TED Books: Media Makeover

Some people are dismayed by the prospect of delivering an 18 minute talk on a key idea.  "I couldn't possibly do that in less than 60 minutes!"  But with the right preparation, they are amazed that they can deliver even complex ideas powerfully in this short time capsule.   The patented 18-minute TED Talks have shown that you don't need a whole hour to explain and capture the imagination of an audience.

OK, so talks can be shorter than we thought.  Why can't books be shorter?  Is it sheer tradition?  Or the publishing business model?  The business model around physical books demands a minimum price to support publishing, marketing, distributing and selling a book.  For that price, the buyer wants a certain heft in a book.  (Have you ever been at an airport bookstore choosing some light reading for a long flight, and calculated the price per page as part of your purchase decision?  Perhaps I'm the only deranged soul that does that explicitly, but I think we all have an implicit size/value expectation in our heads.)

Now that we're solidly in the digital age, could we rethink the norm for what a book's length should be?  The folks at TED thought so when they launched TED Books, short nonfiction works that deliver "a powerful idea that can be absorbed in a single reading of an hour or so".  The books are offered in digital format, for $2.99.  In a time-pressed world, could these short books appeal to both readers who struggle to find time to read a full length book, and potential authors who struggle to find time to write a full length book?  TED Books are a great experiment on that path.

I read, and thoroughly enjoyed, my first TED Book, Media Makeover by Alisa Miller.  Alisa is one of those people you meet at TED who make attendance so invigorating.  CEO of Public Radio International, Alisa is a smart, forward-thinking strategist.  I've heard her lay out strategic alternatives for public broadcasting clearly and convincingly. Her short TED talk, about the US media's failure to cover important world events is one of my favourites.

I liked Media Makeover; it was tightly written and thought provoking.   Alisa lays out the problems with today's news media.  She is explicitly talking about the US, but treats this as a worldwide problem and brings in global examples.  (And she wrote this even before the Murdoch scandal.)

The media are not covering all the important news (further development of the theme from her TED talk).  We live in a land of plenty with respect to news, but we are offered and choose to ingest a diet of news impoverished in the vital nutrients of solid reporting and analysis and loaded up with the sugary sweets of vacuous celebrity gossip.

Behavioural psychology has shown that people have a strong confirmation bias, and crave supporting evidence for decisions they've already made.  Using powerful online tools, consumers of news can satisfy this craving by selecting categories and sources in a way that narrows our input stream, distorts our picture of the world,  and reinforces our existing points of view rather than supporting fact-based decision making on public affairs.  Furthermore, in trying to deliver to us what we want to hear, sites are personalizing the information we see, even without any intervention from us.

As advertisers divert their money from print newspapers to digital news, the overall spend goes from analog dollars to digital cents, undermining the business model for newspapers.  There is a large fixed cost associated with a strong investigative reporting team and international bureau coverage.  Good online news coverage requires that same quality of reportage, and yet digital revenue is much lower.  This deterioration in the business model has driven newspapers to bankruptcy, has led to considerable industry consolidation and to further narrowing of the sources of news.  The result of all this is the hobbling of traditional news media, and a public that is less informed than ever before.

I think there is another piece of the puzzle with regard to the newspaper business model that Alisa didn't mention.  In the heyday of print newspapers,  news coverage was cross-subsidized by other categories in the paper.  Many readers bought the paper because of its service information, such as weather forecasts, stock prices, movie listings, and classified advertising for jobs, real estate, autos and other miscellaneous items.  The classifieds were money spinners in their own right, and service information in general expanded newspaper readership and circulation thus justifying high advertising rates.  Newspapers ceded these categories to specialized online sites, shredding the newspaper business model.

Because the dilemma with the business model has eroded the quality of news coverage, the public trusts the media less than it used to and reads less news than they used to.  This is a vicious death spiral.  Less quality, less trust, less readership, less revenue, less quality. 

These problems are all apparent to thoughtful people, but Alisa does an excellent (footnote supported) job of laying out the issues with supporting facts and data.  She notes news organizations that get it, including among others The Globe and Mail; she points in particular to John Doyle's piece on "Sheen isn't Gadhafi, and Facebook isn't Journalism".

