The answers to the first questions are fairly obvious. First, we keep our sicknesses secret, we say, because we fear we could lose insurance. Except insurance companies force us to reveal our medical histories anyway. And let’s hope that Obamacare — may it survive the Supreme Court — succeeds in outlawing the denial of health coverage due to preexisting conditions. Next, we fear that we could lose jobs. Except in cases where a condition would affect job safety, shouldn’t employers be told that they cannot discriminate on the basis of health? Whether or not society chooses to address these issues through legislation, my point is that it’s possible to do so.

The other reason we keep sickness secret — the bigger reason — is stigma. We don’t want people to know we’re ill. But in this day and age, why should anyone be ashamed of being sick? To be clear, I am not saying that anyone should ever be forced to reveal health information. But why should our norms, stigmas, and economic considerations force us not to reveal it?

Imagine if we didn’t feel compelled to hide our illnesses. Imagine if we could be open about our health. What good could come of that?

We could learn more about correlations, which could yield information about causation and even cures. Given large data sets, we could find out that people who get a disease share common behaviors or characteristics. We might gain the opportunity to discover an environmental cause to a local outbreak of, say, breast cancer, enabling a community to fix the condition and prevent more cases.

Of course, I want to emphasize the conditional: correlation *could* help. One data point is never meaningful: That I’ve contracted one heart condition and two cancers since being at the World Trade Center on 9/11 is meaningless — unless there are many others in the same boat, and even then, one mustn’t jump to conclusions about causation. Still, more data is always better than less.

With openness about health, we could do a better job connecting people who share conditions to get information and support and each other. I am on the board of Learning Ally, formerly Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic, and at our last meeting, I was struck by the barriers that stigmas put in the way of young people getting the organization’s help. I heard how getting our software on iPods has helped more kids use the service because they no longer have to carry around a special device that marks them as different — stigma. I heard a mother say that school officials warned her that her child would be labeled — stigma — if she got him appropriate services, but she said she’d eagerly embrace the label if it got her son the help he needed.

On my blog, I’ve been in a debate about the recommendation by a government panel that men shouldn’t be given the blood test for prostate cancer anymore because, statistically, it hasn’t been shown to save lives. That’s because medical science can’t yet distinguish between fast- and slow-growing prostate cancer. I say men should get the test. I say we should be talking openly about our prostates as women have fought to talk about breast cancer. More information and communication is always better than less.

The real question is what men choose to do when they find out — through a biopsy following the blood test — that they have cancer. Perhaps more men should choose what the doctors call watchful waiting over surgery. But, you see, the problem is that we don’t have *enough* data to make a good decision. I want to know, based on the largest possible population, how long it took prostate cancer to spread after it was found. Then I could decide how long to watch and wait. But I don’t have that information. So I chose to get the cancer out of me. I could make that choice only because I had the test. I had my own data. If I had the data of millions more men, I could make wiser decisions.

How could get get more data?

Step one is to encourage men to talk about their prostates — and, yes, sorry, their penises — so we disarm the stigma about it and get more men to be aware and get tested and share their experience.

Step two is to create the means to open up and share as much health information as possible so researchers, doctors, and hackers can dig into it and find correlations and patterns and questions worth pursuing, perhaps leading to answers.

When I talk about the principles of an open society in Public Parts, this is what I mean. Rather than reflexively declaring that sharing information about ourselves — our bodies as well as our thoughts and actions — is dangerous, we must stand back and ask what benefit could come from such data, now that we have better technological means to open it up, gather it, and analyze it.

Only then can we balance the benefits and risks and decide, as a society, how open we want to be, how open we should and need to be — and why. That is the kind of discussion about privacy and our changing norms I’d like to hear. Let’s not just talk about what can go wrong now but also what could go right.

: LATER: Some added links:
* Larry Smarr quantifying his own health.
* On being a medical data donor.
* Give us access to our own health data, online.

First posted on Buzzmachine.com

It is time for Twitter and its citizens to take back #OccupyWallStreet.

Dear Verizon,

I have a simple, helpful suggestion for you:

Put your technician assignments online for customers to see so we can judge when we need to be home and so we don’t get mad at you for having to stay home all day.

