Fast Companion

Missing the Rebellion

I just received an excellent issue of Inc. magazine. In contrast, I've been carrying Fast Company around for days, trying to get myself to read it. Inc. does a wonderful job of celebrating the individuality of entrepreneurs. No two are alike, and no two get the job done in quite the same way. And that's wonderful--a million paths to success.

When Fast Company was at its peak (first couple of years), the magazine was about rebellion. Rejecting the bad stuff--bad ideas or bad management--was not enough. Rebellion is about rejecting the good stuff, the stuff you're supposed to accept--the stuff that's supposed to be good for you.

It was almost as if Webber and Taylor (FC founders) got 'over it'. They gained acceptance, the magazine took off, page count exploded, and then they lost their way. No editor or publisher since then has figured it out. There's not much they can afford not to accept these days.

Except China in Africa. Although I'm having to drag myself through the story, China's path in Africa ought to be questioned, so I do think publishing the article is a step in the right direction. So why isn't it any fun? It's not even exciting. It feels like medicine.

Although it's well written, I do think the editors let it go on too long. It's hard to feel outrage in a sea of numbers. There are plenty of little stories buried in the text, and I think these should probably be played up more. Being dispassionate just doesn't help.

Let's throw the baby out with the bath water.

Editorial Privilege

Some editors make a contribution, some editors are just gatekeepers, some are parasites, some are mufflers, and some are gags.  We have to make them earn their keep. As media consumers, it's often hard for us to know what the editor contributed, but the journalists know and they need to speak up.

BuzzMachine: Editing’s a drag, 2008-May-30, by Jeff Jarvis

Rather than assuming that everything must be edited, we will need to ask why something should be edited, what’s the goal and what’s the cost (to the product and its urgency and to the budget). As newspapers continue to cut back, what do they need more: reporting or editing? I say reporting. Editors will not and should not die, but they will become a scarcer species.

I found it on the internet

I, too, have worried about the death of "long-form" journalism. Who will pay reporters to spend months researching a story the way Woodward and Bernstein did at the Washington Post (Publisher Katharine Graham is still one of my heros) ?

But maybe that type of journalism is just "lost" like Atlantis. In the future, reporters will NOT be able to stay heads-down for months, behaving like detectives, working on an exclusive. Maybe they will have to throw a few clues over the fence and see if the hoards of bloggers find something they can seek their teeth into. The future is badly distributed--you just have to find it where you can.

Columbia Journalism Review: Lost Media, Found Media. 2008-May/June, by Alissa Quart

It was always hard for nonfiction writers, but something seems to have changed. For those of us who believed in the value of the journalism and literary nonfiction of the past, we had become like the people at the ashram after the guru has died.

Right now, journalism is more or less divided into two camps, which I will call Lost Media and Found Media.

Fast Company Still Doesn't Get This

Publishing Executive: More than ever, the quality and quantity of your audience are crucial to your success. Here’s how you can improve your existing customer relationships and build new ones. 2007-Dec-1, by Bill Amstutz

Once merely a direct-marketing operation pushing out cover wraps, e-mail blasts and direct mail, audience development now encompasses webcast recruitment, online-traffic generation, co-registration, lead generation, conference and trade-show recruitment, as well as managing integrated audience databases. It used to be that a decent audit statement was good enough, but now the audience-development group must juggle their efforts between multitudes of distinctive products. The changes are even more profound than that because marketing has changed. Now, the quality and quantity of their audience are the crucial elements of success for every media company.

Put Up or Shut Up

Even in everyday conversation, we have to filter our comments with "is this really going to add to the discussion?" Too many magazines get established by one group of people and get taken over by another group of people who lack the passion for the subject matter. A media outlet can be valuable only one of two ways: original content or excellent aggregation.

Publishing 2.0: Join The Web Content Conservation Movement, 2008-Apr-20, by Scott Karp

But is shoveling as much content as possible onto the web really the best way to create enduring value?

