Shirky provides an extensive historical analysis to support his claim and while I agree with most of it, I think he ultimately misses the conclusion. Not only will the original mission of newspapers like the NYT sustain itself online, it will be revived in a way their founders could have never imagined. What’s lost in most discussions about the future of news is just what that original idea for a newspaper like the NYT really was and how the internet is in a unique position to execute it for the first time.

Idea

A hundred and thirteen years ago a ‘Business Announcement’ ran in the back of The New York Times. Adolph Ochs, then 36 years old, had just purchased the paper and on his first day he ran the following:

It will be my earnest aim that The New York Times give the news, all the news, in concise and attractive form, in language that is parliamentary in good society, and give it as early, if not earlier that it can be learned through any other reliable medium; to give the news impartiality, without fear or favor, regardless of party, sect. or interests involved; to make the columns of The New York Times a forum for the consideration of all questions of public-importance, and to that end to invite intelligent discussion from all shades of opinion.

It’s easy to forget that in 1896 this kind of talk was bewildering. At the time, population in NYC was surging, and the media market was dominated by papers like The World and The New York Journal which had become profitable by bashing their readers’ heads with lurid scandals. Among publishers, Ochs was a kind of joke. Instead of training his staff to hunt for apocalyptic headlines he turned his staff into a kind of impartial machine. At a time when the most profitable newspapers were running stories like, “Wife Uses a Whip,” or “A Fish that Plays the Piano,” Ochs published reports on a local election so fair that the leaders of rival national committees wrote letters of thanks.

The work was utterly baffling to other newspapers because they failed to see how something so dull could capture anyones imagination or attention. The World and The New York Journal were in the business of producing vivid content; what they didn’t understand was that Ochs and the Times were in a different business entirely.

Ochs was selling a newspaper but what he was really selling was a belief that the pages of the Times reflected a kind of untampered public discourse. The ‘Business Announcement’ was more like a contract to prevent outside distortion. No organization could buy positive coverage from the Times and the paper itself would not add ‘pyrotechnics’ to its articles to sell more copies. Ochs was creating a major distinction; the ambition of the the Times was not to create news, but to be its definitive organizer.

How This Idea was Executed in 1896

It was a big and elegantly expressed promise but it was also one that was restrained by obvious technical limitations. Ochs had little more than a small office, a staff and a printing press. On a fundamental level his production method was no different than any content based news publication at the time. It was a reporting process and it looked like this:

Reporters enter a public, gather information, privately decides what parts of it are worthwhile, and then send that back out to the public as a representation of their dialogue.

All participation is controlled. If someone in that public wants to communicate to the public around them, they send a letter to the organization and if it fits their criteria, they send it back out.

In 1896 it was painfully easy to see how game-able the reporting process was. It put total power in the hands of a few and every stage of the process was vulnerable to chronic and untraceable distortion. This is perhaps why so many early newspaper publishers thought Ochs was naive and why some newspapers at the time were so open about their political leanings that they carried it in their title. Ochs knew this but he was also aware that there really was no getting out of it, these were technical limitations. He addressed the inherent problems of print through branding.

Trustee Media

The logic, in letter form, for trustee media goes something like this:

Dear Public,

We are here to represent you and your interests.

You’re not electing us, we are electing ourselves.

Signed,

-the newspaper

Ochs’s genius as a publisher was in creating an impression that the Times actually did stand for the public’s interests. Many newspapers at the time had vowed against ‘planted stories’ and political diatribes. The difference was the level to which Ochs showed his commitment. In his first year as publisher he turned down $33,600 in suspicious city advertising while nearly bankrupt, as he thought it squandered tax-payer money. He refused advertisements from over-promising tonics and degree programs and he published pages of reader letters. The writing was neutral, factual and without bylines. All of this added to the mystique of the Times brand.

Of course Ochs was aware that his contract was more an ideal than a reality and he chose his words carefully. This is why he never claimed to be impartial outright, it was always his ‘earnest aim.’ Even the slogan alluded to the Times’ epistemological bias. All The News That’s Fit to Print — meaning that there was other news out there, it just wasn’t important enough to merit circulation.

In many senses it worked. The Times came to be affectionately known as The Trust. A word that strikes at the faith required in their process, not its logic.

It took years but eventually The World and The New York Journal folded; The New York Times, and its ‘earnest aim’ to publish news impartially, set the model for the most profitable newspapers in the country. That is until now.

