ideas – Anna Wahrman

Time Inc. parties like it’s 2009, makes an app

December 31, 2014 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

Warning: This post contains unsafe levels of sarcasm and eye rolling.

You may have begun your winter vacation last week, but while you were enduring awkward conversations with your extended family, the Time Inc. PR department was working overtime to convince the public that the magazine producer is thriving in this newfangled technological world of ours. All those olde timey magazines? Who cares? Time Inc. is making apps now. That’s right: apps. Everyone knows that apps are the future! Ever since 2008, which was six years ago, when the App Store launched, apps have been the future. But now Time Inc. is getting into the game, so watch out every other app, of which there were 25 billion on iOS as of May 2013! Clearly we have all—all of us in digital media, and, well, all of us everywhere around the world—been waiting to see just what kind of technology the minds at the magazine company Time Inc. will devise.

Time Inc. doesn’t just want to be known and just to operate as the publisher of popular magazines like Time, Sports Illustrated, InStyle and People any more. It wants to become a technology company too, launching its own products to rival the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Salesforce and even Tinder.

Does it now? I’ll bet those folks can do it! I mean, it wants to be a tech company. It wants to rival the biggest social networks on this planet. So it stands to reason that it can!

Ever since former owner Time Warner announced it was to spin off Time Inc. into a separately publicly traded company last year, Time Inc. has been making some loud noises that it’s not just a dusty old magazine publisher that doesn’t understand digital.

They’re making loud noises, people! About the assumption that they don’t understand digital just because their sites are still running on technology from the 1990s! Wha, wha, what was that? A loud noise, that’s what.

With so much change affecting the publishing industry—first with the move to web, then search, social and mobile—Time is saying “we don’t want to be surprised any more, we want to find ways to get ahead of that curve. They are working to get ahead of that curve and become a tech company.”

Oh, wow. They are working on being ahead of the curve to become a tech company! Did you hear that, all the other tech companies and websites? They are working on it!

M. Scott Havens, Time Inc.’s SVP of digital, told Business Insider “We are building [standalone] apps and businesses.”

No! They are building apps? Apps?! My god, apps! What a brilliant idea! Has anyone ever built—is it pronounced apps? Am I saying that right?

[The first app is] Cooking Light Diet, a mobile app that delivers customized meal plans on a weekly basis.

What! You’re telling me this team of hundreds was able to develop an app that updates once a week? Do they have push alerts? Because if this weekly app has push alerts…

The process started a year ago, when Time Inc. came up with the idea for the product last spring. By May, Time Inc. had 500 paying customers using the service (which, at $18.99 a month, isn’t cheap), giving it the confidence to push ahead with a full launch.

Holy moley! This once-a-week app took only a year to make! And they have 500 users! Yes, five hundred! Let’s see, 500 users times $19 each? Why, that’s almost $10,000 a year in revenue after only one year of development! So really it’s all profit, minus the roughly $5 million to $10 million in costs!

A “young guy” working on the Sports Illustrated editorial team recently had a great idea for an “utilitarian app,” which Havens describes as a kind of Tinder meets Yelp. The guy told his editor, who allowed him to work on the project (at the expense of his time working on Sports Illustrated) with Havens. The company is now working on a prototype.

Wait, what? A young guy had an idea? And they let him work on it?! Holy crap, this is a game changer. And it’s probably going to be more popular than Tinder and Yelp, because it meets them both, according to this one young guy.

Time Inc. is borrowing the tools (and buzzwords) of Silicon Valley with a fast, lean approach to product development. This “minimum viable product” has four digital product experts who work with people at the individual lifestyle magazine brands to develop new products in two-week cycles.

Oh, wow, they’re using Agile, Lean and MVP? I mean, “MVP”? Wow. Well, sorry digital companies, it’s over for you. Time Inc. has figured it out. They’ve hired four different experts, so…it’s kinda game over for everyone else.

Such a change in mindset and business focus requires a huge cultural reorganization. Processes are different, priorities change, even desk layout ought to be different than a traditional newsroom.

Wait, you’re saying that you just need to rearrange the desks in order to make this a digital company, not a “dusty old media” company? So easy! I’m not sure if the union will go for that, but they might just be right about the seating chart being the key to disrupting this whole industry.

Havens hints that everything from consumer apps, b2b technologies and content for watches, cars and refrigerators are all being considered.

Oh, wow. Is there anything this old magazine company that knows nothing about any of those industries can’t do?! Watch your back, all of those above-mentioned multibillion-dollar corporations that are also doing all of these things but with a working knowledge of their industries and without a legacy media business to run!

