Out With A Bang

Not for the first time, I found myself on Friday talking ads in the bowels of Microsoft’s London HQ in Victoria.

The event was GovCamp; the audience was an eclectic mix of data types – those who know how to map a grit bin – web developers and those, like me, who believe that there may be simpler ways of making the web pay.

And that, maybe, as public sector cuts continue to rip through the ranks of local and central government servants and services through 2012, we can find ways and means to save the nearest lollipop lady. Or the part-time cleaner in the OAP home.

Off with the fairies, me? Perhaps.

<But it was instructive, nevertheless, to share bread and thoughts with half-a-dozen people at the local government coal-face and to see whether, in collaboration, we couldn't find ways and means of superceding their current on-line advertising models with something more befitting of these 'bottom up' times.

A multi-action, multi-party way of making all those traffic and visitor numbers work better for the communities of Norfolk, Nottingham and Hull.

All three – for reasons that aren't hard to fathom resource-wise – have 'out-sourced' the management of their locally-focussed advertising space to a small firm in Cailfornia…

<…who with the help of the great algorithms in the sky, drop appropriate advertising into those spaces. For no effort, of course. That's the beauty. Certainly for those charged with making the staffing numbers work in every city and county hall in the land, the fact that you don’t actually have to lift a finger for the ‘top down’ ad networks to ‘work’, is a God-send.

You just bend over and take what you’re given ads-wise. And then wait for the ‘big’ cheque to roll in.

Having served Norfolk County Council with an FOI request last autumn to find out just how big a cheque that was I know it was £250 for May, 2011.

Happy days.

The three screen grabs are – from top to bottom – Norfolk County Council, Nottingham City Council and Hull City Council.

I had to refresh the screen once to get NorfolkCC’s AirBnB ad to pop up and complete the full ’set’. But that’s what three local government websites are being granted from ‘on high’…

A US-based travel brand. Which is great; I love it. I’m stopping in NYC with AirBnB again in a fortnight; and am back with them again for SXSW in Austin.

They’re collaborative; empowering; and totally ‘of the time…’

But I’m just not sure that if I was a travel agent trying to make ends meet in the suburbs of Nottingham, Hull or Norwich I’d be overly chuffed with my local authority punting such services…

In fairness, better them than our old friends at GroupOn whose offers of discount ‘donuts’ and burgers must delight the local authority health chiefs.

Yes, of course, I’m punting a product here. I’m a ceo of an ad tech platform running off the back of a seed funding round, why wouldn’t I be gunning for that market-place?

But, fluffy-philosophical-thinking-me, sees that space as a classic battle-ground for those that believe the complexities of a ‘top-down’ world can service our all-too real local needs and those that hope that we can start to empower local communities to find their own solutions to the challenges of our times.

And not be wholly reliant on an algorithm for our daily bread.

The v3 Addiply is – hopefully – no more than a month away from going fully live.

Within that new platform is, of course, the ability for third parties to act as a localised ad sales force; for publishers to ‘out-source’ that sales function to those that actually know how to work that local ad market.

People like, for example, the local newspaper groups who have been shoe-leathering their way through the streets of Hull, Norwich and Nottingham for the last 300 years persuading everyone from Bob The Builder to Bill The Butcher to part with their cash for a slice of local marketing action.

Why can’t that expertise now be brought to bear on selling the local council’s website advertising? Kill two birds with one stone there, Mr Pickles, the Mr Big of local newspaper vs local council advertising wars. How about they collaborate?

But if you look at the v3 ad space here on this page, we have now added another little piece of functionality – an ‘Advertise Here’ button. You whack it next to your ad space. So people know that the opportunity exists.

We have a missing data feed. It’s why we’re in beta. Not live. Click that button and you’re here…. http://frontend.addiply.com/network/inventory/340

Seeing what you’d get for your money if you placed your ad just there…. As you would if you popped a postcard in the window of your local Post Office.

Simples.

That’s what the web was built for; that’s what people seek; new simplicities from the complexities of old. And that, in our own, still-small way is what we seek to deliver.

Answers, please, on a postcard…

Over the weekend, I received one of those reminder emails from our domain registrars AmenWorld. I have a domain name in need of renewal.

www.MyLocalWriter.com

I had actually forgotten that way back in the mists of start-up time, we’d actually set up a holding page. Complete with catch-line…

‘Welcome to a whole new world of local news reporting. MyLocalWriter, arriving shortly…

If I’m wholly honest, it is something of a moot point right now as to whether MyLocalWriter will ever arrive. My life has moved on. As has the world in which it was intended to inhabit. I mean, who writes now?

But there was a time when MyLocalWriter figured large in my thinking. It was the bigger brother of MyFootballWriter.com, MyBasketballWriter.com, MyBaseballWriter.com…. it was the one that could bring new simplicity and structure to the chaos of the old world order.

That if news – as a ‘profession’ – was returning to a cottage-based industry in which a new, model army of ‘village correspondents’ weaved their local stories from atop their kitchen tables, so MyLocalWriter could be the ‘Piece Hall’ of an earlier age…

http://rickwaghorn.co.uk/2008/03/30/time-to-make-our-piece-with-the-world-and-make-halifax-the-centre-piece-of-our-survival/

Re-reading that piece again from the spring of 2008, it is interesting to note the quotes from Rupert Murdoch at the foot of the piece; first delivered in 2006, they merely ring ever more true today. The Old Man’s power is certainly on the wane…

“Societies or companies that expect a glorious past to shield them from the forces of change driven by advancing technology will fail and fall,” he said.

“Power is moving away from the old elite in our industry – the editors, the chief executives and, let’s face it, the proprietors…

The point about MyLocalWriter and its ilk was that you could impose a new order on people. That through one piece of networked thinking, you could create a platform that would work from top to bottom… from www.MyLocalWriter.com/NR2 to www.MyLocalWriter.com/PennsylvaniaAve you could cover all bases – and all with an elegance and a simplicity that was wholly at odds with the constraints of the silo generation.

Those for whom news started and finished where the paper van stopped – or, equally, where the transmitter signal faltered.

So this was going to be the ‘model’ platform for the future of news. www.MyLocalWriter.com/Lichfield www.MyLocalWriter.com/Saddleworth www.MyLocalWriter.com/Leith.

But I was wrong. In many, many regards.

For one thing, down in that local space others were already doing their own thing. Ross and Philip had their eye of www.LichfieldLive.co.uk; Richard had big plans for SaddleworthNews.com whilst Alastair was sewing up the right-minded folk of Leith with GreenerLeith.org

They were seeking their own solutions to the problems of these times; they were not of a mind to bow to my will and be MyLocalWriter.com/Lichfield. Brothers and sisters were doing it for themselves. Rebuilding new platforms of local news from the bottom up…

To this day, I continue to have problems with any structure that imposes solutions from on high. In that, I suspect I will find common cause with the people of Greece, Italy, Portugal, Ireland…. for whom democratic process has been overthrown in favour of centralised control and the imposition of new, draconian economic measures by a distant, technocratic elite.

‘You will pay this tax, you will work these hours for these number of years, whilst we will cream off these fees, these bonuses, these rewards off your hard labour…’

It is a recipe for revolution. From the streets of Athens up…

Imposing a MyLocalWriter ’solution’ on the likes of our Ben and his LoddonEye.com is, therefore, a non-starter.

There are other problems. One is, clearly, that we are all sooooo much more than writers now. Writing is sooooo 19th Century. We’re all re-broadcasters. Trouble is, of course, www.MyLocalRe-Broadcaster.com/Loddon hardly trips off the tongue. The best I thought of was www.MyLocalPublisher.com/Lichfield.

But then you’re back to the same Achilles heel of imposing that on the common wealth of hyper-local talent and invention that continues to blossom on the streets of Jesmond and, indeed, on seven streets in Liverpool.

So if we believe the future might be collaborative, might be participatory, might be personalised and might just be localised, then I’m not quite sure how I am ever going to get MyLocalWriter to fit. It’s probably never going to work.

Because the other big nut that we never got close to cracking is the tech; the platform upon which MyLocalWriter.com might be built. It would need to a one-stop shop CMS-wise; something that would be a constantly evolving product, but equally one that was a ‘turn-key’ solution for the next generation of local news curators.

Why re-invent the wheel when WordPress or, indeed, FaceBook were doing that for you. Or, indeed, paper.li.

People like to build; they like to tweak and twiddle with things. It’s what sheds were invented for. Which is why platforms like WordPress are so of this age. Here’s the kit, the tools, now go build…

Perfect.

Well, almost.

This popped up out of the woodwork just before Christmas. WordAds…

http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2011/11/29/wordads/

In many ways, Jon Burke’s thoughts are *exactly* what we have been talking about; empowering the individual to be their own master…

‘As a WordPress user you’re breathing rarefied air on the internet: the Creators, the Independents. Creative minds aren’t satisfied being digital sharecroppers on someone else’s domain, and you want to carve out your own piece of the internet and have a space that you’re proud of because it’s so… you…

‘Digital sharecroppers on someone else’s domain…’ Perfect. You’re not MyLocalWriter.com/Lichfield. You’re better than that; the web sets you free.

But, to my collaborative mind, this is the trick that WordPress miss. They then impose an advertising solution on you from on high… what crumbs are left off the table of FederatedMedia.

Because judgement on whether you are worthy or not to receive Federated’s gifts comes from on high; their famed ‘brands’ will decide whether they like the look of you before gracing you with their presence…

‘Selection will be based on level of traffic and engagement, type of content, and language used on a blog. Some blogs may not be accepted….’

If your traffic sucks; if you are only getting 1,200 views a week from the 5,000 residents of Loddon or wherever, don’t expect Federated to be interested. To them it’s a numbers game, not a people thing…

And it has been driving me nuts since I perched myself on a stool on Jeff Jarvis’ revenue panel at NewsInnovation.com at CUNY in the autumn of 2007 and first pondered collaborative ad models…

http://rickwaghorn.co.uk/2011/09/25/for-four-long-years-weve-walked-in-the-shadow-of-the-big-ad-networks-but-heres-their-challenge-set-by-mr-schmidt-can-you-be-mobile-local-and-social/

Where the onus is on participation and not imposition; where the collaboration can be with sales reps within your own community; where you are not beholden to doff your cap and scrape your feet in the face of the big ad networks… be it Federated or Guardian Select Ad Networks, whose language is just the same.

It is one carved in tablets of stone; delivered from on high. If you want access to our ad toys, you play by our rules… not yours.

‘You will make this ad space available… you will guarantee the quality of your content… you will get this revenue return…

‘The standard terms and conditions attached must be adhered to. In the main we ask that you make a minimum of one standard sized ad space available on your website and that you maintain the accuracy and quality of your content…’

Imposition. Not collaboration.

And that was my big, big lesson from MyLocalWriter.com I have never been in a position to impose my own solution on anyone. All we can ever aspire to do is to help people come to their own solutions.

