I'm sorry to hear that Fast Company is laying off people who worked on the web site and folding their digital division into the print magazine management. But not surprised. When they launched the new community, I dutifully signed up and tried to make sense of it, but it never provided me any benefits. Nobody there was ever talking about anything I cared about.
Wow! This article causes me to rethink many of my preconceptions about marketing communications. Employment of marketing communications professionals inside corporations seems to have declined in my perception. Now I wonder if that's really true, and if it is, if that's offset by growth in advertising agencies. The demand for content has certainly never been greater but where is all this expansion in content going to get us? Pay for journalists and copywriters is still abysmal, and now it looks like we're headed to a bust, in my opinion.
BoSacks Heard on the Web - Media Intelligence: Desktop Publishing's Legacy: 230,000 Fewer Commercial Printing Workers, and An Explosion in Content Creation Workers, 2008-Aug-7, by Dr. Joe Webb
Desktop publishing reduced the costs of production and stimulated the content creation process, and was a critical component of the march of new media. In 1987 ... about 52,000 employees worked in graphic design firms then, with another 4000 or so as freelancers. Today, there are 73,000 employees in graphic design firms, plus another 90,000 freelancers, more than three times 1987's level. Even advertising employment is higher. There are 40,000 more workers in advertising than in 1987.
Commercial printing employment is now at 1987 levels, while publishing, design, and agencies have added more than 250,000 workers in the last 20 years. Not all of them are creative workers, of course. Without the ability to create content efficiently, however, even those workers who are not in content creation or content production positions owe their jobs to the creation process that is the reason for their employer's existence.
Big Wind from Texas is identified on FastCompany.com as being from the July 2008 issue of the magazine, but it's not in MY copy for July/August 2008!
The article is an interview with Jerry Patterson, Commissioner of the Texas General Land Office and state government official responsible for promoting wind farms in Texas. Jerry thoroughly enjoys playing the frontiersman, poses with a gun, and exercises every blessed stereotype about Texans. It's entertaining, but I have a feeling it's going to bite us in the posterior.
Fast Company: Big Wind from Texas, 2008-Jul(?), by Kermit Pattison
Patterson: I don't even get into the debate about global warming. It's an argument that has no justification because we need to be doing the same things whether global warming is man-made or not. We're running out of hydrocarbons. Therefore going to alternatives, renewables and conservation are things we should be doing even if global warming is caused by polar bear flatulence. ...
Pattison: Do the bird people appreciate your sense of humor?
Patterson: I talked the Audubon Society and told them, "Don't worry about this, after several generations we'll have smarter birds." They did not think that was funny. The other thing I told them was wind farms in the Gulf of Mexico would be the first line of defense against avian flu. These people have no sense of humor. You can't break the ice with them. ...
Pattison: Put on your cheerleader costume here. What should the world know about alternative energy down there in Texas?
Patterson: This is the frontier for alternative and renewable in the United States. We're not only interested in installing wind and solar, we're interested in manufacturing the components as well.
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.
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, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
C Otto Scharmer: Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges
Chip Conley: Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow
Chip Heath: Made to Stick
Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
Dan Roam: The Back of the Napkin
Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures
