Dana Blankenhorn

Bridge to the Founders’ Generation

During my vacation this year, I surprised myself by delving into early American history, and found some comforting parallels to our own time.

Specifically I read The Quartet, by Joseph Ellis, about the four key figures who drove the creation and adoption of our Constitution, and John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit by James Traub.

What I found was the pre-history of my own profession, journalism, and the press.

In the late 18^th century, and early 19^th century, journalists were simply the owners of printing presses. They were little more than local bloggers, and their opinions were often for sale to the highest bidder. There was no one doing “objective” news. People understood broad events like the French Revolution, but what they thought of those events was driven by money, specifically that money put into driving opinion by printing press owners and by politicians controlling them.

Over the last 20 years, American journalism has moved strongly back toward that model. That gatekeeper function, the pride of The New York Times and even CNN in the 20^th century, turns out to have been a mere product of successful business models, which aggregated an educated readership and then sold access to that market, for a premium price, to advertisers.

I asked, 20 years ago, how hungry publishers were. I encouraged them to take the opportunity the Internet offered to drive their readers further down the sales funnel, not just selling billboards along the roadside by engaging in real commerce.

The Google Content Fund

It’s ironic that a company founded in Atlanta wound up breaking journalism.

Doubleclick was launched in early 1995, in Atlanta, but moved to New York shortly thereafter. It was bought by Google a decade later.

Doubleclick sold ads based on intrinsic targeting. The system used cookies to learn things about you, then buyers took out ads aimed directly at what you were doing. This led to things like a mother being offered cookie recipes at a gun site, or a gun owner being shown a magnum when he’s looking into champagne vacations.

These kinds of ads are intrusive. They invite blocking. They’re irrelevant to where your head is right now and their performance is thus very, very poor. But this doesn’t matter to an advertiser who can buy 100 such ads for what a specific web site on, say, guns might ask for a single impression. They get it back on volume.

Journalism is Dead

That’s what everybody says. The profession I’ve made my living in since 1978, and have made my life, no longer exists.

It died of a business model, they say. Advertising no longer pays the bills, and the damned readers refuse to pay like they did “back in the day.”

This is nonsense. Readers never paid for journalism. What they paid was the cost of getting the paper from a printing press to their front door, or into their hands at a newsstand. The printing, the paper, and the workers were always paid from the advertising in the paper, and due to the high costs associated with printing and distribution, editorial only got 8% of the budget anyway.

With the Web, most of those costs disappear. You no longer need the printing press. You don’t care about paper costs, or ink costs. All you need is a Web site, and there you get to take advantage of cloud economics. Reach and frequency are free.

No. If journalism is dead it is because it has lost its function, its true reason for being, no matter what lies they told you in journalism school.

Journalism is about making markets.

Defending Crooks in the Financial Press

I wrote a piece about health care recently, for a financial site, and had it thrown back in my face.  You can read it, but I won’t get paid a penny if you do.

This is not the first time this happened. It happened in 2011. Back then I was calling IBM’s hiring of Virginia Rometty as CEO an historic mistake. 

Back then shares in IBM were selling for about $180/share. It’s now below $140, and the company has almost entirely missed the most profound tech story of the decade, the cloud-and-device revolution. They still claim a place in the cloud, but it’s a small place, and a precarious one. Meanwhile, even companies like Adobe have zoomed past them in market cap. Apple could now buy IBM about five times over.

Before continuing, let me add that there's nothing dishonest about what IBM did. I'd just seen this movie before, nice marketing people following entrepreneurs and leading the company onto the rocks, because technology is about innovation, and it can only be run effectively by innovators. 

Just Google It

Think of this as Volume 18, Number 2 of the newsletter I have written weekly since March, 1997. Enjoy.

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Google doesn't like seeing its name used as a verb, but that's just too bad.

Because “Googling it” is just so damned easy, and it's something that more of us need to make a habit of.

I can't tell you how often, while on social networks, someone makes a claim that can be easily sustained or (more often) refuted with a quick Google search. I've been making a habit of this since before Google existed. As soon as Yahoo came along, in 1994, I was checking my facts through it, and linking to those facts, “link rot” be damned.

Maybe we should be careful about this, and cautious, but I find most editors brain dead on that score. They reject links to Wikipedia and to competitors' stories. I'm old enough to remember when papers routinely credited competitors for scoops before adding their two cents. Now they refuse to, even though it's much easier to do than it was. It's stupid and selfish.