And if there’s one message I and Addiply take into 2012, that would be it; that we don’t dictate, we facilitate; that we don’t impose, we enable.

That, in short, we don’t tell anyone what to do – or who to be. And we give them the simple tools with which to build again. From the bottom up.

Apologies, in advance. I might go on more than is my usual wont today.

Blame it on a fatal combination of a long weekend without my boy and a lengthy piece from across the Pond that sparked all manner of thoughts.

It is well worth a read first; Dean Starkman’s essay for the Columbia Journalism Review: ‘The Confidence Game: The Limited Vision Of The News Gurus’.

But for those who have long ago spurned the ‘long-form’ of journalism, the defence of which taxes so many keen and eager minds, it might be beholden on me to lay out the principal points in a shorter, tweet-able form.

It is, first and foremost, a worthy tome; one that takes a degree of umbrage with the leaders of the so-called ‘Future Of News’ movement – the likes of Jeff Jarvis, Jay Rosen, Clay Shirky, Emily Bell and John Paton, the ceo of Digital First Media whose frosty ‘push-back’ in the comments is worth a read in itself.

Those that, to a greater or a lesser degree, foresee: ‘an interconnected world in which boundaries between storyteller and audience dissolve into a conversation between equal parties…’

No them and us, just us. No special, short-hand code to mark the J-School students out from the rest of the common tweeting, FB liking herd. We are, to reach for a familiar quote, ‘all in this together’ FON-wise.

Paton’s comment is worth mentioning early on because it touches on what is about to follow – the ‘right’ of any of the named to be judge, jury and occasional gleeful executioner to traditional media in its newsprint format. Bar Paton, all are happily cossetted away in ‘institutional’ surroundings where chasing the last ad dime a la a Howard Owens of The Batavian is of no daily relevance.

It is more the thought that counts; words vs deeds; talking the talk without ever walking the walk…

To which Paton responds: The argument is coupled with the usual broadsides aimed at pro vs am journalism and that those who argue for the new biz models never understood journalism or journalists.

Now, you might have learned some or all of the above, weighed it and included it or discarded it. But to do that you would have had to interview me before you questioned either my business sense or commitment to journalism…

Hold that thought. And one other. Starkman’s last quote at the very top of the piece.

‘The story is the thing.’ SS McClure.

______________________________

I don’t often do this. I learned long ago that to win the heart, the mind and the story out of a 17-year-old footballer, it was neither big nor clever to lay educational qualifications out on the table. Cut no ice with those boys. Still doesn’t.

But Starkman lays a charge at the door of the FON gurus that, for me, demands a Paton-style ‘push back’.

FON thinkers, who emerged only in the last few years, represent a new kind of public intellectual: journalism academics known for neither their journalism nor their scholarship. Yet, the fact is they are filling a void left by an intellectually exhausted journalism establishment, and filling it with crisp, readable—and voluminous—prose that offers to connect journalism to the technocratic vanguard…

Starkman continues: ‘And while power in the media may have been dispersed, it remains a rather small world. Jarvis and Rosen (along with Emily Bell of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism) consult for Paton’s JRC. Shirky wrote the forward to Gillmor’s new book. FON thinkers appear on panels together, etc…

Isn’t it just?

As an Oxford history scholar who ran both the college bar and the football team at University College, I probably served Emily Bell; certainly Mr Bell. And John Ridding, ceo of the FT; Andy Baker, ex-ceo of FriendsReunited and now Addiply non-exec; Nick Denton of Gawker fame was the PPE scholar in my year. This is my generation. My ‘frat’ group.

On my 40th birthday – January 16th 2006 I decided not to go ‘digital first’, rather ‘digital only’. My ‘Damascus’ moment came when reading a piece by a C Shirky in MediaGuardian. The one about the only invention the newspaper industry was looking for was a ‘time machine…’

Here we go; an interview with David Cohn – of Spot.Us fame – from September, 2007, as I went to CUNY to sit on a revenue panel at NewsInnovation.com, as hosted by, er…. one Jeff Jarvis.

We were swapping notes and business cards again at StreetFightMag summit back in NYC this autumn.

The last time I bumped into Emily Bell was at The Guardian’s Oxford Media Convention in January, 2010, when I sat on a panel discussing the future of local news in the UK alongside H Boaden (BBC), S Purvis (then OfCom), S Bailey (TrinityMirror) and A Rusbridger (GMG).

One of the best conversations I had at StreetFightMag was with Steve Buttry, from the Journal Register Group; it was not the first nor, ideally, the last I will have with the good folks under the command of John Paton.

It is, indeed, a very small world.

But laying bear your ‘intellectual’ qualifications to enter this debate is but half the story. It’s those that walk the walk that Starkman looks for.

So let’s do it. For the last 22 years I’ve been a ‘beat’ sports reporter. First on a weekly newspaper in Wiltshire, then for the 13 years on the Evening News in Norwich and – since 2006 and my Shirky moment – a ‘beat’ reporter on a ‘digital only’, ad-funded sports journalism platform, http://norwichcity.myfootballwriter.com/ Which is a networked platform; just as MyBaseballWriter.com/RedSox is. Or could be.

Of which I am still ceo, owner, writer and general dogs-body; I am also ceo of my own digital advertising platform, www.addiply.com. And conference speaker. And entreprenuer.

It was trying to walk the walk with Google AdSense in the summer of 2007 that prompted the birth of Addiply; on the Shirky-esque basis of that certainly doesn’t work, maybe this just might…

But, at heart, I’m a story teller. As most historians are.

I rail against this notion that data can ever tell a story; it is a mere sub-set of the story; a building block – and no more.

So every week I still tell 30,000-odd Norwich City punters ‘the story’ of Friday morning’s Press conference with the manager Paul Lambert; ‘the story’ of Andrew Surman’s return to City’s first team thinking.

What I don’t own is a print press, a delivery van or the rights to the distributive powers of a paper boy at 4 o’clock every night. Nor do I fret over the cost of newsprint. Nor where I might find spares for my print press now my manufacturer has gone bust. Or wonder who else could do me a Berliner.

And nor do I sell ads.

Since 2006, I have left that job to someone who knows what they are doing. Since 2006, between my stories and Kev’s ad sales, we have taken just short of £100,000 (c$160,000) in locally-focussed, digital ad sales sold on a tenancy basis of c£150 plus VAT per month to Norwich and Norfolk SMEs.

In short, Dean, I walk the walk. My ‘vision’ isn’t unduly ‘limited’. Only I walk the walk with our Kev right by my side. Which, in turn, gives me more reason than most to talk the talk.

___________________________

Central to Starkman’s thesis is the $64 million dollar question as to how proper, meaningful ‘public interest journalism’ ever survives in this digital age; to my mind, how it makes the transition from the canal industry to the railway business – such is the fundamental switch in distribution models the web offers.

‘Public-interest reporting isn’t just another tab on the home page. It is a core value, the thing that builds trust, sets agendas, clarifies public understanding, challenges powerful institutions, and generates reform. It is, in the end, the point…

‘You can call it the Nick Davies problem…’

Which brings us to The Guardian and all its works.

And this is the central Starkman challenge – how to keep Nick Davies in worthy employ…

‘The journalism stakes, then, are large. Just as it was an open question a hundred years ago whether a man like Rockefeller was more powerful than the United States president, it was far from clear only a hundred days ago who was more powerful in the United Kingdom, Rupert Murdoch or the British prime minister.

‘What Tarbell did, Davies does, and all great reporters do, always in collaboration with the community. Who else?’

Here I would actually agree with Starkman. Kind of. That journalism is a continuum; that the story-tellers do have a value and a worth that continues across platforms; after all, I have dozens of Norwich SMEs who still see value in my story-telling… even if the platform upon which said stories are delivered is in the midst of revolutionary change.

That we are basking in era when the ‘teeming freedom’ that comes with the ‘liberty of printing’ offers opportunities we never imagined in the corsetted and silo’d world of our journalistic forebears.

But the continuum he speaks of is not limited to the editorial floor; it has to extend to journalists continuing their relationship with the advertising department; that’s the ‘continuum’ that is missing here; the one that the Neo-FONs fail to address.

For does Davies collaborate with his advertising colleagues? My business as a story-teller has, indeed, changed; I am part of a near-instantaneous cycle of news; my stories are ‘exclusive’ for seconds only before the world re-broadcasts my wares.

But how many advertisers make a commercial decision in a similar time-frame?

The big ad networks will insist, of course, that their advertisers don’t have to make such decisions; an algorithm does it for them.

‘Ah, yes…. the word ‘Norwich’… your ad needs to be there… bang…’

‘Ah, I see you’ve booked a ticket via TrainLine; have another banner ad for TrainLine… and another… and another…’

Which is all fine – if Eric Schmidt is wrong. If the future platforms aren’t ‘mobile, social and local…’

But if he’s right – and ‘local’ will be a cornerstone of both news and commerce – then how many local SMEs really make any decision in the same time that I deliver my stories?

Or do they rather require eight or nine separate visits as Howard Owens finds; at least five or six in the case of my Kevin? The whole world of local advertising – be it print or digital – marches to a different beat than does the cycle local editorial production.

But whilst a story might have the daily life cycle of a mayfly – born, eat, read, die – a good, local advertiser is not just for Christmas, but for a six-month run. At $200 bucks a month.

‘It’s not that Nick Davies is a genius,’ contends Starkman, ‘but he was working on the story for years, and after three decades in the business he’s well-sourced and may even—dare I say it?—have professional skills or other qualities that some readers, even academics, do not.

Do those professional skills include digital ad sales? No, I suspect not. He has a book to finish; a sabbatical to savour. He ‘out-sources’ that sales function of his story-telling to The Guardian’s commerical teams – that they will deliver him the best bang ad bucks-wise for his years of public interest toil.

In the meantime, in the words of The Guardian’s own ceo Andrew Miller, the commercial brains buried deep within King’s Place have ‘three to five years’ to work out how to keep Nick Davies in exclusives.

“In the fictional scenario that we do nothing and we don’t realise value from our portfolio, then GMG could run out of cash in three to five years,” he told staff this summer.

One of the more startling lines to emerge from Starkman’s essay is this: ‘It pays to remember that the most triumphalist FON works were written in 2008 and 2009, during journalism’s time of maximum panic. But now, panic time is over…’

As the prospect of a double-dip recession looms, as the cost of newsprint rises again and The Guardian’s staff Xmas party is cancelled, I’m not wholly sure that is true.

The ‘Perfect Storm’ is still upon us.

‘My model would take lessons from The Guardian/News Corp. case and would be institution-centered, network-powered,’ Starkman concludes.

I don’t know how to secure The Guardian, which is on an ominous track financially, but we should agree, at least, that it must be secured.

______________________________

I spoke this autumn at NewsRewired. On collaborative business models. The session after me was one on collaborative investigative reporting. The star turn was Paul Lewis. From The Guardian. He of Twitter riots coverage fame.

The Guardian – with the financial help of The Rowntree Foundation – have taken it upon themselves, in the ‘public interest’, to do the public inquiry that never was into this summer’s widespread disturbances, themselves.

