Vin Crosbie's Personal Blog

For his business blog, visit http://www.digitaldeliverance.com

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Why It Now Takes More Than Journalists to Save Journalism

Vin

I read those words written by the public editor of a major newspaper in Kenya, on her own LinkedIn page, where she commented about an article she had written about World News Day (October 1st) on the website of a global news marketing organization’s website. You can read here much of what she wrote. As the world’s Mass Media industries (and particularly their news sectors) decline as a an effect of the introduction of personal computer-mediate technologies into the media environment during the past 30 years, she hopes that ‘performing journalism better’ will or can reverse the declines. I’ve heard that stated perennially during for the past 30 years. It is well-intentioned. It is myopic. And it is wrong. My favorite incantation of it was during 2005 when the American Press Institute (‘API’), a newspaper sector ‘think tank’, blew a reported half-million for Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christiansen (1952-2020) to formulate what the API termed ‘a new type of business strategy’ for newspapers. ‘Do what they’ve always done but to do it better,’ was that strategy said. As if nobody in the newspaper sector had ever thought of that before. How journalists might solve the continuing decline of their industry sector is a ever blooming topic at journalism conferences and workshops worldwide. After all, journalists consider themselves to be the experts, the engineers, the doctors, even the high priests, of news. And therefore who better to solve the problem than them? “A doctor who treats himself has a fool for a client,” is an adage attributed tothe Canadian physician Sir William Osler (1849-1919). He noted that physicians lose their objectivity when diagnosing themselves and frequently underestimate serious conditions and over-treat minor ones. That is similar to a maxim apocryphally attributed to physicist Albert Einstein (1879-1955), “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” Indeed, whenever the problem be solved is grave or even epochal, the dire need from to expand perspective becomes unequivocal. “If your only tool is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail,” psychologist Abraham Maslow (1908-1970) wrote. Consider that two of every three new restaurants that open in American go out-of-business within their first two or three years. The major reason why is that managing and marketing a restaurant are different skill sets that is cooking. Should a journalism class be taught by a business […]

Underuse > Use of This Website: Part 2

Vin

What I hadn’t anticipated in May when I wrote the previous post was the legal, financial, logistic, and otherwise bureaucratic time consumption of something I’d meanwhile been arranging: I am now a legal resident of Spain. Since that posting May, I’ve obtained a Spanish residency visa and European work permit, both good through this decade. I’ve retained my U.S. citizenship, but am eligible for Spanish citizenship (dual citizenship) also in 12 months. I haven’t decided about that; it hasn’t been my aim. Time and residency will tell. Although I’ve recently sold my family’s newspaper business in Connecticut, my home in that state’s city of Stamford, my family’s beach house on the Connecticut shore, and the only assets that I now own in the U.S. are my eight-year-old car, my bank and investment accounts, and my 30-year-old consulting company, I’ve retain a long-term lease on a condominium, owned by South African friends, in the western Connecticut hills 80 miles (130 km) north of New York City. Forty years ago, while working in New York City as an employee of international companies, I had wanted to work abroad instead. However, most of the folks whom I knew working abroad for those companies wanted to work New York City instead. Although some of those friends suggested that we switch locations, the fact that wanted to work in New York City instead, plus that I was then married to someone with a job in nearby Connecticut, led me to keep working from New York City. When I started my own company 30 years ago, whose purpose was to consult about New Media to media companies in the United States, it rapidly became apparent to me that there is even more aggregate demand abroad for such consulting. In 1997, I began consulting to European media companies and by 2000 had clients from five continents. I’ve co-chaired and co-moderated the WAN/Ifra ‘Beyond the Printed Word’ newspaper conference in Vienna; given Singapore’s annual media lecture (introduced by the audience in its National Library by the President of that Republic), and the initial edition of the now 15-year-old International Journal of New Media Studies, which is based in Asia, lead with my seminal essay, What is New Media. Although also while consulting had been teaching in Syracuse University’s graduate school between 2007 and 2021, I’ve done so much consulting abroad that, except for some for the U.S. Congress, […]