Liberal Ennui

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 37 of the newsletter I have written weekly since March, 1997. Enjoy.

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These are hard times to be a liberal. In some ways, it's harder than in the Bush years. At least then we had someone to hate.

When you're in power, you're naturally playing defense. When you're in the 5^th year of a Presidential cycle, you're also expecting bad things to happen. Lincoln didn't survive 1865, McKinley didn't survive 1901, FDR's 1937 was an annus horribilus and the horrors that were unearthed about Nixon in 1973 destroyed him.

Compared with that, the problems Barack Obama has faced are minimal. The economy hasn't been great but it's growing. Syria almost blew up on us but it didn't. Every effort to inject fear has been followed by a relief rally. Health reform is coming into force. Next year's off-year elections don't look like a disaster.

Still, liberals are mostly pissed at this Administration. The NSA revelations have a lot to do with it. The fact that the crooks who got us into the Great Recession are still walking around free. The fact that the President's legislative initiatives aren't just stalled, but they're being slowly reversed, in both state houses and the Capitol.

Designer Deer, Designer Dogs

I am proud and humbled to present my first guest blogger, Robin Blankenhorn (left, on the right with her parents). 

Despite the lack of family resemblance between us (she is much better looking than I am) Robin is indeed my daughter. She was born February 21, 1988 at Piedmont Hospital here in Atlanta, and I remember that day like it was yesterday. 

This month, Robin became a graduate of Texas A&M Kingsville (Go Javelinas), an agriculture major in range and wildlife sciences with a minor in English. She wants to make her career in urban wildlife policy, a class called "human factors" at TAMUK, and is presently researching the space, seeking an opportunity. If you have one, or just want to comment about this piece, drop her a note.

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A friend of mine who graduated with me from college in Texas this month is an avid hunter. She loves hunting and the meat that she and her husband get.

(The picture, of deer who could not survive in a natural world, is from a deer breeder, RRA Ranch in Mingus, Texas.)

She also owns a Labradoodle. It’s part of a mindset that needs changing.

News Sites Play Hide the Pickle

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 16 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Throughout the Web, the information with the highest cost and lowest return is news.

For me to appear at an event in person, I have to get dressed, get there, stay there, and get back home. It's a full day production. It keeps me from doing anything else.

The problem is that all this effort doesn't bring me any more page views than I'd get from just picking the story off the wire and commenting on it. Less, because I'm not a major news player.

The problem I face is exponentially greater for the major news player. Everyone links to the first person with the story, sometimes with credit but more often not, and the number of page views the first-mover gets may be relatively small. This isn't all bad. Often, the best story is the one that is well-considered, that brings in other facts, that's researched with links and thought through before it's published.

As a result, news sites have been engaged in a growing game I call hide the pickle.

If A Story Isn't Linked To Does It Make a Sound?

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 39 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Since joining TheStreet.com earlier this year, I have been struck by their 1990s' attitude toward links. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

The idea is that, when you link to something, you tell people in the text who you're linking to. Sounds fair, doesn't it?

But what if the story you found on Google News originated with, say, The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times? Further, what if you found the story somewhere else, when it was republished by an affiliate?

Who do you link to?

Days of Apps

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 28 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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In 2012 the software industry is like an iceberg. Most of it is under the water.

Not underwater, mind you. Under the water.

That's because the world of “applications” is over. It's all about the apps now, brutha. And no one in the app business has yet gone public. The smart VC guys and private equity people are putting tons of money into the space, so there's no need to go public, no need to give the public investor a taste.

It's like the social boom. You'll know the bust has started when one of these outfits starts looking for suckers on NASDAQ.

Doesn't mean there's no there, there. There is. I found that out Monday when I went to a “MeetUp” for Techcrunch.com at the Sweetwater Brewery, a few miles from my home.

The place was packed. Cars were parked around the corner and down the next street. (They could do it because this is a warehouse district where everyone else goes home around 5 PM.) There were well over 3,000 people there. Mostly male, mostly young, mostly white. But not exclusively. I was also pleased to find two people who rode bikes there. A guy my own age who admitted he'd taken the train to a nearby transit stop, and a younger guy who'd ridden 8 miles in rush-hour traffic.