World War III

(This is only a test…so far)

A major weapons system for World War III got a test this week and the news barely managed to surface in the swirling stew of Michael Jackson, Steve McNair and Michelle Obama’s European trip wardrobe.

Hackers targeted dozens of major U.S. internet sites, both private and government, and managed to shut down or severely slow some of them, including the Treasury Department and the Federal Trade Commission. Some sites, such as Whitehouse.gov and the Pentagon, were able to shrug off the attack. Targets were reported to include the sites of the New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, Washington Post, and others.

Because the list of sites that came under attack also includes South Korean sites, officials suspect that the world’s No.1 Naughty Playmate, North Korea, may be the bad guys here. After all, Kim Jong Il and his buddies have exploded nuclear bombs and launched missiles, so maybe this cyber-sideshow is their doing.

Maybe. Except it’s not a sideshow. What happened over the holiday weekend and into this week should be as chilling as a squadron of 1941 Japanese attack planes doing practice runs over Hawaii. And shrugging it off is just as silly as having much of our naval might clustered neatly in the harbor while our planes were lined up wingtip-to-wingtip on the tarmac.

We have made much of how our society is becoming completely integrated into the internet. It’s how many of us get our news, contact each other or the government, pay our taxes and our bills, get paid, do our banking and shopping, run our businesses and do our work. With every passing day, the internet becomes so much a part of how we perceive, manage and enjoy the thing we call The United States that politicians now call for universal broadband as they once called for rural electrification.

That’s why the weekend’s events are a lot more serious than most seem to realize. Although they focused on overwhelming target sites with bogus traffic, not fiddling with their internal data, these attacks demonstrated sophistication and resources with potential for much harm.

Well, yeah, but let’s not get carried away – it’s just the internet, right?

Right. It’s just the internet, which last year filed 58 percent of our tax returns, the IRS says.

So let’s put it this way. If last weekend saw someone try to bomb the interstate highway system, the Post Office, the Federal Reserve, airports, railways, bus stations, telephone exchanges, mass media, banks, newspapers, broadcast stations and other institutions, that would be serious stuff.

And that’s exactly what happened last weekend and early this week. The United States of America was attacked by a power or powers unknown, testing weapons capable of seriously disrupting our social and economic systems.

Our government isn’t saying much. Let’s hope it’s doing more.

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Internet Tower of Babel

An informed citizenry is essential to democracy and so the world has learned that revolution simmers in Iran, a nuclear-armed North Korea plans dangerous provocations, and that employees of the City of Brooksville, FL, must wear underwear at work.

This wide-ranging view of the burning issues of our time comes hard on the heels of an earlier revelation, mainly that whatever his other talents and duties, President Obama is good at killing flies. Millions of us watched the videoclip of decisive presidential action in the face of airborne attack.

While there was no word from the White House on whether the late fly acted alone or was part of a larger effort, informed sources said that flies breaching the supposedly airtight security of the White House had become routine.

Nonetheless, President Obama’s summary execution of the fly drove reporters to buzz about PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) until PETA said in as low-key a way possible that it wished the fly still had its buzz and added it was sending the president a catch-and-release fly trap.

Getting back to the underlying information in the Brooksville story, the Tampa Bay Online website reports that enforcing the undies rule is up to supervisors who must be on the lookout for “unacceptable attire,” which includes "the observable lack of undergarments and exposed undergarments.”

Neither the Tampa Bay Online story or an Associated Press pickup that identified the Tampa Tribune’s website as the source of the story mentioned whether a Brooksville supervisor repeatedly staring at an employee’s private areas in an effort to determine whether they were wearing underwear could be accused of sexual harassment.

Research shows that direct action is no stranger to Brooksville. The city’s web site explains it was named for Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina, who became so incensed when a senator from Massachusetts denounced a senator from South Carolina during an 1856 debate that he later used his cane to knock him senseless.

All of this information comes to me on the internet, of course, and it illustrates one of the challenges ahead as old-line media withers and dies – the internet has no editors.

The world today is just as screwy a place as it was twenty years ago, but the difference is that twenty years ago editors separated the stuff we needed to know from the stuff we probably didn’t want to know.

That doesn’t happen now, including at many of the old-media shops that still survive. Editing is out and marketing is in. Editing decides what information is important and relevant and what isn’t. Marketing merely matches information to perceived demand. Parents edit what their kids eat. Marketers only care that their product is eaten.

The result is that the ability to communicate is vastly outstripping the ability to sort and understand. It’s happened before. In Genesis, the result was a tower called Babel.

I wonder what we’ll call ours.

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Newspapers, Advertising

Burn At Adjoining Stakes

 

Newspapers thrash and wail as they are burned at the stake of change. Most were too dumb to arrange for a quick garrote before the flames started, and now the crackle, smoke and sizzle of dying assumptions is the chorus to their final screams.

 

Which keeps them too preoccupied to do some basic reporting and look at the next stake over, where the print advertising business is the unwilling guest of honor at a final barbecue of its own.

 

When it’s not busy holding the most publicized secret meetings since Eliot Spitzer and Friends, the Newspaper Association of American collects data. Some recently released stuff gives details on advertising, the source of almost all the money in the newspaper game.

