What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [67]
Elegant organization. A paper should provide its community with what Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg gave his. In a sense, papers always have. They organize a community’s knowledge so it can better organize itself. Now there are more tools to do that. Papers can create platforms where neighborhoods, towns, schools, clubs, or people with like interests can share what they know and editors can bubble up news out of that. Once the platform has been created, they should follow Craig Newmark’s advice: Get out of the way.
Beware the cash cow in the coal mine. Papers sat back on their cash flow and assumed something would rescue them. Nothing did. Now papers will die. But the demand for news will not go away; it’s growing. New products and competitors will emerge and there’ll be enough audience and money to support them—if they are not saddled with the costs of printing. Can the papers that survive invent these new products themselves with their cultures? Jim Louderback, CEO of the internet TV company Revision3 (more from him next) has this advice for legacy companies: “Look at how Steve Jobs made the Mac. He took a core group of people and put them in a closet somewhere and they built something completely different. So take a core group of people and put them in Kentucky or St. Louis and build something entirely new.” Rethink everything: What is a news story? Is a topic page a better vehicle for covering local news? How should news be gathered? How should it be shared? How should it be supported? Encourage, enable, and protect innovation.
What does a newspaper look like if it is no longer a newspaper? It will be more of a network with a smaller staff of reporters and editors still providing essential news and recouping value for that. Paper 2.0 will work with and support collections of bloggers, entrepreneurs, citizens, and communities that gather and share news. A newspaper is no longer a printing press that turns out money. But as a network it could be bigger than papers have been in years, reaching deeper into communities, having more of an impact, and adding more value. To get there, it has to act small but think big and see the world differently.
Googlewood: Entertainment, opened up
Entertainment is built on a blockbuster economy: Hits are huge and everything else is merely the price you pay to play the odds. This system has long been fed by scarcity: only so many movie screens, so many hours of TV seen by only so many viewers, and so many shelves in the record store (when there still were records and stores to sell them). The audience was herded together to consume a limited field of choice, and the winners were the products that appealed to the most people. There will always be blockbusters just because some things are that good (great movies) or because we enjoy talking about shared experiences (silly reality shows) or because the hype is too huge to ignore (the Oscars). Hollywood is eternal.
The economics of abundance—the mass of niches, the long tail—has opened up entertainment’s business models in ways we have not seen since the last waves of new media technologies: sound recording, film, broadcast. Today we can watch whatever we want. Hell, we can make whatever we want. It will become harder and harder to turn out blockbusters because there is so much more competition for our attention. But it also will be possible to produce more entertainment more people like—that is our new abundance.
Hollywood was built on a system of control. You could break in only if you made it through a gauntlet of agents, executives, and distributors who controlled the money and access to the audience. The internet is busting that system apart. But we didn’t need to wait for the web to break free. It was possible to be a rebel before. It’s just easier now.
I return to Howard Stern,