"I think that general-interest magazines may well be fated to fade away. General-interest anything is probably cursed. For the truth is that interest never was as general editors and publishers thought it was, back in the mass-media age. Old media just assumed we were interested in what they told us to be interested in. But we weren’t. We’re proving that with every new choice the internet enables."
"While you were away eating turkey, the tech geniuses behind Eyebeam and the Huffington Post launched BuzzFeed, a sort of hybrid--a little bit country, a little bit rock 'n roll--news site that's edited by humans but powered by algorithms."
"Magazines, on the other hand, still have very high walls between their writers and readers. The writers and editors enjoy the illusion that they do something no one else can. The readers, then, have only one job: to consume the product."Posted at 08:08 AM, November 30, 2006
permalink | 0 Comments
During the B&A redesign contest, we struggled mightily with the question "What makes a publication scream 'magazine' rather than 'blog'"?
The First Post certainly knows the answer.
Thanks for the comments.. sometimes one gets so close to something, you hardly know what to say.
PublicSquare helps the little guy publish like Big Media, by getting the audience involved! Is the next Thomas Freidman or WIlliam Shawn lurking in your audience, waiting to be discovered?
oops-- already too many obscure references.
Okay, geographicaly dispersed, asyncronous collaboration tool...
bleah.
Outgrown your blog? Hate yoru CMS? Try PublicSquare, and get wrting!
sounds like I'm selling detergent.
One thing we tried to do as often as possible was not reinvent the wheel. Lars took the intiative to contact Shopify, and they let us use their templating language, Liquid. This allows users to enjoy the ability to fully customize their look and feel (our attempted at all-css design already chronicled in Are We There Yet).
One big lesson (in fact a life lesson): when you think something is dumb, try doing it yourself with the same contraints as the creator.
You'll learn.
"I too have had the sense that much of the discussion in the IA/Design community was dangerously close to a conference of virgins talking about sex."
So: let me show you some decisions we made that were different form CMS's and Blogs and all that. (Oh, these screenshots represent a moment in time; things will look differently when we launch.)
I remember a long time ago reading about the New Yorker's slushpile. This is a place where they put all the unsolicited manuscripts, and then once and while they'd send an intern in to dig through them and find the next John Updike. Well, in PS we made the slushpile public, and now teh audience can not only see an easy path to write for a given magazine, but they can also comment on ideas and rate them. This saves editors a lot fo time, and keeps them in touch wiht the reader base.
What's nice about ratings and comments, is that sometimes a contraversial story idea will look lackluster in the ratings, because the positives and negatives cancel eachother out. But if you see a ton of comments on an idea, you the editor know to take a closer look. Contraversy is good for communities, and good for magazine sales/pageviews.
BTW, I'm declaring a spell-check free zone while I'm trying to get these concepts out of my head. Just letting you know.
Our dashboard is designed for the editorial staff: its designed to tell you where all the stories are in the process, and if there is anything you have to attend to. Too many dashboards just give you some navigation you have anyhow in the tabs-- what's the point? Except they don't know what to put on this page.
Note also the status messsages are not just custom to the publication; they are free-form text. Use them as you need, then color them red, yellow or green ( I think most folks know what those colors are all about!)
Okay, more in a bit....
When I describe it, I say
"PublicSquare is a collaborative publishing platform."
But of course that is a bit jargony. It's kinda basecamp meets blogger. Most blogtools don't do what small publications need, becuase they don't support workflow, scheduling, maintence of many staff memebers and even more contributors.
But CMS's are confusing huge messy monsters. I'm a bit nerveous to compare PS to them. I've tried Mambo, and jamba, and many others -- I used drupal for quite awhile-- and PublicSquare is just way more lightweight, easier to use, easier to get started. I htink it's because it's designed for one problem,a nd unlike the others I mentioned, it's really not made to be used for everything. It's not a blogging platform, nor is it for a giant corporation to run its intranet on. Not to say you couldn't, but we're trying to avoid the whole built-for-everybody-so-nobody-is-happy problem.
Okay, let me walk you thorugh a couple of the core concepts....
Magazines need to open their doors to their readers. Instead of thinking of writers and readers as two separate communities, magazines need to realize that they really only have one community: the people who give a shit about their magazine.
Hello blog readers. I've noticed there are a bit more of you lately since I've been baring my soul and all that, so I thought maybe I'd try to take advantage of you. I'm rushing to put together the PublicSquare website, that will introduce folks to Cuina Media's first product. I used thinkature (a really cool ap.. no, a really cool WEB 2.0 ap) to do a loosey-goosey IA. Now for the part where I make you work:
So in otherwords, maybe you-all can help me figure out how to explain this nifty thing to the public, and why it is different. Up for it?
