Consider this part of an early New Year’s resolution to blog more (I really am going to make a run at it in 2014). Anyway, over the holiday break I, along with many others I’m sure, was having a conversation about Healthcare.gov. I mostly mentioned all the stuff I wrote a few months ago (basically that the things that ruined the project seem to be all the regular stuff — scope creep, too many players — that ruins projects), but I also talked a bit about my disappointment with the media’s reporting of the story. Specifically, the inability to do any serious technical reporting.
The New York Times had the deepest reporting I read and that didn’t come close to actually explaining what went wrong. The story included laughable (to technologists) lines like this: “By mid-November, more than six weeks after the rollout, the MarkLogic database — essentially the website’s virtual filing cabinet and index — continued to perform below expectations, according to one person who works in the command center.” While I understand not everyone is familiar with a database, to call it a virtual filing cabinet and index only says to me that the author has absolutely no idea what a database is.
The point isn’t to pick on the Times, though. Rather it’s just to point out that as technical stories continue to pile up (NSA and Healthcare.gov were amongst the biggest media focus areas of the last three months), we’re going to have to get better at technical reporting. That I still haven’t read a decent explanation of what went wrong technically seems, to me at least, as a major disservice and a dangerous signal for society’s ability to keep up with technical change.
December 28, 2013 // This post is about: government, healthcare.gov, journalism, media, reporting
In response to my little post about describing the past and present, Jim, who reads the blog, emailed me to say it could be referred to as an “atemporal present,” which I thought was a good turn of phrase. I googled it and ran across this fascinating Guardian piece explaining their decision to get rid of references to today and yesterday in their articles. Here’s a pretty large snippet:
It used to be quite simple. If you worked for an evening newspaper, you put “today” near the beginning of every story in an attempt to give the impression of being up-to-the-minute – even though many of the stories had been written the day before (as those lovely people who own local newspapers strove to increase their profits by cutting editions and moving deadlines ever earlier in the day). If you worked for a morning newspaper, you put “last night” at the beginning: the assumption was that reading your paper was the first thing that everyone did, the moment they awoke, and you wanted them to think that you had been slaving all night on their behalf to bring them the absolute latest news. A report that might have been written at, say, 3pm the previous day would still start something like this: “The government last night announced …”
All this has changed. As I wrote last year, we now have many millions of readers around the world, for whom the use of yesterday, today and tomorrow must be at best confusing and at times downright misleading. I don’t know how many readers the Guardian has in Hawaii – though I am willing to make a goodwill visit if the managing editor is seeking volunteers – but if I write a story saying something happened “last night”, it will not necessarily be clear which “night” I am referring to. Even in the UK, online readers may visit the website at any time, using a variety of devices, as the old, predictable pattern of newspaper readership has changed for ever. A guardian.co.uk story may be read within seconds of publication, or months later – long after the newspaper has been composted.
So our new policy, adopted last week (wherever you are in the world), is to omit time references such as last night, yesterday, today, tonight and tomorrow from guardian.co.uk stories. If a day is relevant (for example, to say when a meeting is going to happen or happened) we will state the actual day – as in “the government will announce its proposals in a white paper on Wednesday [rather than ‘tomorrow’]” or “the government’s proposals, announced on Wednesday [rather than ‘yesterday’], have been greeted with a storm of protest”.
What’s extra interesting about this to me is that it’s not just about the time you’re reading that story, but also the space the web inhabits. We’ve been talking a lot at Percolate lately about how social is shifting the way we think about audiences since for the first time there are constant global media opportunities (it used to happen once every four years with the Olympics or World Cup). But, as this articulates so well, being global also has a major impact on time since you move away from knowing where your audience is in their day when they’re consuming your content.
