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Here are links to the three sets of notes:
Jack Fuller and Panel 1
Andrew Sullivan and the Blog Panel
Back to the Future
Update: Chad Capellman has a recording of Sullivan and some of the panels that were scheduled at the same time, in case you missed them or were unable to attend at all.
Conference Blog - with some very gracious notes from Andrew Sullivan, and others.
Digital Media
Everything I mention below may seem obvious. I've known it for a long time, but still having just gone to a bunch of talks, met with media companies and consultants, I was amazed at how little of this is out there in any real way for people in that business. So my thoughts are below, however helpful that might be. Maybe not.
The thing is, digital media disintermediates power. And all these people, nice, well educated, important, powerful people, media people, don't want that to happen. Heck, people in power in every other kind of business don't want it to happen either, and yet it is. So the conferences I've been to the last two weeks, none of which have offered anything I didn't already know between all five of them, in various slices of the media business from micropayments to big media to social networks and media, to online news, have all had rooms full of people trying not to acknowledge the coming or present disintermediation of their own power. Yes, they acknowledge P2P or the many many digital media choices or blogs or Tivo or targeted ads or friendster (really all of these things are just tools/offerings, right, so if not these it would be something else in the digital realm) are things they need to embrace in order to move with the times, the Internet, the audience's new found power. But they are not willing to open themselves up to the properties of digital media.
Traditional or analog media cannot be shoveled straight, digitized, and it cannot be made interactive, multimedia style with a lovely poll asking - defining really by the choices given - readers for their "opinions" via check boxes, the bottom line is, it can't be controlled. Whether that control comes in the form of copyright or bundling cable or believing that the producers/editors/shapers/makers of content know more than their audiences. The fact is, you audience is now your colleague. The other night at dinner, with a large table of folks from all over, I challenged a bit, maybe too much, a senior VP at CNN. I have to admit, I think I offended him because of my directness. I really was at the end of a frustrating conference full of people who don't understand what digital media is, why it's different, and a lot of that has to do with the way they use media and technology. They use it like old style news people, which is fine, except that technology is a thing you use, not theorize about, and so describing why some digital tool is different, changes everything, makes life go perpendicularly to the way it used to in the analog, is a bit theoretical. The fact is, you have to use it, a lot. You have to see it for yourself, listen to others, see it from your users point of view. Or you don't get it. So the CNN guy seemed just for a moment like he was going to cry when I suggested that cable customers might only, ONLY, want say, HBO, and not really care to take anything else. And they may never tell you why, or they may tell you lots, but they will go elsewhere if you don't give it up. Cable may become granular. Or the answer from the audience/users may be things that are not legal, or fair, it may not support the notion that the creators of news believe they know what's good for the audience, and it may not support good content in the old traditional way. It's not a threat, it's just what we already know to be real, whatever you think of as right or wrong, correct between content creators/copyright holders and users. But I do feel badly now, because frankly, as frustrated as I was at all these things, I managed to be gracious until this last one, at dinner, with this guy. I wasn't mean or obnoxious about it, but I said what I thought was true and I think he probably regrets the conversation. Because it just doesn't go with the way these companies think. I had just had it, I guess.
So, the lesson I guess is that people really are deeply in denial, with a few bargainers and angry folks in the mix. There are, though, an extremely small number willing to go out into the wilderness and really discover something unfathomable that might destroy the business model. But if you don't work with P2P, your audience, and the Internet, it will kill you. And any attempts to control the network, all the networks you work in, associate with, consumption networks, media networks, etc., will go around you if you don't work with them. And controls include IP regimes, network barriers, frictions like DRM and payment mechanisms, overly-intrusive advertising or even advertising that doesn't apply to a specific viewer and so is not content of value. You can either make the digital work, or be something everyone else avoids. But the days of one to many, controlling, bundled, competitive, stove-pipe media are over.
Update: note this Sorkin/NYTimes article on blogs and media, quoting Jeff Jarvis and featuring Nick Denton.
Posted by Mary Hodder at November 16, 2003 07:50 PM