A ‘Riots’ page appeared on the screen behind him; minus any ad.

I am – hand on heart – something of a geek when it comes to watching the digital advertising that surrounds The Guardian's story-tellers; for a year or so, we collaborated with GNM in following the path of 'local' that Eric set and ran our little text ads on Guardian's local experiment in Leeds, Edinburgh and Cardiff.

So, on the basis that the stories Paul told around those long, riotous nights need to be supported going forward, the question I raised was a bit predictable.

Why no ads?

‘We fought long and hard over that,’ said Paul. ‘But we just felt that the page wouldn’t look so nice with ads on…’

I have no qualms with story-tellers fighing hard to make sure their stories look nice on a page; print or otherwise.

But, for me, it’s a luxury few can afford; and the fact that the Rowntree Foundation was coughing up a cheque is a distraction; it’s back to the ‘not-for-profit’ models beloved in the US where one major benefactor steps in to save everyone’s bacon. Briefly.

Whereas there are, I suspect, dozens of GMG printers who face an uncertain future this Christmas if Paul and his ilk could raise their sights to a ‘not-for-loss’ model.

<Or rather wonder aloud just what sort of return their hard-earned stories were adding to the GMG coffers if the 'collaborative' process with their commercial colleagues yielded no more than a generic bra advert on the pages of GuardianLeeds…

_________________________

Nick Davies, Paul Lewis don’t do local; their journalistic calling is of a higher level. And how we sustain them and their kind going forward is not, clearly, by rolling out more ‘local’ platforms.

But nor do I sense that by ‘doing America…’ is GMG – the ‘role model’ for Dean Starkman – any nearer salvation as a public interest journalism platform.

In fact, I might argue that the danger is that the likes of a Davies or a Lewis become no more than the star, solo turns in the ballroom of the Titanic – feted and prized by the luvvie good that still gather there – while the rest of us in steerage and below take to the icy waters.

I mentioned speaking at NewsRewired; on stage I described the closure of GuardianLocal as the biggest missed opportunity in British journalism for a generation.

I stand by that assertion.

Starkman notes that when the dust finally settles, when all the noise and confusion that comes with working with what was once our audience, when the process of rolling out new participatory models of journalism reaches a place of pause and contemplation, there will still be a need for a story-teller.

Someone to make sense of it all; someone who civic leaders will come trust; someone to work the corridors of ‘Pawtucket City Hall…’

In returning to Michael Schudson’s thoughts in 1995, Starkman appears to agree that: ‘After initial euphoria, confusion and power-shifting, someone credible would have to sort through the news and put it in some understandable form: “Journalism—of some sort—would be reinvented. A professional press corps would reappear. . . .”

A professional press corps would reappear… without a professional ad corps at their side? Really?

In the city halls of Cardiff, Leeds and Edinburgh, Starkman’s beloved Guardian placed a professional press corps… someone credible… someone to sort through the news and put it in some understandable form.

They were Hannah, John and Mike. And the three of them told their stories to up to 50,000 people a week. In each city.

What they didn’t do was give Batman, a Robin. A professional press corps without a professional ad sales ‘corps’ at its side is nothing; you end up with bra ads.

That’s what five years of hard graft of telling football stories has taught me. My audience trusts me to tell them a decent City story; they trust Kev to sell them decent advertising space at a decent and appropriate rate.

And that’s the ‘continuum’ that appears beyond The Guardian’s commercial department.

They trust that an algorithm can do a man’s job in terms of digital sales.

But if the world is turning upside down, if the world is going ‘mobile, social and local…’, if communities are hunkering down and closing in on themselves as the ‘perfect storm’ rages, so that trust in an algorithm, of ‘top down’ ad models saving public interest journalism is wholly misplaced.

You had the public’s interest in Cardiff, Edinburgh and Leeds covered. And you walked. To do America.

Not because your journalists couldn’t see the way the world was moving – to models that were collaborative and participatory, that were conversational and co-operative – but because your commercial teams can’t see the same.

Starkman’s parting lines: Rebuilding or shoring up institutions is going to take some new, new thinking, but it can be done. In the words of that original media guru, Marshall McLuhan: “There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.”

That willingness to contemplate what is happening can’t stop at the doors of editorial; it has to extend to the ad department. Equally, however, it requires a Nick Davies and a Paul Lewis to recognise the way their ad man will be thinking; to acknowledge what their own content is worth – and to fight tooth and nail for something better than a bra ad.

Took me five years, divorce, our Kev and the better part of £100,000 to ‘get’ it, but I now think like an ad man and write like a story-teller.

And maybe, just maybe, I’m now fit for 21st Century purpose.

This is a subject we’ve touched on before. Google wanting to run my brain.

Or rather to be the ‘third half of my brain…’ if I recollect Sergey Brin’s rather chilling ambition correctly.

Mountain View’s designs on my frontal lobe appeared again in a recent blog post by Robert Scoble; as ever, it made for a fascinating read as Scobleizer bagged himself a front row seat in ‘The Game Of Games’… and appeared more than happy to sign away any piece of personal info or data he could find about himself in the hope that would then allow some ever-more magical algorithm to define the contours and confines of our existence.

Without me ever really having to think about them myself.

Have my DNA; ahhh…. thank you, that’s my wife.

Yes, you’re quite right; I am a boxers man. How clever of you…

The choice, he argues, is whether we go for Google’s version of our own ‘identity systems’ – or Facebook’s. Is it in Sergey and Eric we trust to find us the best sushi in any town… or Mark and his mates? Who will start to know us better than, arguably, we will start to know ourselves?

‘Thank you Facebook; I’d forgotten that I do like Cobra with my Korma… Where would I ever be without my own identity systems?

http://scobleizer.com/2011/09/11/the-game-of-all-games-content-and-context-why-mark-zuckerberg-marc-benioff-and-larry-page-are-carving-up-the-social-world/

My original post is here; it will probably come as no surprise to anyone that my views have probably become even more intemperate with the passing months…

… in that I am probably even more convinced that the hour of the collapse of complex business models is all-but upon us now; the artificial construct that is the Eurozone being just the latest in a line of technocrat-ruled, wonk-manned towers whose walls are coming a-tumbling down.

But, for me, the real fascination of Scoble’s piece lies deep within the comments; can I commend to this house the thoughts of ‘SlingTrebuchet’. I repeat them at length here, if only for the benefit of the hard of scrolling…

It’s brilliant.

‘What you describe is all technically possible. It’s interesting as a geeky project.

‘More and more, what people are exposed to on the Net will be a reinforcement of their view/preconceptions/prejudices, and those of their main contacts. Tribalism will be increasingly reinforced…

Interesting as a ‘geeky project’ but its ‘dehumanising…’

Because, for me, there is a real danger that the geeks, the wonks and the quants of this world – perhaps personified in a Brin or a Zuckerberg – really, truly believe that they can second guess the human mind via an algorithm.

That the answer to all life’s glorious and ever-unfolding mysteries can, finally, be explained away via a vast mathematical formula. And if they can just tweak the algorithm that little bit more, they can know what I’m thinking… and from there cocoon me in choices and opportunities of their own design. To save me from myself, in a sense.

Back in the real world – where human meets human in a social setting and we relax and talk to one another – the more socially-attuned can normally tell what people are thinking by the look in their eye, the tone of the voice, the way they sit on that bar stool…

Continue reading that thread. Continue down… To Verilliance…

‘Lately, though, I can’t help but think about Trey Pennington’s death/suicide.

A word at this point; I met Trey Pennington at LikeMinds in Exeter a couple of years back; we shared a stage. Wouldn’t claim to know him from Adam, but – indeed – seemed a lovely, connected fella.

But what if that was his ‘game face’? The one he wanted the algorithm to read?

Verilliance continues: How “connected” he [Pennington] was, and yet when it came down to it, clearly feeling so alone. That simplifies depression, I know.

And that’s what we’re going to end up with more of. More connection, more visibility, but it’s going to drive people to be “popular”, to look a certain way, to put on their “game” face all the damn time…

On this side of the Pond – and in my on-going, ‘previous’ life as a football writer – the same questions that Trey Pennington’s passing prompted, follows in the wake of Wales manager Gary Speed.

No-one understands it; he was a lovely fella, so well connected, so liked, so respected… and yet… And yet.

For me, its the biggest arrogance yet of an over-reaching geek community to think that an algorithm can somehow chart and check the frailty of the human form; that in dreaming of becoming ‘the third half of our brain’, of delivering our own ‘identity systems’ into the palm of our hand and onto the screen of our mobile phone somehow we become more empowered, more enabled, more enlivened… as opposed to more enslaved to the whims of a machine.

This is who you’ll like, this is what you’ll wear, this is what you’ll eat…

The ‘comfort of strangers’ doesn’t sit easily within the circles of Google + Or, indeed, the pages of Facebook.

How does Google ‘get’ why we can pour our hearts out to a passenger on a plane? Reveal our deepest fears and grandest ambitions to a complete stranger? Why do we do that? It’s not what an algorithm would ever recommend.

Indeed, as Google muscle in on the travel market, wait for them to sort out an aircraft’s seating by who likes who… Or who will like who, according to their charts. You will never have to sit with anyone from ‘outside your circle…’

But what if that’s what was missing from the lives of Trey Pennington and Gary Speed? Trapped within the tight, conformist confines of the worlds of social media and football, they never had that chance to seek the comfort of a stranger… to unburden their troubled soul on someone a Google algorithm would never recommend they sit next to?

For me, the very frailty of the human form is one of its greatest attractions; our weaknesses define us – and unite us. When any of us use the phrase ‘We’re only human…’, in what context do you say it?

Usually, in a sentence that starts with ‘Don’t worry…’

It’s a message of warmth, of understanding and of compassion. A recognition of all our failings; how we all fall short in some regard.

Because we’re all human. And, for now, haven’t been wholly dehumanised by the march of the algorithm…

This cropped up twice today; all of which prompted a late night blog. For whatever that might be worth.

Three strands to this ’story’ to bear in mind; and then let’s see if we can’t pull the three together into one, coherent whole.

On the back of the whole hacking scandal, James Murdoch today quit the immediate parent company of The Times and The Sun newspapers, News Group Newspapers. Or rather he resigned in September; the news merely broke today. In the midst of a re-location to New York, it was a ‘tidying up’ exercise.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/nov/23/james-murdoch-sun-times-boards

So that’s one. Murdoch Jnr bailing out of the newspaper biz.

Number two, the MP for Newcastle Central, Chi Onwurah, claiming that the latest round of BBC cuts threatens the future of public service broadcasting in the North-East of England – an area, as everyone knows, that has become rather dear to our hearts of late.

“Investigative journalism supported by the BBC is essential to understanding what is going on in our region which will not be raised by the national media,” said Ms Onwurah, sufficiently moved by the whole issue to call a private members debate at Westminster Hall on Wednesday.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/nov/23/bbc-cuts-north-east

So that’s two… the BBC beating a retreat out of that local space.