Our internet went out after the storms in New Jersey. We were lucky: We lost big trees but they only scraped our house and didn’t take out lines. We lost power and heat but I managed to get the last hotel rooms in the area so we had warm beds. Our power was restored after about 36 hours (many around us in the state still don’t have it) and with power we also got our phone and TV back. But our internet didn’t return. Not so bad. Troubleshooting over the phone with my wife for an hour yielded nothing, so we were told we had to have a visit. But the storm damage was widespread and Verizon was going to take two weeks to come. Internet being lifeblood to me — imagine me Twitterless — I appealed for help to @verizonsupport and they quickly and nicely gave us an appointment after only a few days. That came yesterday.

We were told we were to be the first appointment of the day. So my wife didn’t go out to restock the refrigerator, which was high priority. She waited. She waited 10 hours for the technician to come.

When he came, he said that we weren’t first on his schedule; he had an install, and we know from the effort that went into ours that that takes time. Then his dispatcher inserted another appointment before us. That’s fine, of course. Things are crazy in New Jersey right now. We don’t mind waiting. We just want to know how long to wait.

So here’s my suggestion, Verizon: Go to the Apple store and see the screen that tells customers where they are in line. When you see you’re No. 6, you know you have time to duck out to Starbucks. Apple doesn’t guarantee an exact time — and I know you hate doing that. But Apple gives us enough information so we can know what’s going on and make our own judgments.

Now go to Continental Airlines, look up flight status, and see that they give fliers the complete stand-by list for seats and upgrades. You can see how many seats are open and how many people are ahead of you so you can judge your odds. Again, they give us information. There’s no reason not to. I wrote about this in Public Parts as a simple example of a company being more open. It improves our experience. It saves gate agents from getting the same anxious questions over and over. (I hope this nice practice isn’t lost in Continental’s merger with United.)

So, Verizon, why not open up and simply let customers see a list of how many appointments a technician has and even where they are so we can judge how long it would take to arrive. Give more information when it’s helpful — e.g., that installs take a few hours. When things change, send an update, just as airlines now send SMS or email updates on flight status. You’re a communications company; I’ll bet you can do that well. If we’d had that yesterday, my wife could have spent the morning outside the house (and I wouldn’t feel so guilty for being in New York all day).

When the technician arrived, he was very good and spent time solving our problems with the internet and TVs. He replaced our router.

That leads to another suggestion: Wouldn’t it have been cheaper to send us a router? We’d have had it before the technician came, which means you could have saved the expense of our visit at a really crushed time. Worst case: It wouldn’t have fixed the problem and the appointment would have stood; the only loss would be the shipping cost.

These might seem like minor irritations to customers. But so was Bank of America’s $5 debit card fee. And look what happened to them. In this post, I attributed the bank’s retreat to a young woman’s online petition. But others perhaps rightly credited #occupywallstreet with stirring up productive anger at the banks and winning this small but symbolic and gratifying victory against them at a time of low trust and high contempt for banks in this country.

Friendly advice: You and the other telephone and cable companies could be in a similar boat. No surprise to you that there’s pent-up anger about you. In Public Parts, I tell this story about Frank Eliason, who started Comcast’s @comcastcares — a model for the very helpful @verizonsupport (he later came to New York to work for a bank):

“He was candid about Comcast’s problems, with a rare sense of corporate humor. I watched him at a Salesforce.com event when he came onstage and said, “Customer service . . . . We’re well-known for service, aren’t we . . . . C’mon.” Pause for laugh. “We’re actually working very hard to improve the customers’ service.”

Now see Susan Crawford’s excellent piece for the Harvard Law and Policy Review, out this week, arguing that we are faced with a cable/phone duopoly over our internet access. It is a call to action for regulation of you. It is also, possibly, a focal point for anger about how we customers are imprisoned with our one or two choices.

So beware the seemingly small things — $5 debit cards, 10 hours of thumb-twiddling — can become rallying points for anger and organization against you. We, the community of customers, now have the tools to organize and be heard.

I’m grateful I got my appointment yesterday; thank you @verizonsupport. I’m grateful I got good service from your technician; thank you, Michael. I’m grateful to be using my internet connection at home right now to write this. I’ve also mellowed since Dell Hell. So I want to be helpful.

My helpful suggestion is: open up. If you know information that could be helpful to customers, share it — because now we have the tools that enable you to do that.

P.S. Yesterday was perhaps not the best day to notify us that our rates are going up.

Read more at Buzzmachine.com

Is Apple really the ultimate unGoogle?