What Happened to this Idea in 2009

To frame what’s happened in journalism this past year as a matter of economics is to miss the entire point. Sure, a print publication will make less online than in print and will soon have to fire most of its staff in order to avoid bankruptcy but forget about money. Imagine for a moment that some wealthy benefactor donated a billion dollars and endowed the reporting staff of the NYT for the foreseeable future. In theory this would quiet many of the concerns of the Times and media critics who have spread fear of a weakening national press, but in actuality it would be a drop in the bucket. Even if the Times doubled its entire reporting staff, it would continue its picture perfect swan dive into the second-tier.

Somewhere in the past 113 years, somewhere in erecting Journalism Schools and awarding Pulitzer Prizes, the trustee method of executing Ochs’s idea became confused with the idea itself.

Trustee Media Vs. Direct Media

Perhaps the biggest challenge in media criticism this year has been making discussions on ‘Future of News’ more than a debate between New and Old Media. Just because a news organization established itself and started publishing recently doesn’t mean that the way they are publishing is any different than in the past. Many of the biggest news organizations to spring up in the last few years that are largely considered to be ‘new media’ — The Huffington Post, Gawker, Politico, Tech Crunch — are fundamentally similar to the NYT. That is to say, they are trustee media, they stake a claim on a certain beat and a handful of editors ultimately control everything that is published. When a story breaks and a number of their readers are trying to contribute it still looks like this:

To say that these organizations are without value would make me a hypocrite. For the past year and half I have published NYU Local, a trustee style news org where we, as 15 students, elect ourselves to represent a school of about 40,000. To some degree it has been successful, we’ve quickly lapped the school newspaper in hits and earned some awards, but anytime a big story on our site breaks and we sift through our email deciding what not to publish, it becomes clear that we are missing the point.

The aim of NYU Local was never to bring a collection of smart blogger/reporters together and have them pump out content; the aim was to capture the discussion of our university. Since our inception, our execution of this aim, like any other trustee news org, has been aspirational and abstract; the challenge the web poses to us is that it no longer needs to be that way.

It’s terrifying for any publication with a full-time staff of reporters, but it’s a lesson that is becoming impossible to ignore everyday on Twitter. The more people in your beat publish independently, the less your claim to that beat appears valid.

Much of the confusion and strife among established news companies in 2009 has come from a feeling that there is nothing they can do about this. The potency of the ‘The Reporter’ and the idea that a public needs this kind of representative has solidified so concretely most projects that don’t involve them have been seen as non-competitors. There have been hybrids, CNN’s iReport, HuffPo’s Off the Bus, and recently Gawker’s new way of sharing tips, but the editor, in each of these situations, still takes tight control. Despite ample warnings, an entirely better way of organizing a news company formed with their backs turned away.

Direct Media

In many ways it’s understandable. The staff at Twitter is so incomparable to the staff at the Times that it’s easy to see how they don’t see themselves as rivals, but there is a lot of evidence to suggest they are. The same goes for Wikipedia, Facebook, Google, YouTube, and any of the thousands of web applications that enable users to share and organize their own content. It’s insignificant on a small scale, easy to write off as amateurish, but once you put it in the context of a public as a whole, it matters. What normally would have been a rejected editorial in a large circulation newspaper travels through a public like this:

Multiply that by a million and you have the raw kind of public discourse that now happens every day on the internet. A single person can now speak to millions of people without touching a reporter. In many cases, it’s thrilling, but for the most part the tools are primitive; we are at the utter beginning of what this means for news production.

Twitter and Myspace are different companies in different markets but there is a lot of evidence to suggest that they share, and will always share, the exact same problem. MySpace and Twitter are hugely popular for uses neither company anticipated. The mission of each company is so vague that their products are stretched and molded into a variety of different uses. Instead of targeting and building their business around one of these users they take their sudden popularity as a sign they have a killer product. They don’t.

Scale is Everything

When an industry is in transition or an idea like ‘social networking’ is still being fleshed out, getting explosively popular without knowing the nuances of why is a curse. Twitter is young but in my opinion, it’s already too late. It has grown too big, too fast, for too many different purposes. It will take 2 or three years but Twitter will be lapped by a variety of similar services with focus and actual business models; how Facebook developed in response to MySpace sheds light on what kind.

How MySpace Scaled

Since its inception MySpace has gone after users as if they were Pokemon’. MySpace managers ran competitions on sign ups and the employes used a slew of methods to capture. The result was a sprawling network of users but by 2005, it seemed to be working. If you looked at the stats, MySpace was an utter phenomena. It destroyed Friendster and after it was purchased by Murdoch it was getting all types of press and valuations. What the raw stats didn’t tell you is that user habits on the site looked something like this:

The problem with this way of scaling is simple. When a new cultural practice, like ’social networking’, is in the grass roots stages of development you can’t assume that people are going to your site because they like it. Your competition doesn’t really exist yet. What they might like are certain aspects of your product or they might be using parts of it in ways you never designed. The only way to address this is to study your users obsessively, focus on a particular experience, then update your product accordingly.