What’s the third? Someone moving into that same local space as the BBC are vacating…

Sky.

As in James Murdoch.

Going into local. As both the BBC and, of course, Guardian Media Group are pulling out.

http://corporate.sky.com/skyviews/4bac66f90ff944858746acf95e613f96/sky_tyne_and_wear.htm

That’s interesting in itself. What do Sky know that The Guardian don’t? Why are they going into Newcastle and Sunderland at the same time that GMG are pulling out of Leeds, Edinburgh and Cardiff to ‘go do America…’ Again.

And how are they going to present this new platform to the punters on Tyneside?

‘It will be available free on digital platforms, internet and mobile…’

If old Eric Schmidt knows what he is talking about – and the future winning platforms will be ‘mobile, social and local…’, it would be interesting to know his opinion as to who of the great media minds of this country are heading in the right direction… A Rusbridger heading across the Pond as J Murdoch heads into Wallsend.

What fascinates me further is the choice of broadcast platform that Murdoch will employ to deliver his content into those local spaces.

See, I still don’t think people *get* why earlier this year BSkyB bought The Cloud Networks Ltd…

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/01/27/bskyb_buys_the_cloud/

“The acquisition gives us ownership of over 5,000 public Wi-Fi locations across the UK, ensuring that customers can access our online service at a network of convenient locations,” it [BSkyB] said in a statement.

“In addition, the initiative will complement our existing broadband services by offering customers a comprehensive option for Wi-Fi connectivity while they are on the move.”

So, let’s argue that some of those wifi ‘hot-spots’ are in Newcastle. Or Sunderland.

Through which BSkyB can now download ‘local’ North-East content straight onto the mobile phones of their viewers.

Genius.

To my mind, it puts James Murdoch and BSkyB bang in the driving seat when it comes to the delivery of local ‘TV’ in the UK. They have, of course, still got cash to burn.

All they really lack is a localised ad platform with strong North-East routes that would allow Tyneside SMEs to place their ads simply around that mobile/web play… and, indeed, a platform that would also allow the kids of Newcastle College to sell those local ads into that space as part of their business studies’ modules…

Ah, hang on a minute…

We digress.

Why is James getting out of newspapers? Because of the whole hacking saga? Really?

I have never bought this idea that James is a print man; he’s a child of the video generation – it’s the Old Man that still insists on staining trees.

James Murdoch – and indeed Dad – maybe many things. But they’re not daft.

Which way is the world moving? Well, if you believe the executive chairman of Google to platforms that are… exactly like the one that BSkyB can now deliver to the people of Tyneside via TheCloud’s wifi box sat in the corner of the nearest JD Wetherspoons.

Does James give a monkeys about those that still insist the future is wedded to trees and paper boys? Er, no.

People still see the closure of The News Of The World as an act of contrition; for me, it was an act of calculation…

Far too many people see the world only through the prism of print; #leveson and London – two, big reasons why the meeja industry can’t avert its own, self-absorbed gaze from its own navel and work out what is really going on… out there in Eric’s beloved local space.

Via Marc Reeves, I read this today: ‘Dyson At Large’

The line to dwell on – and the one that James Murdoch will have long ago devoured – comes towards the end as Dyson runs through the likely thinking behind the closure of the Chase Post:

‘Point three: in a recent tour of regional sites, Trinity Mirror finance chief Vijay Vaghela was said to have revealed a 28% increase in newsprint costs in 2011 – with each percentage point costing the group around a million pounds…

Or you whack a black box on the wall of the local boozer and deliver your content that way?

Note it is wifi to mobile… Note the absence of BSkyB at any of the Jeremy Hunt round-tables on the future of local TV; James isn’t about to find the nearest TV transmitter mast, work with the spectrum wonks at OfCom or crack a deal with Richard Horwood and his wretched MUX monopoly.

He’s outta there… and in to Tyneside. Off the back of The Cloud.

All of which might come as something of a curved ball for the Member of Parliament for Newcastle (Central). Her best hope for the survival of local ‘TV’ news on the banks of the Tyne appears to rest with one J Murdoch.

Funny old world…

For those who despair of my inner history geek, turn away now. There will be nothing of any interest to read here.

For the two of you that stay to read on, just bear in mind that the thoughts of Christopher Hill will figure large; as will events of 1640-1660 when – for 20 glorious years – the world, in the shape of English society, did indeed threaten to ‘turn upside down…’

When, courtesy of the ‘teeming freedom’ that the radicals came to enjoy via ‘the liberty of printing’ that was the itinerant pamphleteers and preachers of the time, the heads of both Church and State would roll across the cobbles of Whitehall.

For a long while now I have watched the #Occupy movement with fascination.

Me and our Ian have built a ‘bottom up’ ad platform; anything that smacks of ‘bottom up’, I’m interested in; anyone seeking to establish a new world order and build ‘a common treasury for all’ excites me. And what, exactly, Mayor Bloomberg does next intrigues me, given it is such ‘men of property we do disdain…’

Above all, given that a large part of the radical thinking that grew up around the tents and camp-fires that sprang up on St George’s Hill would flee these repressive shores post-1660 and seek the ‘teeming freedom’ that the New World offered, could echoes of our own, revolutionary past be found on the streets of New York, Portland, Oakland and UC Davis?

So, on a whim, I typed ‘World Turned Upside Down Occupy Wall Street’ into my Google search box.

That song, those lyrics have, after all, haunted my thinking for the last two years; it was December, 2009, when ‘1649′ first graced these pages…

Tap it in today, lo and behold, I get my new pal Scott Murray, aka Randboro… on YouTube… dedicating his cover of ‘The World Turned Upside Down’ to the ‘Occupying Forces…’ Be they gathered in Montreal, Zuccotti Park or Tahir Square.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJP9YTjXjug

It is, to my mind, the anthem of our times. But its words have rung true for the last 400 years…

‘You poor take courage; your rich take care…

‘This world was made a common treasury for everyone to share…’

It will certainly ring a bell with anyone who attended our conference on the future of #localTV in this country in November, 2010… my keynote speech at #1000flowers kicked off with a ‘cover’ of the song. I still have the Powerpoint somewhere.

But what’s interesting is – and, apologies, we return again to Hill here – how such sentiments have underpinned the American Revolutionary spirit for centuries. Those that are now, to this day, defying the ‘masters and the lords’ with their pepper sprays and batons, are merely continuing in the same ‘radical’ tradition that was born among the masterless men of the 1630s-40s, raised on St George’s Hill in 1649 and shipped out to America when the ‘liberty of printing’ was lost to them after the Restoration in 1660.

I’ve argued before that world has clearly now moved on in the sense that we all now enjoy the ‘liberty of re-broadcasting’ via whatever device is sat in the palm of our hands… Scott is spreading the revolutionary word with the ‘common treasury for all’ that is YouTube.

Hill’s conclusions remain a wonderful read. And I make no apologies for returning to him, time and again.

‘After the defeat of the radicals in 1660,’ he writes, ‘…the rulers of England organized a highly successful commercial empire and a system of class rule which proved to have unusual staying power…’

‘It was a powerful civilization, a great improvement for most people on what had gone before, but how absolutely certain can we be that this world was the right way up?

By the end of the 17th Century, he notes, ‘nothing got into print which frightened the men of property’.

Because, in part, those that still had that disdain for said men of property had fled these shores; sought refuge in new lands, in a New England… where the freedom of speech and ‘the liberty of printing’ that Hill so valued would become enshrined in a nation’s constitution.

‘The World Is Turned Upside Down’, in one form, was penned in 1646.

‘It is said to have been played, appropriately enough, when Cornwallis surrendered to the American revolutionaries at Yorktown in 1781.’

In 1774 The Shakers would depart the hills of Lancashire with that same phrase in tow; their mission: ‘…to preach the everlasting gospel to America.’

The challenge for the Bloombergs of this world – bearing in mind that both Charles I and Archbishop Laud lost their heads amidst such tumults – is how to keep the world, in his eyes, ‘the right way up…’ amidst the freedom of re-broadcasting we all now enjoy.

What if pepper sprays, batons and the destruction of the camp library, merely fuels the numbers of those that rant and rave about the world as it currently stands?

In 1660, order was restored via the denial of movement and the censorship of printing; the hand-held press was ripped from the hands of the pamphleteers; for the next 350-odd years the press became a tool of big business. News was delivered from the top down, not generated from the bottom up…

The trick – if trick it be – is to deny the ‘commonwealth’ that is the #Occupy movement the ability to re-broadcast their thinking; to censor the web and close the mobile phone networks block by block if the situation threatens to spill into the gold foyers of Goldman Sachs.

Deep within the psyche of the US mind is, I suspect, that fundamental adherence to the right of free speech; something that was denied to our forebears by a combiantion of stick and carrot… repression and censorship on one hand, softened by new access to growth and money on the other.

A nation of prophets became a nation of shopkeepers. Trouble is, of course, our shops are now stacked high with the goods of others. At precisely that moment in history when we have never enjoyed a greater ‘libery of printing’ than we do now.

Nor have the ‘men of property’ ever been held in greater disdain.

Put the two together and there are forces at work that even the ‘Masters of the Universe’ will struggle to contain.

The more observant amongst you will have noticed a slight change on OutWithABang today.

We now have a new default ‘Advertise Here’ ad… it’s that thing off to the right. Beneath the recent posts…

The one that doesn’t scream red, bloody murder at you. That thing.

Click on it and – for now – it takes you through to the ‘purchase’ page for OutWithABang. We still have to feed in the traffic and price data; the transparency that allows you, the advertiser, to know *exactly* what you’re buying into.

So not every button works; not every link is in place. There’s a pic of the new-look home page on top of this piece.

For we are – and, in every likelihood, will forever remain – a substantial work in progress.

I figure that by the time we invite Joe Public through the doors of our nice, new house, we will be inundated by new requests and suggestions. Wouldn’t the sofa look better over there, by the window… why can’t I open the French doors out onto the patio…. etc etc

And being by nature, collaborative types, we will always endeavour to work with our community and build something that works for the 99%, and not the one…

But for those that have spent most of this autumn twiddling their thumbs and waiting for our new arrival, I thought it was important to get something out there; a brief glimpse of what we are soon to call home.

It is still in beta; and will be for a while.

Inevitably there will be bugs to fix; links to sort; text to change.

But nothing is ever fixed in stone out here on the web; we can tweak and twiddle for forever and a day in the hope of making something work, if nothing right now does… to misquote Mr Shirky.

Big bits of the jigsaw will fall into place as we go; not least the ‘Community Sales’ tool that we hope can start to address the challenge of putting a P2P local sales force into the field – *the* issue that, for me, came to dominate at StreetFightMag summit last month.

