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 18th 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.
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