"The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be." Paul Valery

"Where are you likely to find people with the least diversity of experience, the largest investment in the past, and the greatest reverence for industry dogma? At the top." Gary Hamel

"If you work slowly and meticulously, you merely end up with a very fine implementation of your initial, mistaken idea. Working slowing and meticulously is premature optimization. Better to get a prototype done fast, and see what new ideas it gives you." Paul Graham

Today's image: Banksy (crop) by Martin in London. Great shot. Thank you for sharing.

Not what they signed up for

Much continues to be written about the state of affairs in ad-supported measured media. The 400 year-old death spiral of the dead tree guys is, rightly, getting the most attention. Jeff Cole, the brilliant media scholar and leading researcher of our new digital world, said at this week's MPR hosted Future of News Summit..."Instead of counting down the two newspaper towns, we now count up the no newspaper towns." Jeff went on to say should a newsprint eating virus vanish newspapers no one under forty would notice and, off the cuff, opined that a precious handful of papers would survive. Indicating the NYT, WSJ, WaPo, USAT were likely among the short listed survivors, he suggested "my LAT" was headed towards ruin.

The problem for jazz stations and college professors

Cole said we will see incredible consolidation ahead and this will extend to the academy. He indicated 2,000 US college professors now teach Introduction to Psychology. Why should anyone have to take the course from anyone other than the best professor in the country or the world, who might even be dead when they teach the course. We will end up with three or four professors teaching three or four basic courses - via the internet - the best professors who have ever taught the subjects. We don't have a need for 2,000 teaching the same course.

We no longer need listen to local radio that we perceive to fall short of expectation. Professor Cole used Jazz radio as an example. We are not bound to tolerating the poor local jazz station when we may opt to listen to the best jazz station in the world (he's heard it originates in India). This echos my brief before the 2005 Conclave Learning Conference: "It is no longer a game of being the best at what you do in your market, that soon won't be enough to sustain success. You must rise to the challenge of being the best in the world at what you do - and becoming known for it."

"For those who want to understand the environment in which we are operating, our learning curve has to be much steeper than our action curve.
We have to be studying and watching and following relentlessly." Jeff Cole

Cole made an excellent point when he suggested TIME Magazine got it wrong three years ago. They had missed a significant cultural shift (the fundamental importance of "community") when naming its Person of the Year "YOU" instead of "US." You may access video of Jeff Cole's keynote, truly a tour de force, via YouTube, here. Highly recommended.

One of the best lines of the meet was by Richard Gingras, CEO of Salon Media Group. Quoting his own earlier tweet, he said "The future of news is a future of conferences about the future of news."

Let us commend Bill Kling and his MPR team for organizing and hosting such an important gathering. Let us also extend kudos to MPR's own Julia Schrenkler for coordinating a real-time, robust and leading-edge companion effort online. Julia tells me it was her team that pulled off the practically flawless execution. She does single out the uber-cool camera jockey Chuck Olsen for his valuable behind-the-scenes contributions. Should you wish to learn more about The Future of News Summit, the MPR team offers a Ning, here. Julia has advised me that more video and ppt will be posted in the coming days.

Those that follow me on Twitter are perhaps aware that I attempted to live tweet the summit. As usual I was getting things almost right, sometimes dead wrong, leaving important stuff out but dear friends such is the nature of live tweeting. You may access the live tweets (and retweeting of many) by searching the tfon hashtag, here.

Later I'll post more on the issues raised during the summit. Today, allow me to invite your attention to two items and, while we're at it, a throwback to 2004 and a bonus must-read.

We have an urgent need to invite more women, minorities and youth to participate in our most important discussions. It is hard to argue the presence of (or respect for) cognitive diversity when industry gatherings continue to feature middle-aged white men in the majority. We can change this overnight. Let's do it.

While there is no shortage of blame being delegated for today's troubles in ad-supported measured media we have witnessed a change. Once celebrated as rock stars, CEOs are now, more often than not, the goats of coarse derision. No offense to goats intended. The transition of CEO from visionary wealth building genius to tone deaf idiot has happened in less than a decade.