Tags: #occupywallstreet, creativedeflation, publicparts

After almost three years, What Would Google Do? is out in paperback. Oh, no, now I have two things to hawk. It comes with a new afterword. A snippet from that (with rules from the book highlighted):

* * *

The best part of writing What Would Google Do? came after it was published, when people from a surprising range of sectors shared with me how they had tested the rules you’ve just read in their own endeavors.

I spoke with a convention of truck-stop owners who realized that their way stations could act as nodes to build networks among drivers who have information to share with each other. Join a network. Be a platform. Think distributed.

At the other end of the demographic spectrum, I heard from executives at two of the largest luxury-goods companies in the world, who saw value in opening up even their exclusive design processes so they could build direct relationships with new tastemakers and new talent and become curators of quality and luxury. Elegant organization.

At another extreme, I heard foundations speculate about how different their work would be if they opened up their structures to identify new needs, new grantees to meet those needs, new ways to measure their success, and new ways to leverage their assets by encouraging others to help in their work. Join the open-source, gift economy.

At a meeting of librarians, we faced their worst case—closing libraries—and then catalogued the value they will still add when information and search are digital but human expertise and guidance aren’t. Atoms are a drag.

A group of postal executives wondered what Google would do if it ran the Post Office. One official speculated that it would give every American a computer and printer, replacing mail and slashing cost. This discussion led to a conference in Washington called PostalVision 2020, where I pushed the industry not to try to fix the Postal Service a cutback at a time but to bravely consider what the market would and could do on its own. Beware the cash cow in the coal mine. Do what you do best and link to the rest. Get out of the way.

At the height of the financial crisis, I moderated a session at Davos in which entrepreneurs speculated about how to fix the broken banking industry. They imagined creating the bank that is open about all its data, from investments to salaries. Be honest. Be transparent. Don’t be evil.

Lufthansa ran a brainstorming session with a score of social-media practitioners at the DLD Conference in Munich, wondering how even an airline could be Googley. The bottom line: Customers want airlines to share information with them (why is the plane late?) and then they will be willing to share information back if airlines make good use of it (for example, assigning me the exact seat I like best). There is an inverse relationship between control and trust.

Best Buy’s tweeting chief marketing officer, Barry Judge (@BestBuyCMO), had me come to the company’s headquarters to try out some of the ideas here. I learned more from them than they did from me as I witnessed a smart company that is trying to move past just selling things in boxes to providing service and expertise. Best Buy opened up its infrastructure to allow others to build stores atop it. It has 3,000 sales people answering customers’ questions through a single Twitter account (@Twelpforce), turning them into the “human search engine.” It also is becoming a media company, selling promotional opportunities in stores. Decide what business you’re in.

Sales guru and author Jeffrey Gitomer invited me visit his staff to help them decide how they could be Googlier. I suggested they start by gathering the best sales tips from their own readers, who are out there selling and succeeding every day. Gitomer himself blogs and tweets and that inspired his new book, Social BOOM!, about this new way to do business together. Trust the people. Your customers are your ad agency.

In my next book, Public Parts, I also tell the story of a very Googley car company Local Motors, which designs cars openly. Collaborate. I also report on visionaries who are rethinking retail from the ground up, now that Google and the net make pricing transparent. Google commodifies everything. Welcome to the Google economy.

Most fun of all, I have heard of church pastors who aspire to be Googley, leaving their brick walls behind to go to where the parishioners live, using the web as a tool. Church Magazine suggests a “move from giving answers to asking questions.” Listen. Trust the people. Everybody needs Googlejuice.

These church folks did not fall for the joke in the title of this book. Google isn’t God and these laws here are not immutable. “We don’t consider Jarvis’s rules to be sacred or unchanging,” Leisa Anslinger and Daniel S. Mulhall wrote in the magazine, “but they do provide a valuable tool to help us rethink how we are to be a church in the twenty-first century.”

It is with some considerable relief that I read What Would Google Do? today and find that its gospel still stands. But then, as I said at the beginning, this is not really a book about Google but about the changes overtaking our world. Those changes only prove to be more disruptive—and more important to understand—by the day.

More at Buzzmachine.com

To ask how 9/11 changed me is to assume that I could imagine life without that day. 9/11 became a line in my definition of myself, alongside father, husband, journalist, teacher, writer, blogger, child of the ’60s, tall klutz, odd liberal, and now middle-aged man.

I was reluctant to join in the alarm-clark nostalgia and self-examination coming with the 10th anniversary of the event. But I just decided that I’d best look in my own mirror before my landsmen in media try to define us for ourselves.

