unfair.”
Still, I don’t think that’s a good enough argument that we should keep all these journalism schools; it’s an indictment of our have and have-not education system. All students, regardless of profession or major, should be given the opportunity to learn how to express themselves clearly. This is the same for ethics training and the law (which came up in many comments as an argument for J-Schools as well). Those are issues that should be taught in general education, especially since anyone with an internet connection can create content.
As always, the conversation continues…
Gillmor’s post, to me, appears to be the strongest yet, but I’d be happy to hear more…
What The Reader Elite Means for Journalism Schools
In the wake of my last post about The Reader Elite, I had several discussions with friends in the media industry about what such an audience would mean for journalism as an academic concentration. The Reader Elite is what I call the group of people that will emerge as paywalls begin to ramp up in earnest. The Reader Elite is affluent, well educated, and small in size, and perhaps the only group that will be willing to pay money for professional content creators.
Since that audience will be small — and thus the amount of people whose sole job it is to serve them will be smaller, too — is there any purpose for having journalism schools anymore?
In the coming years, I think most journalism schools will shrink or disappear. The ones remaining will be drastically different, with students focusing on topics that don’t relate to content creation at all. Moreover, some of the best new professional content creators won’t attend journalism schools. They will hail from different majors and degrees, like business, computer science and finance. The notion of being a professional journalist who is merely an objective observer of a topic or industry will officially fade in the coming years. This is a good thing, since it was a stupid fantasy that it should be like that anyway.
Even with the Web 2.0 decade now closed, journalism schools still teach decades-old methods that make no sense for the current media landscape. Many think that adding a “Web journalism” or a few HTML hacking classes can bring them into the 21st century, but it doesn’t. Journalism school teaches kids to be reporters, and little else. They learn to call people and collect information to construct a story, and they boil it down into a “he said, she said” story.
Whether it’s captured in text, sound or video, the “he said, she said” story professes to put a journalist on the sidelines as an objective observer. It presumes that regardless of their own opinions, if you can get quotes and information from two opposing sides and package them into a story, you have been a good journalist. If you’re really good, you might even be able to appear on television as an “expert.” Students in J-Schools are thus taught to worship what my friend Stowe Boyd would call the Church of Journalism.
The problem is, most journalists today aren’t experts; they merely report about people that are. This creates a barrier and credibility problem that people paid little attention to before the Web because the journalists’ identities to regular people were less transparent, and less social. Even those journalists on TV whose face you did see — you couldn’t click on a link to see their background, disclosures, or why they might be qualified to be reporting on a certain topic.
Now you can go on the Web and find out. The less you can find on them, the more skeptical you are of their analysis.
On the Web, where social connections reign supreme, trust and truth matter more than objectivity. For this reason, journalism schools in the way they are currently comprised don’t work. For my money, one of the better business journalists to emerge in the coming years probably went to business school and interned at a multinational firm instead of a newspaper. In the Church of Journalism, this was deemed an ugly “conflict of interest”; For new content creation on the social Web, this is viewed as great experience and credibility provided it’s disclosed. This will have great benefits. If more of the financial journalists worked in finance first, maybe they could have blown the whistle on certain practices before it was too late and we were plunged into a near-catastrophic recession.
But this argument about expertise and credibility glosses over an important question: Is teaching people how to create quality content important? I think it is, but that’s something that should occur in elementary school education and in high school, utilizing the variety of tools the Web offers and making sure kids know how to write and express themselves in a clear way. At a certain point, as it concerns doing content creation for a profession, it’s also innate: You have it or you don’t.
Perhaps a content creation class should be offered in college, but I think it should pale in comparison to the amount of classes that focus on the topic a content creator covers.
Journalism schools were made to serve the Church of Journalism and the vanity contained within it (“Oh, I’m a journalist actually.”). The foundations of that cathedral have been shaken to the core because there is less money to validate its existence and shield the inadequacies of some of the people in it. My advice to kids currently in journalism school is to, at the very least, find a niche and expertise that isn’t about content creation itself. If you do, you might be one of the lucky ones to serve the Reader Elite.
