The Navy Abandons All-Capital Letters, Semaphore, and Morse Code

The Navy Times reports that the senior service will discontinue use of all-capital letters in official communication, a policy that has been in place since 1850, apparently due to the inability of the early telecomm systems to accommodate lower-case letters.  That wireless telegraphy has permitted use of lower-case since 1932 was not addressed.  After all, what are eighty-one years to a centuries-old institution?   And don’t GENADMINS (general administration) and MOVREPS (movement report) suggest a certain historical weightiness and grandeur that is not held by their lower-case cousins that have infected social media and non-seagoing brains?

One reason given for this change is that younger sailors think the All-CAPS policy suggests heavy-handedness and sounds as if the entire command structure was shouting at the fleet.  I don’t want to disparage this logic, but that is exactly what the command structure intended.  All-CAPS represented a loosely disguised Pavlovian signal to stand up and salute.  After all, ATTENTION ON DECK worked for me every time. 

Navy brass must be familiar with the Buddhist notion that “you can’t move small enough.”  Or slow enough.  To their credit, Morse code was put on the dustbin of history as far back as 1999.  Though I place myself in the vanguard of progress, I feel a tinge of sadness and regret because I had to learn that alchemical language when I served and am not pleased that others in my specialty aren’t required to master this arcane art.  I can’t tell you how many pleasurable discussions, via flashing light and Morse code, I had with strangers on other ships in the early morning hours in the Gulf of Tonkin about whether it was practical or even desirable to collect a bucket of water line.  To be able to render in Morse, across countless sea miles, to another ship on station, the code ZWC, meaning a personal message to follow, was almost worth the price of enlistment.

Sometimes we were more serious.  It was not uncommon when the ship was “running dark,” especially when we were in joint exercises with other vessels for turn signals, such as “Turn 270 degrees,” to be executed via Morse code delivered on the masthead lights.  I have racked my brain but can’t remember any collisions of note.

Those who refer to Morse code as a “language of distress” must have heard an overweight Steven Segal beating out a desperate SOS on the steel cage of his own making.  But even the critics of this horse and cart technology will acknowledge that a one-hundred-and-sixty-year run was not bad for this 1939 invention. The French Navy, full of Gaelic pomp, said farewell to the code with these immortal words, getting very close to a Hallmark moment: “Calling all.  This is our last cry before our eternal silence.”

In its own, historically-efficient way, the Navy has gradually deep-sixed the technologies and practices that seemed radically old-fashioned, even though it was precisely these practices that made Mister Roberts, Away All Boats, and The Caine Mutiny so popular to another generation.  One of the last vestiges of that romantic past is semaphore, the use of hand flags held in precise positions that represent letters of the alphabet to deliver messages, usually at close quarters, between ships.  This discipline was especially useful during replenishments at sea where close, visual communication is essential.  The first semaphore message was sent in 1867.  I have heard reports that semaphore is still being used during replenishments, but it is also a dying art.  Flags appear now as bunting and ceremonial art, especially when COMSERVPAC comes aboard.  Sorry, Commander Pacific Services.

But there is at least one lining in this cloud.  In 2007, the Semaphore Flag Signaling System (SFSS) was introduced, a proposal to carry Internet Protocol (IP) by semaphore flags.  Sadly, this proposal was made public on April Fool’s Day.  I’m not LOL.

But I’m not fooling.  I have completed and will have in the market by this fall a novel that captures the original ALL-CAP Navy grandeur, based on my service during the Vietnam period.  The Navy is proudly coming back in ALL-CAPS in USS BUNKER KILLS: A SEA STORY.

www.digitalfirstmediany.com

http://jamescmccullagh.com

Product Placement: Between the Lines in Iron Man 3 and the Chinese Sequel

It is becoming increasingly clear that we are what we wear, carry, breathe, advertise, post, boast and declare in the willing public ear.   

I embraced this lusty ethos some time ago when I was editor and publisher of Bicycling Magazine.  When appearing on the Today Show, Good Morning America and CBS This Morning, I must have looked like an advertiser’s wet dream with my Trek carbon fiber bicycle, Bell helmet, Specialized cleats, Louis Garneau jersey, Cannondale shades and just a hint of rain gear from Gore-Tex.  I had a handler who made sure my minor case of color blindness did not cause any fashion missteps under the harsh light of morning television. With delicacy and British understatement, I dropped these labels into the 8 am segment of the American imagination without losing a step.  In the vernacular, I was right on the money.  Subliminal, more or less, sells.