9/11 helped make me who I am; then again, it didn’t. That is, a life is not defined solely by its sameness and banality. Life is also defined by its exceptions and how one absorbs the impact of their blows. War, disease, loss: so many people suffer trauma worse than we did on that day–just look to the Middle East today–and have no choice but to carry on.

9/11 happens to be mine. I catch myself assuming that people know this about me because it was once what described this blog and thus me. I forget sometimes that it has been a long time.

My story in brief: I came into the north tower of the World Trade Center on the last PATH train from New Jersey just as the first jet hit above.

The scenes I remember vividly include empty women’s shoes on the silent, just-smokey concourse; their owners ran out of them that fast … the woman cop who shouted at us–”RUN! RUN!”–as we came out from under WTC5 … standing across the street when the second jet hit, feeling the heat and pressure of its explosion from the other side … running away … the first responders’ faces as they ran into the buildings … mundane paperwork everywhere on the ground … listening to the news of the Pentagon around a manhole cover, on a utility worker’s radio … talking to a woman there, dazed, who’d just escaped the towers, her blouse dotted by the fire sprinklers there … the tourist who wanted me to take his picture in front of the burning towers (I refused) … the top of the south tower tilting slightly to the left … running away … being overrun by the dust and debris … utter blackness … banging into cement and glass while around me things fell and people screamed … finding refuge in a building, covered in that dust, which also filled my mouth and ears … when it began to clear, back outside, I saw a black woman passing, all white except for the dark trails of tears on her face … emergency workers asking me how it was as they, too, ran in … walking uptown, people looking at me with some fright … Times Square shut up, practically abandoned … waiting for hours by the Lincoln Tunnel until it reopened and a kind stranger from Staten Island drove me to my car … opening the door to home. There are worse scenes I refuse to recount.

Then the aftermath began. There are many obvious changes in my life with 9/11 as the cause.

For years, my son, then 9, would not let me leave without saying he loved me and hearing that from me.

To this day, I cannot watch even the most obvious, manipulative emotional crescendo of a movie or TV show without feeling the reflex to well up. It is as if my pathos button is now exposed on my sleeve and anyone can push it.

The dust gave me pneumonia and when I was given a lung test, that triggered a heart arrhythmia that’s under treatment with drugs, though it threatens to return anytime. It’s nothing next to the diseases of first responders and others. It just happens to be my physical scar.

My politics took a detour. From a war-protesting liberal student in the ’60s, I became a hawk in this new war on — what? — terrorism. Though I certainly did not link 9/11 to Iraq, it was that hawkish turn that steered me to endorse war there, which I regret as a mistake — especially in light of the Arab Spring. Today, citizens are claiming their own nations rather than seeing others come to claim them. I have learned a lesson.

The most profound change of 9/11 for me was this very blog. Though I’d followed blogs since Nick Denton himself showed them to me, I didn’t write one because — and I say this with no irony — I thought I had nothing to say. After 9/11, I wanted to share more memories and thoughts. So I started a blog at first called Warlog: World War III (irony’s obituary had been written by then). I thought I’d use it for a few weeks. Instead, it changed my understanding of media, my worldview, my career. All that emerged from understanding the power of the simple link. The blog also led me to meet and become friends with people in Iran, Iraq, Germany, all over. This blog changed my life more than 9/11 but I have this blog because of 9/11.

There is a recitation of the obvious impact on me. To go much beyond that, I’d have to speculate about what life would have been like without 9/11 but, as I said, that’s impossible to do. Life includes 9/11.

Thinking through the impact on us as a city, a nation, a people is even more difficult. I am dubious of those who claim to examine how it changed us. How do they know? It’s a logical impossibility to catalog what we are now but would not have been without that day.

On this 9/11, I haven’t decided whether I will go to the site, as I have in all but one year since, when I was traveling. In the first year afterwards, I was among many there, listening to the names, and also listening to a one-year-later replay of Howard Stern’s show from that morning. When I hear that show still it hits my pathos button. Every year, I have retraced my path from that morning. Every year, I give thanks for surviving. No, I don’t know whom I’m thanking. I think about those who were not as fortunate as I am. My wife still wonders why I do this. I figure it is a rare privilege to be able to visit the grave one could have but have not yet inhabited.

