Dana Blankenhorn

Break From Google

Once news distribution became free, almost 30 years ago, publishers forgot what made the business go and they all went for scale.

What makes journalism go is knowing your audience. You don’t write for everyone, but for specific readers. You monetize the credibility you earn based on who you do business with.

The Internet opened the whole market to every publisher. It also opened the whole market to every advertiser. What Google and later Facebook did was let businesses reach just the people they wanted for a “run of network” rate, which kept declining as Web content expanded.

This broke the connection between writers and the audience. We stopped trying to write for specific sub-segments of the population and went for the mass market. Advertisers took the job of targeting in-house, using the Web only for branding and spot sales.

I said from the beginning that was a mistake. This is obvious now. Along the way we have raised a generation of publishers on the mass market model, and as they’ve come to power, they’ve lost the plot.

The Creativity Economy

The ignorance of Washington continues to amaze.

Reporters are all claiming Republicans “must” win in 2022, because the economy will be destroyed by inflation.

The economy will not be destroyed by inflation. The economy isn’t what it was.

Yesterday’s economy was based on resources. The economy before that was built on the rising efficiency of manufacturing. Today’s economy is based on technology and Moore’s Law. It’s built on clouds and devices. It’s centered on software. The gating factor in a tech economy is what I have called “human capital” – trained, empowered brains.

This is the creativity economy. (Shown is Richard Florida, who has  been talking about this since 2002.)

Newswriting in the 21st Century

I was taught two ways to write a story in the 1970s. (That's me in 1981.)

First was the inverted pyramid. Describe the story in a sentence. Then summarize the most important point. Keep going, in order or importance, so an editor can snip the story, from the bottom, and always have the gist of it.

Second was a circle. Grab the reader in your first paragraph. Then walk around the story until it’s told. Deliver a sting ending, a thank you for reading. This was my specialty. It worked great in magazines.

In 2021, the Internet has two different ways of delivering the news.

The first is what I call the “oh no.” This has replaced the inverted pyramid. If it’s good news, say “yeah, but” in the first paragraph, then describe how things are likely to go bad. If it’s bad news, scream “oh noes” and describe how things can only get worse.

The second is what I call “hide the pickle.” This has replaced the circle. Promise you’re going to say something important in the headline. Then don’t say it. Lead the reader on for paragraph after paragraph, page after page, filling their eyes with ads, until you finally get to some point (always less than was promised).

Yeah, But…Watch Out

I hate to sound like some 66 year old curmudgeon, but I was taught a different style of newswriting.

The reverse pyramid had you describe the event in one sentence, then make the most important point about it in another sentence, and so on until the story was told. This let the desk snip the story off at any point and still have its essence, which would be laid down into print.

What I preferred and practice was the magazine style of a circular story. You hit them with a hard lead paragraph, to grab the reader and draw them in. You walk around the story, describing it from every angle. Then you deliver a tag ending, a thank you for reading that puts the whole thing into context. You ensnare the reader, but you also satisfy them.

Today everything is written in a different style. I call it “yeah, but…watch out.”

In this style every sentence, starting with the first, includes a contrary thesis. That is, unless it’s bad news, in which case you pile more on top like whipped cream on a sundae.

Google vs. Oracle: No Takesie Backsies

The world of open source software is based on one truth above all.

No takesie-backsies.

Once code goes open source it doesn’t go back. You can create a new version, create a new license around it, and sell that. But the old code remains free to see, free to fix, and free to change.

Oracle hates open source with a passion. Nothing else represents such an existential threat. Oracle’s business model is based on charging high and rising prices for its database software. If someone could create an alternative that was free, Oracle couldn’t exist.

So, Oracle took direct action. It bought Sun Microsystems, at the time a primary supporter of open source, in 2010 and closed its projects’ source code. The Sun Solaris operating system didn’t survive. The Open Office code base was eventually forked but isn’t a big factor in the market. The big get was Java, originally created as a “write once, run anywhere” environment but, by 2010, a primary language for servers.

Oracle closed the code by declaring the Application Program Interfaces (APIs), the instructions showing how the code worked, could be copyrighted. To Oracle, this now meant that any code whose creation relied on those APIs belonged to Oracle.

This is bullshit.

Heidelberg One: LaLa Lab

First in a series of essays showing how my book, Living with Moore's Law: Past, Present and Future, interacts with the bleeding edge of software development at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum, where some of the biggest brains in software history try to inspire the next generation, and be inspired by it. 

To learn more about the book, especially if you're an agent or publisher, write me and we'll talk

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I got a demonstration of just how powerful Moore’s Law of Software has become at LaLa Lab, an exhibit being held in conjunction with the Heidelberg Laureate Forum.

LaLaLab is subtitled The Mathematics of Music. It demonstrated the value of Digital Signal Processor, or encoders as Texas Instruments’ competitors call the. DSPs turn analog input into digital output or vice versa. Here they’re used not just to move the music, but to graphically show what’s going underneath, and let you interact with it.