Those heady days seem such a long time ago.  I was playing in a sandbox with few tools and restricted movement.  These days the entire shoreline is fair game.  The traditional separation between Church (editorial) and State (business) seems to be breaking down and media companies are aggressively pursuing initiatives such as content marketing, brand journalism, and native advertising.  I just read that the New York Stock Exchange launched a project called The Big Stage, developed by Digitas, intended to highlight corporations in a photo-rich setting.  For example, “Animal Pharm” recounts the efforts of drug company Zoetis to fight animal diseases.  The actual content was produced by Time Inc. Content Solutions, which is outside the Time and Fortune Magazine operations.  Content Solutions are paid by companies to produce brand journalism.

To their credit, media companies are working hard to define these new content categories and make sure they are labeled clearly so consumers won’t be confused.  Forbes and The Atlantic deserve particular credit for this effort.  And given the pressing need for increased digital advertising revenues, there is no reason to think the push into brand journalism or content marketing will slow anytime soon.

But if you want to experience the crème-de-la-crème of product placement, go to the movies.  I saw Iron Man 3 over the weekend and, due to exposure to what seemed like hundreds of products, some of which barely related to the narrative line, I will have to see the movie again to get a fuller sense of the rise, fall and rise again of these Marvel comic book archetypes.  Or maybe not.

I recall attending movies as a kid in North London and looking forward to the newsreels, the obligatory pre-roll where we learned of the British Empire’s grace and foresight in giving up large swaths of the African continent.  At my multiplex, the obligatory pre-roll of coming attractions lasted almost thirty minutes, during which we were mainly bombarded with large images of a 67-ounce Coke bottle and that new, partially crushed, bowtie-shaped Budweiser beer can designed primarily for party animals with thin waists.  The bombardment was so focused, intense and relentless that I had to excuse myself and buy an $8 tub of buttered popcorn.

By the time Iron Man 3 showed its face, we were sufficiently schooled in the art of product placement that classical concerns such as the narrative thread and the all-important denouement seemed like yesterday’s news.  That our heroes drive an Audi R8 and S7 should come as no surprise.  Or that they wear Matsuda Eyewear and Aviator glasses and Fred Perry shirts; stay in touch through TCL mobile phones; drink Budweiser; read Forbes magazine; and exploit the technology in a limited edition Dora the Explorer watch.  It is not as if the director decided first on the products to be placed; then built the story around these branded items.

The poet T.S. Eliot reminded us a hundred years ago about the importance of a willing suspension of disbelief.  He was talking about readers immersing themselves in literature, though he might as well have been talking about product placement.  With Eliot in mind, we will accept in Iron Man 3 the branded gardening tools, Bloom’s Special Fertilizer, and the Green Light Fire Ant Control.  We will stay with the poetic logic and assume these products will contribute to the pyrotechnics and the overall quality of the film.  We will accept the presence of the IRB 120, an ABB Industrial Robot.  After all, there’s a lot of heavy stuff to move around in this film, and one more robot will hardly be noticed.  

But we will have to stand tall with those online voices, some mocking in the extreme, who find the placement of the Oracle Exadata Server, including a close-up of the actual server model number, to be decidedly over-the-top.  After all, this product is used for data warehousing and online transaction processing.  It’s not likely to be found in a panel truck in Anywhere, Tennessee.  As products go, this baby is no lightweight placement.

At this point, I can express gratitude that we were not watching this film in China, where they added four minutes to the ending so the producer could drop in a plug for Duo Li Duo, a Chinese milk product from a dairy in Inner Mongolia that apparently gave the Iron Man his power.  Even the People’s Daily, the official Communist Party paper, called the Chinese version pointless.  Perhaps this is also because no one, not even the Communist Party, could believe that our Iron Man hero would go to China for a life-saving medical procedure.  

Now that is over the top!

But I am worried when the one voice of sanity in this product placement circus is the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party.

Perhaps we should feel blessed that a purported movie sex tape of Gwyneth Paltrow/Pepper that was to be broadcast in a fictional Home Depot, in proper product placement mode, courtesy of the villain, with presumably all the appropriate handy tool references, was left on the cutting room floor.   This fan-fiction is courtesy of Complex Media.

Thank goodness the director had the foresight to forego the sex and keep us numbingly amused with wall-to-wall product placements.  At the very least, the movie theater is still safe for our children.

www.digitalfirstmediany.com

http://jamescmccullagh.com

The Graduation Speech I Have Not Yet Given

I’m glad to be speaking today at Keats College of the North, where five hundred English, philosophy, and history majors are set to be knighted and sent out into the Great Unknown.