Because MySpace grew in so many different markets at a single time and gave users so much space to use the service how they liked, they’ve never been in a position to either watch or effectively control this experience. How do you update a product without knowing its target? You don’t. MySpace at its height and the current MySpace look remarkably similar, it lost control to its users. It has gone from being hailed as one of the best acquisitions ever made to a drain on News Corps portfolio. The results look like this:

How Facebook Scaled

When it comes down to it the mechanisms of MySpace and Facebook are not that different. The pieces and concept are nearly the same. Both are constructed of user profiles, avatars, walls, interest spaces, groups, photo capabilities, and a friend confirmation/listing process.

Facebook distinguished itself philosophically and pragmatically. Zuckerberg’s biggest insight into designing the site was that you are online who you are in real life. Facebook was one of the first social networks to emphasize genuine identity insofar as they required full names, university email addresses, and deleted accounts that used aliases. The second was pragmatic. Facebook launched in a single target market. In this case, of course, it was Harvard.

What this enabled was a less abstract more manageable mission. Instead of having to define what an ‘online social networking space’ was supposed to be for everyone, Zuckerburg just had to answer for Harvard. As Facebook became popular on campus, he was able to see directly into how his peers interacted with the site and was able to update the product to help them use it more efficiently. Because they were all college students, the feedback he was getting was focused and nuanced. Having less users also meant they could redesign their entire product without pissing off disparate subsections. The result was an incremental evolution. The Facbeook that started at Harvard looks radically different than the one we use today. It worked.

How Twitter Scaled

Twitter grew much like MySpace. It ran competition for signing up users, aliases were allowed, and it grew in multiple markets at the exact same time. Twitter started as a group SMS texting service then became popular for something wholly different. By restricting the length of a message the site inadvertently addressed one of the oldest problems in group communication. How do you hear many voices at a single time? Twitter’s answer is dead simple. 140.

This little restriction has produced a fascinating, highly-addictive product. If you look at the stats, Twitter seems to be working. It’s one of the most popular websites in the world and now has an excess of 44 million members. For those who invested or employees that had stock options, it must be an incredible feeling. I have grown to love Twitter but in my opinion we are rapidly approaching its peak. Its parallels to MySpace in 2006 are explicit. Twitter has been bootstrapped for a vast number of uses and while its exciting to watch, its service is not containable . Like MySpace, Twitter is getting pulled in a variety of directions:

Why Twitter Will Dissolve and Turn into Detroit

The ability to hear and communicate messages with a group is what brought Twitter its initial wave of users but the real allure of Twitter, the reason it has caught the imagination of the press and millions of users, is something much more abstract.

On Twitter, you can hear a public.

Of course, there isn’t just one public, there is an infinite number. Whether it’s your country, your college, your city, or a shared niche interest like nyc media, everyone belongs to many publics and most everyone has a natural curiosity about what’s happening inside of them.

Twitter offers a way to manage how you see these publics. The problem is that its 140 character restriction is a blunt instrument. The site does not reflect the potential or nuance in which a public can speak to itself online. 

Twitter as a network is an ungodly mess. From the onset, the site has allowed users to register aliases on custom URLs and because of it, usernames are inconsistent and confusing. It’s hard to find people who you know and its often even difficult to deduct wether that person is who they claim to be. Twitter is mobbed by impersonators, some of them hilarious, others manipulating. Twitter addresses this issue recently by creating a ‘Verified Account’ stamp, its sloppy but more importantly, perpetually incomplete.

There are a host of other problems related to reputation and maintaing users but the biggest issue concerns its identity, which is also where the leaked documents got interesting. Twitter employees are so clearly uncertain about what their product is even doing. Shots at it swayed from, “Twitter  is for discovering and sharing what is happening right now,” to, “Twitter makes you smarter, faster, more efficient and more powerful.”  

Twitter became popular before it had a mission. What this means is that its employees and investors will forever be trapped in boardrooms having these inane cyclical discussions about its identity. Twitter will either perpetually be simple insofar as its millions of users will have to hack the service to reflect their own values or it will roll the dice on a focus, put the site through chronic redesigns, and risk a mass user exodus. Either way its top talent will likely get frustrated and leave the company. Its top users will drift to something else then jump. 

How Twitter will Resolve

The first thing to realize is that there probably isn’t going to be just one product to replace Twitter, there will be several and they will battle it out or find niches. I see their design following two trends with a potential for a hybrid. 

