Newsstands everywhere today groan under the load of magazines devoted to the Internet and the Web. Just telling them apart from one another is tough — a search engine might help. These publications’ names seem to have been generated by an artificial-intelligence device programmed to provide every conceivable mutant combination of the syllables “Web,” “Net,” “Internet,” “Guide,” “Life” and “World.” The magazines don’t carry a lot of ads yet — but have they got URLs for you!
The growth of this publishing sector attests to the popularity of the Web. Paradoxically, it also suggests that the new medium has failed miserably in making its riches available to the masses. If all the promises of point-and-click, search-and-find ease-of-use had been delivered upon, who’d need a glossy monthly magazine to get around online?
The common wisdom shared by the publishers and editors of these new magazines is that newcomers to the Web don’t have the skills, and online veterans don’t have the time, to keep up with the burgeoning volume of sites they could visit. They need a digest for the medium, like a TV Guide or a trusty hot list.
But wait a second — hot lists are a staple of the Web itself. And when a hot list appears inside your browser window, all you have to do is click to reach the site you want — whereas to “follow a link” from a print magazine means retyping a sometimes-lengthy Web address at your keyboard. Most of these magazines have Web sites of their own, of course, and they all point their readers to the online versions of their hot lists to avoid the annoying retyping of URLs. But that just raises the question of why the reader in search of online diversion wouldn’t start out on the Web in the first place, rather than taking a detour into print.
The advantages print holds over online publishing are obvious and well-known, and the editors of print magazines about the Web tick them off: “Print is portable — you can take it from home to office, to the beach, to the bathroom, or on an airplane,” says Jon Zilber, editor-in-chief of The Net. Steve Fox, editor-in-chief of The Web, points out, “Refresh is immediate — all you have to do is turn the page.”
All true. And if you wanted to read a magazine about, say, cars or cats or basketball or books, all those advantages would certainly be valuable. The Web is different, in two big ways.
First of all, it’s a moving target: Its technologies and its content both change insanely fast, certainly quickly enough to make the six-to-12-week lead time of the typical print monthly a huge problem. And it’s not only URLs that change; the whole business seems to rearrange itself every few months.
Back in 1995, when Microsoft Network first launched and then instantly revamped itself, a lot of magazines got burned with major stories that were instantly out of date. Similarly, NetGuide’s May issue contained an article about WebTV’s battle with the U.S. government over exporting its products because of its use of encryption; by the time the issue hit the stands, Microsoft had bought WebTV and the company had an entirely different fight with the government on its hands — an antitrust inquiry. Obviously, Web-based news services don’t have the same problem keeping up; they have no lead time at all and can change what’s on their site at will.
Second, beyond the issue of timeliness, print publications can never match the power of the Web itself to serve as its own guide. People needed listings for TV and radio because those media couldn’t effectively and conveniently deliver reference material to their audiences. The Web is a reference tool par excellence: It was originally developed as a means for linking information into cross-referenced documents, and it has the capacity — imperfect yet remarkable — to create chronicles of its own events and catalogs of its own content. Yahoo, Excite, Altavista and the rest, for all their shortcomings, can satisfy both the browsing surfer and the single-minded searcher. Nothing TV has ever offered in the way of on-screen program guides can match their versatility, scope and latitude to customize.
There’s one big advantage print has over the Web that doesn’t get mentioned nearly as often as “portability” and “user-friendliness”: advertiser-friendliness. Where advertising on the Web remains a tough sell, advertising in paper magazines is well-established and well-understood. Among magazines about the Web, interestingly, it’s the ones that cover the technical and business end of the industry for professionals that have a healthy number of ad pages, mostly from computer hardware and software companies. The newer magazines that focus on Web content have a harder time of it: The businesses they cover, “content providers,” are struggling themselves to sell ads on their Web sites and don’t often have big ad budgets of their own to blow on expensive print campaigns. And so you have the anomaly of a magazine like The Web appearing to be largely supported by cigarette ads.