The Reader Elite
One of the stupidest books I’ve ever read was The Media Elite. Knowing the premise, I never would have voluntarily read the thing, but I had to for a media and politics class in college. The central goal of the book was to use quantitative data to paint journalists as liberal, Godless, secular creatures. Rich, powerful and connected, media elite mostly hail from the northeast, the book explained, and they show tolerance towards homosexuals and minorities (I guess that’s supposed to be bad?). Though the book doesn’t say so overtly, we’re supposed to deduce this is why they use their journalistic work to pick on poor Republicans in office.
The authors of the book might be happy to know that the pretentious Old Media Elite is dying, but it has nothing to do with their politics and everything to do with their inability to make money on the Web. Their demise will give rise to the Reader Elite, a small group whose influence and effect on the future of content will be far more significant and long-lasting on media and democracy. Because while the Web itself democratizes information by providing the ability to easily access, publish and share information, it’s also contributing to a disparity in the quality of content that will lead to a “have and have-not” gap, much like we see today with our education system and health care policy. As free ad-based models fail online, those who wish to consume information produced by people whose sole job it is to gather and compile content will be a select few. Those people willing to subsidize content creators will dictate the future of truly investigative journalism as we know it.
The move to a pay model will be the first step in giving rise to the Reader Elite. Pay-for-media sites will employ smaller staffs that will produce headier content to satisfy its needs. Paying up to hundreds of dollars a year for their content boutiques of choice, the Reader Elite will expect stories, videos and podcasts put together by onsite content creators across the world. While the Reader Elite will generally be progressive and see immense value from social technologies, they don’t see Twitter, Facebook and mom and pop blogs as full-blown replacements. They view the social interactions online with those tools as a complement to the quality content they pay a lot of money for, not a substitute or a social revolution that displaces it entirely.
But how many people will comprise the Reader Elite? It’s tough to tell. In this week’s Pew Study detailing people’s reading habits and propensity to pay for content, we learned that only a fraction of online news readers would pay for content, and we can assume it will even be even less than reported since some percentage of these righteous respondents might not put the money where their mouth is.
According to Pew:
Our survey, produced with the Pew Internet & American Life Project, finds that only about a third of Americans (35%) have a news destination online they would call a “favorite,” and even among these users only 19% said they would continue to visit if that site put up a pay-wall.
In the meantime, perhaps one concept identifies most clearly what is going on in journalism: Most news organizations — new or old — are becoming niche operations, more specific in focus, brand and appeal and narrower, necessarily, in ambition.
In reaction to the study, Jeff Jarvis rightly noted that online news sites need to work on engagement and loyalty, but I’m not sure it matters much at this point. Most of these sites will die in the face of planning a business for the many when they only have the loyalty of a few who actually see the societal need for what they provide. The organizations that survive, as well as the new ones that rise from the ashes, will be beholden to a small readership (the Reader Elite), and they will have intense demands that will weed out the talentless and the vanity seekers who still work inside these organizations right now.
With the Reader Elite, the readers become the niche, not the content itself. In fact, they demand content that’s broad in scope and takes a holistic view of the world, from international news to politics, to business, finance and technology. They will want stories full of depth, that employ the kind of research and reporting rigor that current big media organizations (with a couple exceptions) aren’t even practicing, and that independent mom and pop sites, while not beholden to legacy and big media ownership, unfortunately lack the resources to provide. The Economist, to date, is probably the best example of where the Reader Elite thrives (in a bipartisan way and in large numbers, which is quite remarkable).