Alisa does have a proposal.   As people depend more on social media for news, this is both a threat and an opportunity.  The public should grasp the opportunity to get more aware, get active and take control.   We can become more astute in our news consumption and Alisa offers sites and tools that will help with that.  We can also become creators of news through the many environments that publish news and analysis from informed contributors - opportunities like the Huffington Post or The Mark News which assemble thoughtful pieces from experts in a wide range of fields.  Alisa details her call to action at the MediaMakeover web site.

Conversation is the New Luxury

Susan Bird, CEO of wf360, is impassioned about the value of conversation.  “As we get more electronic, conversation is the new luxury”.  Her Inner Circle luncheons bring together eclectic groups for a free-ranging discussion around a particular topic.  The recent lunch in LA focused on purpose. (The meeting was hosted by Laurie Coots, Chief Marketing Officer of TBWA Worldwide, in their marvellously quirky offices, with the conference room table make of surfboards, and the bastetball court in the middle of the office).

Many corporations see maximizing shareholder value as their sole purpose.  The burning question was ‘is that a sufficient purpose for an organization?”  Most people said no.  Everyone agreed that a purpose, whether it be as lofty as changing the world, or as down-to-earth as serving their customers, was more engaging for employees.   People may pay lip service to caring about all their stakeholders, but as Linda Lore, CEO of Frederick’s of Hollywood put it, most corporations manage their behaviour to satisfy only one stakeholder – the shareholder.

What happens when an opportunity offers an immediate financial windfall, but undermines the company’s purpose?  Tena Clark, founder and CEO of private DMI Music and Media Solutions, described a situation where she’d turned down a significant piece of business in order to remain true to her purpose.    Being private is a huge buffer from the financial markets which demand short term returns; Tena’s decision may only pay off years in the future.  My question  "What would happen if all shareholders had to hold stock for a minimum of two years" generated considerable discussion about whether that would put a damper on market drivers for short-term results.

Western companies who think in the long term, usually justify such decisions in terms of the ‘protecting the brand’.  Jose Rueda, a Canadian now teaching business in a university in Hong Kong, argued that Chinese do not place much value on brand.  They are more purely money-driven than Western companies, feeling that the relationships had to endure, but not necessarily the brand.  Taking a short-term profit and exiting a business was more acceptable in that culture than in the West.  (To me, this is akin to day traders rather than value investors).  He argued that this cultural difference was a key source of misunderstandings and misperceptions of the Chinese by the West.

Another discussion emerged around how you could evolve purpose over time?  PRI’s CEO Alisa Miller described Public Radio International’s need to establish its purpose as connecting people with their interconnected world.  That purpose has already moved from radio to audio (including podcasts and so on) and must now move to pure storytelling.  This is a difficult move to sell to the board of directors.  Alisa described PRI as a ‘battleship in a tempest’.  In order to survive, she feels the organization has to move to a hybrid business model, combining for-profit and not-for-profit revenue in order to survive.  The challenge will be to remain true to their purpose during such significant change.  

Andy Hobsbaum, Co-Founder of Green Thing, and Niall Murphy, Founder and CEO of Evrythng shared a common theme, arguing that many companies have a purpose centred on endless growth, a proposition that is unsustainable. Kris Manos, former CEO of Hermann Miller returned to this thought at the end, musing about how persevering values can be.

The lunch ended by going around the table with everyone stating their biggest insight and offered a provocative what-if question.  What if China ruled the world?  Was China different from the West only because it was at a different stage of development?  What if women ruled every company and every country?  What if we understood the relationship between the economy and wellness?  What if brands were important in China (meaning that they would do business more like the West)?

It was a wonderful format for a discussion.  Susan was a magnificent hostess, guiding the discussion with a lovely light touch.  What a delightful group of people!  No concrete conclusions, but lots of food for thought.

American News' representation of the world

Alisa Miller, President and CEO of Public Radio International (NPR), gave an amazing 3 minute talk on how American media presents the rest of the world. She was dramatically showing the miniscule proportion of American news that covers the rest of the world. You really must catch her talk at www.pri.org/ted.html.
One couldn’t help but link her talk to an interchange during the World Debate on Wednesday night. Mwenda (remember he was the Managing Editor of The Independent in Kampala) threw out a question to the audience, asking Forrest Whittaker the change in his attitude about Uganda after being on location there to film The Last King of Scotland. Whittaker responded that he not only had his stereotype of Uganda shatter, he also changed his attitude and interest in other countries. It’s always seemed to me that the world would be a better place, if every single American could travel outside their own country……