Investors rarely expect new magazines to turn a profit out of the gate; the typical business plan for a print magazine assumes five years to reach the break-even point. Yet that longer-term view poses problems for magazines about the Web that wouldn’t exist for a magazine about, say, fly-fishing. With most subjects, the more fanatically interested readers become, the more likely they are to subscribe to magazines that cater to their interests. But the Web’s different: The deeper into the Web people get — the more they invest in faster connections, the better they get at finding things, the more they crave timely updates — the more likely they are to take their information about the Web directly from the Web.
Inevitably, this dynamic is kicking in first among the Web professionals who already spend most of their lives online. Last week, Web Developer magazine’s parent company, Mecklermedia, decided to pull the plug on its print edition and move the whole operation onto the Web — where it will compete with other sites like Webmonkey and Web Review. Mecklermedia president Alan Meckler explained to Wired News: “It was pretty apparent that high-end Web developers don’t get their info from print.”
What’s true for the hard-core pros is likely to spread to the wider population as the Web gets faster and easier and the general public gets more comfortable with it. That puts print publishers in a tough position: Two or three years down the line, right when they would normally expect to be approaching profitability, they may find themselves losing their core of readers. And the better they do their job of educating newcomers about the wonders of the Web and stoking the engagement of veterans, the more they will hasten that exodus.
The editors are undaunted. Barry Golson, editor-in-chief of Yahoo! Internet Life, waxed thoughtfully enough about his optimism that we decided to present his perspective in its entirety.
Jon Zilber, of The Net, notes that his average reader has been online for two years and is hardly a novice, and argues that his magazine’s “three-legged stool” approach — publishing not only in print and on the Web, but also on a CD-ROM that’s packaged with the paper magazine — provides an “unbeatable combination of the convenience of print, the timeliness and interactivity of online and the huge bandwidth of CD-ROM.”
“We’re not worried that the Web is gonna put us out of business,” says The Web’s Steve Fox. “Print magazines about the Web may eventually have real troubles — when bandwidth improves and screen-display issues disappear. But I’m not sure that’s going to happen in our lifetime.”
Maybe not. Then again, who could have predicted, six or seven years ago, when the Internet was still an arcane academic network for scientists, students and hackers, that news racks today would be crowded with magazines dedicated to it?
Way back when I joined Facebook I was under the impression that it was the social network where people play themselves. On Facebook, you were supposed to be “real.” So I figured: OK, this is where I don’t friend everyone indiscriminately; this is where I only connect with people I really know.
I stuck with that for a little while. But there were two big problems.
First, I was bombarded with friend requests from people I barely knew or didn’t know at all. Why? It soon became clear that large numbers of people weren’t approaching Facebook with the reality principle in mind. They were playing the usual online game of racking up big numbers to feel important. “Friend count” was the new “unique visitors.”
Then Facebook started to get massive. And consultants and authors started giving us advice about how to use Facebook to brand ourselves. And marketing people began advocating that we use Facebook to sell stuff and, in fact, sell ourselves.
So which was Facebook: a new space for authentic communication between real people — or a new arena for self-promotion?
I could probably have handled this existential dilemma. And I know it’s one that a lot of people simply don’t care about. It bugged me, but it was the other Facebook problem that made me not want to use the service at all.
Facebook flattens our social relationships into one undifferentiated blob. It’s almost impossible to organize friends into discrete groups like “family” and “work” and “school friends” and so forth. Facebook’s just not built that way. (This critique is hardly original to me. But it’s worth repeating.)
In theory Facebook advocates a strict “one person, one account” policy, because each account’s supposed to correlate to a “real” individual. But then sometimes Facebook recommends that we keep a personal profile for our private life and a “page” for our professional life. Which seems an awful lot like “one person, two accounts.”
In truth, Facebook started out with an oversimplified conception of social life, modeled on the artificial hothouse community of a college campus, and it has never succeeded in providing a usable or convenient method for dividing or organizing your life into its different contexts. This is a massive, ongoing failure. And it is precisely where Facebook’s competitors at Google have built the strength of their new service for networking and sharing, Google+.
Google+ opened a limited trial on Tuesday, and last night it hit some sort of critical mass in the land of tech-and-media early adopters. Invitations were flying, in an eerie and amusing echo of what happened in 2004, when Google opened its very first social network, Orkut, to the public, and the Silicon Valley elite flocked to it with glee.