Or, at least, that was my ‘takeaway’ from mixing and mingling with the US’ hyper-local finest…

http://rickwaghorn.co.uk/2011/10/28/so-whats-the-biggest-lesson-learned-from-my-trp-to-nyc-and-streetfight-that-the-local-ad-dollars-will-be-won-by-those-that-do-p2p-face-to-face-sales-is-the-key-to-unlock-that-150-billion-door/

With a fair wind and a bit of luck, we can then *start* to arm the kids with a new tool to learn the art of digital ad sales – at colleges and universities up and down the land.

Given the news this week of the current number of 16-24-year-olds out of work, I have a strong belief that it is up to our generation – the one that built the Goldman Sachs and the Royal Bank of Scotlands – to try and give a Lost Generation something to cling to; someway of harnessing their enterprising and entreprenuerial talents to the greater good.

And if, via Addiply, the kids of City College Norwich can start to help the city’s community radio station www.futureradio.co.uk secure its own future by lifting the burden of ad sales off Toby, Dawn and Co, then I think we’re working towards a future that is at least collaborative – even if we remain a way off proving that its sustainable…

StreetFightMag told me that future will also be big on Lats and Longs; that we need to install.

I’ve always wanted to re-create a full ‘Classifieds Page’ and create Addiply texts ads in block form – 5×5s or 6×6s, as opposed to our current 1×5s or 5×1s. That’s in the pipeline.

We can do a Welsh language version with our new, more flexible API; we can revisit dropping local text ads onto local video and so help to underpin future visions of ‘Local TV’ in the UK…

And so my ‘wish list’ will continue; others will, no doubt, swiftly add to it.

In fact, you can do so now…. have a word with our Elle or Matt in TheForum; the place where, we hope, advertisers, publishers and affiliates alike will come to do business…

http://addiply.invisionzone.com/index.php

To tick the ’social’ box that Eric Schmidt demanded in his ‘local, mobile and social’ speech at DreamForce11 this summer.

Mobile is another box to tick; I’m sure Ian has something up his sleeve.

But, once again, that remains for the future.

Today and all that remains is to repeat the fact that this is still first throw; the paint is wet, wires dangle, rooms remain unopen and undecorated… but we’re getting there.

And, for that, I thank Ian T and Ian A, Emma and James, Leon, Chris and Andi, Harry and Toby, Elle, Lou and Matt and, of course, Richard and all at www.NorthStarVentures.co.uk without whom none of this would be possible.

For now, be gentle. But our new baby is starting to show signs of life….

There was an interesting piece doing the rounds this week with regard to ‘Ten Ways To Save The Regional Press From Disaster’ – as proposed by Neil Fowler, the Guardian Research Fellow at Nuffield College.

I’m 99% sure I met Neil in Oxford when I spoke on the future of local news in the UK at the 2010 Guardian Media Convention, alongside Sly Bailey (Trinity), Helen Boaden (BBC), Stuart Purvis (then OfCom) and Alan Rusbridger (GMG).

Some 18 months later and the Guardian’s answer to the future of local news in the UK turned out to be doing America instead, leaving the rest of us – Neil, clearly included – trying to work out *exactly* how we might ever get ‘local’ to work. How would we ever hold the local parish council to account if there was no local reporter left?

Neil’s ten commandments make for an interesting read… reprinted here via Jon Slattery’s blog…

http://jonslattery.blogspot.com/2011/11/ten-ways-to-save-regional-press-from.html

Up to No6, I didn’t find much to overly disagree with – and No8 is bang on the money. More of that later.

But No6 causes me a problem.

• Moves should be made to help the three PLCs – Johnston Press and Trinity Mirror in this country – and Gannett [parent company of Newsquest] in the US – to have, in the words of the moment, an orderly default on their debts.

I really, really struggle with that proposition. The chart above is JP’s share price. Taken over a ten-year time span. It demonstrates that since November, 2001, JP’s shares have declined in value by 98.34%.

Interestingly, the cliff face over which they plummeted came around the 2007-2008 time. From 2005-2007, of course, then JP chairman Roger Parry and Co were busily pawning the family silver in the pursuit of print presses, delivery vans and paper boys. Some £500 million worth, to be fair.

The apologists would, of course, insist that Roger and Co had no way of foretelling events of 2008 when the first credit crunch bit. Which is true. They didn’t. But, personally, I don’t think it’s rocket science to know that newspapers and newsprint faced a challenging future in 2005-2007. It was, after all, around then that The Guardian were going digital first. For the first time.

Now, the fact that the basket-case that is the Royal Bank of Scotland were there, greasing the wheels of JP’s buying spree should come as no surprise; they were there helping Brian P Tierney pull off the deal of the century across the Pond as he found himself $400 mill in debt with regard to the purchase of Philly Media in 2008.

http://rickwaghorn.co.uk/2009/02/23/chapter-11-now-filed-in-the-story-of-fred-the-shred-brian-p-tierney-and-philly-media-kiss-good-bye-to-more-of-our-millions-folks/

The point is whether RBS and Lloyds will – come 2011 – be prepared to say: ‘Ooops…’ and let JP off with an ‘orderly default’ on their debt?

Or else will they follow CitiGroup’s lead? Wrest control out of the hands of the incumbent owners, break the business up and sell it on to a third party within a year – milking every last fee and bonus as they go. For Guy Hands read Roger Parry; for EMI read JP; for CitiGroup read RBS.

http://rickwaghorn.co.uk/2011/02/03/question-if-a-us-bank-can-now-own-radiohead-whats-to-stop-rbs-owning-the-sheffield-star-not-our-bob-i-fear/

I once had a 45-minute conversation with a ceo of one of the big regional newspaper groups cited by Neil as in need of an orderly default. He lives about five miles away from my Mum’s.

The last 20 minutes of that conversation was dominated by his relationship (or lack of) with his lenders, ie the banks. And the constant, daily fight he fought to keep them off his back. They were merciless in their pursuit of every last penny owed; having happily greased the wheels of that spending spree in 2005-2007, come 2011 and they were ripping what last flesh remained on the bones of that troubled newspaper group.

And as far as the almighty ‘Markets’ were concerned, those that were still staining trees for a living in 2011 were dead in the water. That judgement call was made in 2008-2009. ‘Junk’, would be the word on a trader’s lips.

But I wonder how many such conversations individual regional newspaper editors ever had with a newspaper group’s lenders? I suspect they are few and far between; and maybe explains why Neil appears to have a more hopeful view on the world of ‘Big Money’ than most.

Me? I think RBS will bleed JP to death cash-wise, before picking over the dead carcass of a once-great newspaper group in the hope of find anything of worth left to flog. The impact on the lives of anyone still left in the bowels of those buildings will be of no concern whatsoever to those that call the shots from on high.

Witness Big Money’s relationship with the democratic process in Greece and Italy. Now repeat when it comes to the ownership of Johnston Press.

As for No8, that’s where Neil is spot on with his thinking.

• University media schools should move from their pre-occupations with the study of journalism to include much more of the study of the business of journalism. They should work with their sibling business schools to help the industry find real solutions to its woes.

That is straight out of our thinking at Addiply; that we have to empower the Business Schools to support the J-Schools in terms of revenue streams… if the journalists won’t sell a ten-buck ad off the local pizza parlour, then let’s find the kids that can…

Let’s enable them to ‘earn and learn’ in the words of the Principal of City College Norwich, Dick Palmer…

http://rickwaghorn.co.uk/2011/11/03/why-i-believe-the-future-of-localtv-in-this-country-will-lie-in-the-hands-of-a-c-o-l-l-or-a-tommy-johns-itll-be-the-college-kids-that-will-rule-this-new-world-of-ours/

Thataway lies hope… that the kids can start to fill the breach left by departing regional journalists and their newspaper sales colleagues.

As for ‘orderly defaults’ – of HM Government asking the Royal Bank of Scotland to look kindly on those it happily led up the garden path of acquisitions in 2005-2007 – no chance.

They’re bankers. The lot of them.

The picture above is the YouTube page for City College Norwich’s new marketing video.

My understanding is that it was produced by the kids themselves with little or no help from their tutors or lecturers.

I’m no X-Factor judge nor TV broadcast mogul. But to my mind, it proves a point.

A big point that certain TV folk still don’t appear to *get*. And as everyone’s attention continues to be drawn to the future of local TV in the UK, I think it is time that certain people start to get with the programme here – and get down with the kidz as if their commercial lives depended on it.

Here’s the link…. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAQUsGMruv8

Have a look at it. See what you think. The lad on centre stage is a City College student, called C.O.L.L – Creative, Original, Lyrical, Legend. And is signed to InterimRecords….

http://interimrecords.co.uk/artists.html

And if you think that’s a one-off; have a look at this… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZV_hqrsGaM&feature=related French Connexion. Filmed around the campus at UEA. By the same kids. With little or no help from their adult college peers.

The point?

I was a parent helper the other evening at my son’s Scout pack – 1st Loddon, to give them their official title. It was hobbies night; each of the kids brought in something that related to their favourite hobby.

Tommy Johns brought in his lap-top. And on it played the short, animated videos he had been cutting and editing himself since he was seven.

He and my Tom have made their own videos together; I’ve seen my son edit them on his mother’s lap-top. When he was nine.

I suspect that when they ‘graduate’ from Hobart High School in the back end of Norfolk and head to the bright lights of City College Norwich, they too will think nothing of producing the kind of video that C.O.L.L and his mates are already churning out of a small studio space at the local college. Armed with no more than a lap-top, a small, digital camera and heaps of imagination and invention.

This generation of teenagers work with video in the same way we as kids used to work with a pen and paper; they are masters of the medium already. They participate and collaborate in its production; they share and delight in its distribution. And, I would argue, they do this all without the interference of a TV transmitter mast or the box thing sat in the corner of their parents’ living room.

As I sat in the Principal’s office at City College Norwich the other week, two thoughts screamed out… two, *big* questions for others to answer as everyone in this country starts to jostle for a slice of Jeremy’s #LocalTV cake.

One, is the video produced by the students of City College Norwich of ‘broadcast’ quality?

That’s the bar to entry that anyone and everyone who ties their future to Tacolneston Transmitter mast always bangs on about… ‘It’s all very well saying that there are people out there who can produce video cheaply, but what about the quality…’

The argument being that ‘quality’ only comes with a best boy, a gaffer, a boom mike, a make-up artist and a big desk for the two, presenters to sit behind…

And, of course, it can only ever be broadcast via a single MUX company… whatever that is.

The ‘broadcast quality’ argument is, to my mind, right up there with the whole ’shorthand’ debate within the world of written journalism; it is a last line of defence that we cling to in the hope that it will somehow continue to separate a C.O.L.L. from a Richard Horwood; or separate a local blogger tweeting a live-streamed council meeting from the JP-trained, junior reporter with his or her 120 words a minute short-hand.

That somehow we – be it written or TV journalists – are still ’special’; that our trade is still distinct from a common populace that now re-broadcast their content for fun. We’re the professionals – not you Tommy Johns.

The second question is for the provincial newspaper industry; how many of you are producing video to the quality of C.O.L.L. and his crew?