If you’d asked me in the days after the event what I’d be feeling now, on the 10th anniversary, I think I’d have told you this would be a momentous anniversary with much introspection, many lessons learned. I’d have vowed that we must never forget and thus must revisit the scene and our memories, as I did even days later (that’s why this blog was born). I’d have been wrong.

I find it quite odd that I don’t want to watch any of the documentaries or read others’ recollections (why am I subjecting you to this then? I don’t know; it’s more feeding the blog god and therapy for me, forcing memory). I agree with friend Bill Grueskin, who was at the Wall Street Journal then and is at Columbia now and who suffered the impact of the day in many ways more directly than I. He posted on Facebook that he’s not really up to immersing himself in 9/11.

I don’t know why. It’s not that I want to forget. I can’t and won’t. It’s not that it’s too painful. It was more painful then, though I will say that all this 9/11 talk is giving me a renewed if slight sense of dread. It’s not even that I think media have been too exploitive. In fact, I’m shocked they haven’t been far more exploitive.

I guess it’s that life isn’t defined by a day, no matter how momentous.

: Here are my audio recollections of 9/11, recorded some days afterward.

More at Buzzmachi

Four incidents of late challenge the very notion of journalism. Michael Arrington, Henry Blodget, Wikileaks, and TV’s Irene coverage each in their own way raise the question: What is journalism? And does it matter?

When Michael Arrington announced that he was starting an investment fund at Aol with capital from other VCs, Kara Swisher went after him for violating canons of journalism. Just one thing: Arrington rejects the title of journalist. At his Disrupt conference, I tried to get him to take on the mantle and alter it. But he sees nothing to aspire to there.

In Swisher’s case, one has to concede — as she does — the irony in riding the journalistic high horse from within News Corp., which is rapidly becoming journalism’s Death Valley. I asked her on Twitter what she had written about hackgate and she responded at length with multiple links in this thread. She has written about it and has been, as she says, more vocal than other Journal journalists. That’s what troubles me. I would have hoped that WSJ reporters and editors as a group would have spoken out against not only hackgate but also their paper’s anemic coverage of it and its humiliating editorial justification of its owners. Where are their standards?

What are the standards? Arrington, remember, started TechCrunch not as a journalistic venture but instead to gather and share information about startups and to promote himself as an investor. He is returning to his roots. Along the way, he created a media entity of value. I noted on Google+ that The New York Times Company invests in startups (including one where I’m a partner, Daylife) and starts them and still covers them. It will say it maintains a wall. Arrington, not so much. Neither church nor state, he’s not trying to be a journalist. He’s trying to get information. He does it well. He has covered startups better than any big paper; that’s why WashingtonPost.com publishes TechCrunch posts. Given his links to startups and investment, can we trust him? That’s what Swisher’s trying to make us ask.

Now look at Henry Bodget, another businessperson who creates a media enterprise around gathering and sharing information — which we journalists define as journalism … if it’s done to our standards. Jay Rosen challenges Blodget for using confidential sources in this thread: “I hate the way @BusinessInsider uses anonymity.” But Blodget has an answer: “Sorry, Jay. Sometimes (often) it’s the only way to get the real info…. In business, anyone who goes on the record has agenda.” Felix Salmon counters: “Anyone who goes OFF record has an agenda. And those guys are more likely to lie. I trust on-the-record more.” Blodget: “Then you’ve clearly never worked in business. On record is only propaganda.”

Note cultures clashing. The journalism tribe says that confidential sources and the journalists who use them are not to be trusted. I agree that journalists overuse them. That’s not reporting to our standards. But the deal-makers disagree. Blodget says, “My goal is to get to the truth.” Isn’t that journalists’ goal, too? How can he get there by a different route? Is that journalism? Who’s to say? The journalists? Perhaps not.

Now look at TV coverage of Irene. Complaints about it have been miscast as “overhyping” the storm. The storm was severe. My problem was instead the over-exploitation and under-reporting of the storm. They had “reporters” as cast members standing thigh-deep in the surf or even being covered in sewage not to impart information, not to get to the truth, but to entertain. How much better it would have been if even a few of them had been dispatched north the center of their universe, New York, to report the devastation that would come there. My problem with the coverage is that all it did was take information already available to us all and repeat it endlessly and theatrically, adding no value.