It's an amusing and little known fact that I cannot post a comment on my own blog. I used to be able to type something random and short, typically "fish" then go into the MT interface and replace it with a real comment; but now nothing works at all. I nearly moved to wordpress, but decided to wait until PS was ready and then migrate. So here I am, holding forth and responding to your recent comments on the blog. I just don't want you to think I'm ingorning you, my pretties.
I think the thing that hit me hardest was that my point was missed. I am not an IA, moreover I haven't been an IA for at least four years. I know a lot about IA, and that informs a bunch of my choices as an entrapreneur (though not as many as one might suppose, and certainly different ones than you'd guess. For example, the taxonomy control on PS currently stinks. And it's going to stink for a little while becasue there are more important parts of the ap to make work well.) I say this while liking IA, and liking IAs and wanting to hire them everywhere I go, because I think they add a lot of perspective, insight and design chops. Same goes for designers, and IxDers, and user researchers and the rest of the merry crew.
What resonated with me about Adam's post is how little I had in common with the lists I was on, and moreover how my intial response was to say to the lists, grow up! But it was me that had to realize I had changed, and that I needed to admit that everybody is who s/he is and not who I wanted them to be. The newbies are new, the masters are masters, and the sideways lunatics are-- well, a bit crazy. The day has only so many hours, and the brain seems to have limited shelf-space. You can spend your time filling it with new things, or go deeper in understanding old things and both are fine pursuits and belong in the larger context of a team.
Angry, awkward, "tribeless" and desperately trying to avoid a bunch of chores I know I need to do, I've lashed out on lists and overexpounded on the blog. While overcritical of many, I realize that the only quality I really need designers to have is not business chops or Microsoft office skills, but the one they profess to already have mastered: empathy. Being dismissive is the opposite of empathy, and if you want to stay a designer, it's a behavior I suggest giving up. (I'm still on step one: admitting you have a problem.)
Beyond that you can learn from others to season your chops, or you can choose to go more deeply and find folks who are digging into the questions you ask -- you can read business journals, or you can read academic ones. Architecture, microbiology, economics: if you are in the right state of mind, everything is teaching you all the time. You can research and seek better and better solutions, but don't sit on your buttocks thinking you know all the answers.
Last week I set a personal record: started flamewars on four mailing lists. It would have been six or seven, but I realized I was edgy, and decided to not watch the mailing list folders for a few days until I cooled off. But I never cooled off. And I wondered why. I recalled a recent blogpost by Adam Greenfield (hilariously if inaccurately mocked by ok-cancel) and I found a clue. I think he, and Peterme, and Lou and Peter Morville... well, we're all outgrowing our favorite pair of jeans: IA. And the waistband is cutting in badly, but it's our favorite pair, so of course we're crabby. We're all going to stay crabby unless we finally take them out of our "skinny" drawer and give them to goodwill. (Okay, I suspect Peter Morville saw a tailor to have his let out, restyled, and pressed; and Lou told us that they were in the garage, but really he cut them into patches and made a quilt -- but hey, let's not beat this metaphor to death. Oops, too late.)
Despite no longer calling myself an information architect (I've been happy with entrepreneur for some time) and despite a deep affection for the community I've been part of for so long, the lists have been making me crazy. I'd been off them for a while, and had gotten back on for a number of reasons, from promoting the new Boxes and Arrows features to seeing if new trends were emerging in my (former?) profession. And I was shocked at the blatant stupidity I thought I was seeing. Only it wasn't stupidity; I had radically changed my point of view. It was as if I had been enjoying the company of swans for some time, went to sleep and woke up a duck-- and thought the swans looked silly, all long necked and white and showy.
Starting my own company, I've had to learn an amazing amount in a short time. I've had to essentially give myself a home-MBA (resulting in similar quality, I might add, to a home-perm). As a result, returning to the lists, I couldn't believe what things people were saying -- I was thinking "Of course they don't implement that feature, there is no upside" "you have to make choices, and in this market that was the right one" " Jesus kee-rist, of course YouTube is designed." and so on.
I've been angry because so many (not all!) design practitioners whine about how no one pays attention to them, when they don't take time to understand the business folks. When they proudly crow about their empathic skills, and just as proudly crow about their hatred of excel. They expect business to read GAIN, but refuse to read businessweek. Too often they judge from their point of view, instead of questioning and learning instead.
And I'm angry because I've been so very stupid in so very many of the same ways, and my hubris pisses me off. I've been humbled by Excel in the last weeks, and made wise by Advertising Age. PowerPoint has been a better friend than Photoshop, and Drucker wiser than Hillman.