That if I built a #LocalTV platform for Norwich and split it up into channels of content – Live/Norwich, Love/Norwich, Learn/Norwich, Play/Norwich, Eat/Norwich, Shop/Norwich, etc – whose video would I take first? That of the local evening paper? Or that from the local college?

In seeing off the BBC’s move into ‘local’, the Newspaper Society waged a highly-successful rearguard campaign to keep the BBC off their lawns; that ‘local video’ was their space; their opportunity; their manor.

We come round the LocalTV block again and I look up and down the land and I don’t see any provincial news room having the time, the resource, the imagination or, indeed, the basic knowledge to touch what C.O.L.L and his mates can deliver.

And that’s clearly the big challenge for anyone aspiring to play in this space – where’s the content coming from? Of what quality is it? And how much is it going to cost?

In the summer of 2008 I wrote a blog piece about the opportunity the new world order will offer the world’s J-Schools; that with mainstream, traditional media in continuing retreat, the field was opening up for new entrants…

http://rickwaghorn.co.uk/2008/07/29/if-we-start-to-suspect-that-the-playing-field-is-starting-to-empty-who-fancies-being-a-player/

‘In the new landscape you don’t need a printing hall, a fleet of delivery vans and, indeed, rows of sub-editors… you just need a clutch of bright, young things armed with a lap-top apiece and away you go…

The *really* interesting part for me and Addiply, of course, is whether you could similarly arm the colleges to start moving into the space of digital ad sales through local sales modules on their business studies courses… be it around the local community radio web-site, for example, or indeed selling around a local TV space, the kids could ‘earn and learn’, to quote Dick Palmer, Principal of City College Norwich.

Give me a choice between trusting the local newspaper group to deliver on both the content and the ad front when it came to a local TV platform – and all the while fighting the fires that are raging down by their print press – and handing the college kids the chance to both broadcast their wares and to learn the craft of sales in a real, every-day environment and there’s only one winner.

C.O.L.L. doesn’t need to know how to work a lock gate to deliver his content; and for those that still expect that young man to help tow their barge into this digital age, the world gets ever more uncertain by the day.

Me? I want to help the kids of this country build a bright new, shiny railway. And bring their invention, their imagination and their commercial enterprise fresh to a market that, in the words of Eric Schmidt, will be local, mobile and social…

…and won’t hang off the nearest TV transmitter mast.

Apologies in advance if this lacks in coherent thought; it is late at night, the jet-lag lingers and there are 201 things sparking about in the back of my mind following three days in NYC attending the 2011 StreetFightMag summit.

For those that missed it, here’s the line-up and the thinking that David and Laura put together in an achingly cool space down in Mercer St…

http://streetfightmag.com/conference-2011/

It was, in effect, two days of intensive discussion trying to ‘get’ under the skin of hyper-local in a commercial sense; if right now nothing works, what might? What can the mighty Deb Galant and Baristanet tell us about how to sustain a community news platform?

Where next for daily deals and vouchers? What have FourSquare up their sleeve for those of a mind to rummage through their open API? And in the ‘Graveyard of US Hyperlocal’ where did it all go wrong for the likes of Backfence and TBD.com.

It was a conference of the great and the good of US local; from Patch and CBS downwards, I suspect most of them were all there.

I suspect I was the only Brit there; of the UK media organisations that might have sent to such a local luvvie crowd, the one that always appears to have cash to burn has famously decided that America offers more by way of a commercial return than anything Leeds-like and local. For the Trinitys of this world, while their heart might remain in the right space, time, cost and manpower tend against them attending.

I get that. The UKTI’s 50-50 funding of my visit Stateside as a UK technology exporter helped my cause. Them I thank. We made the right kind of friends for Addiply going forward.

So what did I learn? I think the learning curve started before I ever set foot on the Isle of Manhattan.

It started when I booked my accommodation through AirBnB.

Or rather the first time I spoke to Veronica V as we did business on a P2P level – person-to-person. And, in so doing, disrupted layer after layer of intermediary – people who have grown fat and complacent in the flawed belief that they are the only means into that space.

That we have to walk through the door of a travel agent or a TripAdvisor to get to booking an apartment on 2nd Avenue for half the price of a hotel in MidTown. Courtesy of a simple platform, me and V can now sort all that out ourselves – on a person-to-person basis.

We act collaboratively to best utilise and monetise her spare apartment space in the cause of finding me a place to stay in NYC. My review will, in turn, help others collaborate with Veronica in their search for safe and affordable accommodation in the heart of Manhattan…

http://www.airbnb.com/users/show/117028

The whole AirBnB experience wasn't without hic-cup; my first choice of accommodation bugged out on me 48 hours before I flew; but I talked to Jessica via their live chat functionality. Again, I was conducting a commercial quest in a P2P environment; I wasn't buying off a machine; nor having an answer imposed from on high upon me.

In local ad terms, I wasn't being herded into signing up for an AdWords campaign, nor being forced to accept any old ad that the networks deigned to deliver me. I was working with people – Veronica, the owner, and Jessica, on the end of the live chat 'phone…

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Above is our lesson learned; on the end of our ‘live chat’ phone will be our Elle who – working in collaboration with our new pals at SnapEngage – will add the human touch to wrinkling out the creases in making our new, v3 Addiply work for local advertiser and publisher alike.

People like their hand to be held; people like a smile and a person they can relate to. People always like Elle. And that’s the way we like to do our business. In person. To a person.

Why does all this matter quite so much? Because when it comes to leveraging deals out of the $150 billion market that is the US local advertising industry, Mops and Pops want to work on a P2P basis – as they always have done with the local ad rep from the newspaper.

And that’s as much true of the whole over-blown daily deals market as it is of the local display ad market; people buy off people, not a machine. Groupon know that; it’s why they’re spending $100 mill a month putting a local ad sales force into the field; which, in turn, is a large part of the reason why their IPO numbers don’t stack.

But we can’t all be a Howard Owens, whose name cropped up time and again; we can’t all be both editorial Batman and ad sales Robin and prise every last ad dime out of Batavia. We need to find friends within our community that can sell for us… people who, in turn, will be trusted by that community to take their ad and daily deal dollars and put it to best use.

Whether Patch get that point and whether they think they can monetise local from on high without boots on the Main St streets is open to question; in leafy Philly suburbia the two smart cookies behind the good-looking network that is…. http://www.buckshappening.com/ know that ad dollars come off a friendly face and genuine handshake. And they know that boyfriend ‘X’ of best friend ‘Y’ will *get* the opportunity a third-party affiliate sales programme out of the Addiply back-end would offer…

It’s a P2P thing. You have to do people.

And not data.

I have absolutely no doubt that the geeks, wonks and quonts that lie buried deep within the world of GeoIQ are some of the smartest coders, decoders, data-miners and developers that have ever been gathered under one roof.

They must be to deliver the stream upon stream of real-time data that lies behind a visualisation of this ilk… http://www.geoiq.com/video/geoiq-acetate-0

What the f*ck it all means, however, I have no idea. At a local level – be it on a US block or down a UK street – people want a simple story for their news and an easy, familiar smile to win their ad dollars.

Ain’t rocket science. It’s just about putting people first. As it always has been.

I have Dominic Campbell to thank for this; if truth be known, inspiration was in little short supply this weekend.

We have something decent in the pipeline – OK, I’m biased – but that remains a few days and several more dev hours away from hitting the streets. So, therefore, this tweet was heaven-sent:

@dominiccampbell http://opendatamanual.org is great but why does so much #opendata related stuff have to look so drab? not going to draw in the masses #gov20

Data. As in sets. As in open. As in, er, dull…?

Or, to quote Dominic, ‘drab’?

It’s a block that we’ve walked before. As in EveryBlock…

http://rickwaghorn.co.uk/2009/03/20/everyblock-was-brilliant-but-we-have-to-aim-higher-than-data-cos-in-my-little-provincial-world-punters-dont-do-data-they-do-people-and-they-do-stories-for-when-they-get-a-mo/

And, again, as in Drones vs Grunts on the ground… that the way to win the hearts and the minds of punters – or rather to win the trust and the dollars of the advertising punters – is to get boots on the streets, familiar faces on the street corner…

http://rickwaghorn.co.uk/2009/04/23/the-lesson-comes-from-the-streets-of-baghdad-that-our-future-has-to-be-a-joint-operation-you-need-grunts-on-the-ground-you-win-no-hearts-and-few-minds-with-just-drones-in-the-air/

Re-reading that post from April, 2009, it still seems a bit bizarre to be quoting from an obscure military manual when it comes to formulating thoughts on this new, media landscape of ours but – for me – it still rings very true…

The battle is easier to win if it is a ‘joint operation…’ ie, data with a human story attached. From said post:

“New communication technology allows air and ground forces to work together much more effectively than in the past,” the author continues.

“The synergy that joint forces derive from this interaction vastly magnifies the power of the force. The situational awarenss of both soldiers and Marines increases dramatically when married to airborne ISR [Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance].

“The effect of this increased air-ground synergy has been to make the surge [in Iraq] more effective than 20 per cent increase in ground forces would have suggested…”

Only now – in 2011 – I’ve added a few more under-scores to underline the point yet again.

Data alone is not sufficient to win the hearts and minds of an embattled populace. We need to look at joint ops, new synergies, involving both data and people.

Data, at best, delivers a ’situational awareness’ to those we still hope to find out there on the ground, working the streets, left to put a human face and context to the ‘drab’ data delivered by those drones over-head.

For whatever reason, as one hack-day after another unearths yet another previously untapped seam of data, I have this nagging image of Lord Percy discovering green.

‘Oh, Edmund… can it be true? That I hold here, in my mortal hand, a nugget of purest Green? etc etc

Only for green read grit-bin, public-toilet, postbox, etc etc… none of which are pure gold. They are all shades of green… useful only to help colour in a bigger picture.

And I have another nagging doubt about this current fascination with data. Because data is finite. At the end of the day, there are only so many data sets sat in the back of a local government larder.

At some stage in the none-too distant future, we will have mapped every toilet, grit-bin and post-box; will have charted the movement of every library book, grit lorry and food hygiene official. And then what?

People, by contrast, are infinite; there is no limit to the variations possible within the human story; that’s what makes for interest, for engagement and for community. We do not gather round camp fires populated by data streams; we gather round camp fires where people gather with warming stories to tell.

Always have; always will.

Which, I think, all lies towards at the heart of this excellent post by Marshall Kirkpatrick:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_heartbreak_of_hyperlocal_news_aol_scoops_up_ou.php#

..in which he poses an intriguing question: Why haven’t the three great hyper-local technology sites in the US – Outside.In, EveryBlock and FWIX – worked out as well as everyone hoped?

And when he put that question to his Twitter audience, one answer stood out.

‘Because they lack soul…’ said @mathewi

Precisely. Data has no soul; people do.

Likewise data doesn’t build communities; people do.

And we ignore that basic human truth at our peril.

Many, many moons ago now I took brand ‘Ricky’ to market in the shape of www.rickwaghorn.co.uk, the Mark I version of MyFootballWriter.com.