It’s easier for Time Inc. to adopt this approach now than it would have been a decade ago, though, said Reed Phillips, managing partner of media investment bank DeSilva & Phillips.

Yeah, totally! If they’d been able to develop social media a decade ago, they’d definitely have been ahead of the curve. Time Inc., your PR department makes it pretty clear that you have many great ideas (and plans!) on how to be an tech-industry leader. All I can say is good luck with that.

Are print-to-digital apps ruinous for media?

December 14, 2012 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

As I mentioned in a previous post, many of my recent freelance gigs have involved reading printed materials on various electronic devices. For several distinct projects, I read the same material on no fewer than four devices at a time, and each had a different layout, different size, different coding language and different interactive elements. This was the case because Apple, Amazon and the rest render their materials in different, proprietary programming languages, and the hardware they’ve created boasts proprietary specs. It has been a major shock to learn how much work and money must to go into optimizing the same printed material for all these devices. And it’s abundantly clear that as publishing professionals, we must do much more work, and soon, in establishing standards for print-to-digital conversion.

“Technology is always destroying jobs and always creating jobs, but in recent years the destruction has been happening faster than the creation.”
—Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist and director of the M.I.T. Center for Digital Business (via)

Arguably, this obtuse process is employing me. The technology has, in this case, created a new job: There’s a need for someone to read each article of each issue (or each page of each chapter of each book) on each device. I don’t want to sound ungrateful, because I’m developing quite a little niche for myself as an expert on print-to-digital conversions. But I wonder how long it can last, considering that print media is undergoing huge change at the moment. Momentous, disruptive, industry-wide change that’s happening at a rapid pace, particularly with regard to technology.

We might be powerhouse publishers, but in the tech world we’re just like every other Joe App Maker, 96 percent of whom do not make significant money on their apps. According to a recent article in the New York Times, 25 percent of Apple game app makers made less than $200, with only 4 percent making upwards of $1 million. Granted, random game app makers don’t have the brand recognition or cachet of major publishing houses; neither do they have an overarching, Apple-endorsed app that features their stuff (Newsstand for Apple, if you’re still following me).

But make no mistake, the field has been leveled, and instead of competing only with each other, even the biggest content publishers now also compete with Angry Birds, Twitter, Facebook, travel apps, e-commerce apps, dining apps, coupon apps…the list is endless.

The difference? Unlike many apps, the media’s brand relevance and reputation absolutely hinges on an amazing user experience across devices at all times. In short, it has to be perfect. And in order for that to happen, the same material must be reconceived by its creators multiple times. It seems impossible to believe, but publishers optimize the same product over and over again, incurring all sorts of real costs from designers, editors, producers and programmers with each iteration. (And this isn’t even counting the web producers who conceive it all over again for the online version!) Once you account for these costs, in addition to the so-called legacy costs of creating the print product in the first place, it hardly makes sense even to enter into the realm of app creation for many print products. That’s even if you can get your app sponsored or otherwise monetized, and even if you use Adobe to help you create it.

I realize that the common line of thought is that, like websites, if you don’t have an app presence, you don’t exist. Half a decade ago, this principle propelled the creation of a million new half-assed websites (websites: another print-distribution model without a standard!). But I’d counter that without apps — without content — these devices would be useless. So unless we want to bankrupt the already struggling print media industry further, we must stop playing by the device makers’ rules and rewrite them to benefit our business. We must invent technology that adapts our product (ie, content) to any device at any orientation. We must create or help market forces create a standard we can implement and follow; we must negotiate a better rate than giving away 30 percent of our revenue; we must not “throw in” digital access with print subscriptions.

I know, I know: Nature abhors a vacuum. If we don’t follow suit, we’re nothing. But following hardware makers blindly down dark passageways as our pockets get picked around every corner isn’t a smart strategy, either. In one big way, we are not like Joe App Maker: We possess a hugely powerful medium. We must harness our strengths and lead ourselves forward. A nice start might be to begin taking a stand against having to endlessly tinker with every article in every issue of every magazine, every book, every design.

As Shawn Grimes, the app developer profiled by the Times said: “People used to expect companies to take care of them. Now you’re in charge of your own destiny, for better or worse.” Let’s be in charge of our own destiny.

The media’s Dust Bowl

November 30, 2012 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

It’s human nature to compare things. We put things in context for better understanding. “This thing [business/weather/process/person/event] that is happening is like this other thing that happened, and that thing turned out [good/bad/different/better/worse].”

I’ve been doing a lot of that lately surrounding the media. Specifically, I’ve spent time contemplating how to reconcile how valuable journalism is to society compared to how much actual monetary value it generates. As I’ve written about before, no one knows what’s going to happen to this business: whether it will go the way of the steamship and the telegraph, reinvent itself a la Apple, or something in between.

