Media Must Adapt to Open Source Culture

The following article was original published on October 27, 2009 in the Technician:

Individuals born in the 1990's make up the most technology savvy generation of all time.¹ They have grown up in a world where they are constantly connected, always communicating and sharing information freely. These aspects of our world are strikingly different from the environment in which newspapers, television and radio evolved. As a result, open source culture is undermining the effectiveness and financial stability of the traditional media industry.

The Internet originally began as a U.S. military project in the late 1960s.² Starting with email, web technology was quickly adopted by public and private institutions. Although a degree of open source culture was present in the scientific and academic fields, it began to grow and flourish among users and developers of web technology. Rather than claiming software code as their own property, developers contributed to projects that solved complex problems. Apache, PHP, MySQL and WordPress were collaboratively developed and made available for free. Together these packages are enough to begin distributing your own content online. Add Shoutcast and you have an Internet radio station capable of being heard around the globe.

As a result of open source culture, traditional media companies, previously shaped by an environment of scarce information and expensive production and distribution methods, now find themselves in a new landscape where content is virtually unlimited and automatically disseminated. Explosive growth in user-generated content has put the media in direct competition with its consumers. "Professionally produced" has succumbed to "good enough"³ as consumers flock to Facebook to interact with their peers, post pictures of their homemade meals to Tumblr, upload incriminating videos from their phone to YouTube or coordinate protests on Twitter.

These online activities represent the crux of what traditional media companies must address: consumers of media are not just consumers, they are also producers.⁴ They are experts on their own circumstances and willing to share what they learn for the benefit of their community--just as software developers continue to innovate the very platform that has usurped traditional media models and empowered the average citizen.

Adapting to this new cultural context requires a revamping of the traditional media business model. If news and information are no longer scarce and have less value in the eyes on the consumer,⁵ where can value now be found? In my opinion, consumer demographics have more value than the content they consume. Advertisers can use this data to target ads more effectively and media can get a clearer view of their customers.

In addition, redefining the relative importance of privacy, objectivity and intellectual property are also important parts of adaptation. The media can look to many examples of how other industries are embracing the culture: OpenCourseWare in academia, FutureMelbourne in government and Creative Commons licensing amongst artists and musicians.

I expect open source culture to continue to spread. Traditional media companies will struggle, and perhaps fail, if they expect to operate as they have in the past. Regardless of the outcome, now is an exciting time to be involved in the media industry.

'Create content for people to love'

From New media virtual interview No. 2 via @macloo

What's the best way for media companies to move from a print first to a web first mentality?

... when it comes to the print-first vs. web-first shift, it's actually not rocket surgery. You have to take some of your staff and give it the mission of doing incremental, breaking news on the Web. And then you have to get your key newsroom people, and I'm talking managing editors, city editors, sports editors, and you've got to make the success of the website part of their mission. If you do those two things, you're going to wind up producing news in a different workflow and it's going to work.

Most places want to treat this as a training issue and a systems issue, and don't get me wrong. Both are important. But it's really a trust and accountability issue. Unless your top leaders are actually accountable for the success of your Web efforts, they're going to be sabotaging or at least undermining them. It's just too easy for them to give the Web lip service, and then stick to doing the same old thing. And employees aren't stupid. They see that, and they just wait out most 'web-first' initiatives.

... unless your top management is accountable for its success, and by that I mean that their salaries and bonuses are tied to it, it's not going to change. This is a cultural challenge masquerading as a technical problem.

Create content for people to love, not for people to encounter in this zipless, bloodless, view-from-nowhere mass-media fantasy world that we created in the 20th century.

'Transparency is the New Objectivity'

Some interesting ideas to ponder from http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/2009/07/19/transparency-is-the-new-objectivity/

... during a bloggers press conference at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, I asked Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Walter Mears whom he was supporting for president. He replied (paraphrasing!), 'If I tell you, how can you trust what I write?,' to which I replied that if he doesn’t tell us, how can we trust what he blogs?

... What we used to believe because we thought the author was objective we now believe because we can see through the author’s writings to the sources and values that brought her to that position. Transparency gives the reader information by which she can undo some of the unintended effects of the ever-present biases. Transparency brings us to reliability the way objectivity used to.

... credentials and authority work best for vouchsafing commoditized knowledge, the stuff that’s settled and not worth arguing about. At the edges of knowledge — in the analysis and contextualization that journalists nowadays tell us is their real value — we want, need, can have, and expect transparency. Transparency puts within the report itself a way for us to see what assumptions and values may have shaped it, and lets us see the arguments that the report resolved one way and not another. Transparency — the embedded ability to see through the published draft — often gives us more reason to believe a report than the claim of objectivity did."