Wikileaks saw, for a bit, the ability of journalism to add value to the flow of information. Julian Assange went to the Guardian, The Times, and Der Spiegel to get their help redacting leaks to make their revelation — in the view of these participants — responsible; to add context and facts; to promote the leaks and get them noticed. Now these journalistic organizations are disavowing Assange as he releases unredacted cables and Assange is disavowing the Guardian for publishing what it thought was a dead password to the files (though who was responsible for the entire file being available is another question). Assange has called himself a journalist; now the journalists are rejecting him. They say he’s violating their standards, though there is no rule I know of that would cover these eventualities, except perhaps the Hippocratic Oath: Do no harm.

What is journalism, then? I define it broadly — some would say too broadly, but I am always afraid my umbrella is not broad enough. I say that journalism helps a community organize its knowledge so it can better organize itself. I say that a community can now share its information without us, so we journalists must ask how we add value to that exchange. I use Andy Carvin as a model of adding value through vetting, questioning, challenging, and giving context and attention to the end-to-end, witness-to-world flow that already goes on without him. But he violates plenty of rules, passing on information before it is known to be true — so we can get closer to what is true.

What is journalism, really? Does it matter? I’ve long said — ever since I rejected my own use of the term “citizen journalist” — that is a mistake to define journalism by who does it, as anyone can commit an act of journalism. Anyone can share information. By that definition, Arrington and certainly Blodget are committing acts of journalism as they gather and share information quite effectively. TV news is less effective. Wikileaks is perhaps too effective.

So what the hell is journalism? Dave Winer says it doesn’t matter. “Journalism itself is becoming obsolete,” he argues well. Mathew Ingram recasts what Winer says, asking whether journalism is obsolete because anyone can do it.

In a wonderful email thread among the members of Journal Register’s advisory board (of which I am privileged to be a member), we debated about theWashington Post’s new social rules. Jay Rosen said, in the kind of essential abstraction I try to learn from him, that “the subtext of all such rule sets: ‘We’re in charge. Really…We are!’” Is that what journalists are doing when they set social rules or claim that Arrington or Blodget or Wikileaks violate journalistic rules (or when I claim that TV news does)? The rule-setters would argue that rules define what they do. Rules try to protect one from the consequences of bad judgment. Those subject to rules — or those we journalists would like to subject to them — would say that rules are a way to exercise power and sometimes to exclude. In the thread, I recalled the worst and best of my time at Time Inc., when I was saved not by rules but by one editor’s integrity, by the principles she maintained.

As I was trying to think through this post — a process obviously not over — I tweeted: “Information, more and more, comes from nonjournalists who’ve not signed the pledge.” To which Chris Tolles of Topix replied: “This is key. Journalism no longer the gatekeeper. Journalists’ protests about this are guild protectionism.” There’s the peril of setting rules: They are, in so many senses of the word, limiting.

Journalism is not defined by who does it and who does it does not define journalism.

So what is journalism, damnit?

I don’t know.

I know that people can exchange information and knowledge easier than ever. I believe there is a need for someone to add value to that exchange. I hope that “someone” can be journalists who will use precious resources only to bring value. I pray their efforts can be sustainable (that is, that they can eat; that’s why I do what I do in entrepreneurial journalism). But I think we need to question — not reject, but reconsider — every assumption: what journalism is, who does it, how they add value, how they build and maintain trust, their business models. I am coming to wonder whether we should even reconsider the word journalism, as it carries more baggage than a Dreamliner. These are the questions I see raised by Arrington, Blodget, et al. Do they matter? You tell me.

: YET MORE: Jay Rosen, as I’d hoped, abstracted the discussion including his abstraction. In the comments, he write: “The users don’t care about “journalism” all that much. That’s the name the producers of it have for what they do. News, information, “what’s happening,” accountability, staying in touch, alert system, “just tell me what I need to know…” Yes. The users care about those things. Journalism? Not so much.”

Right. The question of what is and isn’t journalism is one that journalists ask. It has nothing to do with the questions the public asks. And the journalist’s job, supposedly, is to answer the public’s questions. Disconnect, eh?

: And in the also-lively discussion on this post at Google+, David Sass has an interesting perspective:

I submit journalism was never more more than a academic concept – like Plato’s forms – that never really existed except as a vague concept in poly-sci textbooks. The reality is that I receive information from many sources – from direct observation, from friends, from entertainment, from politicians, from government, from media, from pundits/propagandist. Journalism is the naive belief that I should trust any one of these sources more or less than another. . . Information is not to be trusted from ANY source. To believe otherwise is to abdicate your individual responsibility to seek the truth.