I’m not the only observer who’s searching for an appropriate comparison from the past in order to predict the media’s future, but I do find that some insights are better than others; does anyone really think that the envelope business, of all things, is really a good model for the Random House-Penguin merger? (Does anyone think of “the envelope business” at all?)

Watching the Ken Burns PBS documentary The Dust Bowl recently, however, opened my eyes to a new analogy for the media of the present day: farming a century ago. (And why not — we did recently learn that there are far more software app engineers than farmers.) According to Burns, farmers in the Great Plains around 100 years ago sold their goods, wheat in particular, in enough volume and at a fair enough price, that they kept their families fed, happy and productive before the Great Depression. Prior to the big event, they faced periodic yet persistent droughts and occasional technological breakthroughs (gas-powered plowing, for example). But year after year, they found a way to keep going, even increasing volume to make up for the deficits caused by off years. That is, until the permanently landscape-altering Dust Bowl.

Compare this to journalists and media today. For decades we plied our trade, not making big money but making enough to support our families. We changed with the times, moving from copy boys and paste-ups to computers. But the past decade has seen such a huge acceleration of technology (and a hugely inverse deceleration of jobs) that our worth is now, to put it mildly, in question. Like the farmers, we’ve tried doing more: You’re now not only a reporter, you’re also a videographer, photographer and blogger — and you will hereafter be known as a “content creator.” You’re now responsible for not only reporting your usual one-story-by-deadline allotment, but you’re also going to write six additional posts a day (and you need to know how to produce them, tag them and upload them).

But as the farmers discovered, doing more not only didn’t help them, it actually created its own set of problems. In their case, they unknowingly caused the largest man-made ecological disaster to date (you’re well on your way, though, global climate change: hang in there). In ours, the huge volume of posts was churned through by disloyal consumers, the glut and pace belittled the value of the news, and the business changed from creating newsworthy, relevant content to attracting eyeballs and lowering bounce rates and counting click-throughs and measuring social engagement and Tweeting viral videos.

Other, larger factors were also at play, including the rapid pace of technological development. The ease of use of technology meant that anyone could be a creator of content — so the process of journalism was democratized, but it was also dumbed down and its worth devalued.

“But of all our losses, the most distressing is our loss of self-respect. How can we feel that our work has any dignity or importance when the world places so low a value on the products of our toil?”

—Caroline Henderson, Oklahoma farmer during the 1932 drought during the Depression, just prior to the Dust Bowl’s worst

Now, I’m not saying it’s a perfect comparison. We haven’t had to put to pasture cattle that suffocated during “black blizzards” or bury children who caught “dust pneumonia.” But I think it’s a decent metaphor, because the media is going through its version of the Dust Bowl. Newspapers and magazines are closing up shop at an unprecedented pace; media businesses are losing money quarter after quarter and year after year, with no end in sight; those workers who are able (and I count myself among this number) are learning new skills and moving into new areas. (All of this can be said for other industries as well, by the way, particularly music.)

Somewhat brazenly, and I think disrespectfully, we’ve taken to calling tech and business shakeups, events and new models “disruptions.” Of course, since the beginning of time businesses have striven to disrupt other, existing businesses, but it seems much more ruthless to start your business with the sole intent of creating wreckage. I think it’s fair to cast our historical eye onto the Depression and the Dust Bowl and deem them disruptions, at the very least. And it’s easy to forget, but disruptions have a cost — a monetary one and a human one.

Years from now, I wondered while watching the documentary, how will journalism be perceived? Who will be the talking heads and what will they say? Which commentators will highlight which historical implications that, in retrospect, seem clear? How will the people generations from now — even one or two — talk about the media? Will we have adapted with the times and made a new reality for ourselves (and somehow have figured out a way to feed our families along the way)? Is journalism like the family farm in the Oklahoma panhandle of the 1930s, and are we farmers, continuing to plow the fields that we’ve yet to learn will never again yield crops? Is it like kerosene lighting, steam-powered train engines, millinery, fax machines, answering services, 8-tracks, the luncheonette, and the endless list of other businesses throughout history that litter the shoulders of the road toward the future? I want to believe that it’s not. I hope upon hope that it’s not.

“Hope kept them going, but hope also meant that they were being constantly disappointed.”

—Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, Dust Bowl historian

Nobody knows anything

November 15, 2012 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

Nobody knows anything.

I’ve suspected for a while that no one really knows what they’re doing, what’s next, what’s going on, what the plan is (“What’s the plan, Phil?” –Claire Dunphy). As I age and gain experience, I’m starting to realize the truth of it all: Everything is slapdash. Everything is last-minute. Everything is barely hanging on. Everyone is making it up as they go along and crossing their fingers.

