Internet

“I have been thinking that the newspapers have got it right! Only the popular topics gets all the hits… The rest get… well… just the spill overs.”

He is right on one part, but oh so wrong…

The news papers and media in the US today predominantly covers entertainment news, and very little international news. In Feburary 2007, the coverage was around 79% US news. The remaining 21% was dominated by coverage of the situation in Iraq. Here is the really scary part: “The combined coverage of Russia, China and India, for example, reached just 1%.” We all know about the BRIC countries and their influence over the world economy today and in the future. Does it really make sense to have such a infinitesimal coverage of these big forces? Not to mention the non-existing coverage of the natural resource intense fourth BRIC country Brazil. I won’t go in to a international policy discussion about the reasons behind it here, even though it is an interesting angle.

The world becomes more and more flat. The borders – geographical, political, ethnical, cultural and religious – are becoming more and more fuzzy to even non-existing. We are living in a global society. The issues we have to tackle are predominantly global and multifaceted. They have to be solved and understood by us all, together as one society. At the same time the media who should cover this is decreasing their international covering staff by around 50% already. We are witnessing a very dangerous development from a societal growth perspective.

I came to Stanford back in 2005 with the task to figure out ways to increase the coverage in troubled areas and it became obvious that the web as a distribution channel was not the issue. It was the lack of coverage of the events taking place. The few journalists there were getting killed, threaten or in some way worse stopped from covering the events on-the-ground. Today in the US we see an increasing number of unemployed, in many ways suffering core of journalist, photographers, video makers and other media workers. The industry is seriously wounded. Any organism, organization or company will in the state of being wounded turn to survival mode and the quick fix. It is about surviving for the moment. Go for the easy win. In here lies the reasons for the media business trend, as well as we as consumers have very few other alternatives at the moment.

The reality however is that the web has forever changed the possible revenue models for news papers and the media business in general. The music industry got their piece of this change first. The time has come for the news media business to realize that the era of the traditional media is gone. A lot of the revenue streams have for news companies come from either the classified (in the printed editions) or for the big news agencies syndication of content. Look at Reuters for instance who earn their revenue from financial data, not their news arm, where you need accurate massaged data to make balanced and accurate decisions. Syndication is an ancient, today non-working and dysfunctional solution. The freedom of content – both on the publishing and consumption side – on the web these days make syndication notoriously hard, or let us be honest impossible in the traditional sense. The news media industry is starting to realize this fact.

Syndication models work well if you have access to purely unique content for which people are willing to pay for. These days you have to have the emotional and human touch to it. It needs to have that little extra. It needs the entertainment value. Content has a life cycle of it’s own and the value of content is pretty much built up by it’s freshness (how breaking is the content), how unique is it, and how emotional the content is. Breaking news content will always be in high demand. The life time and stickiness of the content increases as you add supporting material such as context and opinions, and provide the audience with the capability of interacting with the content.

Wait a minute! Can you not get this via a traditional media model? Sure you can, but it will cost you as content creation is incredibly expensive. It will cost you, it will cost you a lot. You will have large head counts, which lead to large expenses, and the margins for content are not there anymore. Charging for content clearly does not work in the web era where everything should be free, at least on the surface. Should it be free? That’s another question, but it is naive to think that will change either. The unconstrained, immediate distribution of content online have set a stage where you need small slim organizations, that let the content flow freely. The era of the “walled gardens” is forever over, even though the cellphone business is still stubbornly fighting this trend. Remarkably, even the cellphone industry has started to realize the absurdness of the fight, and probably already realize that it is lost already. The model for the future has been set. We as a media consumption society shaped it- for good and bad.

The option left is to adapt as in all paradigm shifts. We should just realize that we have entered a completely new era of media. A more exciting. A more dynamic. A more un-predictable. A more interactive. Yeah! Where do I buy the ticket to tag along on the ride? I want in on this ride!

How do you do this? You turn to multipurpose, flexible and moldable solutions. This is surely nothing new as all big changes throughout history have come from such solutions. You have the steam engine. Multipurpose. You have the PC. Multipurpose device. You have Microsoft Office (regardless what you think of Microsoft). A multipurpose package to solve most of your needs. On the web you have YouTube. A multipurpose video sharing site. You also have Flickr. A multipurpose photo site. The list goes on. Now in here the opportunity lies. The opportunity of changing the news business to something the world has never seen before. The opportunity is to create a multipurpose news media platform where anyone can publish, any one can share any piece of content and anyone can discuss it? The opportunity is the creation of a multipurpose news platform. To use some buzz words the ultimate social media mashup experience. Wouldn’t that be awesome and cool? It sure would be.