Google+ represents Google’s fourth big bite at building a social network. Orkut never took off because Google stopped building it out; once you found your friends there was nothing to do there. Wave was a fascinating experiment in advanced technology that was incomprehensible to the average user, and Google abandoned it. Buzz was (and is) a Twitter-like effort that botched its launch by invading your Gmail in box and raiding your contact list.
So far Google+ seems to be getting things right: It’s easy to figure out, it explains itself elegantly as you delve into its features, it’s fast (for now, at least, under a trial-size population) and it’s even a bit fun.
By far the most interesting and valuable feature of Google+ is the idea of “circles” that it’s built upon. You choose friends and organize them into different “circles,” or groups, based on any criteria you like — the obvious ones being “family,” “friends,” “work” and so on.
The most important thing to know is that you use these circles to decide who you’ll share what with. So, if you don’t want your friends to be bugged by some tidbit from your workplace, you just share with your workplace circle. Google has conceived and executed this feature beautifully; it takes little time to be up and running.
The other key choice is that you see the composition of your circles but your friends don’t: It’s as if you’re organizing them on your desktop. Your contacts never see how you’re labeling them, but your labeling choices govern what they see of what you share.
I’m sure problems will surface with this model but so far it seems sound and useful, and it’s a cinch to get started with it. Of course, if you’re already living inside Facebook, Google has a tough sell to make. You’ve invested in one network, you’re connected there; why should you bother? But if, like me, you resisted Facebook, Google+ offers a useful alternative that’s worth exploring.
The ideal future of social networking is one that isn’t controlled by any single company. But social networks depend on scale, and right now it’s big companies that are providing that.
Lord knows Google’s record isn’t perfect. But in this realm I view it as the least of evils. Look at the competition: Facebook is being built by young engineers who don’t have lives, and I don’t trust it to understand the complexity of our lives. It’s also about to go public and faces enormous pressure to cash in on the vast network it’s built. Twitter is a great service for real-time public conversation but it’s no better at nuanced social interaction than Facebook. Apple is forging the One Ring to rule all media and technology, and it’s a beaut, but I’ll keep my personal relationships out of its hands as long as I can. Microsoft? Don’t even bother.
Of the technology giants, Google — despite its missteps — has the best record of helping build and expand the Web in useful ways. It’s full of brilliant engineers who have had a very hard time figuring out how to transfer their expertise from the realm of code to the world of human interaction. But it’s learning.
So I’ll embrace the open-source, distributed, nobody-owns-it social network when it arrives, as it inevitably will, whether we get it from the likes of Diaspora and Status.net or somebody else. In the meantime, Google+ is looking pretty good. (Except for that awful punctuation-mark-laden name.)
Salon.com Wednesday announced plans to close Table Talk, the online discussion space and community that has operated continuously since Salon’s launch on Nov. 20, 1995. I was involved in Table Talk’s creation and management for its first several years, and when I read the news, I flashed back to my first day at Salon.
As the tech-savviest of a not-tech-savvy-at-all gang of newspaper refugees trying to build a Web magazine, I got pulled over by our then-publisher. He’d been tearing his hair out trying to get a group of unruly Cornell students to write the software that would power Table Talk, which was going to be Salon’s big bid for being not just an online magazine but an “interactive” website worthy of the Salon name. Things weren’t going well. “I want you to project manage this,” the publisher said. I thought, “What do I know from ‘project manage’? I’m a critic!” Then I dove in, because, in a start-up with six employees, that was what you did.
For me it was the start of a deepening engagement with and affection for the excitement, complexity and pitfalls of building software-powered websites. (Salon itself was lovingly hand-coded then and for several years after.) We got Table Talk launched, sort of, though within weeks we had to ditch the version those Cornell kids had built and start fresh. Said kids took their software and built TheGlobe.com with it, which went on to an impossibly successful IPO at the height of the dot-com bubble before a spectacular flameout.
