Dana Blankenhorn

The War Against Oil is a War for the Economy

---

Think of this as Volume 12, Number 20 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

---

Want to get the economy out of the ditch? 

Make something. Make something new, something valuable, something real, something with a ready market. 

Despite what critics felt there was something real about the Internet, which defined the 1990s. The Internet accelerates the transfer of knowledge, and of any knowledge-based value store. It's the most powerful economic accelerant since the creation of the telegraph.

By contrast there was nothing ever real about the economic drivers of this decade, financial services and homes. Not that homes aren't real. But the value of a home has nothing to do with its cost or even its location. It is a measure of the economic value left out there to buy homes. A home sucks money, it only creates money for those who build, assuming someone buys. Thus homes became a natural sinkhole for the confederate money of this decade, soaking up as much as the banksters could create from thin air.

Now that the economy has stopped falling this question becomes vital. On what will we base the next boom? 

The answer is obvious. Energy. 

Big, Rich and Ignorant

Frank Rich of The New York Times has offered a thoughtful, provocative piece about The American Press on Suicide Watch. 

There's only one thing wrong with it. 

Mr. Rich still  doesn't know how his employer's business works.

I, on the other hand, actually took a publishing course at Medill, so let me state this as clearly as I can. No one pays for their newspaper. They pay for its delivery, for the infrastructure of trucks and men who get that paper from the printing press to your door. 

Newsgathering costs have always come from advertising. Always. That's how it was in Joe Medill's day, and that's how it is a century later. 

Where newspapers screwed up was in forgetting the purpose of advertising and their business role. The purpose of advertising is to sell stuff. A publisher's job is to help the businesses he is advocating for and organizing to sell stuff. 

The ad space on any page, whether real or virtual, is just the last piece in this puzzle. The ad space is a billboard which the advertiser fills. 

Why does he fill your empty billboard? This is the question newspapers used to be very good at answering. He fills it because the medium can prove that an ad placed with it will reach his target market, and that some of the people in that market will act on the ad. 

Print newspapers, and magazines, long answered this question with surveys. Not just surveys of their readers or their advertisers, but surveys of the target market. These surveys would show, for instance, that "46% of the people who will buy a new car next year in New York read The Times," or that "you can reach 50,000 millionaires for less with The Times than with any other medium."

Ad agencies used these kinds of surveys in planning campaigns. They would say, "we have to reach X number of people who have Y characteristics Z number of times," and if their creative was right it would result in $ worth of sales. 

Newspapers, in the print era, were never just at the billboard end of the sales funnel. They actually went deeper down the funnel than that. 

The Media Civil War

---

Think of this as Volume 12, Number 17 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

---

Out of sight of readers there is a true Civil War going on within the world of  journalism.

Part of it is the old shrinking water hole problem. Some people actually fear that advertising is disappearing, that it will soon cease to exist. That's how scarce advertisers are on the ground these days.

The evidence is all around them. Newspapers have disappeared from many cities and will disappear from many more. Magazines have gone under without telling anyone. Even giant TV companies are fading fast. 

One place to watch the fun is at CNBC. Right-wing talent has become increasingly strident. At the same time management has brought in Obama supporters like Dr. Howard Dean to add balance. This is supposed to be a business channel but it has become more like a non-stop Crossfire show from the 1990s. 

What this is providing is opportunity. Advertisers who step up to the plate now can get enormous concessions from any media property they talk with. Entrepreneurs who launch now can get traffic, attention, and positioning for the next recovery -- which will happen.

Question is, what do you invest in?

You invest in people like Emptywheel, aka Marcy Wheeler (above). 

A new writer's life

There is good news today.

My daughter Robin (right) will have her Associates Degree in a few months and has been accepted to both her first-choice schools for the B.A., one in Texas and one in Washington State.

She's leaving home, bye-bye.

It's a bittersweet moment and a long time coming. She's 21. She has looked down the barrel of both ADD and dyslexia, and faced down both. She loves reading, even if her decoding is slow. 

I have seen her writing and it can be better than mine, because her process is internal. She writes after she has everything in her. My process is external. I write as though I'm talking, and nearly as quickly. 

There are advantages to both methods. Internal writing is often deeper, more heartfelt, and the first draft may be more complete. External writing is what journalists do, and it's what I've been since I was old enough to want to be anything. 

The writers we remember are internal writers. Those we read most days are external. That's the way it is. 

But back to her. Some advice follows:

The market hits paradise

Having watched a number of recessions during my journalism career one constant remained. Those journalists who most  sucked up to the hierarchy, who served their owners, were insulated and isolated from the marketplace.

They became the journalism "profession" equivalent of tenured professors. They were pundits, with high salaries for the Washington cocktail circuit, and with no responsibility other than tell the rest of us what to think.

In 2009 those days are over. Suck on this, Maureen Dowd. You too, Tom Friedman (and your wife).