 

According to NAA’s figures, the value of print advertising in 2005 was $47.408 billion. In 2008, that was down to $38.704 billion – a drop of more than 18 percent over the three-year period. That’s bad enough, but the NAA’s figures show an accelerating year-to-year decline.

 

In 2006, the decline was 1.7 percent. In 2007, that had increased to 9.4 percent and by 2008 it was 17.7 percent. In the first quarter of this year, the rate of decline for print sales was 29.7 percent, and even online sales declined 13.4 percent.

 

While print journalism wraps itself in the First Amendment to cover an otherwise naked lust for the First Annuity, equally profound changes have been rocking advertising.

 

First, if all those print ads are not being placed, it means lots of folks are not being paid to create, produce and place them. You know, the folks in the advertising business. Which in turn means that the advertisers themselves are getting along without those mass-market print ads.

 

Well, yes, there was a severe recession that now seems to be ending, but the betting is that neither mass-market print journalism nor mass-market print advertising will rebound to track with the economy.

 

And the reason for both is the same, although it’s small comfort as they crackle and pop on adjoining stakes. They are no longer needed.

 

Individual consumers want to read only news and ads of interest, but the technology of our past didn’t permit that, except in a clumsy way. That meant herding both news and ads into special sections of a newspaper or to niche magazines or direct-mail demographics.

 

In all cases, the consumer got some of the wanted information along with lots of the unwanted, while the advertiser got some potential customers along with lots of those who just weren’t interested. And both paid.

 

The internet changed that in important ways. First, the consumer decides what interests them and now has the tools to exclude what doesn’t, which goes for both news and ads. Second, for both news-providers and advertisers, there is an instant-feedback loop that tells publishers exactly what got read and what didn’t and advertisers not only what got read, but whether or not that resulted in a sale.

 

You can’t do that with mass print journalism and the advertising that once supported it.

 

So both consumers and advertisers have stopped paying for news and eyeballs they don’t want and can’t use.

 

What, if anything, either group will pay for in the future has yet to be confirmed. In the meantime, if you’re looking to invest in a growth industry, get into stakes and kindling. It’s a booming business.

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News-Fish In A Waterless Ocean. . .

 

Pale and growing cold as the lifeblood of readers and advertisers drains from them, newspapers are flopping about trying to find the mistake that laid them low.

 

Dinosaurs millions of year ago probably asked the same question, and in both cases, the answer is that they made no mistake, did nothing terribly wrong. The dinosaurs disappeared when the world around them changed dramatically through no fault of their own, and daily printed newspapers are meeting the same fate.

 

Paleontologists speculate about dinosaurs and climate change, but with newspapers, it’s community change, and the change is that the geography-based news community is disappearing, leaving newspapers like fish in an ocean going back to component hydrogen and oxygen atoms.

 

Look at the roll call of the dead and you’ll notice that they’re all tied to a place. RIP the (Denver) Rocky Mountain News, the Cincinnati Post, the Albuquerque Tribune and whoever follows this week or next. Like all newspapers, they were of, by, for and about a geographic community. As Wikipedia says, “Traditionally a "community" has been defined as a group of interacting people living in a common location.”

 

Folks interacted in a common location because it was a major pain and expense to interact much beyond a circle of 20-25 miles. Newspapers fostered that sense of community and fed upon it, telling readers about their own doings and those of outsiders who might affect them. Those readers in turn were offered to advertisers. Newspapers collected from both.

 

There were flaws. If you were peddling cars, you hoped to reach the couple thousand or so readers in a newspaper’s hundred-thousand circulation who were looking for cars – but to do so, you paid to reach everyone. Or you might subscribe to the newspaper because you liked the sports section, even though you seldom read the other sections but paid for them anyway.

 

It was like a couple whose kids were long grown paying real estate taxes to support local schools – they got no direct benefit, but it supported the community. As the folk saying put it “It goes with the territory.”

 

Now the folk ought to update that saying to “There goes the territory,” and with it the base for the editorial and marketing scheme that supported newspapers so profitably for so long.

 

The internet enables the extremely economical transfer of information without regard to geography and forms “communities” the same way. Politico.com serves the political junkie community whether they are on K Street or Kodiak Island. It has a large audience. Click on the web site button it labels “Community” and you’ll find forums about all flavors and subsets of politics, none of them tied to a particular location except incidentally.

 

But as a reader, you’re not likely to find sports, home and garden or any of the other one-size-fits-all trappings of a community-focused newspaper. Nor, as an advertiser, are you forced to pay to reach those who very likely aren’t interested in your product.

 

And if you’re running the place, you aren’t paying for all that content that might or should interest some segment of your geographic readership. You’re just producing the content that you’re rock-solid, damned-straight sure will interest your readership community. Plus, that’s a certainty easily checked.

 

A business model that dumps barely sorted content on a community defined by geography can’t compete for very long with a business model that matches both editorial and advertising content to interest-defined communities.

 

Maybe some newspapers will adapt and survive, but consider: some scientist think that chicken you’re roasting for dinner is a dinosaur that adapted and survived.  A chicken, of course, is insignificant next to a Tyrannosaurus Rex – except that the chicken survives and Rex doesn’t.

 

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