The original idea was that every Salon article would have a link at the end to a Table Talk thread. The articles would serve, in part, as discussion-starters and then our community would kick the ideas around. It wasn’t a dumb plan — story comments are now a Web standard. But the way we built it, modeled on the experiences some of us had had as members of The WELL, Table Talk was a separate space with threaded discussions that anyone could add. The conversations weren’t tied to the stories very well, and we quickly learned that the community members — who took to the project avidly — preferred to talk about what they wanted to talk about. Salon’s editors and writers rarely hung out in TT, and it didn’t take long before the TT members developed a dysfunctional relationship with Salon’s staff — simultaneously craving our attention and resenting our presence.
So TT went its somewhat separate way from Salon-the-magazine, which soon started running a simple, hand-coded letters-to-the-editor page to highlight actual responses to our stories. Mary Elizabeth Williams, its original and longtime host, managed the discussion space with great love and devotion for years. We all learned a lot about dealing with anonymity and trolls, personal authenticity and online performance art, technical woes and social dynamics.
What we never managed to do was find a way to knit the energy and talent of Table Talk’s remarkable community with the skills and money being invested into Salon.com itself. Instead, Salon tried over and over to find different models for tying community together with journalism. In 1999 it acquired The WELL. In 2002 it launched a blog program. In 2005 it transformed Letters to the Editor into a more Web-standard comments feature. In 2008 it launched Open Salon as a modern, social blogging platform.
As a result, Table Talk became, more and more, a separate entity. When we started Salon Premium in 2001 as a paid service that let users see an ad-free site and some premium content, we rolled Table Talk into it: Its pages were readable by anyone, but you needed to pay to post. That insured its survival but also assured its marginality. Over the years Salon’s management (which I was a part of until 2007) considered, over and over, whether to shut it down. It generated large numbers of page views from a relatively small number of users, and advertisers were not excited by that. Its WebCrossing software was increasingly out of step with the direction the Web was moving in. Yet TT’s community remained close-knit and vibrant. In the wake of this week’s announcement, its members, unsurprisingly, are already trying to figure out ways to continue their conversations after the site’s announced June 10 shutdown date.
I don’t second-guess Salon’s leadership for deciding to end TT today — I might well do the same in their shoes. I do think there’s a lesson here, though, not just for Salon but for all the other enterprises out there today that dream of doing what we tried for so long to do at Salon. (Hi, Arianna; hi, Tina.)
The lesson is simple: Don’t think of “conversation” and “community” as subsidiaries to “content.” They aren’t afterthoughts, add-ons or sidebars. They are the point of the Web. Here’s how I put it in “Say Everything”:
[Interactivity] is just a clumsy word for communication. That communication — each reader’s ability to be a writer as well — was not some bell or whistle. It was the whole point of the Web, the defining trait of the new medium — like motion in movies, or sound in radio, or narrow columns of text in newspapers.
Editors and publishers keep crossing their fingers and hoping to find some new platform that reverses this principle and puts them back in the comfortable realm of piping content out to consumers. They think this stuff will finally settle down. But change keeps accelerating instead. Today we are feeding one another stories, passing links around, telling friends what we’re fascinated by or excited about or steamed over. My Flipboard is more useful and interesting to me than the front page of the New York Times (sorry, Bill Keller). The conversation isn’t an afterthought. It’s interesting in itself, and it’s how we inform one another.
So Table Talk is dead: RIP. But Table Talk is everywhere, too — on Facebook and Twitter, all over the blogosphere, and in a billion comment threads. Table talk is what we do online. It’s not what comes after a publication’s stories. It’s what comes before.
BONUS LINK: If you haven’t already, go read Paul Ford’s wonderful essay on the nature of the Web and its fundamental question — “Why wasn’t I consulted?”
There is much more to say, but I’m angry, and I want to say this quickly: We’re all on notice now. Keep your eyes open and your ears cocked. Public life is becoming a maze of entrapments, and the press is enabling the deceit.
Yesterday James O’Keefe, the conservative trickster who has previously targeted ACORN and other organizations with fraudulent schemes aimed at exposing what he sees as liberal bias and malfeasance, unveiled his latest act: his confederates impersonated Muslim donors and recorded a meeting with an NPR fundraiser, Ron Schiller. Schiller said some impolitic things, some of which were true, others of which were overstatements, none of which was that different from what you can hear in any bar and on any blog. (Unless you believe nobody has ever charged that there are racists in the ranks of the Tea Party, or that anyone has ever suggested NPR might be better off without the federal funding that conservatives are constantly threatening to cut.)