Good luck.  You have probably wasted at least four years of your lives and are in debt, on average, about $40,000 dollars.  And by-the-way, your student loan rate will be doubled to 6% in June unless the Congress finds its courage.  Get used to the 6%.

 Don’t get me wrong.  I have a BS in English education, an MA in Literature, and a PhD in Philosophy with a concentration in literature.  I think everyone should be deeply rooted in literature, philosophy and history.  The current social media discourse indicated how vital this need is.  I have never lost my love of literature, especially poetry.  I’ve published my share of books and critical articles for the journals.  I just completed a course about Rilke’s “Duino Elegies” and his “Sonnets to Orpheus,” given by the Jung Foundation in New York.  I just finished an epic, book-length poem, “The Archetype of the Gun.”  The itch never goes away.

 So what you have learned at this fine college will likely be with you and nourish your soul for the rest of your life.  Well, that’s something.  You might decide to stand off to the side at cocktail parties raging against the inanity of Twitter and the utter insanity of Yahoo!, buying Tumblr because everyone knows the content on this platform is long but vapid and mainly pornographic.  Vent a little.  You will still have Keats and Shelley to keep you warm.

 I received my PhD more than thirty years ago.  I did everything right.  I aced my oral and written exams.  Wrote a blockbuster dissertation that no one read: “Aesthetics and the Religious Mind in Three Catholic Novelists: Francois Mauriac, Graham Greene, and Flannery O’Connor.”  I received a number of two-year job offers in Michigan, Washington, and Indiana.  Even then, full-time university positions in the humanities were beginning to dry up.  Then my son was born, and I didn’t want to drag a family around the country chasing short-term jobs with little prospects for tenure.  So I took a job with a media company and started over.  My first assignment was to research the health benefits of fish.

 That is no fish story.  And my lot was so much easier than yours is likely to be.  Recently New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg suggested, to the anticipated roar of disapproval, that high school students might be better off learning to be a plumber rather than going to college.  That seems good advice.  Having lived in the Bronx, I know that finding a plumber is harder to find than dope.

If you think that’s insulting, not the dope, consider the Op-Ed piece written a few weeks ago in the WSJ by Kirk McDonald, president of PubMatic, an ad tech company in Manhattan.  His piece tells the tale: “Sorry, College Grads, I Probably Won’t Hire You.”  McDonald introduces himself as your next potential dream boss.  “I run a cool, rapidly growing company in the digital field, where the work is interesting and rewarding.  But I’ve got to be honest about some unfortunate news:  I’m probably not going to hire you.”

 The bearer of bad news is certainly not suggesting that you have goofed off during your college years.  This is Keats College of the North, after all.   In a way, the fault, my friends, lies not in you but in the stars.  Or in the educational establishment that has not prepared you for a world where science, engineering, technology and math are king.

 But good news, McDonald has a simple way that you can beef up your resume, stand out from the crowd, and get in his front door:  learn computer code.  He doesn’t mean you need to become a programmer—God forbid.  McDonald is suggesting that “If you want a job in media, technology or a related field, make learning basic computer language your goal this summer.  There are plenty of services—some free and others affordable—that will set you on your way.”

 So instead of going to the beach this summer, “Get acquainted with APIs.  Dabble in a bit of Python.”  When you become acquainted with a couple of programming languages, move that skill to the top of your resume.  The world awaits you.

You might take some comfort in knowing that this prescription also applies to many who have been in the workforce for decades, including yours truly.  For at least fifty years, media executives tended to have a liberal arts education and that was quite sufficient.  After all, a liberal arts education usually ensures someone can write, research, analyze, and draw strategic conclusion.  And these abilities readily find a place in the business setting.

However, the disruption of the media space is unrelenting and anyone wanting to advance in the media field or even keep her job better enjoy a high Digital IQ and understand the technology and analytics that reside underneath that beautiful User Interface.  As McDonald nicely puts it, “Unless you understand the fundamentals of what engineers and programmers do, unless you are familiar enough with the principles of coding to know how the back end of the business works, any answer you give is a guess and therefore probably wrong.”

You’ll recall the first line of Keats’ poem “On First looking into Chapman’s Homer”:  “Much have I travelled in the realms of gold.”  Hold that thought and that line.  It will make you spiritually rich.