Because come the following summer – 2007 if memory serves – me, our Ian and Neil had twigged that we needed to be a more elegant network. That we needed a simple url that could deliver everything from MFW/IpswichTown to MFW/GraysAthletic with every Football League club and Premiership outfit in between.

And, a while later, we applied the same, nascent network theory to the US; and bought www.mybaseballwriter.com, www.mybasketballwriter.com and www.myhockeywriter.com.

Because if there was one of me doing football on the back of Evening News in Norwich, UK, so there was one of me doing basketball on the back of the LA Times.

ie www.mybasketballwriter.com/lakers.

Not rocket science. Nothing on the web really is. The web loves simples; trouble is, most of us, do complex. And therein lies 201 of our problems.

Addiply followed a similar line of thought. That, eventually, we might be able to do Addiply.com/Cardiff and deliver a simple page outlining transparently all of the advertising opportunities that exist within that fair city off our platform.

We’re starting to get there. Starting.

http://www.addiply.com/index.php?option=com_addiply&Itemid=69&r1=1&r2=200

So, I think, we *get* the potential power of simple networks and how – more often than not – that starts with a simple name; one that lends itself perfectly to a network.

Through which you can then deliver both content *and* advertising opportunities in a nice, elegant form.

Which is why www.garrisongirls.com caught my eye.

It wasn’t the only reason. We have, for example, been working with one famed ‘Garrison Town’ that wants to re-brand itself as ‘Wireless Town’.

And I can think of several conversations I’ve had with a good friend around the kind of intense community that any military garrison tends to foster – particularly in times of international conflict.

The wives, girlfriends, children and dependents live in a world that few of us on media ‘Civvie Street’ can readily imagine; I suspect they cling together like few other communities in this country. And understandably so. One knock on the door and their worlds turn upside down.

Given events of the last 48-hours and there are now 00s of families gathered around one RAF base in Norfolk for whom the news of events in North Africa have huge and communal meaning.

Clearly the intention behind www.garrisongirls.com is hugely laudable and, in many senses, demands a spot of collaborative thinking – how can we help make this work? *Potentially* make it less dependant on charitable giving and more self-reliant and self-sustaining going forward?

Because, clearly, I can ‘localise’ that network. Globally.

I can do www.garrisongirls.com/catterick and www.garrisongirls.com/colchester – and then I can do www.garrisongirls.com/fortbragg or, indeed, www.garrisongirls.com/osnabruck

After all, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is not solely an issue in the UK; the every-day challenges faced by that ‘community’ will resonate in garrisons and outposts across the world.

It is, as ever, finding a simple organising principle to enable these individual garrisons to collaborate together for the greater good.

And to, potentially, help cover their costs in the process. At least make the digital platform ‘not-for-loss’.

So, apply a little ad network theory and that GarrisonGirls community ought – with scale – to be able to command the interest of those national brands that descend on MumsNet.

Whilst, equally, you should be able to command the interest of Catterick Mums&Toddlers groups with their FaceBook pages doubling as a website, a Tidworth B&B, a Colchester curry house, an Aldershot estate agent… etc etc.

As well as a ‘classfieds’ page for baby-sitters, garage sales, and whatever else makes up for the ‘community noticeboard’ section in the daily life of any garrison.

And this is over and above all the official – and unofficial – content and news you could deliver through such a gateway.

One that then goes stellar if you whack a wifi/wireless proposition over any such garrison and create ‘GarrisonGirls TV’ – with a live video-stream replacing the traditional ‘blueys’ to those loved ones stationed abroad.

The possibilities are endless; and wholly intriguing.

But to borrow badly from Hot Chocolate, it doesn’t so much start with a kiss, as a name.

And www.GarrisonGirls.com we like.

If we work on the basis that our communal media graves will have the words: ‘Nothing works, but everything might…’ chiselled upon them, this I think is interesting.

As is our wont, it’s us being open and transparent in our progress and thinking.

And it remains very much a first throw – as the potters amongst you might appreciate.

And, in many ways, all it does is pose more questions than provide immediate answers.

No-one, be they Rupert Murdoch or Alan Rusbridger, is going to be able to re-invent the wheel overnight.

Even now, at the start of 2011, we are still feeling our way into this Digital Revolution. I strongly suspect that we still haven’t seen anything yet… we’re but on the starter. The main course has yet to be served.

But anyway… here we go… And, remember, first throw only. It’s the drift that’s more important; a very first show-and-tell of where we *might* be able to go next.

http://www.streamexchange.tv/AdDemo/AdDemo.html 

Essentially, via the good folk at www.StreamExchange.TV we’ve found a piece of video; and then – via the equally good folk at www.emo.uk.com – we’ve found an appropriate advertiser for that piece of video.

And over-laid an Addiply text ad atop that video.

Simples. As the web invariably is when you start again from scratch and not approach it via the lens of a print press, a TV transmitter mast or mile after bleedin mile of copper phone line…

So there’s a motoring ad relevant to Northamptonshire; why wouldn’t AlfaRomeo (Northants) see a link? An audience that was appropriate to their wares… and place a ‘live’ ad in front of that audience that clicked me through to here…

http://www.motorvoguealfaromeo.co.uk/promotions/mito-sprint.html

One of the more interesting aspects of this little experiment in the Google/YouTube (local) space is that the video comes courtesy of Northants CC and their own ventures in Northamptonshire ‘TV’ territory courtesy of their existing relationship with StreamExchange. That and their involvement with NEL.

Now we’ve offered a way to – potentially – monetise a county council’s video content that doesn’t involve a big black box beneath Mountain View; that enables a council to set its own ad rates for that opportunity – and allows them to pre-approve any advert link before it ever goes live.

I think that’s interesting.

I also think that the future of Local ‘TV’ is interesting – particularly if we think there is any worth in the whole Yahoo/Starbucks model in the US – free wifi into 4,000 coffee shops, via localised channels of content.

http://rickwaghorn.co.uk/2010/08/17/if-starbucks-are-building-localised-doorways-and-channels-through-their-coffee-shops-cant-we-do-the-same-into-rural-communities/

Now if that localised content proves to be video-led, can we not now monetise that video with relevant local, over-laid ads?

What would happen if we embedded a pilot player into the back of Ben’s http://loddoneye.com.

And Ben worked with the media studies department at Hobart High School – where Waghorn Jnr is bound this summer, btw – and then the kids could ’show-case’ their video talents through that platform… all part-monetised via, say, a FaceBook ‘ad’ for the White Horse, Chedgrave.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-White-Horse-Chedgrave/106441003556

Ben could sell Simon, the landlord, that space on a fiver-per-week basis; or a tenner-a-month.

Or PPC. Or, of course, CPM. Between Simon and Ben and a pint of his finest Landlord, I’m sure they can come to an understanding.

And then if we apply a little bit of network magic to this, we could get the ad agency for the Co-Op ‘looking down’ on the this local opportunity and re-asserting their claim to being the nation’s ‘local’ grocer by dropping an ad into that space themselves…

And then we could go to those bright lads on www.blogpreston.co.uk

Old Joseph has been out and about with his video camera, of late. He could pal up the Business School out of UCLAN; they could *learn* to sell video over-lay ads and keep Joseph in batteries.

And then, of course, there’s Richard Jones and www.SaddleworthNews.com. He’s long ago got the value of video and what it can add to his obvious abilities as a local story-teller par excellence.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Nf59hxxBAeo

Would an interview with the newly-elected MP be a best place to an over-lay an ad?

Maybe not.

But this is the point. Hopefully, what we’re starting to do is to deliver choices to people like Richard Jones.

For Richard to be empowered to make these kinds of decisions for himself; does he want to take ads of any sort? Does he want video? Does he want an over-lay….

We are giving people the tools with which they may be able to do the job.

And that’s important – that, for now, they are only tools. Getting the skill-set to work with them to best advantage and return.

We are in a period of re-tooling; the re-skilling is the next great journey we all have to make.

Whether that be The New York Times. SaddleworthNews. Or even BlogPreston.

‘Right now nothing works, but everything might…’ And therein lies the joy of this time. Kind of…

I’ve kind of refrained from entering the whole pay-wall debate.

To speculate as to what might just be going on behind the walls of Fortress Wapping.

But with the NYT clearly intent on pursuing their strategy, The Times long since locked up behind their’s and The Guardian trying to work out what might just work for them given their heart now seems set on conquering America, I read this piece with interest.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2011/apr/02/dailytelegraph-fashion

Not, I hasten to add, because I know any of the characters involved.

But something just struck me as I pondered why Ms Armstrong might wish to up-sticks. I think the comment is very illuminating too; but the drive towards affiliate revenue streams might have to wait for another time.

I’ve long liked the phrase ‘the great unbundling of newspapers…’ I thought that was smart.

That, actually, I’ve never given a t*ss about the business pages; or the fashion pages.

The ‘news that matters to me…’ is home affairs, is sport, is the guy that writes the wine column on a Friday, the restaurant review on a Saturday… these are the bits that I will ‘unpick’ from that digital offering.

For my motoring writer I will go here, for travel there, for cricket I like him… that’s the way, I think, most people consume news on the web.

We have become far more promiscuous in our tastes; we enjoy the ‘Smörgåsbord’ of reading opportunity that a free web proffers.

And it’s back to empowerment; back to a world turning upside down; back to the notion that just as much as the iPlayer allowed me to watch TV when I saw fit and not when you, The Radio Times, told me… so I can now pick and choose my reading habits. A sports reporter from here; a fashion writer from there.

All of which is wholly contrarian to the thought processes behind a silo’d pay-wall.

OK. So, The Times now has 79,000 subscribers; if I’m Ms Armstrong I’ve got to be wondering whether the demographic of that 79,000 matches the demographic that I’m aiming my fashion column at…

If that 79,000 is broadly made up of retired Home Counties colonels, how many are likely to step through my ‘door’ and read my thoughts on A-line skirts this season?

Let’s say 20% of that 79,000 have an interest in fashion; that’s 16,000-odd people reading me. Me and my ‘brand’. Ms Armstrong is a brand; just as much as Henry Winter is. Or Martin Samuel.

Let’s say it’s 5% – and the 30-something female crowd are getting their fashion kick from elsewhere, from a http://www.net-a-porter.com/ or a http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/fashionstore/index.html or, indeed, from a ‘rival’ flying solo as http://www.stylebubble.typepad.com/

…then that’s 4,o00 punters finding me, brand me, behind the walls of my employer’s unyielding fortress.

And given that I’m a journalist and an ego is woven into my DNA and I, therefore, want my work to be read and admired, that’s not great.

Because here’s the other point that springs to mind. On a print format, you can happily see a circulation figure of 2,000,000, believe that each individual paper is – on average – read by 2.2 people… and all the other smokes and mirrors beloved of the advertising department…

… and can happily convince yourself that some 5,000,000 punters hang on your every fashion tip and word. Every day.