NPR rejected the bogus Muslims’ bogus contribution, but Schiller’s words got him suspended yesterday. And today we learn that NPR’s CEO, Vivian Schiller (no relation), has resigned too.
In a saner cultural moment, a serial liar like O’Keefe would not be taken seriously by the rest of the media or by a board of directors. Here’s why (courtesy TPM):
Previous tapes by O’Keefe’s group have later turned out to be misleadingly edited, including the video that launched them to stardom featuring O’Keefe posing as a pimp in front of ACORN offices, so it’s worth taking the overall footage with a grain of salt until further details emerge. Last year, O’Keefe’s credibility took another major hit when he reportedly tried to invite a CNN reporter onto his boat to try and seduce her as a prank, an effort that was revealed when one of his own colleagues blew the whistle to the press.
But just as the White House dumped Shirley Sherrod the moment Andrew Breitbart’s doctored video of her supposedly damning admission of racism surfaced, NPR’s board chose not only not to fight but to cave in immediately to O’Keefe’s tactics. By not fighting back, NPR has invited an open season on truth, and ushered us into a new age of mistrust.
You should go listen to O’Keefe’s tapes of Ron Schiller’s statements — first, to see that much of what he said is harmless and reasonable, but more important, to ask yourself whether you have any expertise or standing to determine the recording’s authenticity. How can we possibly trust O’Keefe’s reports when the essence of his technique is deception? Who knows how this recording was edited or doctored? Does the phrase “consider the source” mean anything any more?
Sting operations conducted by law enforcement officials have a dubious record themselves, but at least they require oversight and must meet court standards of evidence. For public actors like James O’Keefe, the oversight, we assume, is performed by the media. The press prides itself for serving as truth’s first line of defense, democracy’s bullshit filter. This week it failed in a big way.
The larger problem here isn’t Viv Schiller’s ultimate fate, and it’s not even the final disposition of congressional funding for NPR — an institution I admire in many ways but which, let’s face it, we’d survive without.
The problem is we are crediting creeps and letting liars take over our public discourse.
This is hardly a partisan concern. Roughly similar tactics caused major headaches for Wisconsin’s embattled Republican governor recently, when he got taken in by a caller impersonating conservative billionaire David Koch. (This led Wisconsin’s Legislature to start talking about outlawing prank calls.) Increasingly, public deception carries little apparent cost.
If a James O’Keefe can win attention and scalps by ruses and lies, why should he stop? And does any public figure have a big enough megaphone and a strong enough spine to say to him, “Have you no decency?”
BONUS LINK: Jeff Jarvis: “The stations’ interests and NPR’s interests are no longer aligned.”
A late Sunday night in winter and the surprise announcement of a big merger, with Kara Swisher one of the key people breaking the news: No wonder the Huffington Post/AOL announcement last night gave veteran tech and media-biz reporters a flashback to 2000 and the colossally ill-fated AOL/Time-Warner deal.
The events are similar in another way: Despite all the CEO happy-talk about synergy, we are once again watching two companies in trouble taking a big gamble that the other will solve its problems.
People think of Huffington Post as the leading popular liberal-Democratic news site. Huffington is now at least suggesting that the progressive point of view isn’t a part of what she’ll be pursuing at AOL. “Ms. Huffington said her politics would have no bearing on how she ran the new business,” says the New York Times story. Really? This strikes me as strange, disingenuous, and about as credible as Roger Ailes claiming that Fox is not a partisan-driven institution.
One possibility is, Huffington is just saying what the corporate script requires and actually the plan is to position AOL as a sort of Democratic alternative to Fox News/Drudge — which I think would be a really interesting move. I have to assume Arianna has big TV ambitions; I have yet to meet a new-media empire builder who didn’t secretly yearn to do an Ailes (or an Oprah).