Read More at Buzzmachine.com

The Chicago Tribune’s Groupon is a Losing Strategy for the Long Run

Anna Tarkov calculates that the Chicago Tribune’s Groupon deal — two years of the Sunday ‘bune for $20 — works out to 19 cents an issue.

What’s at work here is the myth of legacy media, that every reader sees every ad thus every advertiser pays for every reader…thus every reader is equally valuable and it’s worth losing money holding onto any reader.

Those aren’t the economics of online, where advertisers pay only for the readers who see (or click on) their ads, and where abundance robs publishers of pricing power over their once-scarce inventory.

My favorite illustration of this is the Star Ledger killing its stock tables in 2001, shaving $1 million of costs and losing only 12 subscribers. That means that prior to this, the paper was spending $83,000 per reader to hold onto them. Papers had been scared of losing one reader because, in their economics, every reader was equally valuable. But no longer. I keep urging papers to calculate the net future value of readers and decide who’s worth keeping and serving and who’s not, economically speaking.

The Tribune is losing much money on every one of those Groupon readers — not only the lost retail value of every discounted sale but also the fact that the paper no doubt was already published at a loss — that is, it costs more to produce a copy than it’s sold for because each reader is valuable to advertisers. But is she?

What the Tribune is also trying to do here is hold onto its critical mass. When its Sunday circulation falls below a certain level, certain lucrative advertisers — coupon and circular advertisers — will stop using papers as their means of distribution. That will be a kick in the kidneys almost equal to the creation of craigslist and it’s coming any day. In fact, it’s already starting…that, surely, is why the Tribune is so desperately trying to hold onto every reader.

But those economics will quickly disintegrate. Watch it happen….

Read More at Buzzmachine.com

More From Jeff Jarvis:

Hurricane Irene and the Media: What’s a Journalist to Do?

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How Can Journalists Add to the Hurricane Irene Coverage?

On Twitter, I’ve been ridiculing the #stormporn in coverage of #Irene: the predictable and numbing repetition, alarmism, and idiocy that is TV. Of course, the storm is serious but the coverage is often laughable and, some would argue, a matter of crying wolf. The inefficiency of the coverage is also boggling: crews everywhere, all shooting the same wind and water, yet saying nothing new.

But obviously, there are many new, more efficient, more informative, more level-headed ways to cover a storm such as this. It’s all only a link away.

CNN iReport and FoxNews amusingly named competitor uReport as well as many media sites post pictures and videos from witnesses. Given the opportunity, witnesses can also provide much more detail. When I oversaw Nola.com, the publisher of the Time-Picayune got us to put up forums so residents could share information about flooded roads. Those same forums were used in Katrina to alert officials to rescue people trapped on roofs.

There is all kinds of data available. There are great maps showing the progress and strength of the storm. Talking Points Memo points to a bunch of outage maps from power companies.

There is much information available directly from governments and their agencies. New York City’s 311 service and site give updates and resources and we can watch the mayor directly on the net. Jen Preston at The New York Times compiled an impressive list of officials using social media to get their messages out. The Wall Street Journal visualized evacuation centers using Foursquare.

Much of the most important information — the forecast — comes from the same sources, such as NOAA and its hurricane center.

And I’m barely scratching the surface of sources of direct information.

So the question the journalists should ask is how they can add value to that. That is the the question must ask constantly now that information can be exchanged so easily and instantly from officials to citizens, data sources to users, and witnesses to witnesses. It’s an everyday question, not just one for emergencies.

Journalists don’t add value by repeating themselves endlessly, but standing in front of random but ultimately uninformative sites where their cameras and trucks happen to be set up (or worse, in the water), by alarming more than informing people.

So how should they? As in some of the example above, they should aggregate and curate reports from witnesses and data from officials. They can visualize data. They provide background and service information. But mostly, shouldn’t reporters report? Standing in the water repeating what we already know over and over is not reporting. Reporting would be finding out what government is not doing — see Katrina. But in truth, with all this information flying by, we don’t need a lot of reporting unless and until government messes up. That’s what is making journalism more efficient and sustainable.

Oh, and journalists and TV networks could still afford a few minutes an hour to deliver real news. While Irene moves up the coast at 14 mph, storms of another sort are still overcoming Syria and Libya, both of which might as well not exist on supposed news networks today. Is that journalism?

Read more at Buzzmachine.com