At the highest levels of government, the military and business, it’s all perilously close to nonfunctional. (And often it is nonfunctional, not to mention dysfunctional — a distinction.) So why should the media — even the upper echelons of the media — be any different? It’s not.

Nobody knows anything.

This thought crystallized in my mind earlier this week when I attended a tech start-up job fair Monday, an all-day start-up conference Tuesday and a Meetup called “Content Conversations” Tuesday night.

The resulting emotion from this string of events was one of deep malaise. I’d gone in thinking I’d get some perspective and advice from job creators and also hear some inspiring start-up success stories. As it turns out, the companies who were hiring were seeking programmers and UX designers, not journalists (or even, as we’ve come to be known post-Internet, “content creators”). And the panelists the following day, those who were alleged successes, had very little practical advice for the attendees. Sure, there were platitudes expressed by these supposed luminaries: Stay true to yourself. Find your voice. Put the user first.

But nothing said was really actionable. Now, going in I expected tech start-up founders to speak variously in jargon and dude-speak; it’s their MO. However, I wanted more from the content-focused discussions and panelists. Unfortunately they, too, had only vague advice in terms of the future of content on the web, what’s next for those of us who create content, and how brands can use content to sell their products.

I left the conference to attend the Meetup, which was a Q&A with Noah Rosenberg, the founder and editor of Narrative.ly. He seems like a nice fella, and I agree with his thesis that the Internet’s short bursts of information are starting to zap our brains. He’s trying to remedy that with what he terms slow journalism — long-reads stuff focused on a weekly theme. But he’s paying his contributors for their many-thousands-of-words pieces not in dollars but in exposure, mostly. He regrets that he can’t pay them what they’re worth, and when I asked how he thought the Internet could help create high-quality content while providing a living wage for content creators, he said, “That’s the million-dollar question” and “There’s no magic bullet.” So no answers there, either.

I left feeling dejected and resigned. But I awoke the next morning with a realization: Nobody knows anything. No one was able to provide answers to the information I was seeking — all day long — because no one knows. Not high-ranking people, not low-ranking people. Not CEOs, CTOs, CMOs or interns. No one!

Nobody knows anything because we are in a time of extreme transition. That’s not a new or original thought, even for myself. But sometimes you have a moment when a mere notion is made real. You go from knowing it to knowing it. For me, that was this experience. I saw for myself, hands-on and up close, that in times of transition the story cannot be told, because no one knows how it turns out. You have to live it, day by endless day, until you’re on the other side. And even then, you don’t really know for sure that you’ve reached the other side until much later.

Just as you couldn’t tell that the disappearing shoals under your shoes fomented a destructive deluge that would make you question your survival, so too are you unsure, once you’ve grabbed onto a branch and tenderly climbed onto the opposite bank, that you’re truly safe.

That is the unfortunate state of the media today: We’re in the rapids, hanging on for dear life and praying. (Which I would not deem a strategy, exactly.) The media — news, advertising, marketing, TV, movies, print, online, creation, distribution — and those of us who practice it are evolving, and nobody knows what will happen. And I’m not upset about it; I’m ready to join in and try things, experiment and help in the effort of making it up as we go along.

And I don’t think anyone else has a better idea how to navigate these waters, because nobody knows anything.

Narrative Science and the Future of StoryTelling

October 7, 2012 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

On Friday I had the good fortune to attend the Future of StoryTelling conference. Among the leaders and luminaries in attendance (whose names I will not drop here) was Dr. Kris Hammond, who is the CTO at Narrative Science, which has created an artificial intelligence product called Quill that transforms data into stories (the product generates a story every 28 seconds, per Hammond). I’ve written about Narrative Science before, and I argued in that post that Narrative Science “is not a threat, it’s a tool, and it fills a need.”

Now that I’ve met Dr. Hammond and heard him speak, I’m more a believer than ever that this is the future of journalism — and not just journalism, but all of media, education, healthcare, pharmaceutical, finance, on and on. Most folks at FoST seemed to be open to his message (it’s hard to disagree that translating big data into understandable stories probably is the future of storytelling, or at least part of it). But Hammond did admit that since the Wired story came out in which he was quoted as saying that in 15 years, 95 percent of news will be written by machines, most journos have approached him with pitchforks in hand.

I went in thinking that the two-year-old Narrative Science went hand-in-hand with Patch and Journatic in the automated-and-hyperlocal space, but I now think that Hammond’s goals, separate from these other companies, are grander and potentially more landscape-altering.