But still learn code.  That’s where the earthly riches lie.

www.digitalfirstmediany.com

http://jamescmccullagh.com

News Apps, Rap Genius, and Crowd-Sourced Annotation

For the last year or so, I've been playing in the news app sandbox, delighted that Project X will soon see the light of day.  That is, if the algorithm gods are willing.   From time to time, I pull my head out of the sand and notice that other parties are moving in with buckets and spades in considerable numbers.   The competitive set is becoming very competitive indeed.   We are all in search of that nectar, that secret sauce.  We want a news app that is personal, reliable, beautiful, predictive, and getting better by the day thanks to machine learning.   And we want to hang on long enough without seed money or venture rounds until Google or a large media company agrees to buy us for at least $30 million.  This story is more than a thrice-told tale and not such a fantasy after all.  It is the sound of Orpheus with flute.

Ken Doctor at The Nieman Journalism Lab just published a mobile aggregator roundup, reminding us of how hot and full of intrigue this space has become.  Most of the basic facts are well-known, but Doctor’s perspective is nonetheless quite interesting.  So tablet aggreggator Pulse was sold to LinkedIn for $90 million.  I’m still trying to get my head around why Yahoo paid $30 million to an English teenager for Summly, a smartphone aggregator.   CNN had earlier picked up Zite and Google had purchased Wavii for $30 million and closed it down.  One assumes the software will find a home somewhere.  Doctor notes that this leaves Flipboard , which is probably valued at $400-500 million, with Facebook and Google lurking in the wings.

Clearly the above start-ups have gotten the jump on traditional media companies that are learning to deal with them.   And the more established start-ups, such as Flipboard, Pulse and Zite, are in their second or third generations, where design and business model are taking center stage.  In some ways, there is a great deal of commonality among the news aggreggators—and I mean as a compliment.   As Flannery O’Connor reminded us, everything that rises must converge. 

Just this morning, I learned about another start-up or at least an idea of a start-up:  News Genius, which is a first cousin to Rap Genius.  The latter richly and deeply annotates, through crowd-sourced commentary, textual analysis, and clarifications, specific lines of rap lyrics such as ZPac’s “Hail Mary Lyrics.”  Those who contribute useful annotations earn Rap IQ points and can become contributors.   I’ve heard that Rap IQ points are being traded like Bitcoins, and could be as valuable.   

This is a curious site that publishes tons of respectable coarse rap lyrics with a layer of commentary floating over the profane body as if delivered by an army of professors who are dedicated to annotating the world.  To get the flavor of this site, have a look at a YouTube investment video (DLD13 Conference: Annotating the World) in which the investment  lead and the Rap Genius start-up team, apparently from Yale and eager to cite Plato, talk about their venture as if it’s akin to a kind of biblical exegesis.  Yes, the Torah does appear in an annotation.   This is not like analyzing poetry and finding the hidden meaning. Rather, with the help of the wise and filtered crowd, this is about building layers of knowledge about knowledge.   If you are up to it, you can enter that DMZ between Gucci Mane’s thug lyrics and that quiet zone of linguistic and textual subtlety.

I was fully ready to call this a scam, an Internet joke that marries, shotgun-style, discordant layers of meaning, such as rap hyperbole and semantic squatting, until I learned that the business had received $15 million in funding from the increasing rap venture capitalist Marc Andreessen.  What to do, what to do!

Rap lyrics have a density, discordance, and a metaphorical vulgarity that would be an English teacher’s wet dream.  Have a look at Rap Genius; meaning is breaking out all over.  It’s an open question whether the extended metaphor can reach all the way into the crucible of news.  That is, unless news becomes rap, a kind of melodramatic, vital poetry that focuses on the shadow side of news, our desperate underbelly, our alligator shoes that neither talk the talk nor walk the walk.

Lately I’ve been broadcasting Bit-poems on Twitter and Facebook.   It’s a desperate attempt at legitimacy.  Rap Genius seems to have a better idea.  Annotate rap lyrics until they smother you.  These Yale guys seem to know that the media business, the land of suits and summer yachts, is a two-valued nightmare.  It’s either this or that, Newton or the NRA; in other words, a semantic and profitable pissing contest.   Perhaps a service that adds layers of crowd-sourced meaning, vulgarity, flights of fancy, error and disdain might have a fighting chance in  this field of the also said.