Jeff Cole offered many valuable insights during his remarks. Among them saying executives that had started their careers in newspapers, broadcasting and advertising thirty years (or more) ago have a significantly different pov of the business than those that came into the industry in the middle 1990s. There have, in fact, been profound and dramatic changes in the way business is done. It's a sea change, a very different business as usual set point. While I am not one to defend or excuse the bad practices or poor decisions of most media CEOs, please permit me to suggest that what is happening today is clearly not what any sitting CEO signed up for (or even imagined) twenty, thirty or forty years ago. Therein one core problem of our failed industry leadership. Dee Hock said it best, to wit:

"When it became necessary to develop a new perception of things, a new internal model of reality, the problem is never to get new ideas in, the problem is to get the old ideas out. Every mind is filled with old furniture. It is familiar. It is comfortable. We hate to throw it out."

It remains my proffer that the serious challenge at hand is one of unlearning. For the record, my first blog post here in February of 2004 was prompted by a single concern - leadership. You can access that first post, The Fish Stinks at the Head First, here.

Sidebar: During thirty talks given this year I have made mention of my run heading an American broadcast group disclosing my thought that the results produced during my watch (in the 1980s and 90s) could have been replicated by an inflatable doll or stuffed animal assigned my role. My thought being this was not a singular experience, this replacement exercise would have proven equally successful at those other organizations led by my peers. Truth be known, we were all managing inventory, playing golf and/or tennis and doing very well without any serious sustained thought or discussion given to innovation. Those of us lucky enough to have strong general managers did just fine by staying out of the way as the money flowed into stations, it rained dollars. One would have needed a carefully detailed plan in order to fail. On the occasions group heads gathered, we would talk - beyond the usual lying to each other - people, markets, treasury (how we handled the money), exchange war stores of bad deals passed and share the hidden values of each others known acquisitions making published purchase prices seem very shrewd. Broadcast was our business and business was good.

As Mary Hopkin once sang "Those were the days my friend, we thought they'd never end." Clearly, that party is over. I have rarely been challenged on this assertion. Those few times I have been called out, intellectual honesty prohibited my purchase of the kool-aid. Got no interest in joining those on an ice flow drifting to oblivion - those sharing the false belief, the plainly irrational delusion, that things will one day "come back." The opportunity rich reality of now holds far more appeal to me than the wayback machine. Game on.

Bonus: Tom Webster, the digital cool kid of Edison Research, has posted a writing that merits your attention. Read Social Media: Just A Hobby? via The Infinite Dial, here.

As always, you're comments are welcomed - please join the conversation. Thanks for stopping by. More tomorrow.

"Thank God for screw-ups, for if life had adhered strictly to six sigma rules, we’d all still be slime." Gary Hamel

"Mindless habitual behavior is the enemy of innovation." Rosabeth Moss Kanter

"It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to management than the creation of a new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institution and merely the lukewarm defense in those who gain by the new ones." Nicolo Machiavelli

Today's image: canal by Banksy. Wonderful. Thank you for sharing.

It's the top line, stupid.

Broadcast leadership continues to be obsessed with tweaking the numerator.

My sense is too many are still keeping score like it's 1999. Preoccupied with optimization they continue to fail because they do not yet appreciate the critical importance of recognizing and unlocking the incredible value inherent in attempts at bold innovation. Truth be known, playing around with numerator has reached beyond the point of diminishing returns. To be blunt, optimization strategies for broadcast operators are well past their best used by date. Attention and resources continue to be invested in getting better at a game that is less and less relevant. Over the past ten years every department (and related function mission systems) at broadcast stations has fundamentally changed with one exception - sales. Proof of this abounds. Any candid accounting of results produced will tend to support this assertion. Let me suggest the best (and most important) evidence may be found by talking with buyers. How has the "broadcast buying experience" changed? How does this experience stack up when compared to other media options?

If you always do what you've always done,
you'll get what you've always gotten

Permit me to invoke an old saw from Zig Ziglar "Two sure ways to fail. Think and never do or do and never think." Broadcast leadership appears to have cornered the market on both. Enough! My thought (confirmed by recent experience) is the new game is getting really serious about changing the denominator. Sales development - the hard work of driving new top lines. Getting fresh and creative in perspective and approach. Experimentation. Discovery. Learning how to respect, appreciate and reward the art of failing faster in order to succeed sooner.

On the day job we have observed the best "return on imagination" begins with unvarnished discussion concerning the creation of new markets rather than the same old fights over how to grow an increasingly irrelevant metric - silo share of a declining market. Going to work to kill the guy across the street is simply not an effective strategy in driving top line development and the entire ball game is, plainly, to continually, consistently and creatively develop the top line without any excuse. To develop your top line you'll need to invest in developing your people.