I know I sound like a fangurl, but I was truly that impressed with his vision for what his product can be, and what it will mean to the future of journalism. No, it can’t pick up the phone and call a source. It can’t interview a bystander. It can’t write a mood piece…yet. But they’re working on it.

With that, my top 10 quotes of the day from Dr. Hammond:

The first question we ask is not “What’s the data,” it’s “What’s the story?” Our first conversation with anyone doesn’t involve technology. Our first conversation starts, “What do you need to know, who needs to know it and how do they wanted it presented to them?”

Our journalists start with a story and drive back into the data, not drive forward into the data.

We have a machine that will look at a lot and bring it down to a little.

The technology affords a genuinely personal story.

It’s hard, as a business, to crack the nut of local. For example, Patch doesn’t have the data, but they’re the distribution channel. There’s what the technology affords and what the business affords…. We don’t want to be in the publication business.

Meta-journalists’ [his staff is one-third journalists and two-thirds programmers] job is to look at a situation, and map a constellation of possibilities. If we don’t understand it, we pull in domain experts.

The world of big data is a world that’s dying for good analysis. We will always have journalists and data analysts. What we’re doing is, we’re taking a skill set that we have tremendous respect for and expanding it into a whole new world.

The overall effort is to try to humanize the machine, but not to the point where it’s super-creepy. We will decide at some point that there’s data we have that we won’t use.

Bias at scale is a danger.

The government commitment to transparency falls short because only well-trained data journalists can make something of the data. I see our role as making it for everybody…. Let’s go beyond data transparency to insight transparency. It can’t be done at the data level, it can’t be done at the visualization level, it has to be done at the story level.

The differences between print and online publishing

September 24, 2012 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

I’ve spent the past month helping edit a book. A real, old-timey, printed-pages book, with big photos and tons of words. While it has been an all-consuming grind to move the thing from words on a screen to designed layout to perfected page, creating a book also opened my eyes even further to a handful of differences between the print and online worlds of publishing. I suppose I knew these differences abstractly — after all, I’ve worked in the print publishing world for a more than a decade and I’ve written about some of these variations before — but living the book-publishing life instead of the online-publishing one for a month solid has put these five distinctions into stark relief.

1. Standardized technology
Practically the entire print world (magazines as well) uses Adobe’s Creative Suite. If you’re a publisher, you’re using InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator, period. Occasionally there are major disruptions — when the industry moved from QuarkXPress to InDesign around the turn of the century, for example, after having been Quark-centric for the previous half-dozen years. If a stranger wandered in off the street to a prepress shop or printer, they’d see InDesign being used. If a college kid majors in graphic design, she’d better be taught to use Illustrator. If you’re a photographer or retoucher, Photoshop is your go-to.

Compare this to the completely opposite world of online publishing. There’s not a standard content management system that every publisher uses. Open-source platforms like WordPress and Drupal are huge and growing — they’re being selected as the go-to CMSes more every day — but they’re not widespread enough to be called a standard, at least not the way InDesign is for print publishers. More often, each Internet publishing site has its own, homegrown, cobbled together, Frankenstein half-solution, which works well enough to connect A to B, but just barely, and it is not a complete solution in the way that Adobe Creative Suite has been for print.

There’s also no standard photo-editing app: Photoshop is one option for online photo editing, but so are Pixlr, Aviary, Gimp, on and on. Even Facebook and Twitter — not to mention Instagram — offer online photo editing.

In fact, Internet publishing reminds me of nothing more than print in the 1980s and 1990s. Computers were being introduced and used to some degree for word processing, but there was no single software system for print publishing. We’d moved well beyond copy boys, news alerts coming across actual wires and traditional typesetting, but the “technology” that most publishers used then included paste-ups and X-acto knives (or some version thereof). We’re living the equivalent now online. Will the Internet standardize to a single CMS? Will there be a turnkey solution invented that takes online publishing from primordial to fully evolved?

2. Established process and workflow
The printed word carries with it an established process, one that has been more or less the way things have worked since Gutenberg. First you write the words, then you edit them, then you publish them. This is true still in print publishing. Broadly: brainstorm, assign, write, edit (line edit, fact-check, copyedit), design, prep, print, and then distribute completed, unalterable product. There are often many rounds of each of these steps, and distribution can be a months-long process. But a process it is, and one that carries a fixed order and a good degree of finality.

Online publishing, on the other hand, usurps this process from end to end; the online workflow is not fixed. Anyone can devise her own ideas and then write them. They needn’t be edited nor fact-checked, but even if they are, many people and even organizations publish first and edit later, and then republish. This doesn’t actually disrupt the distribution process a bit, because the piece is a living document that can always be changed. The immediate distribution means that readers can also respond immediately, and they do, via comments and social media, and this often precipitates yet another round of reediting and republishing.

