GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – The great tech war of 2012 is warming up, writes Fast Company, meaning that four biggies are stepping on each other’s toes and pretty soon the slug fest will begin, featuring Amazon, Apple, Facebook nnd Google. “There was a time, not long ago, when you could sum up each company quite neatly: Apple made consumer electronics, Google ran a search engine, Amazon was a web store, and Facebook was a social network. How quaint that assessment seems today.” [bold added by GenevaLunch]

I like Fast Company, a magazine that produces some well-researched and well-written material. But even here, we can’t call it a magazine, in these days of amorphous companies, including amorphous media.

Media is still a line of business, the question is whose

Here’s how Fast Company, what I would call an online news magazine, describes itself; if you look hard you’ll find the word media in there, and note the lack of italics, which are generally used to denote the name of a publication: “Fast Company is the world’s leading progressive business media brand, with a unique editorial focus on innovation in technology, ethonomics (ethical economics), leadership, and design. Written for, by, and about the most progressive business leaders, Fast Company and FastCompany.com inspire readers and users to think beyond traditional boundaries, lead conversations and create the future of business.”

If you’re one of the sticklers who still wants to know why GenevaLunch calls itself an online daily newspaper when we don’t have a print version, I can only say a) I usually shorten it to “we’re an online daily” to avoid the debate and b) at least we produce news and that’s our main business. We’re part of a shrinking industry, with newspapers trying to hold on to that part of what they do while looking elsewhere to make money. We’re staffed by volunteers, in answer to your unasked question, what’s our business model.

Make way for quasi-news

The latest development in the news industry is the quasi-news business, with two branches. The first is smaller social media tacking on news services to make their sites sticky. At first glance this looks like a smaller, shadow version of the big upcoming tech wars,  but that’s an illusion. They mostly stir around the news rather than producing it themselves, they have no editorial team overseeing news although they sometimes hire a reporter or two, hapless freelancers. These groups are a target for the second branch of this new business, companies that produce and sell “news” cheaply to other businesses which want to pitch their own news service without going to the trouble of manufacturing the news themselves. I am getting several calls a week from these new companies, most of which claim to be in London (I have my doubts). Their news packages are a mix of public relations rehashes and re-arranged aggregated news.

This only seems to upset people when the subject is politics and government power, but the quasi-news industry makes sure there is plenty of celebrity stuff to keep interest high. I was told in a call from London last night that they can give me any mix I like of Lady Gaga and what’s happening to the euro.

I turned down the offer.

ProPublica (journalism in the public interest) carried an article in May about the implications of “PR up, journalism down”. Author John Sullivan noted that “the Pew Center took a look at the impact of these changes last year in a study of the Baltimore news market. The report, “How News Happens,” found that while new online outlets had increased the demand for news, the number of original stories spread out among those outlets had declined. In one example, Pew found that area newspapers wrote one-third the number of stories about state budget cuts as they did the last time the state made similar cuts in 1991. In 2009, Pew said, The Baltimore Sun produced 32 percent fewer stories than it did in 1999. Moreover, even original reporting often bore the fingerprints of government and private public relations.”

The demand for news is there, it’s just  moved to FB

Farhad Manjoo, author of the Fast Company article, writes that “Facebook, meanwhile, is now more than just the world’s biggest social network; it is the world’s most expansive enabler of human communication. It has changed the ways in which we interact (witness its new Timeline interface); it has redefined the way we share—personal info, pictures (more than 250 million a day), and now news, music, TV, and movies.”

News is like any other product, with R&D, production, packaging, distribution

FB is a distribution channel for news. What does this mean? That someone still has to produce the news in the first place, a fact that quick sharing of news among friends, online, tends to blur. At a social media evening jointly hosted by the US Mission in Geneva and the Diplomacy School a young woman in the audience declared that like most of her friends she doesn’t get her news from news organizations, but from friends online and their links.