The argument of a Reader Elite is, of course, elitist. It presumes new media and social technologies can’t plug the gap in what will be lost if we don’t have quality professional content creators. So let me just say it (and I’d get shrieks if I were in Austin this week): It’s true, these technologies aren’t a panacea. Try as we may with our use of transparent social tools and easy do-it-yourself publishing platforms, it will be no substitute for paying a really smart, ethical person to focus on it all day as their job (notice the adjectives there to describe such a person, because we know some people who are paid to do it right now do a lousy job. Luckily, the thinning out of the industry and the demands of the Reader Elite will eliminate these people pretty quickly).
But the Reader Elite, progressive as they are, should not be satisfied with this elitist model. They should be outraged, especially if they embrace social technologies and the democracy of the Web. Their progressive values should tell them that access to quality content by the fourth estate is a right, not a privilege. One thought (already being implemented in some places) is to dump their money into non-profits and an NPR-like model for providing quality content for people that need it (even if they don’t know they need it yet), and then retweet and share the hell out of it.
Despite the fast rate of Old Media decline, the emergence of the Reader Elite remains several years down the road. The proverbial shoe needs to drop even further before the general public realizes what’s being lost. The inability to finance quality content creators is something only Old Media people care about right now. The New Media Elite will care about it eventually, too, once their “I told you so” self-satisfaction abates, and they have less to link to and huge passages to excerpt from — and they’ll find themselves disrupted as well.
The erosion of media will be felt by the many when it hits close to home. The inflection point will happen when a community finally realizes that no one is going down to our local city halls, companies and institutions, everyday as a part of their job, to check on the powers that be and report back to people who have other things to worry about (like their own jobs) during the day. Yes, we all have publishing tools in our pocket to participate ourselves, but we can’t make time to do what they do. It sounds like a corny example, but this will start happening soon, if it hasn’t already.
Until then, the Reader Elite will be the guardians, and I can only hope those of us who are apart of that group will work to remedy this very profound problem.
Why People Make Business Processes
For years, we’ve tried to automate so much of our lives with technology at both home and work. Concerning the latter category, that means drumming up some rigid set of guidelines woven into our technology pipeline that we think workerbees from the cube farms to the factory floor will follow in order to ensure the utmost efficiency.
Philosophically, won’t we ever learn that’s a colossal waste of time, resources and money?
People, not rigid enterprise systems, create business processes, and that’s really where the opportunity for using social software has been having profound effects on the way work gets done.
Companies in need of social software suffer specific hurdles and logjams from existing technology that make their processes inefficient, and their employees slow to deal with market changes and new opportunities. Most often, the hierarchical technology they have in place (from Enterprise Resource Planning to call center software to old document and content management systems) forces them into working a way that isn’t natural, creating unnecessary redundancies and communication breakdowns.
Because these systems are so inflexible and algorithmically designed without people in mind, they fail to connect employees with the proper colleagues and information they need to do their job. Enterprise leaders have started to notice. A recent Gartner report (subscription required) that surveyed enterprise business unit heads highlighted this issue, noting that “the quality of information remains iffy and calls into question whether business unit executives can make smart and effective decisions. One in five business unit executives rated the quality of information from corporate databases and information systems as poor, an ominous percentage as economic expansion looms on the horizon.”
Accessing quality information can be alleviated by supporting processes that match the way people work, not the way we think they might work. From the standpoint of basic workflow, social software lets people change business processes themselves on the fly (Groups forming around projects really helps in this regard). It empowers them to create a set of processes that makes sense for their company at any given time (day or hour) because the tools are lightweight, encouraging transparency and sharing. If your business changes tomorrow — as it often can — the employees have the ability to alter the process without calling IT or asking someone to hack a bunch of java code.
This flexibility means social software can be applied to a wide range of business processes and use cases. I love seeing it everyday in my case study work. Companies like GM use online workspaces to share research before and after events for their researchers. At the Ohio-based Industrial Mold & Machine, the factory floor workers can now communicate with the people in the office via secure microblogging.
People make processes, and any technology they use should reflect that reality.
/cgl