I come back, as always, to Google, the most valuable media company on the web.

Google doesn’t create any new content — it just cleans up our mess, like a giant recycling plant.

Google cleans up content pollution by linking to the most relevant content, determined by counting all of the links on the web.

A link is a form recycling because it references a valuable piece of existing content rather than creating more content. A link reduces pollution just like recycling plastic does.

In the Future: No View from 50,000 Feet

If you believe as I do, that nothing is more important than a good perspective, you have to be concerned about the shrinking of the news divisions in the mainstream media. Not that they always provided a healthy perspective, but at least that's what they thought they were in business to do. Bloggers are in the business of providing a perspective close to the ground -- which we also need. These days news is thrown out into the public conversation too fast, too undigested. Context, a view of how the event fits into the landscape, is guessed at by too many people speculating instead of performing research. Including me.

The New Yorker: The News Business: Out of Print , 2008-Mar-31, by Eric Altman

And so we are about to enter a fractured, chaotic world of news, characterized by superior community conversation but a decidedly diminished level of first-rate journalism. The transformation of newspapers from enterprises devoted to objective reporting to a cluster of communities, each engaged in its own kind of news -- and each with its own set of truths upon which to base debate and discussion -- will mean the loss of a single national narrative and agreed-upon set of facts by which to conduct our politics.

BusinessWeek, unlike FC, links out to bigger world

MediaPost Publications - Mag Bag: Business Mags Bow New Digital Features, 2008-Mar-28, by Erik Sass: Last week, BusinessWeek announced that it is partnering with LinkedIn to create profiles for over 160,000 companies to aid social networking and career development by business professionals. Rather than allowing companies to create their own pages, the LinkedIn profiles will draw on information provided by BusinessWeek as well as contributions from LinkedIn members employed by those companies.

Powerful Media Shows the Connections

Journalism.org: The State of the News Media 2008: A news organization and a news Web site are no longer final destinations. Now they must move toward also being stops along the way, gateways to other places, and a means to drill deeper, all ideas that connect to service rather than product.

Web Site Redesign

Beat Blogging: What Magazine Websites Will Look Like In Four Years.2008-Feb-18, David Cohn interviews Ed Sussman on the new web site for Fast Company

That took us to 100,000 members and they were pretty passionate and they still are. They had 200 groups around the world that would meet every other month or so. They came together because they liked to talk about business, they used the web of friends to learn about each other and make friends. It is like an early version of meetup.com but limited to business and discussion about technology and innovation.

But we didn't know who they were and we weren't capturing what they were saying and doing at their meetings either. Here are all these people that are meeting because they love Fast Company and there was no way for us to capture that. We had somebody on the road who would go from meeting to meeting, but that doesn't scale very well. There are only so many cities you can absorb with one person taking notes. It's not a bad thing to actually meet people in the real world but we wanted to hear what they had to say and capture the content they had on the website too. So we are first and foremost giving the community a lot of tools.

We also were thinking; there are a million people on average that come through the site, that's from our internal logs, so there are at least 900,000 who don't participate in our community aspects at all, because it might be too much for them to join a local group. But those people might still have something interesting to say that we are interested in hearing - so we wanted to recognize that they are part of the community and find a way to include them in an easy way.

Ins and Outs of Community at Fast Company

I agree with Valeria that Fast Company was one of the first magazines to have an online community, but lack of vision at the publication hobbled its development with poor tools and support. Even now, it's clear that the business managers don't understand how to leverage a customer constituency. I could go on forever...

Conversation Agent: Fast Company as New Media in Beta Since 1995. 2008-Feb-10, by Valeria Maltoni

I've learned a lot from Fast Company, and I would like to think that they in turn have learned a lot from their community. I am hoping that many of the site features that mimic other networks like LinkedIn and Facebook go away or are evolved through community use to become ownable and unique to the Fast Company leadership brand.