A Different Kind of Publisher Wanted

During the bottom of the last recession, I self-published a book on Moore's Law (right).

The idea was to examine how technology had changed the world in my lifetime, to look at the past, present and future of Moore's Law, its antecedents, and its relations.

A marketing "expert" suggested I call the finished book  The Blankenhorn Effect and I did -- to my shame.

Not that I don't like me. I do, very much. Not that I don't like being associated with change. It's my beat. But in retrospect that title was over-the-top. Change isn't about me. I'm just an observer of change.

In the end the book sold only a very few copies. I didn't push it very hard. But it's still available at Google Books, and I still get a regular stream of checks from an online publisher.

These checks inspired me to work up an update, which I have now begun. And I would really like a publisher, although it will have a new title.

Moore's Law 2010: Better and Better, Faster and Faster

I'm rocking right along. I've actually edited half the old draft. I'm planning on adding a few chapters so it's not really halfway done. But the work itself is going amazingly well.

Now for the really important bit.

The Online Newspaper of 2009

I have now been a paid blogger (not here -- there) for over four years.

While my former colleagues in daily journalism are dropping like flies I'm hanging in -- thanks largely to my wife.

I have learned a lot.

• Readers genuinely prefer style over substance. I could spend all day researching and interviewing about a new tool and draw no audience. I could spend five minutes writing, in effect, "Microsoft sucks" and people rush to the rail.
• Brands matter. By that I mean a publisher brand can define your audience based on the advertisers and readers it targets. Most individuals can't do this. A few did by getting in early and staying both persistent and consistent. But publishers have proven their worth in the online world.
• Incentives need to match expectations. I am proud to say that ZDNet has a business model, one that apparently works. But that model is entirely geared toward page views, not editorial quality. It could be tweaked and, over time, I expect it to be tweaked. Tweak yours regularly.

All this said those who claim the "daily newspaper is dead" are only talking about newspapers that were dead long ago. Let me tell you a few things that can turn your daily paper into an online money-maker.

Time to Lean on Rupert

I am trapped in a hotel where the only entertainment option is Fox News.

I didn't know how bad it is. They were talking about the Employee Free Choice Act, and even their headline lied. I'm not talking about spin, I'm taking about blatant falsehood.

The EFCA will give employees who seek union representation a choice between a card check and an election. If the employer does not want the union, this is the only way organizing is possible. An election "campaign" is just an opportunity for employer intimidation. Intimidation in this case means firing those leading the campaign on the other side, and their sympathizers.

There are ways to spin this, to claim the effect is something different. You can, at minimum, offer the other side's arguments, even while disparaging them.

None of this was allowed on the Fox air. Instead, worker freedom was said to be entirely on the side of fighting the act, and no one in their right mind felt any different, except a few "union activists" and the "Obama Administration," which need to "pay off" the activists.

This was not journalism. If no facts contrary to what your boss says to conclude are allowed into what you're doing then you are not a journalist. You're a propagandist.

It was Orwellian.

Open Source Process

The video above is more than a good song. It says a lot about the times we live in.

First, it's a collaboration among musicians in Africa, Europe, America and Asia who did not meet to record. They are singing the song of a Jamaican.

Many of these people come from poor backgrounds, yet they are able to use the same basic technology to make their contributions. See the headphones? Tracks are layered on tracks. The music is built using the Internet, the files passed around, additions made much as you would build a software program.

Which is the point. This collaboration was possible because people were using compatible technologies, because they had free interconnection, and because they shared a universal vocabulary.

In this case music. Other universal languages include mathematics, where equations look the same to a Chinese scholar or a Russian, and Java, which (like any computer language) uses the same structure whether you're Indian or Peruvian.

Why Republicans Appear Stupid

Previously I have noted that each political generation represents a change in political assumptions, and a change in the dominant medium.

One thing I had not realized before was it also represents a change in how decisions are made.

The Nixon Thesis was based on TV, and decisions were made based on PR-spinning think tanks. Ideas came out of these ideologically-driven institutions, were pushed into the mainstream media, became conventional wisdom and were then acted upon.

Notice the contrast with how things worked under the New Deal Thesis which preceded it. There decisions were made based on academic research. Ideas came out of universities, were then pushed through Presidential appointees, and newspaper columnists then validated them.

Republicans are continuing to do things the Nixon way. That's why they seem stupid. The mistake made by otherwise-smart people like Digby is to assume this is how things always are. It has always been that way in her memory, how could it ever change?

We're seeing right now how it changes, and what is changing . Village journalists are frankly amazed that not only did the President get his stimulus bill through, but that he remains as popular as ever. He appears to be defying political gravity and thus, they assume, he must be brought back to Earth.

This assumption is especially virulent over at The Politico, the Pajamas Media of the Chattering Classes. Despite the fact that this site exists on the Internet, it is created in the same way, and by the same people, we see on TV. It is thus the penny paper of The Village.

What changed?