Marc, call me.  Maybe.

www.digitalfirstmediany.com

http://jamescmccullagh.com

Tech Reps in the Operating Room & Other Hoary Tales

So, I had just about finished all pre-surgical prepping.  I had bathed in antibacterial soap to make sure pathogens would flee from me in disgust.  I had listened to the soothing, melodic voice of a nurse, humming a Jay-Z melody, in her quest to lower my vitals.  Now, flat in my back on a gurney, I sign permission slips that would give the man the right to take away parts of me.  The anesthesiologist said I would no longer be required to count backward from a thousand.  Rather, I would slip off peacefully into some dream space, absent the heavy incest mutterings of Freud.  And just before I was wheeled into this action drama, with my sinuses playing a central character, I was asked to sign a waiver that gave permission for a salesperson/technologist to be present in the operating room.  I responded that this presence would be acceptable as long as there would be no transactions over my warm, still body during the four-hour surgery.  And protests rose in the amphitheater like angels pushing back from the heavens’ heavy cumulonimbus clouds.  I recall a nurse in the operating room saying that they would take care of me because they liked me.  I remember saying that I thought it was because I had insurance, thinking before I sank into that blissful pit of despond, that I shouldn’t joke too much with those who are about to cut.  But old habits die hard.

During the run-up to surgery, I noticed how technology is transforming even the most traditional medical practices, such as one I visit outside of Nyack, NY.  All conversations with the doctor are immediately digitized.  An electronic wand sweeps my forehead and my temperature is attained.   And so on.  Within hours, these digital files sit on my surgeon’s mobile device in NYC.

And this is hardly earth-shattering.  Portable technology, especially when imbedded in wearable devices, already allows much of this basic testing to be performed remotely.  Mobihealthnews reports that Sense4Baby, a fetal monitoring system, uses a wireless monitor that straps to the belly of the pregnant woman and transmits data about fetal and maternal heart rates and monitors contractions.  Data is sent via Bluetooth to a smartphone or tablet and is uploaded to a secure cloud.

Perhaps one of the most useful advances will come from maximizing the use of data and to better glean from social media sites what consumers are actually thinking and saying about pharmacology and treatment regimens.  Treato, an Israeli company, has developed and algorithm that scours thousands of social media sites.  Such insights will likely provide the next generation of patient intelligence.

Now back to the salesperson in the operating room.   Before my surgery, I had read at Venturebeat.com about Nurep, a startup that provides medical device support for physicians in the operating room.  From what I understand, this company enables medical device representatives to see more physicians, to increase sales, and cover a broader geography.  The service guarantees physicians 24/7 support in the operating room, including on-demand, virtual support.

For hospitals this is a very touchy issue and most have gone to considerable lengths to restrict access of device reps to physicians, the purchasing department, and the C-level suits.  Some places actually electronically track the presence of reps on the hospital floors.  This is vital oversight as where there is technology, there is big money.  In an earlier blog, I referred to Steven Brill’s masterful piece in Time Magazine about how new medical technologies are driving up patient costs and padding the wallets of executives.

On the other hand, we patients want our doctors to be technologically proficient.  A few years ago, I was undergoing another sinus surgery that involved imaging technology.  This is a useful extension of the surgeon’s eyes and hands when she is poking around the brain floor.  In this instance, the imagining technology failed and the surgeon continued “manually.”   I was not consulted.  And I was not happy about this hand-job.

I live close to Manhattan and am blessed with access to some of the best medical institutions in the world, including Roosevelt Hospital where I spent a little time.  Nonetheless, the adoption of technology is often tied to age, experience, and probably face time with Xbox.   I want my surgeon to be totally at ease with latest technology.  If she is comfortable with a tech rep at her side, so am I.

Just tell me long before I slip into that chemical bliss.

Thanks, Doc!

In Praise of: TIME, The Week, Wired, and Flipboard2.0

The American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) just announced finalists for the Magazine of the Year (General Excellence) and other awards.  The list includes the familiar and impressive heavyweights: Esquire, Glamour, National Geographic, New York, and TIME.  I don’t envy my friends at ASME the task of sorting through the best of the print best while giving a nod to digital.  So far, all is right with the world.

I was very happy to see TIME on the list, not only because many friends still work there, but also because of the way it was knocked around during the rumors about Meredith acquiring Time Inc.  TIME was said to be left out of that fantasy transaction and a place at the table.  Perhaps this indignity prompted the Atlantic Online post by Joshua Macht, who leaves nothing to the imagination in his title: “Running out of TIME: The Slow, Sad Demise of an American Magazine.”