Compare the reactions of print versus online outlets to the publishing scandal of the summer: Jonah Lehrer’s making up of quotes and self-plagiarization. His book publisher, Houghton, had to “halt shipment of physical copies of the book and [take] the e-book off the market,” as well as offer refunds to readers who purchased copies of the book. Presumably, they will actually fact-check the book sometime, then issue a new version in a new print run sometime before…who knows when.

Lehrer’s online publishers, on the other hand, merely republished his pieces with an “Editor’s Note” appended that they “regret the duplication of material” (NewYorker.com) or a “notice indicating some work by this author has been found to fall outside our editorial standards” (Wired.com).

I haven’t discussed the cost-as-expectation factor because I want to limit this post to my observances on technology and workflow as an industry insider, but I do wonder whether, because the Internet is free, the standards are lower for both process and product. Regardless, it’s clear that making corrections as you go along isn’t possible with a printed product once it’s been distributed.

I also think that because the Internet is not only a publishing business but is also a technology business in a way that print is not, editors are cribbing from technologists’ desire to embrace iterative methodologies and workflows, such as Agile (in relief to Waterfall) — more on this below.

3. Clearly defined roles and responsibilities
Hand in hand with the process itself are the people who conduct the process. Print, having been around for centuries, has evolved to the point where jobs are delineated. It can be stated generally that in the world of print, photographers shoot pictures and photo editors select among these pictures. Designers marry text and art. Copy editors edit copy. Printers print. Managing editors meet deadlines, collaborating with all parties to get things where they need to be when they need to be there. There’s no such delineation in the online publishing world. Editors in chief shoot photos and video; copy editors crop art; writers publish. Everyone does a little bit of everything: It’s slapdash, it’s uncivilized, it’s unevolved.

I think that soon this madness will organize itself into more clearly defined roles, or else we’ll all burn out, go crazy and move to yurts in the middle of Idaho. This is happening already in small degrees in online newsrooms, and it’s starting to reach into online publishing broadly, but I have to believe that the insanity will decrease and the explicit definition of roles will advance as we sort out how it all fits together.

4. Focused, respectful meetings
It caught me off guard to realize that something as simple as speaking to coworkers is very different in the print versus online worlds, but the meetings I had when I was working on the book were a far cry from those I’ve had when I was working online. They were focused, with little posturing, corporate speak, agenda pushing or bureaucracy. At no point did anyone say, “Let’s take that offline” (translation: “Shut up”). At no point did I wonder, “Are you answering email or IMing the person across the table right now instead of paying attention to what I’m saying?” It’s pretty simple: No (or few) laptops and lots of respect for others and their abilities.

Technology likes to put labels onto concepts that publishing has been using for decades. For example, Agile has concepts like “stand-ups” and “Scrum.” Print has been having these sorts of as-needed-basis check-ins as long as it’s been around — it’s called “talking to your coworkers,” and it works quite well as a method of communication and dissemination of information. For all that’s going against it, print succeeds on a human level; technologists are playing catch-up in this respect. Whether this is because most technologists are men or most technologists are introverts I’m not sure, but the cultural and human-interaction differences are clear. If online publishing did a little more in the way of focused and respectful meetings — or maybe even fewer organized meetings and more on-the-fly collaboration — I think the industry would reap major benefits.

5. Frequency of disruption by and importance placed on email and social media
When I was head’s-down editing on paper for this book, and when I was on the computer editing, devising schedules or creating task lists, I didn’t check email, Facebook, Twitter, or really any other website except during lunch. Turns out, this behavior is fairly easy to do when you’re not working on a website yourself. I’ll admit that I felt a little out of the loop on the latest stupid thing Mitt Romney said. I missed the uproar about, next-day recap of, and explanatory cultural essay regarding Honey Boo-Boo. But I didn’t actually feel less engaged with the world. Having been completely engaged in the task at hand, I felt like the focused energy I was able to pour into the book benefited the work and my own sense of accomplishment.

When I work online I often end days thinking, “What did I actually do today? Meetings, emails, checking social media…now the day is over, and what do I have to show for it?” Quite distinctly, when I ended days on the book, I could say with conviction that what I had worked on mattered. I moved whatever I was working on from one state to the next, and I improved it when it was in my hands. It was a welcome departure.

—
The book will be in stores a few months. And I’m about to press “publish” on this post, which will then be live and available to anyone with an Internet connection the moment after I do. All of which serves as the starkest reminder yet about the benefits of, drawbacks surrounding and often chasm-like differences between each medium. Unlike print, for online publishing the history is being written as its being lived, and I feel privileged to be a witness to it.