The first trend is a service with the most minimal centralization possible. Both Dave Winer and Anil Dash have discussed plans for such a product. Winer calls his the RSSCloud and Dash describes the project more generally as the Push Button web. The RSSCloud grew from discussions with Jay Rosen over frustrations with Twitter and how its users have been bootstrapping. The line of thought is that your data belongs to you, not Twitter, and you should be able to use your data how you like with as little brand interference as possible. The proposal is to build RSSCloud, a loosely coupled service that will push your data to any website in real time.

The second is a product that is centralized but has an elegant way of organizing its content and attracting users. This is a product that would look and scale much like Facebook. It would start in a single target market and develop as a place for users to hear and communicate to that public. Ideally it would begin in a cloistered network like a university where establishing members is as easy as checking their .edu email address. 

Addressing what’s wrong with Twitter isn’t going to come from thin air. It’s going to take a lot of time, development, and platform competition.

Many will soon be working on this, myself included. What will fill the blank is likely to define modern news production. 

@codybrown

The analysis arrived at a pretty classic conclusion,  Tech Crunch Vs. NYT is really an example of David Vs. Goliath  where one isn’t following the rules that the other is making. This is the case (and if you haven’t read the Gladwell piece, you must) but  there is a more helpful way to think about what is happening. It comes  down to this:  print news sources and web news sources are made for entirely different types of information processing, print works best in batch and online works best in real time. 

Tech Crunch and others like it are not breaking rules so much as they are doing what works for their medium. Each platform suits a specific type of news brand and answers core questions differently. 

How To Build a Great News Brand
Print Vs. Online

Print

Gestalt: Batch Processing. The medium requires that  Information is processed in chunks. A program takes a large set of data files as input, processes the data using a system, and produces an output file.

How should a great paper develop its brand? 
As the voice of god. Most of the biggest city newspapers took The Times’s lead in the 1890’s and have since spent a century developing their brand as public trusts that get it right the first time, all the time. When two city newspapers are in competition with one another, it is a war of access and infallibility - slighting an organization with a piece that is full of ’scuttlebutt’ leads to sources less willing to talk to the paper the next time. The community does not own the paper, an average person has little ability to influence it and because of this the paper is under constant scrutiny. It needs to create an aura that its work is in the interest of the public. Competitive newspapers spend millions of dollars hiring j-graduate reporters, copy editors, fact checkers, section editors, managing editors, all to create a kind of trust between the community and its information provider. When they drop a story, it is designed to be read as fact. 

How should a print newspaper publish information about a developing story? 
Cautiously. It should triple check it’s information and  call every source involved in the story to give them an opportunity to comment.  The consequences are great when Newspapers publish something wrong, it doesn’t take more than a few careless edits for a newspaper brand to fall to pieces.

How should it output its work?
Into tight neatly written comprehensive articles that it can then sell as part of a wire service. Articles meant to exist as a ‘first draft of history.’

Who should edit and produce a print newspaper?
Professionals. It’s expensive. A finite number of pages means a constant question: what is newsworthy to the most number of people?

—-

Online

Gestalt: Real Time Processing.  Information is processed  on the fly.

How should a great online news source develop its brand?
As an open platform. Instead of putting brand value on the final output of a news organization  put value into a process of verifying news. Take the values/tactics  that go on behind the walls of a newsroom (’the magic journalism box’) and execute them publicly. 

How should an online news source publish information about a developing story?
Instantly. When a page is able to be updated at any frequency, corrections can be made just as fast. Rumors and gossip can be used as leverage to get sources, who otherwise wouldn’t, to spill what they know. Publishing incomplete information is the fastest way to get users to contribute to the bigger picture. This is a tactic in effective commons-based-peer production and it is how Wikpedia grew so fast and so well. As Harvard Law Professor, Yochai Benkler, describes, it often looks like a “disaster area.” This is the ’scuttlebutt’ the Times can’t wrap its head around.

How should it output its work? Into everything. API.

Who should edit and produce an online news source?
Everyone in the beat. When a website has unlimited pages: there is no excuse.

The Tragedy of a Print Newspaper Brand Going RT

It’s possible for a news website to work (and even do decently) without playing to the unique real time characteristics of the web medium just as it’s possible for Tech Crunch to print out its articles and throw them into a small-circ industry newspaper. The challenge is in branding. The New York Times is powerful because whatever falls under its logo has an immediate effect of seeming true. This is its biggest asset, and what it has spent the past century painstakingly building.  The problem with branding the news product over the news process is that its readers see the NYT’s like this:  

The messy, opinionated, incomplete, rumorladen, shit-show that is actual news production is hidden away. If you want a real time news website, it must be brought to the surface. This isn’t a problem for a brand like Tech Crunch, but it puts print news brands in a terribly awkward position. How does The New York Times show the mess under its articles without wrecking the omniscient aura of the brand it has worked so hard for?