Thank you ASME for giving this relic of a magazine one last acknowledgement at the upcoming awards dinner because, well, you never know.   But Macht seems to know, suggesting that it’s hard to imagine there will be much left of the brand in 36 months. 

He exaggerates and I exaggerate.  There is some sadness in his blogger voice.  He wonders out loud how Time Inc., so early in the game with a $100 million investment in the Pathfinder portal, long before Google and when Netscape and AOL were still tiny, has not been able to capitalize on the web? Obviously the huge distraction with the AOL deal that some have called the worst media merger in history didn’t help.

But this is all a prelude to the real dance.  Frank Rich’s current New York piece, “Inky Tears” sucks all the sentimentality out of our much-aired historical narrative about the demise of the media titans.  “TIME is on the block.  The New York Times is teetering.  It can get an alumnus down, but the last thing the news business needs is a case of nostalgia.”  He writes that whether print survives or not is borderline irrelevant:  “Survival, not survival of a print edition, is what’s at stake now.”

My earlier remarks about TIME magazine point back twenty years to those halcyon days.  Rich suggests that “If you look back at TIME in its heyday, it’s a model more worthy of parody than emulation.”  Here  Rich is referring to the magazine’s far flung bureaus, editorial redundancy in the extreme, and a profligate waste of money worthy of an Evelyn Waugh satire.  Accordingly, the seeds of the magazine’s decline were planted a long time ago.  The writer notes that “In the modern history of media, the reigning giants have nearly always been caught napping by transformative change.”  There is something almost biblical in that statement.

In the last couple of days, I’ve had occasion to look at The Week, a modest, hardly handsome, print summary of domestic and international news within the fair-use doctrine.  When Felix Dennis of Maxim fame launched The Week in the US in 2001, the WSJ wondered out loud whether the man was nuts.  I know Dennis and have called him a lot of names, but “nuts” wasn’t one of them.  Dennis, who is rich, unpredictable, and a Brit with a wicked wit, gave his best quote to the NYT:  “In the end, The Week will inherit the earth.” 

The Week has neither inherited the wind nor the earth, but it has gained a tidy, secure, foothold on a piece of expensive real estate by behaving like a very traditional print magazine.  It has a paid circulation of about 540,000, a fraction of the 3+ million TIME enjoys.  Its circulation base is almost completely subscription.  Newsstand sales are insignificant as are digital replicas.  The Week sells a lot of gift subscriptions.  The magazine has a very active web site, but is just now looking more seriously at digital revenue-generating opportunities, such as e-commerce and the like, an effort that is likely to be helped by sister company Mental Floss.  The Week is said to generate about $50 million in total revenue with a 10-15% ROR. 

By publishing standard, this is a very small enterprise, but the example is instructive nonetheless.  Over the years, The Week has reminded the publishing community that it is not a legacy magazine trying to adapt to the current news environment.  The magazine identified its niche, filled it, and served the readers well.  My guess is that the ratio of consumers who subscribe to those who renew their subscriptions for the next term is very high.  And this is the secret sauce.  You can bet that Felix Dennis, a stickler on cost control and, as I’ve noted in earlier blogs, a trenchant critic of American magazine cost structures and largesse, has kept the business very lean.  I’ve heard people argue that The Week isn’t a real magazine; that it is built on the backs of other journalists.   This sounds like legacy thinking.

In his New York article, Rich raises the question, first raised by PaidContent, that “At what point does it become more of a hindrance than a benefit to be associated with a traditional media brand?”  Rich is referring here to newspapers and news magazines, but his question probably has broader media implications.  The brand remains the glue, the identity, the existential positioning for media properties.  Magazine publishers now design for branded, edited content that will thrive in a cross platform and cross-channel world.  Print is just one component of this content universe.  This positioning is vital, pragmatic, and defensible in the business sense.  And this approach should become more secure as publishers get better at delivering and monetizing content across these platforms, especially tablets where advertising CPMs are favorable, without all those workflow and staff redundancies.

Speaking of awards:  this is the 20^th anniversary of the launch of Wired Magazine by Jane Metcalfe and Louis Rossetto, a date worth celebrating.  I recall meeting Ms. Metcalfe in 1996, showing up in their office in the low-rent district of SF in my very NY suit and tie to chat about expanding the title internationally.  Three years earlier, New York publishers had rejected their business plan, so they turned to Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab, for financial support to publish their version of Rolling Stone for the digital age.  (Ad Week’s Ted Greenwald has a wonderful article on the launch of Wired in the current issue.  The 20^th anniversary edition of Wired will be available for download April 16 and on newsstands April 23).