Invite and encourage cognitive diversity in your organization

Paul Jacobs offers a writing that merits the attention of radio and TV leadership. Follow The (Shrinking) Money - his post on the Jacobs Media blog, is a call to action, to wit:

"...if we don't make major moves in our sales and marketing
strategies, we're in real trouble"

Read Paul's entire post, here. Kudos to Paul, he is right on the money. He presents a well-reasoned case for changing up the game and getting into a whole new reality, the competition that is measured media fighting for dollars at the dawn of the 21st century mediascape.

Congrats and cheers: Robert Feder, by far the best and brightest writer of his generation to cover the media beat, has returned. His new home is Vocalo.org, a new media venture of the Chicago Public Radio folks. More, in his own words, here. Welcome to the conversation, Rob. You've been missed.

Bonus: Cool kid Mary Meeker and her colleagues at Morgan Stanley delivered an important presentation at the Web 2.0 Summit. You may access the PDF of their presentation - Economy + Internet Trends - here. Bravos to Mary and the Morgan gang on a job well done.

Oldie but goodie: Malcolm Gladwell from 2004 on spaghetti sauce. Thanks, as ever, to TED.

"Fear is the mortal enemy of creativity." Alex Bogusky

"Originality is deliberate and forced, and partakes of the nature of a protest." Eric Hoffer

"When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something...That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things." Steve Jobs

Today's image: Bart1 by Banksy. Great work. Thank you for sharing.

Minding the Gap

For those of us working in measured media, we are living in times of incredible disruption and, it seems to me, equally incredible opportunity. The question needing attention is how do we make the best of our present circumstances? How do we most effectively navigate the gap, from our past analog successes and through today's rough waters to the brave new digital frontier?

Elizabeth L. Eisenstein has provided us with an excellent guidebook. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Amzn). Her writing does an outstanding job of helping us to understand how technology can trigger dramatic and unimaginable change. Let me also suggest a fresh reading of Marshall McLuhan. Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines have produced an exceptional book pulling together McLuhan lectures and interviews in Understanding Me with a forward by the great American writer Tom Wolfe (Amzn)

In giving my talks on social media this year I have mentioned some conventional radio station jobs (e.g., the overnight, midday and part-time weekend disc jockey) using the metaphor of 15th century scribes (inspired by the brilliant Michael Rosenblum). Getting a job working for the church as a scribe was about as good as it could get way back in the day. It was the ultimate job security, working for the rock solid employer of choice. And then, everything changed. Working as a liner reading announcer now seems an anomaly, an occupational accident of pure chance. In the not too distant future winning a bar bet suggesting that people once made a wage good enough to support a family and buy a home by simply playing music (and little more than reading formatted remarks four times an hour) will be, well, practically impossible.

My father was a musician and did some work in radio. When TV came along the musicians union told its members that their radio jobs would be safe. When it was suggested that radio would replace live musical performances by playing recordings - the same phonograph records available for purchase by the listeners - the union said "Radio intends to play the same records that the public can buy and play whenever they wish? It will never work." To my knowledge, there are no musicians on staff at any radio stations today. By the way, my dad reinvented himself. He decided to end his successful career as a musician and band leader, he took a flyer and went off to play the records. He never looked back. Johnny Martin had the audacity to ignore the conventional wisdom and the accepted rules of the day, he helped to put on the air the first black owned radio station in the nation, WERD in Atlanta. It happened this month in 1949.

Don't Keep Calm and Carry On

The important challenge of broadcast managers today is minding the gap, building a bridge to the digital future and that's a mission that will require first creating a magnet, a culture that fosters innovation. Broadcasters must attract the best ideas.

While there is certainly a lot of talk about the challenges and problems of our current situation there is far too little discussion and resources focused on actual solutions. Too often activity is being mistaken for progress. There's not enough implementation, experimentation, effective execution. We must adopt a dead serious bias for action. Discovering solution sets should be the proper focus most deserving of our attention. Please permit me to again say ... It's not about getting better, it's about getting different. It's all about shifting focus from the numerator to the denominator.