I'm not sure I could write another design book ever again without first going to the well of business and drinking deeply. For those "moron sheep" sure know a whole lot. And you cannot learn unless you have ears to hear with, and sometimes that means shutting up.
I'm not even sure if I have a point yet to make from all this research and digestion.
I do know I am a small piece of something big, and I bring my own skills to play along with others, and now I can no more tolerate dismissing of "monetization" any more than I can stand dismissing design as "making it pretty." I don't know if the right thing is to unsubscribe and move on, or to remain, and try to explain some stuff I figured out, while watching for the new stuff others have figured out. Or maybe I should just flame and be done with it, and start the conversations needed to get change happening. I'm not sure I have the stomach (even though I clearly have the talent) for that work.
This blog has more to say these days about publishing than about IA, because it is a blog: a personal journal of one person's view. Maybe it's getting to be time to change that also; change topics formally, change the dynamic, or maybe it's getting to be time to take my own advice and "Shut up and Dance."
Anger is almost always based on fear, and change fuels fear. I am becoming Christina 2.0, and joy and fear and anger as par for the course, I guess. With occasional flamewars and design bashing thrown in.
from paidContent.org.org: The Economics of Content
"Morgan Stanley Investment Management is ratcheting up the pressure on the Sulzberger family to boost the New York Times Co.’s flagging stock price. The Wall Street firm, which owns 7 percent of the NYTCO stock, wants shareholders to vote on a proposal at next year’s annual meeting to dismantle the dual-class stock system that keeps the Ochs-Sulzberger family in control—and to separate the job of company chairman and publisher of the New York Times, according to the WSJ and AP."
When I was first looking for a lawyer for Cucina Media, I was lucky enough to be introduced to John Montgomery. In our first meeting, he talked about why corporations can act against their mission, and what to do about it. It seems that (and excuse my oversimplification) the bylaws of most corporations make the corp responsible to the shareholder. This sounds logical, right? Well, that shareholder can then sue if the corp acts against the shareholder's interest, and shareholder interest often being entirely about increasing shareholder value (these days meaning stock price) means the company is obliged to do what ever gives the stock a pop.
But Monty also explained to me that you don't have to use a boilerplate for your bylaws; you can make the company responsible to the shareholders and somebody else. This could be
If you find the quote above boring, or irrelevant, let me tell you... watching the struggle the LA Times has gone through to improve profitability and increase shareholder value... well, you can improve profitability two ways: increase revenue or cut costs. Revenue cannot grow indefinitely; that means at some point you must cut costs. The greatest cost a business carries is the staff.
Unless of course, profitability is not your only driver. At which point a corporation can actually start taking a long view on important matters.
Your assigned reading:
I'll expect a 200 word report by monday.
According to Alexa, moving B&A to the PublicSquare platform bumped up it's traffic significantly and it has maintained the higher number. I'm curious if anyone has theories about why. Before we were on Movabletype...
from The New Yorker: The Talk of the Town
"On Kean’s page there has been a long-running take-it--out-put-it-back-in duel concerning a video of the candidate shunning an antiwar activist whose son is stationed in Falluja. Menendez supporters write up the incident on Wikipedia, under the heading "Refusal to meet with military families."Kean supporters, in response, add a few sentences about how the incident was a setup, orchestrated by the Me-nendez campaign. "
Wikipedia, long held up as proof of what is possible if you trust the crowd now illustrates that not all topics are equally suited to the wikipedia approach: the "truth" is changing every second.
AIGA Polling Place Photo Project - Home
With citizens' images and the information that accompanies them, the Project becomes a research tool on how voting happens in America and how it can be designed to be easier, less confusing and more enjoyable. The project intends to collect photographs of every polling place in America, so you are encouraged to participate no matter where you vote, how large or small your polling place is, what kind of ballot you use, or what your party affiliation.
Plateauing: Redefining Success at Work - Knowledge@Wharton
What may be happening, suggest McGrath and others, is that people are setting career paths based on their own values and definitions of success. They are not burned out or dropping out; they are not going back to school and changing careers; they are not having a mid-life crisis. Instead, they are redefining how they can keep contributing to their organizations, but on their own terms. Rather than subscribe to the 'onward and upward' motto, they are more interested in 'plateauing,' unhooking from the pressure to follow an upward path that someone else has set.
"Let’s stop being prey, let’s start being predators. Think like a venture capitalist, think like a start-up. There are opportunities here but if you look at Craigslist and Yahoo and Google and cry in your beer, you won’t get anywhere. Start looking for opportunities to attack and start looking for opportunities to do it in a calculated way, in a business-like way."
-- Bob Benz, General Manager of Interactive Media, Scripps Newspapers, United States