'Media companies are in the service business, not the content business'

From O'Reilly:

"... what you're selling as an artist (or an author, or a publisher for that matter) is not content. What you sell is providing something that the customer/reader/fan wants. That may be entertainment, it may be information, it may be a souvenir of an event or of who they were at a particular moment in their life (Kelly describes something similar as his eight 'qualities that can't be copied': Immediacy, Personalization, Interpretation, Authenticity, Accessibility, Embodiment, Patronage, and Findability). Note that that list doesn't include 'content.' The thing that most publishers (and authors) spend most of their time fretting about (making it, selling it, distributing it, 'protecting' it) isn't the thing that their customers are actually buying."

Three ideas about online media and journalism

I just had an excellent discussion with Tyler Dukes about online media and journalism. Here are a few significant points that we discussed:

• The most important value that can be added to online publishing is credibility. This especially applies in social networking. Whether or not people follow your website, blog or tweets depends how much they trust you. If you are publishing junk people will pay not attention. So how do we improve our online credibility? One way is to understand our readers. What is relevant to the students, faculty and staff? The web, more than any other medium, provides a way to interact with our audience so we know what is important to them.


• Journalists need to be as tech-savvy as their audience. You will be a better journalist if you are familiar with web/technology trends (and listen to your IT guy's ramblings :p ). Where is our audience going online? We as journalists can't be expected to create social networking sites or online communities, but we need to be aware of where our users are already going online. They are on Facebook, Twitter, iPhones and who knows what else in the future. Go there to deliver news and solicit their input. This also implies that our systems of delivering news must as technologically open as possible. It must be possible to pull content from our site, blogs, etc. to be re-published elsewhere. The places where people are going online changes constantly, and we can't meet this moving benchmark without keeping our systems open.


• There is still no concrete way to monetize online news. At this point, anyone can create content with practically no cost. The media is competing with it's audience and has no control over the technology used to deliver or receive news. Readers are empowered and can receive information piece-by-piece based on their personal interests and contacts. The definition of "mass media" is evolving. It remains to be seen what business model arises from this evolution, but Tyler and I toyed with the idea that the value of news is in its readers. The profiles and personal habits of your readers provides a way to target ads very specifically. The more information you provide in your personal profiles, the more information collected about your browsing and shopping habits, the more valuable you are, and the more coupons you could receive according to your interests (think MVP card at Food Lion). Sound scary? Yes, but it will be much less scary, perhaps natural, to our children and grandchildren.

Why use RSS?

The following question was posted on the Collegiate Broadcasters, Inc. (CBI) listserv:

How do you use RSS feeds? This question has at least two pertinent facets to it: How does your organization use the feeds and how do you expect the feeds to be used on the other end?

WKNC uses RSS feeds to promote our Rock Report: http://wknc.org/rockreport/

The Rock Report is a listing of shows at local venues. Many of the bands listed are in rotation at the station. The list is populated by a team of student staff headed by our Promotions Director.

The purposes of putting this list on the web are to promote local bands and to provide a centralized source of information on local music events. As we fulfill these purposes we provide a service to local bands, venues and listeners.

By making the Rock Report available through RSS, we allow anyone to subscribe and stayed updated on local events. There is a certain demographic that actually uses RSS feed readers; that demographic is small and has apparently peaked: http://www.micropersuasion.com/2008/10/rss-adoption-at.html

Aside from from this personal use, it is possible for other web sites to republish the Rock Report by parsing our RSS feed and then re-presenting it. Essentially this "opens up" the Rock Report. Someone may ask, "Why would you do this? All your hard work could be republished without credit!" The answer is: it promotes local music, and by doing this we get indirect and intangible benefits.

Another aspect of RSS feeds is the fact that they can be easily integrated into other applications. For example, we would like to make our play list available through RSS. If other stations did this too, someone could perform an analysis on the aggregate data and identify trends or unique attributes of each station. Or record companies could use it to determine when and where their bands are getting the most air play and promote accordingly. It's actually an interesting way to chart as well. The potential possibilities are limitless. I would argue that this should be the goal: to make your station's information widely available and therefore re-purposable.

So think of RSS feeds as a way to open up your web site and your station, as a female connector if you will, so that any new web technology that comes along can plug into it and provide unforeseen benefits to your station, listeners and local music scene.