The launch of Wired now seems gutsy and charming in a way, brought to life by founders who had a clear sense of purpose and who perhaps fortuitously lived three thousand miles from the epicenter of publishing.  The founders could bring in alumni from Ziff-Davis and Macworld to help bring the magazine to life where, in the East, few seemed to speak that language.  I don’t think the magazine would have stood a chance in New York in 1993.

Media disruption today can be found in the app stores.  The joke in Silicon Valley is that everyone is working on an app, but it’s not that funny.  Google just booted 60,000 apps from its Google Play, many apparently spam-like.  I’m working on a couple of mobile apps and have learned how difficult it is to differentiate and bring something genuinely new to market.   And like most in the space, we keep an eye on Flipboard.

The platform is said to have 50 passive and 4 million active users.  That’s a sizeable community any way you slice it.  Though there has been some pushing and pulling with publishers, especially over revenue-sharing, Flipboard appears a useful tool in the publishing arsenal.  And with the introduction of Flipboard 2.0, this relationship could get even more interesting--and complex.

We’re heard ad nauseum for the last decade or so that one grand end-game for digital is to allow every consumer to be an editor and publisher.  To a degree, this wish-fantasy has already come to life as the proliferation of blogging and self-publishing tools have become widely available.  Flipboard 2.0 raises the stakes even more.  In this version, the navigation is much simpler and I can flip through digital pages as if I am thumbing through a print version.  But for me, the really interesting part is that consumers are now able to create custom magazines in literally seconds for sharing or private use.  Have a look at the Flipboard video available on the site and watch magazines such as Living in Trees, Mountain Biking, and Mid-Century Amazing, about houses and the like, come to life.  And with the new bookmarking feature, you don’t have to be on the platform to add content from other sources, such as the web.

Paul Armstrong at PaidContent has referred to Flipboard as a “giant iceberg lurking in the path of media,”  As an ex-Navy guy with long stints at sea, I can appreciate this metaphor, even if it appears to be somewhat overstated.  But Armstrong is absolutely right about Flipboard 2.0 signaling a “pivot from purely curation-based interaction to one that uses full-blown creation abilities.”  

Flipboard’s business model would become much more interesting if the platform became a digital magazine incubator, a media laboratory, an experiment in beautiful branded content, particularly for the publishing verticals, all with the energy and insights of the crowd.  Flipboard could be a real partner to magazines and media companies.

In my most recent post, I wrote that the software that will make content more intelligent and an increasing dependence on algorithms to solve editorial tasks over time will impact the magazine publishing model.  Flipboard might be a more old-fashioned disruptor, making use of technology plus the wisdom of the crowd.  IDG, publisher of Macworld and other computer titles, realized years ago that its readers knew as much, if not more, than its editorial staff and embraced that talent. This seemed an important awakening.

Going forward, magazines publishers will likely need a lot more of this brand of humility.

Intelligent Content, Algorithm as Editor, and Poetry in Decline

After college, I was intent on becoming a full-time poet.  In that pursuit, I read for small cash poems at the American Legion, the VFW, Future Farmers of America, and Daughters of the American Revolution.  I usually selected anti-war poetry and for that reason I rarely got a return curtain.  I had a brief run of success with religious poetry during Holy Week until an Episcopal Church in Bethlehem, PA, objected to my “On the Medical Aspects of the Crucifixion,” which I considered balanced and in good taste.  Soon after I joined Rodale, I read a poem about male executives cheating on their wives while on business trips.  After a time, I found it easier selling advertising.

Poetry is like a skin rash that returns when the seasons change.  After months of chewing on big data and tracking delicious publishing workflows , I decided to take a course, from a psychological perspective, on Czech/German poet Rainier Maria Rilke, author of Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, works that still have something to say about soul one hundred years after publication.

I read a few years ago that Steve Jobs was an inveterate reader of William Blake, the visionary 18^th century English poet.  Many of Blake’s contemporaries considered him mad and that’s probably why he is still interesting and T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound barely survive as academic footnotes.  Blake spoke of “Jesus the Imagination” and the importance of seeing the world through a Third Eye.  Maybe this is where the iPhone was hatched.