Yes, the cracks are showing in news apps

August 3, 2012 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

Short post today, in response to Matthew Ingram at GigaOm, who asks, in light of the recent news about the Huffington app going free and The Daily laying off a good chunk of staff: “Are these two isolated cases, or a sign that cracks are starting to show in the content model that publishers have bought into with the iPad?”

Answer: The latter. Slightly longer answer: Publishers only dreamed that the iPad would create a new revenue stream. In most cases, it hasn’t, so back the the drawing board. I’ve said before that I don’t think the business case is there in most cases. A wing and a prayer is not a strategy.

“But can he do it?” Who cares?

July 14, 2012 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

The New York Times today published another entry into the annals of a trend I’ve noticed that I call the “But can he do it?” story. It’s a series of stories that profile a white guy “reinventing” the media, as reported by a white guy in the media. This one is about David Karp, the 26-year-old “wunderkind” who invented Tumblr. It’s filled with quotes like: “‘He has very little notion of what it means to be a conformist,’ or to measure his thinking against abstract conventional wisdom.”

Eye roll. A privileged white guy is a nonconformist? OK, if you say so.

But this is only one article, one that follows many, many eye-rollers before it with the same theme. For example, there was the Ken Auletta profile of Tim Armstrong in The New Yorker last year, in which he questions whether Armstrong’s strategy of revitalizing AOL’s home page and investing in local will pay off. (I guess Armstrong didn’t bother to tell Auletta that actually the other part of this “strategy,” the winning part, was buying the Huffington Post a week later.)

The Washington Post recently did a “But can he do it?” piece on whether Chris Hughes really can revitalize The New Republic. And speaking of white guys revitalizing the media: Can Josh Tyrangiel remake Businessweek now that it’s Bloomberg Businessweek? And speaking of The Washington Post (talk about the insularity of the media), can Robert Thompson remake it under NewsCorp?

On and on. Obviously the trend is indicative of a much larger problem, which is that white guys in the media are constantly (unconsciously?) creating these stories so they can continue to reinforce their own relevancy. The narrative of “But can he do it?” is really their own, so they think it’s interesting for others to read about. And then their editors, who are for the most part white guys in the media, also think it’s interesting, so they OK the stories, and the column inches, and the emphasis in coverage. But obviously no one else cares whether these white guys in the media will succeed except for other white guys in the media.

Really: Will Bloomberg Businessweek make money? Will David Karp reinvent advertising on the Internet? Well, WILL THEY?

Who cares?

And also, of course, the articles never actually say or even predict whether these white guys will or will not reinvent these media properties/websites, because the writers have no idea. Which just reinforces how useless this so-called reporting truly is. No one actually knows how this business is going to go in the next few, handful, several, many years in the future. These stories might as well be headlined: “Does this white guy know something the rest of you white guys don’t?” The answer, at the end of each, is, “Maybe!” And also, if not explicitly, “I hope some day this guy or a guy like him will hire me!”

The same is true, by the way, for political profiles and business profiles. “Can this white guy win this election/policy argument/budget showdown against other white guys?” “Can this white guy sell more lightbulbs/lumber/lathes than the other white guys?”

It’s boring. It’s irrelevant to most of the population. No one knows the answer anyway. And yet it’s the focus of coverage because, unfortunately, white guys run everything. So it’s a problem for women, gays, minorities and anyone else who would like see themselves and their lives and struggles reflected in the media but is completely un- or under-represented.

Final note on this: “But can he do it?” is basically is Ken Auletta’s reason for being. It seems like every article he writes is another breathless “But can he do it?” He wrote a whole book that was basically a “But can they do it?” about the two white guys who created Google. Rarely, he writes a “But can she do it?” But given that there are only two powerful ladies in media (obviously, Jill Abramson and Sheryl Sandberg), these are unusual. But fair’s fair, he did write them, though I’ll warn you that neither of these women has any answers about the future of media, either.

Publishers tackle the outdated CMS and the damn DAM

July 7, 2012 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

This article in Folio about CMSes and DAMs reads like a primer for magazine-based web publishing. It’s a bit dumbed down for those of us in the industry, who’ve been having this exact conversation since, oh, 2006. But that’s precisely why this quote from Time Inc. CIO Mitch Klaif is so hilarious (and hilariously sad). “Time is currently evaluating CMS platforms that offer ‘create once, publish many’ capabilities, but Klaif notes that it is too early to know if these can meet Time’s multi-channel needs.”