August 5, 2013 // This post is about: content, culture, global, media, time
I really like this little post on “Borges and the Sharknado Problem.” The gist:
We can apply the Borgesian insight [why write a book when a short story is equally good for getting your point across] to the problem of Sharknado. Why make a two-hour movie called Sharknado when all you need is the idea of a movie called Sharknado? And perhaps, a two-minute trailer? And given that such a movie is not needed to convey the full brilliance of Sharknado – and it is, indeed, brilliant – why spend two hours watching it when it is, wastefully, made?
On Twitter my friend
Ryan Catbird responded by pointing out that that’s what makes the
Modern Seinfeld Twitter account so magical: They give you the plot in 140 characters and you can easily imagine the episode (and that’s really all you need).
July 30, 2013 // This post is about: borges, culture, media, seinfeld, sharknado
This morning I woke up to this Tweet from my friend Nick:
It’s great to have friends who discover interesting stuff and send it my way, so I quickly clicked over at read Jeff’s piece on sponsored content and media as a service. I’m going to leave the latter unturned as I find myself spending much less time thinking about the broader state of the media since starting Percolate two-and-a-half years ago. But the former, sponsored content, is clearly a place I play and was curious to see what Jarvis thought.
Quickly I realized he thought something very different than me (which, of course, is why I’m writing a blog post). Mostly I started getting agitated right around here: “Confusing the audience is clearly the goal of native-sponsored-brand-content-voice-advertising. And the result has to be a dilution of the value of news brands.” While that may be true in advertorial/sponsored content/native advertising space, it misses the vast majority of content being produced by brands on a day-to-day basis. That content is being created for social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the such by brands who have acquired massive audiences, frequently much larger than the media companies Jarvis is referring to. Again, I think this exists outside native advertising, but if Jarvis is going to conflate content marketing and native advertising, than it seems important to point out. To give this a sense of scale the average brand had 178 corporate social media accounts in January, 2012. Social is where they’re producing content. Period.
Second issue came in a paragraph about the scalability of content for brands:
Now here’s the funny part: Brands are chasing the wrong goal. Marketers shouldn’t want to make content. Don’t they know that content is a lousy business? As adman Rishad Tobaccowala said to me in an email, content is not scalable for advertisers, either. He says the future of marketing isn’t advertising but utilities and services. I say the same for news: It is a service.
Two things here: First, I agree that the current ways brands create content aren’t scalable. That’s because they’re using methods designed for creating television commercials to create 140 character Tweets. However, to conclude that content is the lousy business is missing the point a bit. Content is a lousy business when you’re selling ads around that content. The reason for this is reasonably simple: You’re not in the business of creating content, you’re in the business of getting people back to your website (or to buy your magazine or newspaper). The whole letting your content float around the web is great, but at the end of the day no eyeballs mean no ad dollars. But brands don’t sell ads, they sell soap, or cars, or soda. Their business is somewhere completely different and, at the end of the day, they don’t care where you see their content as long as you see it. What this allows them to do is outsource their entire backend and audience acquisition to the big social platforms and just focus on the day-to-day content creation.
Finally, while it’s nice to think that more brands will deliver utilities and services on top of the utilities and services they already sell, delivering those services will require the very audience they’re building on Facebook, Twitter, and the like to begin with.
July 29, 2013 // This post is about: brand journalism, content marketing, jeff jarvis, media, native advertising, percoalte
This is three years old, but I just ran across it and it’s just as relevant today as it was then. Apparently in response to Nicholas Carr’s book The Shallows, Steven Pinker wrote a great op-ed about how technology isn’t really ruining all that stuff that technology is constantly claimed to be ruining. A snippet:
The effects of consuming electronic media are also likely to be far more limited than the panic implies. Media critics write as if the brain takes on the qualities of whatever it consumes, the informational equivalent of “you are what you eat.” As with primitive peoples who believe that eating fierce animals will make them fierce, they assume that watching quick cuts in rock videos turns your mental life into quick cuts or that reading bullet points and Twitter postings turns your thoughts into bullet points and Twitter postings.
July 15, 2013 // This post is about: culture, history, media, Technology