As it happens we have an app for that today. Edison Media's Tom Webster recently presented a wonderful webinar - A Small, Good Thing - on behalf of the Conclave. You may access a recording of Tom's webinar, here. Word to the wise - put Tom's blog, BrandSavant, in your reader, it's here. [FD: I serve on the board of the Conclave. Let me also thank and credit moleitau for his killer image shown here above left]

Bonus: Cool kid Alex Bogusky has some good writing on offer - Creative directors are in the business of professional insanity - well worth your bandwidth, here.

Wait, there's more: Still feel the need to read? Check out what I've been reading via delicious, here.

"No one cares about how much you know until they know how much you care." Jerry McGee

"Hire slowly. Fire quickly. It's not the people you fire that hurt you. It's the people you don't fire." Marcio Moreira

"Don't get intimidated by the world out there. Most people don't have a clue." Dennis Scully

Today's image: Banksy by Martin in London. Wonderful. Thanks for sharing.

Please take 16:31 to watch today's video feature. It's a wonderful talk by Beau Lotto, the founder of Lottolab studio. Opticial illusions show how we see. My thanks, as always, to TED.

"Beau Lotto's color games puzzle your vision, but they also spotlight what you can't normally see: how your brain works. This fun, first-hand look at your own versatile sense of sight reveals how evolution tints your perception of what's really out there."

"Why is context everything?"

No one is an outside
observer of nature

Each of us is defined
by our ecology

...ecology is necessarily
relative, historical and empirical

"Hire execs who love the product." Dave Winer

"Enthusiasm is the genius of sincerity and truth accomplishes no victories without it." Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

"Courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm." Winston Churchill

Today's image: Banksy. Cans Festival Leake Street SE1 by pomphorhynchus. Amazing. Thank you for sharing.

Good to be back. So much to catch up on. Let's get started.

Dave Winer inspired this post. Should you not be aware of Dave, please do get to know him. He was instrumental in bringing us game-changing breakthroughs including blogging, RSS and podcasting. He's an original thinker, a person not afraid of dealing in that most rare and refreshing of attitudes, he dares to offer unvarnished thought. You may find his blog, Scripting News, here. Longtime readers will recall the header of this blog once contained Dave's wise counsel "People come back to places that send them away." That has never been more true or relevant than it is today.

Recently Dave wrote: "Every crop of entrepreneurs thinks it's different. They never are, but they have to learn that for themselves. One thing they do over and over is hire execs who don't love the product. It's as if the guy who ran professional football didn't like football." My sense is Dave is spot-on in this observation. Read Dave's entire post, Hire execs who love the product, here.

Seems to me too many of those working in broadcast today don't truly love the product. Should we somehow be given the ability to Mirandize the majority of broadcast leadership, have them raise a hand and give us the straight dope under oath, my sense is our finding would be there ain't a lot of love. These guys are not happy, not having fun, not excited about the industry as it is today and not close to convincingly enthusiastic regarding the road ahead. Can't totally blame them. It's not the job they signed up for. Moreover, 2009 is turning out to be yet another one of those years that they would prefer we all just agree to forget. More on this leadership issue later.

Today, let us choose to learn rather than forget.

Here now the lessons of a media company about one hundred and thirty years old that put down one of it's most prized assets earlier this year. The Rocky Mountain News printed it's final edition on February 27, 2009.

At that ending, John Temple was the editor, president and publisher of the Rocky Mountain News. Now he presents us with an exceptional gift - lessons learned from the end of an institution. Here are his ten lessons. I strongly recommend you visit his blog, watch his video and read his entire presentation delivered earlier today at the UC Berkeley Media Technology Summit at Google. [Speakers list]

1. Know what business you're in.
2. Know your customers.
3. Know your competition.
4. Know your goal.
5. Have a strategy and be committed to pursuing it.
6. Measure, measure, measure.
7. Keep new ventures free from the rules of the old.
8. Let the people running a new venture do what's best for their business, regardless of the potential impact on the old.
9. To compete in a new medium, you have to understand it.
10. Invest in R&D.

Bravos, John. Well done. Thanks for sharing. This gentleman loved his product, loved his job, of that there can be no doubt. His leading by example, his generous offering of learning, is simply exemplary. You may find John's post, including video, slides and the text of his presentation, here.

Thanks, again, to Dave Winer for the inspiration and to NYU rock star Jay Rosen for his tip on John's wonderful gift of learning.

Your comments are always welcome.

More tomorrow. Thank you for stopping by.