It’s too early to know and the company is evaluating CMSes? Interesting spin. Here’s what’s actually going on: Time Inc. uses outdated technology that was created in 1997. I’ll say that again, in all caps: NINETEEN NINETY-SEVEN. They rely heavily on a CMS that was built in 2002. So in web years, that translates to, what, around 50 or 75 years behind the times? Consider that the company that makes the CMS Time Inc. uses doesn’t even exist anymore.

So it’s more than a little disingenuous to claim that “it’s too early to know.” They know, it’s just that what they know is either, “We don’t have a strategy except to keep maintaining this ridiculously outmoded tech that doesn’t even use languages recognized these days and for which the runway is quickly vanishing under our wheels” or “We’re scrambling to find a solution that won’t leave us in this exact same position five years hence, except no one on our tech team is remotely bold or forward thinking, so we have no clue.”

As for the rest of the article, I certainly agree that a CMS or DAM environment that makes assets “smarter” is desirable…and has yet to be built. Letting publishers “easily find and use relevant content — not only based on the article’s specifics, but also on the asset’s relevance to a particular platform” and allowing “access only to assets for which sufficient rights were secured” are both awesome ideas. But no one in publishing does this well.

I’ll grant that media tech — heck, all of tech — is constantly evolving, and often in unpredictable ways, and getting digital rights from writers and photographers is its own hell. But after all these years, no turnkey solution has yet been built. It simply does not exist, and it likely will not until actual technologists take an interest in what publishing is doing and the particular challenges the industry faces. But they probably won’t, because (have you heard?) the media industry is dying, and it’s unable to monetize itself, let alone create forward-thinking systems.

Apparently at Hearst, “Our plan is to have a system where, no matter where content is created, we’ll be able to store it in such a way that it can be easily used on any platform.” Really, is that your plan? Do you plan to do that? How about less “planning,” less “it’s too early” and more doing, building, iterating, testing, shipping code? The time is now; in fact, the time was years ago.

[Disclosure: I used to work at Time Inc.]

Being busy and the fetishization of the offline

July 3, 2012 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

I noticed an interesting juxtaposition in two articles I’ve recently read about the intersection of “real life” and those we live online.

The first argues that “being busy” is an artificial creation or, as Tim Kreider puts it, “a hedge against emptiness.”

[People are] busy because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety, because they’re addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence. Almost everyone I know is busy. They feel anxious and guilty when they aren’t either working or doing something to promote their work.

He says that busyness is “something we collectively force one another to do,” and he goes on at length about how he hates being busy (“Every morning my in-box was full of e-mails asking me to do things I did not want to do or presenting me with problems that I now had to solve”) and has instead taken to an “undisclosed location” to focus and write.

Here I am largely unmolested by obligations. There is no TV. To check e-mail I have to drive to the library. I go a week at a time without seeing anyone I know. I’ve remembered about buttercups, stink bugs and the stars. I read. And I’m finally getting some real writing done for the first time in months. It’s hard to find anything to say about life without immersing yourself in the world, but it’s also just about impossible to figure out what it might be, or how best to say it, without getting the hell out of it again. …The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration.”

The piece has some really lovely passages, and I consider it a romantic idealization of what life can and should be. That’s why I’m anxious — it’s my surroundings! Who doesn’t want to drop out every once in a while and just be with nature, man? And this guy is doing it! He’s so right.

Then I read this piece by Nathan Jurgenson. In it, he argues that, in fact, the only reason we feel peaceful and like we’re actually accomplishing something when we’re offline is that it’s in direct relief to being online.

The ease of digital distraction has made us appreciate solitude with a new intensity. One of our new hobbies is patting ourselves on the back by demonstrating how much we don’t go on Facebook. People boast about not having a profile. We have started to congratulate ourselves for keeping our phones in our pockets and fetishizing the offline as something more real to be nostalgic for. …Maintaining the fiction of the collective loss of the offline for everyone else is merely an attempt to construct their own personal time-outs as more special, as allowing them to rise above those social forces of distraction that have ensnared the masses.

Take that, guy who just bragged about his personal time-outs!

“The clear distinction between the on and offline, between human and technology,” Jurgenson writes, “is queered beyond tenability”:

It’s not real unless it’s on Google; pics or it didn’t happen. We aren’t friends until we are Facebook friends. We have come to understand more and more of our lives through the logic of digital connection. Social media is more than something we log into; it is something we carry within us. We can’t log off.

This piece also gets a lot of things right, and I consider it, as I did the Kreider article, to be a romantic idealization, this time of our lives online.

They key is to somehow find a happy medium. It’s not moving to rural France, and it’s not constantly taking pictures of the things and places you’re seeing instead of experiencing them. It’s somewhere in between, and that, to me, is the challenge of the technological times in which we live.