Now to the really, really cool part. It exists. I will get back to why after I have laid out some of the main issues you face in any long tail media application or site.

First, let us take a brief look at the coverage issues laid out initially about the skewed news coverage in the US. The main issue with the traditional media model is that is completely incapable of catching the long tail market of any component of the long tail. Again the cost is one of the main reasons, but also the traditional editor model will never be able handle the vast amount of content produced in the long tail. Today’s media market is all about content packaging as the entry barrier for content publishing and creation is in every mans hand. The explosion of cellphones and the incredible growth of the web has enabled anyone to become a reporter, an opinion maker or just enable anyone to share their voice. The birth of citizen reporting or as I see it sharing of their voices and opinions is made possible by the access of publishing technology for no cost especially since web space is incredible cheap these days. The long tail encompasses a lot of challenges such as How do you navigate through the vast amount of information? How do you explain and make the relation between the different content pieces obvious?

Moving forward in the media and news business, the game to play is about content packaging. How do you relate traditional media content and marry it with user generated content and other related content? How do we combine and package this content to make sense out of it and make it digestible for a normal content consumer? Technology is again the answer with the guidance of a community. The main issue throughout time has been to efficiently validate content – user generated or not. Positioning yourself as trying to take on the task of covering the long tail you expose yourself for a large discussion about quality assurance as for any process aiming to substitute humans with machines. In traditional media, human editors have been used as the major part of the content quality assurance process. This is not a scalable solution and never will be a scalable solution. Why? They all rely on a human decision at some stage of the process, and consequently, there will always be a scaling limit even though the associated cost is lowered or at least not increasing. Furthermore the traditional editing model via human editors has furthermore been proven to have some concerning issues especially for high profile news stories/events. The vast number of surfaced staged photographs published by for instance AP, Reuters and NYT via their photographers during the conflict in Lebanon 2006, as well as the plagiarized and fabricated stories by the NYT-journalist Jayson Blair have really seeded doubts that human editors/journalists are really the solely solution on the long term. Not to mention the issues with the super editors in Wikipedia.

The solution is clearly a never seen combination of Wikipedia and Google. You use the community to drive the content creation and use technology to guide the community and fill the gaps in where the community fails to fill in the gaps. You create the rewarding dance between the community and technology. Letting them interact and learn from each other. The secret lies in a free publishing model together with providing the context via aggregation and contribution and ranking the content based on validating elements.

The solution becomes simple in it’s core, but technology heavy, community and participation intense. It becomes the ultimate mashup between traditional and user generated media. It is allvoices.com (a company I co-founded). Shortly, there are three main components to the site:

• Report – Anyone can report from anywhere via cellphone or PC, sharing news, images, videos and opinions.
• Related voices – Weaving together multiple perspectives:
  • News stories
  • Blog posts
  • Images
  • Videos

  via contributors and aggregation.

• Discuss – Emotionally connect with other voices around the world through discussion and complete the human story.

The free publishing of the Report by any means – web, SMS/MMS or email – is central, especially as it should not be “controlled”, “checked”, or especially edited before it is published. If you share your voice, it should be your voice. When you hit the Post-button, the content should be published. The Related voices is the most technology intense component and is central for the validation of the content. By looking for validating content, the context around the report is also built helping the consumer to understand the report and to fill in any gaps in the report. All these components the human side of the story and the context built up by other users contributions and aggregation will provide the user with the grounds for a well-grounded Discussion. You will have all the angles and opinions right there for you to react on and to share with others. The social networking and community aspect of the news creation, consumption and interaction is central and key. It brings more life to the content and makes it more engaging.

Now that’s cool. Very cool. Especially since it brings the media arena to a new level. A whole new level.

Around the world. Constantly. Something is happening. The snap of the moment. A flash. A picture. A video. A short text message. A reflection. In the flash of the moment this might seem insignificant. Non-important. Random. Often these reflections, perspectives, observations are the first evidence of an event. It is the whisper of the wind that something is on the horizon. Something is bubbling up. It is the glow before the fire starts… Something is about to happen or is happening as we speak. The importance may vary, but it’s the breaking moment of the event… Snap, snap…

It is the need for the open forum. The personal angles of any event. The human side of the event. The community.

It is the breaking events that appear all the time around us. All around the world. The impact varies, but the characteristics are the same. They matter to all of us. They influence us all.

These events are built up by people. The individuals. The participants. The observers. The influencers. The enforcers. The average Joes or Janes. The politicians. The police men. The demonstrants. They all play their part of the event. They weave the plot. They are the plot.

This is the need for the open forum. The people. The community around the event.

All these elements should be put together into the unique event experience. The user should be given all perspectives. The user should be given all the news stories. The user should be given all the blogs and opinions. The user should be given all the images. The user should be given all the videos. The user should be given all the relevant content of the event….