The other, more likely possibility is that this whole thing is about the money, the investors needed to cash out, HuffPo’s numbers weren’t looking good enough for an IPO, and Huffington is basically improvising. She’ll spend a couple years at AOL and then move on. This means that, in 2011, Huffington Post will be playing the same role in relation to AOL that AOL played in relation to Time Warner back in 2000: selling itself at the top of a market bubble, pocketing the profit from a sale that couldn’t be earned from customers, and leaving a bigger, older company with all the headaches.
I was one of the few outspoken skeptics of Time Warner/AOL back in 2000. This time around there are more — see Om Malik, who looks at some numbers; Dan Lyons, who’s funny; and Ken Auletta, who views the deal as AOL CEO Tim Armstrong’s “hail Mary pass.”
Having all this company in doubt gives me a little pause. Maybe Huffington and Armstrong will prove a great team: The queen of low-cost SEO-driven content paired with the guy who built the Google ad machine that made SEO-driven content pay. But I still think this union is unlikely to end well. AOL remains a generic blandness factory when it comes to journalism. Huffington’s brand could change that; far more likely, it will just dissolve into the corporate miasma.
A decade ago, if you were a “digital” person — if you were interested in how computer technology was changing our culture and economy — then you were a Web person. The Web, built on top of the Internet and ultimately eclipsing its source, dispatched its competitors — the closed online services, the packaged-goods multimedia/CD-ROM industry — and became, for a time, the single face of the digital revolution.
This week’s launch of Rupert Murdoch’s iPad “newspaper,” The Daily, is a milestone: It’s the first significant attempt, since the Web conquered the digital world in 1995, to create a major new media product that embraces technology yet spurns the Web — and the public Internet, too. Chris Anderson’s Wired “Web is Dead” package was the warning shot for this phenomenon, but The Daily’s introduction puts it in front of us in palpable touch-screen form. It boldly declares: We’re digital people but we’re not Web people.
Why do I say that The Daily spurns the Web and the Net? I mean, beyond the obvious reason that there is no Web site that offers its contents in a convenient form each day. It’s not just that. The Daily also contains no links. (Some today see this as a plus; I do not.) There are no RSS feeds. No email addresses to contact the writers and editors. No email alerts or mailing list. Comments on the articles, yes, but not reachable through the Web. No, archives, back issue index, or search! (They’re on Twitter, however. They have a blog, too, and it’s not bad.)
In other words, most of the apparatus of two-way communication that every serious digital publishing venture of the past 15 years has taken as a given is missing from The Daily. They’re serious about this iPad-only thing! But they don’t seem to realize that they’re repeating the mistakes of the very recent past.
The Daily’s designers are eager to show off sparkling graphics, integrated video, and the swipe-ability that the iPad allows. Unfortunately, they are defining “interactivity” the way the lost pioneers of the 1994-era CD-ROM “multimedia revolution” defined it. They have built a gleaming but limited set of interfaces for users to interact with static, prepackaged content. The Web taught us that true interactivity was the interaction between people moderated by the network — along with the personalization you could build into the network based on those people’s behavior.
The Daily’s one concession to today’s Web is the mechanisms it provides for its readers to share individual stories via the usual routes — Facebook, Twitter, email. The recipient of your share notice receives a link to a URL that’s a Web page version of The Daily article. We don’t know how long these web addresses will be good for. But for the moment, at least, it’s pretty easy to assemble a set of links that points you to the Web-accessible versions of each article in the day’s Daily edition. That’s what Andy Baio has done.
How long will Baio’s index last? Will it still be easy to assemble after The Daily’s first-two-weeks-free period ends? Will the News Corp. folks ask him to take it down? We’ll have to wait and see.
The question is whether The Daily’s secession from the Web is a matter of convenience or ideology for its creators. Did they put their energy into spiffing things up for the iPad — the hard, fun, innovative part — figuring that they can circle back to beef up their Web offerings later? Or do they feel that it is their calling, their mission, to leave the Web behind?
My prediction: If they’re pragmatists about the Web, they’ve got a chance — they can adapt and evolve their product so it’s a little more up to date, less hermetic and more inclusive of the public that lives online today. But if they’re ideologues — if they really believe that what is essentially a magazine “pasted on a screen” is the future of journalism — then they’re in deep trouble, and The Daily will only be Murdoch’s latest and most spectacular digital money-sink.
James O'Keefe 