Ad Interim

Vin

I’ve Revamped and Rebranded the Digital Deliverance newsletter to Focus on What has Already Superseded the Mass Media as Consumers’ Predominant Way of Obtaining News, Entertainment, and Other information. As old dogs such as me get older, we sometimes forget the new tricks we had learned. “You’re publishing a newsletter to teach media executives the lessons that you taught in graduate school? Won’t this confuse people who instead expect a newsletter that comments about news and current events in the media industries? Moreover, you’ve devoted the past 20 years your life to recognizing the rise of Individuated Media. So, why not call it that rather than brand it with the name of your 30-year-old consulting company.” The perceptive and beautiful Ph.D. with whom I live mades some good points! So, welcome to the Individuated Media newsletter (formerly Digital Deliverance newsletter). I’ve revamped and rebranded it. The many lessons I wrote and taught in my required course for New Media Management master’s degree students (an elective for doctoral candidates) at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, I’m instead converting to podcasts and videos for this newsletter’s paying subscribers—a better way to differentiate what they get from what free subscribers receive. I’ve increased this newsletter’s frequency to more than weekly. And I’ve also changed its tone. I had been these past years publishing academic publications such the International Journal of New Media Studies, the Nordic Journal of Media Management, the Journal of Strategic Innovation and Sustainability, etc., rather than media industry trade journals. Academic writing is virtually required to be bulletproof and concrete, particularly because any dissident or non-conformist articles get attacked by the hidebound or philistine. Yet that can tend to make academic writing sometimes as heavy and ineffective as the Maginot Line. My career started 50 years ago in journalism, in which writing should be short and snappy, particularly in a newsletter. Here we go! I’ve a reputation of not taking prisoners at conferences, symposia, and seminars about ‘New Media’. I’d rather immediately kill a faulty idea or unsound strategy than let those go viral. However, I regret that wasn’t faithful to that hygienic practice during an online journalism conference hosted by the University of Massachusetts 20 years ago. The result is that I’m today writing about a misguided strategy that has cancerously metastasized since. In my opening remarks as that day’s co-moderator of the conference, I warned against the Mass Media industries pursuing a strategy that I’ll now outline below. […]

When the Doom of Mass Media Became Apparent

Vin

Digital Deliverance Newsletter #4: Clear Evidence Existed 20 Years Ago Websites Won’t Compensate for Print Edition Losses When is a strategy recognized as disastrous? How long must its obvious devastation be experienced until it is called what it so clearly is? How much sheer volume of perennially negative data does it take to alert reasonably intelligent executives to the factual reality that they’ve executed a strategy which has become catastrophic? Indeed, if a strategy has already failed for over a quarter century, how much longer until the executives who maintain it escape what otherwise appears to be a zombie-like condition in which they thoughtlessly stagger towards their doom? In the cases of Mass Media executives, perhaps never. They executed a disastrous strategy for adapting to the changes wrought by the introduction of personal computer-mediated technologies into the media environment. They’ve hoped this strategy would at least reap revenues from online that are even greater than those which their printed products or broadcast services generated at the start of the 21st Century or at least compensated for any losses they incurred as consumers shifted media consumption habits to online rather than those traditional products and services. What they hoped clearly hasn’t occurred despite more than a quarter century elapsing. Yet rather than change, or even significantly alter this failed strategy, they mindlessly continue it despite its disastrous effect upon their industries. After all, why change course, even at the last minute, when you instead can go down with the ship? I refer to what I term the ‘shovelware strategy’. The Mass Media industries simply shoveled onto websites the contents of their printed products and broadcast services. These industries hoped that consumers would use these websites the same ways (i.e., as frequently and deeply) as consumers had used their printed products and broadcast services during the 20th Century. Compounding that hope, the industries likewise shoveled onto these websites their theories, doctrines, business models, and traditional practices of Mass Media Newspapers were the first sector of these industries to implement the shovelware strategy. They encountered personal computer-mediated technologies during the late 1970s and early 1980s in the form of news ticker scrolls in videotext; then as textual news stories in teletext experiments during the late 1970s through the 1980s; then in the form of third-party proprietary online services from then until 2000. When the Internet opened for public usage and the first multimedia […]