The users should be given the possibility – by the means that are available to them – to bring forward their message, shared globally for the benefit of mankind.

But… For any event…

The forum will need you – yes you – to tell your side of the event, whether it is a political event, business event, sports event. Yes, any event. The forum will need you to give your perspective. It will need you to share your feelings and emotions. It can be as short as a sentence. It can be the cellphone picture. The cellphone video. An article. A perspective. Yes, anything. It all weaves the mosaic of angles of the event. The human side of the event. It gives the “right” perspective.

Right now Pakistan is being impacted in every possible way by the death of Benazir Bhutto. Regardless of your political agenda you will have an opinion, an emotion or just a comment. This is why this forum is needed where you can express yourself – unedited, unmediated and in context of an event.

The title says it all. To add on to that: Community sites are tools for communities not the other way around. These are probably the biggest misconceptions I face when discussing social media, and community building. The later the paradox in itself as the community is formed by the community not by persons. A community is a collection of individuals, that can be guided by individuals but only with the consent of the community.

You can trigger community by pushing it along but you as a person, company cannot per se build it. Yeah I know it is a pretty bad deal. :-) “Igniting” an unstable community usually creates a really poor community if any, and most likely chaos will appear. This chaos can be pretty unpredictable and the community takes all possible twists and turns.

For instance look at dictatorships, even though they might not be considered as true communities as they are artificially created. What happens when the control over these are lost? Look at what happened to Balkan, the former Soviet Union and other examples throughout the world. The moment the stronghold dictators started to erode the community exploded. However in the vacuum of leadership and any kind of structure (which should not be mistaken for strict hierarchies) the chaos began, bad elements took the opportunity and it is only now when we see something good is happening.

I wrote 2005 a piece based on the blog “The Group is Its Own Worst Enemy” by Clay Shirky. I will take a quote from the blog to exemplify:

“Someone built the [social software] system, they assumed certain user behaviours. The users came on and exhibited different behaviours. And the people running the system discovered to their horror that the technological and social issues could not in fact be decoupled…. As a group commits to its existence as a group, and begins to think that the group is good or important, the chance that they will begin to call for additional structure, in order to defend themselves from themselves, gets very, very high.”

Even for the artificially created communities you will see this. The group accepts the boundaries, it forms from it but however tries to change and push them. (Some very funky, funny yet graspable analogies can be made with the entropy concept in chemistry and physics, but I will leave those out.) The change of the boundaries is the tricky part here. The community is constantly evolving, and is very fluid in its nature. Try to control it and you will most likely create a chain of reactions that you didn’t have the slightest clue could happen.

Maybe the best analogy here is to consider the power of the ocean. You can as a sailor only embrace the power of the ocean. You can sail the ocean but you can never control it. The sea is in command and you can but only just adapt to it. Still you will be able to take out a bearing and after you have accepted the power of the ocean you will be able to navigate over the ocean. Not always is the straight course the best way to go here. :-)

What can we learn from this?
A community site is driven by the community but the actual site is but yet only a way for the community to express itself. For the social media company, the site becomes what the ship is for the sailor/captain. A tool and only a tool. The ship can only be prepared for the ocean. Do not in your wildest imagine try to shape the ocean after the ship you built or the community after the site for that matter.

Remember that communities are built up by the dinner conversations. The disagreements The agreements. The issues. All emotions – happiness, sadness, anger, frustration, apathy. Every emotion out there. This is what the true citizen media should be about. It is the personal accounts. It is the mosaic of personal views. It is the emotional content. It is the view into the life of people, but not in the silly reality shows we see on TV but real life. It is the instant capture of emotions. The capture of the personal views in context is the key. Technology have now made it possible to capture this in real time and organize it. That is what is so cool.

For instance. I got an email as part of an email group by a person. (I will not go into the content of the email as it is not important. Basically it was a personal account of friend disappointed in one of his friends. Also I will not go into whether he should or shouldn’t have sent it as I do not think it is important and not a matter for me comment on.) Nevertheless I was struck by the personal nature of the note as so was I struck by the discussion that followed. The amazing part is that he by that email created a sub-community around that email which spread out throughout the relevant resources online. He for a brief moment of time built a content-based community around that particular topic or an event. The cool thing is that this can be replicated over and over again… I will soon tell you how.

These are the conversations and personal reflections that are completely lost in traditional media which still struggles to adapt to the new distributions channels we have at hand not to mention the mechanisms to cover events around the world. The moment they have bubbled up into the news story they have been filtered by a selected set of eyes (often too influenced by their biasses and backgrounds as so am I) and too often the context is totally lost.