A microphone and some instruments demonstrates how this works with a Fast Fourier Transform. Speech, the input of a variety of instruments, or just playing music comes up as beautiful diagrams ,showing just how “saturation arithmetic” fills a computer with input over time. The degree to which a note is played during each bit of a second is shown as white against the black of time itself. Each channel of input is separated, showing how a DSP can pick up a variety of types of sounds separately, giving a mixer control of it.

Nearby is a demonstration of how easy it is to control music. A tablet has sensors which turn your waving hand into output, “conducting” music from Chopin or Beethoven. The hand’s movements, and the system’s response, are displayed on a screen overhead. 

There’s a lot to learn here about math, about music and about outputting results on a screen so people can understand it. I asked one of the people manning the booth how you can get the software. It’s all online, downloadable. All music teachers, or math teachers, need to do is build a curricula around it, using the extensive documentation in the booklet she handed me and the tools at Imaginary.org.

 

Copyright Wars 2020

My #1 life goal is to be plagiarized. THERE IS NO GREATER ACHIEVEMENT OR HONOR.

                                                                                ---Tom Peters 

                I first wrote about the Copyright Wars in 1997, when the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was being debated.

                I predicted, in my first version of Moore’s Lore, which came out in the year 2001, that “East Coast” laws like this would fall to the “West Coast Law” of code.

                This is not the way things are working out in 2019. The Internet’s ability to serve mankind is threatened as a result.

                As Tom Peters notes, there is no real value in an idea. An idea is only worthwhile if spreads, or if it’s acted upon. For this to happen it must be communicated, disseminated, and digested by many other people.

                The Internet, specifically the World Wide Web, is the means by which this now happens. The Internet lets any idea, from anyone, reach an audience and change people. Or not.

                But two things are happening. First, bad ideas are getting the same power to change people as good ideas, because no one can credibly tell everyone the difference. Second, the copyright industries have moved to stop the distribution of ideas, under the mistaken belief that there is value in them, and that anyone repeating them should pay.

                Trump illustrates the first point well, although anti-vaxxers and other idiocies would exist even without him. It’s in the nature of the Internet to eliminate gatekeepers, and those companies that have risen to that position, like Facebook, Google and Twitter, eschew the role, fearing it will let government prevent protest (which it can).

Internet is the New Radio

Michael Wolff believes that “TV is the new TV.” Jeff Jarvis insists that a paper’s decision to go all-digital is not a death sentence.

Both, in the current economic environment, are fundamentally wrong.

You will find the answer when you turn on your TV. What you will find there is not action, and not news. You will find talking heads. Talking heads are cheap and draw audiences. This was true 50 years ago, when talk radio was first invented, and it is just as true today. TV is not the new TV, it’s the new radio.

A web site budget consists of three kinds of costs:

• Capital costs, the Web site and tools needed to create content on it
• Bandwidth costs, which have been falling over time
• Labor costs, which have been rising over time. These include the management costs needed to define and oversee the site’s mission.

A typewriter and word processing software are one kind of capital cost, but it takes a lot of labor to create things with them. A TV camera and studio set up are another kind of capital cost, but they take much less labor to create things with them.

Anyone with “the gift of the gab,” as Salman Rushdie wrote, can create an hour of TV or radio content in about an hour. But even the best writer (especially the best writer) may take many days to create an hour’s worth of reading material.

A New Model for Journalism

Ever since the Web was spun, 21 years ago now, I have continually asked publishers a single, simple question.

How hungry are you? (Gee, we were all so young then...)

The fact is that journalists have never been very hungry. An ad is just an empty billboard. The buyer has to fill it with a message that will drive people down the sales funnel. Traditional journalists haven’t bothered themselves with such things.

Publishers had to. A publisher’s job is to define a market – a place, an industry, a lifestyle – and bring buyers together with copy that he can then sell ads against. Publishers are businessmen. They are not subject to the “ethics” of journalists. They’re subject to the laws and the rules of business. They should be focused on market making. That is their job. For 20 years they have failed to do that job, and journalism as a whole has suffered.

Here’s how hungry you can get.

Newspaper Armageddon And What Comes Next

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 32 of the newsletter I have written weekly since March, 1997. Enjoy.

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As I've noted before, when I was a journalism student at Northwestern University, 35 years ago now, I engaged in debates with my teachers about the coming of the online world.

They were upset about it. I was optimistic. I insisted the news business could adapt to a cheaper means of delivering more product, and the result would be more jobs for journalists. They insisted the world was coming to an end.

We were both right.

I deliberately sought a career in the new media, and from the time I joined Newsbytes, in 1985, I looked for new means through which to get news to people and make a living. I tried an online newsletter as early as 1989. My Interactive Age Daily was the first online publication to launch alongside a print counterpart, in 1994. I treated what became A-Clue.com, from which this blog post descends, as an online newsletter starting in 1997.