Duh, I was a little surprised that for a graduate student she doesn’t seem to have asked herself where the news originally came from, since I don’t think she was talking about citizen news and iReports, which were mostly a flash in the pan and are now used by media to make them appear connected and interactive. I don’t think she meant the Arab Spring with direct-from-the-battle-line reports or the boom in news moving around on cell phone informal networks in Africa. I’m pretty sure she was referring to the various bits and pieces of news shared by friends on FB, Linked in, Twitter and on local social networks, the stuff I see batted around by my friends, colleagues and acquaintances who somehow became online “friends”.

This is news without the packaging. Packaging is part of what magazines and newspapers and now online media offer. The friends distribution system is a free-for-all. The cost goes down as a result of this loss of packaging and distribution, a fact media are beginning to realize can work in their favour.

A nod to the brand

The danger is that the brand disappears. Fast Company is lucky because I made my source clear here, cited them and linked to them. A few hundred other unscrupulous people won’t bother and will rewrite some of what Manjoo wrote, never giving  him the credit he deserves for a really interesting and rich article.

And while I’m being honest, I will admit that I found his article because one of my FB friends is The Browser, who makes me sit up and notice all kinds of interesting articles (thanks, dear Browser folks).

 

 

 

 

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And it gets better: for being anti-competitive!

This was one headline that landed in my mailbox which I couldn’t ignore. How bold! How brave! How – stupid? Telecom TV‘s final sentence makes it worth a read through, from headline to the last bit, with a lot of interesting stuff about the machinations that are part of lucrative government contracts. We’re talking here about the e-mail contract for the Department of the Interior. Voters in the US are thinking today about where their tax dollars go, and re-shaping Congress based on where they think their tax dollars should be going. I wonder how many of them would vote for Google, how many for Microsoft.

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The Financial Times is more aggressively bumping out those of us who don’t subscribe, so we don’t get more than a fleeting glimpse of articles after the magic free number. So I’m not sure but I think the first line of the article said each Twitter character (not word?) is worth more than $7, based on what a nameless person who is, of course, close to the story, says new investors are willing to pay for it. The more words the better, and it’s irrelevant if they actually communicate anything. I wonder if Twitter has invited Qadaffi to tweet, a great way to multiply empty words quickly.

So googling “FT Twitter” to see what I missed, I trip over this intriguing bit of media data: Malcolm Coles in the UK putting together a table of how many followers various British media companies have on Twitter. Guardian Tech is way out in front, over 800,000, while Guardian News fares better than the FT, some 26,000 compared to roughly 20,000. This maybe tells us more about techies, who hug Twitter, than newsbies, who don’t quite get it, and more about tech writers than news writers. Whether it tells us much about the true value of Twitter is dubious.

But then again, I couldn’t read the FT article correctly. Their loss or mine?

I turned to the NY Times, which carries an article that so far you and I can read for free. It tells me Twitter is completing a “round of financing of around $100 million that values the three-and-a-half-year-old start-up at $1 billion.” It points out that the company “managed to raise money and score an impressive valuation without ever actually bringing in any significant revenue on its own.”

Sorry, I’m old school and I look for black socks, x number sold = x dollars, so I had to turn to Robert Scoble to make a bit more sense of what’s going on, and it worked, more or less. I found something useful down towards the bottom of this post. I looked at what he had to say on Twitter. Got totally sidetracked by something called the SUL, which sounds like it’s for me. A list of where to go on Twitter if you can’t make heads or tails of it.

Duh, weren’t we talking about Twitter’s new investors? I probably wouldn’t have bothered to read except that I know Robert Scoble is a live person, who comes to Geneva for the Lift conferences, and is in fact pretty congenial. I went to a cocktail where he was more or less the guest of honor but not having done my homework I didn’t know that and marched up to the guy alone in the corner, wine in hand and said, “Hi! So who are you?” thinking I would make him feel at  home. “I’m Microsoft’s blogger,” he said. Right. He’s since moved on.

Keep talking. Somebody thinks our words have value. Nananananah (wow: 77 bucks right there!)

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