Embargoes: collusion or coercion?
All of the points made about the Denby-Rudin dust-up are correct:
- Embargoes give journalists time to turn in their copy.
- If you agree to one, you should keep that promise.
- It’s the price of early access.
But here’s the thing: while embargoes can be a good thing, a benign collusion that maximizes and maximally times coverage for the company/organization and gives all journalists/critics time to (hopefully) put together a good story or review, they can also be instruments of coercion in which access is used to play favorites or at least weed out those who don’t play the game.
And whether or not an embargo feels like benign collusion or icky coercion depend quite a bit on the skill and professionalism of the PR people involved in arranging it, and the willingness of the people at the center of it to be cool about the subsequent coverage and not feel it’s their right to say how their research or announcement or cultural product should be received/reviewed. And the more it feels like coercion, the more likely something will go wrong.
Persistent conversation among people I trust
I recently went in and cleaned up the more than 900 items I had starred in Google Reader going back to 2006. At least half of them were on recurring topics — personal finance, literary criticism, social media tracking, economics, food, etc. — that I like to follow closely (thus why they had been starred). But I had no trouble letting most of them go because, well, the conversation has moved on and things change and, to be honest, part of me was saying “hey, they’re only blog posts.” Don’t get me wrong — I love form and have been reading blogs since Instapundit just started out and have regularly blogged since 2004. But although blogs are a good way to generate current conversation, they suck when it comes to persistent conversation across time. Digging into archives can be very hit or miss (and tags and categories only take you so far, especially with a blog that has been around awhile). And even if comments aren’t closed on an older post, chances are the conversation is not going to be re-ignited. Also because of the semi-casual nature of blogs, both posts and comments don’t focus on real tight writing on thought.
On the other hand, Wikipedia is excellent for persistent content over time. Entries get updated, refined and fleshed out. Changes to the page are tracked and made available to the casual reader. But the problem with Wikipedia is that it’s only an encyclopedia. It’s tone and scope is focused on factual, relevant content.
And finally, scholarship, as it is made available in academic journals, and public intellectualism, as it is made available in magazines and newspapers, can often be great and producing polished work and work that is in conversation with others in the field. But you often have to slog through a lot in order to get to what you find interesting and conversations get off track and some of it is just too specialized.
So here’s what I want: a way to read a persistent, focused conversation on specialized topics I’m interested in undertaken by people I trust, admire, tolerate, hate or whatever but at least am willing to listen to that is set up in such a way to occur over days, months, years. I’m still mulling over what form this might take. More later when things have fully coalesced.
Why the media doesn’t get Twitter
I find it interesting that the mainstream media doesn’t seem to understand Twitter (and I’m being reductive here — obviously some MSMers get it). In particular, I’m amused that the words inane and superficial tend to come up a lot (or even if those exact words aren’t used, the impression of what Twitter is always seems to head in that direction).
The media doesn’t get Twitter because it obsesses over the contents of the tweets (and in many cases because the commentator has only experienced Twitter as the content of the tweets). This is a completely understandable mistake to make. But it misses what Twitter is — or at least the Twitter I know. I’m sure that there are parts of Twitter that are completely inane.
The comeback from many of us who use Twitter tends to be: it’s all about the conversation and the community. I agree, but also think that it’s a bit more complex than that. After all, there are much better platforms for having meaningful conversations — FriendFeed, e-mail lists, blogs with threaded comments, and web forums all provide a better way of managing the flow of conversation.
In addition, the business press has gotten all hot and bothered lately with the idea of real-time search. I think that’s an intriguing direction, but except for certain topic areas, it’s not quite there yet.
Here’s what Twitter really is: a stream of triggers. It’s not so much the content of individual tweets that matters as the effect a tweet has on a reader. Or to put it another way — each tweet is an invitation.
Each tweet provides one or more of the following:
- A link to click on
- A reminder to do something related to your life or job
- An opportunity to ask a question
- A recommendation
- An amusing tidbit to brighten your day
- Another piece of info about a person that may become an important part of your personal network
- An invitation to interact, to reply ,or re-tweet, or direct message, or comment on a blog, or donate, or take a survey, etc.
A lot of the negative reaction to Twitter follows from the platform itself. In particular, the 140 character limit and the fact that the platform name itself suggests a certain superficiality. And really, it’s interesting how much of the reporting/commenting on Twitter revolves around the name* and the character limit as if that really said it all about what happen on Twitter. There is an immediate negative reaction to the idea that anything could be communicated in that amount of space.
I say the focus on content — on what’s being communicated, the story being told — is understandable, and it is. But let’s be clear that when it comes to print journalism (as well as TV/radio), the obsession with content, on a certain method of storytelling and how that is defined as good or important or successful is a product of its own set of (not 140 character) limits.
On the one hand, you have the content creators — the reporters, editors, producers — who tend to measure the success of content for how well it would communicate with/appeal to an ideal reader/viewer.
On the other hand, you have the sales and marketing people, where the measure of success is ratings and ad rates — e.g. the response of the readers/viewers in aggregate.
Neither measure of success necessarily has a whole lot of meaning to the real flesh-and-blood individuals who are consuming the content. Certainly, news stories and advertisements can be triggers, invitations, calls to action. That’s the whole Faustian bargain of the old business model, right? The ads are meant to influence behavior but are tolerated because they subsidize an informed citizenry, the two sets of triggers living side-by-side, not holding hands, of course, but always twinned.
Twitter is also a medium for delivering content, but by focusing solely on the nature of that content, the meaning of each individual message, you miss out on why the content — whether you think it is inane or not — is important to those who create and consume it. Simply put, Twitter affects your day (or night).
With Twitter, you choose who you follow — you choose who you allow to send triggers your way. And in return you create triggers, some that are calculated to speak to all of your followers, some a sub-set (hashtags!) and some to just one person. And you choose when to dip in and out of the flow of triggers, and how they are delivered to you — mobile, web, widget, app, feed reader, etc.
So, of course, the mainstream media doesn’t get it. Just like they didn’t get blogs at first. The audience isn’t only talking back, it’s going off on its own and creating networks of people that enrich each others lives. Sometimes that expresses itself in superficial and inane ways, but here we get to the real genius of Twitter: every trigger, every invitation has to happen in 140 characters or less. Which means that skimming, processing, reading, in short, consuming a call to action takes very little time at all. Not every tweet is a hit for every Twitter user. But if you get the right collection of people you follow, enough are that, corny as it is, your life is better because of it. And really, that’s what all human interaction should be about.
* And I can’t help but note that the riffing off of the name and the claims of superficiality are a bit rich when they come from the nattering nabobs of the chattering classes (yep, I’m not afraid to smugly combine alliterative insults).
Wm’s Twitter stream- morriswm: RT @fakebaldur: This: http://t.co/NTaIPRJx “Khan Academy: It’s Different This Time” February 5, 2012
- morriswm: RT @Nobilis: I figured out why I don't like Tumblr: There's no room for conversation. It's a place to put up billboards. February 2, 2012
- morriswm: @ImaginaryZina @mel_leilani Yep. That's what I do. But I only do it on 1 out of the 4 times that I would normally click. So. Lost pageviews. February 2, 2012
- morriswm: @HeidiTighe 3/4 of the time I will just forget it. The other 1/4 I'll just Google the headline. February 2, 2012
- morriswm: RT @stacylwhitman: @morriswm The thing that drives me most nuts about it is that it *appears* to be a link to the newspaper itself. February 2, 2012
- morriswm: @stacylwhitman Exactly. February 2, 2012