The Hallmark Flaw of the Mass Media

Vin

Ask historians to say when the Industrial Era began and they will cite dates in the 18th or 19th centuries when a factory powered by hydraulics or steam engine was first constructed in their nation. I think they’re wrong. The start of the Industrial Era shouldn’t be defined by what powered mechanisms of mass production, but by the invention of such a mechanism itself. In approximately 1454, the entrepreneurial metallurgist Johannes Gutenberg invented the moveable type printing press: the world’s first mass production device. Prior to Gutenberg, books were rarities, affordable only by the church or the rich. A typical scribe or monk in a scriptorium could copy by hand two to four pages daily, laboriously producing a simple book in three to six months. If the book was also ‘illuminated’ with illustrations or decorations, it could take up to three years. Gutenberg’s press used metal type characters that were set in a mirror-image analog of the page to be printed. This was then inked and pressed onto paper. A two-man team operating the press lever or crank could imprint hundreds of pages daily, enough to produce hundreds of books per month, more than a lifetime’s production by a scribe or monk. The societal effects of Gutenberg’s press are often cited as ending the Middle Ages and beginning the Modern Era. This first mass production device fundamentally improved how human beings distribute, store, and trust information. Nearly half a millennium later, Guglielmo Marconi’s invention of wireless broadcasting markedly extended the immediacy and reach of information. He converted electrical teletype signals into analog electromagnetic waves of radiation that could be instantly received across huge distances. The later additions of microphones and photovoltaic sensors and cathode receiver tubes resulted in radio and television. From these analog production and distribution technologies of the Industrial Era arose the theories, doctrines, business models, products, services, and practices that are now colloquially known as the Mass Media. Their industries globally generate US$3 trillion in gross revenues annually. The Present Since the mid-1990s, the Mass Media industries have created online versions of their Industrial Era products and services ‘converged’ into multimedia websites or ‘streaming’ services. The industries hoped that consumers and advertisers would utilize the websites the same way (i.e., as often and thoroughly) as consumers had printed products or broadcast services during the 20th Century. The industries hoped that the same Industrial Era business models would […]

Bezos & Bogeymen

Vin

Don’t Get Distracted from the Existential Problem In 1998 when I first began questioning if the Mass Media industries would have a future, the senior vice president of marketing at largest daily newspaper in Texas tried to reassure me, “People have been using newspapers for centuries, so we expect they will for centuries more.” What immediately crossed my mind was that horses had been a prime means of transportation for millennia, so people living 100 years ago probably thought this meant that horses would still be a prime means of transportation in future centuries, too. How wrong they were! Within 30 years of 1898, horses had disappeared as a prime means of transportation in most developed nations. Not just in Texas! Last week in this newsletter’s first edition, I stated that its focus is the existential threat now confronting the Mass Media industries as the Industrial Era wanes and the Informational Era dawns. What is this threat? Is it truly existential? Or am I being over-dramatic or otherwise hyperbolic? No, I can justify what I here state. Twenty years ago, the Mass Media industries was riding high. Many of those industries announced recorded earnings during the first half-decade of the new millennium. Although the ‘Great Recession’ then struck, those industries reasonably expected to restore and resume those record earnings soon afterward. However, that didn’t happen. Since 2007, almost all sectors of the Mass Media industries have seen plummeting audiences (i.e,. readership, listenership, or viewership); advertising clienteles; and gross revenues (turnover) when such numbers are adjusted for population growth or inflation. Some of the declines have been spectacular, an example of which I’ll describe below and in subsequent newsletters. Starting next week, I’ll likewise write about he categorical reasons for these declines. However, in this second edition of the Digital Deliverance newsletters, let’s focus on the proximate reason why the Mass Media industries are not only in rapid decline but actually in danger of extinction, a tangible problem already creating troubling societal effects. What is this existential threat? Some myopic pundits call it the ‘Missing Business Model’ problem. During the past 30 years, literally billions of consumers worldwide have begun using personal computer-mediated technologies, rather than printed products or broadcast services, as their primary means of obtaining news, entertainment, and other information. Yet during that time, the Mass Media industries unfortunately haven’t been unable to devise a business model or models […]