Colleagues I haven’t spoken to in decades sent me without apparent glee a recent WSJ piece by Joseph Epstein announcing yet again the end of poetry.  I can barely read my own tea leaves, though I suspect Epstein is right that academics had a lot to do with this decline.  T.S. Eliot trumpeted an aesthetic he referred to as the “objective correlative,” suggesting that every image in a poem has a recognizable referent in the physical world.  And the soul went out the window.  A school delightfully called New Criticism, centered in Sewanee, TN,, grew up in the 1920s around this notion and generations of tight, tidy, analyzable academic-friendly poems were written by poets, for poets and the New York Times Book Review.  I rode the train for many years before getting off at a station called Rilke.

It’s not particularly surprising that university English departments would adopt analytic tools consistent with the time as a way to show prospective students that this discipline had as much science as the psychology and sociology departments.  To aid in this effort, lots of academic journals sprang up in the post-WWII years and fed this hunger and provided university administrators with leverage.  You would either publish or perished.  I published a lot—and left.

I studied linguistic and generative grammar in college and understood early on that “language” was “chunky” and in a way self-generating.  I taught this in a Hollidaysburg, PA, English class and was reprimanded by my supervising teacher for coloring outside the lines.  But this is a long way from machine language reading me and updating content based on my quirks and browsing habits.  This is the premise of Roger Wood and Evelyn Robbrecht, of the Art+Data Institute, in a recent fascinating piece about Intelligent Content at PaidContent.   They write that “books and magazines of the future will act as sort of human computers translating your reading desires into pure machine language that tells the publisher how to present the material for faster and more pleasurable absorption.”

The authors observe that we are seeing the beginning of this development with Flipboard, where consumers can now create, curate and share their personalized magazines with perhaps a revenue-share component down-the-road.  They point out that Wordpress and Tumblr appear to be the closest thing to offering an always-on and continually updated reader experience through analytics.  This brave, not-so-new world “will be filled with mashups, video, audio, real-time updates, new navigation interfaces and even content that interacts with the reader’s environment,” such as Augmented Reality.

Freud declared one hundred years ago that we had to depend on a strong Superego—our civilization and culture--to hold back the dark forces of the unconscious.  Freud was buttoned-up, but did have a bit of the novelist in him and liked to draw large and startling figures.  With much less at stake, I have been listening for at least fifteen years to publishers, including yours truly, who trumpeted with a certain logic that the editor was the last defense against the wild forces of the web and social media that spits out unruly content from a stream-of-consciousness spigot invented by an increasingly mad James Joyce.

Hyperbole aside, this is a defensible position and a vital business posture where “branded content” is a powerful and necessary selling proposition, especially for magazines.  But what if our authors, our seers, are right in their view that the algorithm will replace the editor and curator: “Quick and automatic branding and positioning of the book or magazine on a glowing electric slab will become more important than the most  sage human editor.”

Content farms such as Demand Media, lambasted by publishers and downgraded by Google, might be only the first iteration of using data to develop article ideas.  Wood and Robbrecht go further and suggest big data from reading and search behavior will help predict what articles will likely rate high in terms of reader engagement.  Publishers also will be able to choose subject matter with an eye to ROI.  If true, this would be profoundly disruptive and interesting: software as the secret sauce.  And as the authors indicate, we have only to look at Quartz, Gravity, Contextly, and Sailthru to find evidence of companies that are developing tools to customize, personalize and update content on a device level.

A few years ago, I invited Demand Media into MPA to speak to editors and publishers about their use of search data to decide and shape articles for their various web sites.  The NY editors at this forum were understandably neither happy nor impressed with what they saw.  Demand Media was and is still, to some degree, a race to the bottom from any editorial perspective.  But that was yesterday.  What we are seeing today are analytics that can shape content to a user’s need and subtle inclinations.  This is neither far-fetched nor bottom-fishing.  On the contrary, it is consistent with everything publishers say about the importance of user engagement in terms of the lifetime value of the customer and the immediate P/L.  Intelligent Content can have a positive impact on the bottom line.

These days, we hear a lot about Responsive Design that enables web content to be distributed via templates to the various devices.  This is an important development, but has raised key business and advertising issues that need to be resolved.

It will likely be some time before we see the Algorithm atop the editorial masthead and Intelligent Content the rage.  But the authors present ideas for a content future that already exists in germ.  Writers and editors are becoming more sensitive to content use by marking up content with metadata at birth so it—and they-- will have more value downstream.  They will also have to become more sensitive to analytics and the role of algorithms in reading, serving, shaping and updating content based on what consumers want in real time.  This is why we call it rich media, the new augmented editorial reality.