Because there is no metric, no data to dissuade you otherwise. Just as no newspaper ad exec can tell Primark how many people actually saw that full-page newspaper ad on Thursday, March 31, 2011, so no-one can tell Ms Armstrong that her column wasn’t read by 5,000,000 Times readers.

On-line, however, and everyone can now be transparent with their numbers. Kind of…

So, in theory, Ms Armstrong could head into the bowels of Fortress Wapping and the number of times her page was served on any given hour, day, week or month ought to be sat there on a IT desk server. For her to view and ponder.

And wonder whether her ‘brand’ is best served by hanging round and being viewed by that number of paywall-happy fashion fans.

Be interesting to know whether the fashion department of The Times are allowed access to their online ‘viewing’ figures.

Because the data must be there; someone will have the answer to her question: ‘So, just how many people are seeing this, Rebekah?’

And I wonder what answer Mrs Brooks gives. Not the right one, presumeably, as Ms Armstrong unfurls her brunette tresses and duly flees the Fortress…

What that means for NI, NYT and the pay-wall peeps is harder to judge; don’t employ a journalist who fancies having their name read, perhaps?

If there were certain traits that we’d like to think were woven into Addiply’s DNA, one would have to be ’simplicity’.

If I, the advertiser, wish to place an ad on that website, how do we make that process as simple and as transparent as possible?

Placing a five-buck ad in the window of the local Mops & Pops store has always been a pretty simple process; why can’t that be replicated on the Web?

Why does that same five-buck text ad have to undergo the rigours and complexities of a distant algorithm in the hope that it lands in front of the advertiser’s desired audience?

Why the need for a third party to intervene in that process? One that injects the uncertainty and opacity of an algorithm into that particular ‘local’ transaction?

So, therefore, these boys look very interesting – if only for the simplicity of their own thought process. Very of the moment.

If this… then that… ifttt, in short. Or @ifttt.

http://blog.ifttt.com/post/2316021241/ifttt-the-beginning

Light bulbs began to spark, in particular, with lines such as this…

‘I realized that the key to unlocking the creative potential of our existing digital tools might be to build a service that simplifies and consolidates the way those tools can be connected…’ 

Which could - without too great a leap of the imagination – be applied to the relationship between a publisher and an advertiser; one that has been complex from Day One… be it raising invoices, art-work creation, placement, size, tracking, etc etc…

It has never been an easy process; let alone the ’sales-craft’ needed in the very first place to bring a potential advertiser to within even the same orbit as a potentially appropriate publisher.

Complexity isn’t, to my mind, where this world of ours is head; complex business models are beginning to unravel; as witnessed by the now-abandoned streets of downtown Detroit.

http://rickwaghorn.co.uk/2011/01/03/if-you-want-to-see-the-collapse-of-complex-business-models-made-flesh-walk-the-streets-of-detroit-now-walk-the-streets-of-burnley-this-summer-george/

And then there was this… the phrase ‘duct tape’ has been used for a while now in our neck of the woods.

‘However, ifttt isn’t a programming language or app building tool, but rather a much simpler solution. Digital duct tape if you will, allowing you to connect any two services together…’

And then, finally, there was an invite… an opportunity for ‘collaborative individualism’ to build something simpler for the common good.

‘I hope that an adventurous few can find cool ways to use ifttt right now and still others will let me know about how they would like to use it in the future…’

All of which I’d all-but forgotten about until me and our Ian shared a five-hour return train journey to Newcastle on Friday and he got onto the subject of ‘web services’, Open APIs and how he impressed he’d been with the thinking behind http://blog.ifttt.com/

The quest then was to work out where ‘If this…. then that…’ would fit, potentially, into an Addiply model.

So, for example, if an advertiser were to place an advert on this website, then why not place an advert on that website…? That one decision can simply spark another – and can bring advertisers and publishers together in a far more open and accountable fashion.

And, by the same token, if a publisher can attract this advertiser to his or her website, then why can’t that publisher attract the same advertiser to his or her website? 

So, we have a greener audience that reads ‘Greener Leith’ – www.GreenerLeith.org. That then attracts greener ‘advertisers’. Like http://www.ecospiritdating.com/

And EcoSpiritDating might then want to run advertising… and so if that, then this… http://www.greendrawers.com/

And so we might continue; re-building and re-wiring the Web from the bottom up. But with every new strand and proton-esque connection, we strengthen and empower communities – particularly if it allows them then to address the money question.

How do any of us ever hope to make a living at this? Even if, for now, it is no more than part-time? How do we drag ourselves up from a position of being ‘not-for-profit’ to one of ‘not-for-loss’?

As ever, right now nothing works, but everything might. But there’s something within ifttt that is of this time and is worth a far longer conversation.

Ian meet Jesse and Linden, Linden and Jesse meet Ian…

There was a very interesting piece doing the rounds on Twitter this week from Business Week.

It charted the career of a maths genius from Harvard, a certain Jeff Hammerbacher.

And it delivered a wonderful quote from the fella himself; one that got the Twitter crew nodding sagely with approval.

“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” he says. “That sucks.”

Read the full article at your leisure. It is fascinating; a tour de force on how far a phenomenal head for numbers can get you these days. The ability to manipulate data via algorithmic forces that are tameable only by the Harvard/MIT few is the entree to Valley super-stardom.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_17/b4225060960537.htm

The mathematicians are now the kings of cool. Boy, do they rock…

I was an Oxford history scholar; who ran the college bar and played football. My world has always been full of words and people. I always found numbers dull. Still do.

What floats my boat is the fact that the last great English Revolution was borne on the twin seas of ’social mobility’ and ‘a liberty of printing’ – the likes of which we are only now returning to.

It had nothing to do with data. But in the new-found freedom of movement enjoyed by the New Model Army and the freedom of individual expression enjoyed by the cheap and cheerful pamphleteers that followed in their wake, English society was turned inside out for 20-odd years.

The world turned upside down and Charles I lost his head.

Return to our world – or rather that of Jeff Hammerbacher – and his brilliant, left-sided mathematical brain currently commands top, top dollar Valley-wise in the belief that he and his generation of Harvard/MIT super-heroes can crack the advertising nut.

To boldly go where no punter has ever clicked an ad before…

‘…engineers burn the midnight oil making sure that a shoe ad follows a consumer from Web site to Web site until the person finally cracks and buys some new kicks.

‘… Any generation of smart people will be drawn to where the money is, and right now it’s the ad generation,” says Steve Perlman… 

Next week I have my boy for the Easter holidays. We’re going to go to London for the day on Wednesday. Do the Imperial War Museum; I’ll leave the Science Museum for the Hammerbacher kids.

So I bought a couple of tickets from Trainline.co.uk. Norwich to London Liverpool Street.

As one or two of you know, I have an unhealthy interest in the richer media advertising space on The Guardian. The feeling is clearly mutual. That same space now has an unhealthy interest in me.

For not only am I now getting Trainline ads punted my way; I’m getting them specific to the routes I frequent. Norwich-Liverpool Street. Peterborough-Newcastle.

And somewhere, deep in the bowels of that behavioural ad tech, there will be a clutch of Jeff Hammerbachers whooping and high-fiving eachother and what their math has now delivered. And, no doubt, behind them are some Valley VCs doing the valuations. Crunching the IPO numbers.

It’s clever. Don’t get me wrong. It’s clever. Addiply can’t do that. No chance. We’re not that clever.

But I’d quite like to go to Cardiff next month; to go and talk to some folk about this…

http://www.addiply.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=60&Itemid=118

So I don’t want tickets to Liverpool Street or Newcastle; I want tickets to Cardiff. Tickets to Newcastle and Liverpool is old news; that’s the way I used to behave, not how I will behave…

And this is the danger, for me, of Google, GroupOn and all the rest of them starting to shape and predict my life for me – particularly when it comes to my purchasing decisions. It might start to get right on my t*ts if they think they know better… and take the fun out of discovery and take the human out of the loop.

I don’t want Google to be the ‘third half of my brain…’

http://rickwaghorn.co.uk/2010/09/12/aspiring-to-be-the-third-half-of-our-brain-suggests-google-have-their-heart-set-on-new-complexities-be-wary-shirky-might-warn/

There was another very interesting line within the BusinessWeek piece; where our Jeff first started his stellar career… as a ‘quant’. In a bank.

‘He took a job at Bear Stearns… On Wall Street, the math geeks are known as quants. They’re the ones who create sophisticated trading algorithms that can ingest vast amounts of market data and then form buy and sell decisions in milliseconds. Hammerbacher was a quant…’

It’s exactly the same logic that is now moving in on the world’s ad spaces… this notion that the winners are those who: ‘create sophisticated trading algorithms that can ingest vast amounts of market data and then form buy and sell decisions in milliseconds…’

In just the same way that the world’s trading floors, gilt markets and currency exchanges are now dominated by the boys with the biggest toys… ‘toxic dark pools’ that might, on occasion, have the odd quant floating about in it.

http://rickwaghorn.co.uk/2011/02/05/weve-done-flash-trades-before-lets-move-on-to-toxic-dark-pools-and-flash-crashes-and-wait-for-may-6th-to-repeat-itself/

The point here is that there will come a stage – if the fate of the mid-sized US stock-broker is repeated on an ad agency level – where its only the boys with access to the biggest behavioural toys who will be able to follow me around the web. Access to that level of data, to that level of algorithmic excellence will be the privilege of a Walmart or a Tescos and the agencies that enjoy their favour.

Likewise, for the publisher, access to that level of sophistication comes only for those with the numbers; a FaceBook, a GMG, a MailOnline… or, of course, a Color – the latest hot kid on the Valley block. 

In fairness, to Hammerbacher he appears off to conquer new worlds – applying the science of data analysis and interpretation to the world of DNA; matching trends buried within vasts piles of data to predictive analysis tools for medical science. He seems like a good guy. And smart, clearly.

But the worry would be that just as the trading floors used to be the preserve of people, so too was advertising. People bought off people – be it shares or a quarter page ad in the local evening paper.

Now the machines are running the show; it’s a numbers game, not a people thing. And it’s getting ever more complex to play the game – whether you’re an advertiser or a publisher. Particularly at a local level.

The biggest Kingdon of Quants on Earth remains, of course, Google. It was interesting to note that the math boys are now getting the keys to the management ladder.

“It lets people that are left- brain leaning expand their career opportunities,” says Doug Mack, CEO of One Kings Lane… “People that might have been in engineering can go into marketing, business development, and even sales. They can get on the leadership track.”

And the biggest gap in Google’s armour; the Holy Grail that they continue to chase and chase with little or no sign of success? A ’social media’ platform to rival a Twitter or a Facebook; some space where you and me and the rest of the right-minded world come to hang out, chat, banter and swap those every-day stories of our every-day lives.

That’s their biggest challenge.

Being human.

Given our close involvement over the last 18 months with all-things GuardianLocal, it would be slightly remiss of me not to mark their passing this week with a few thoughts.

Many spring to mind; some will have to wait for another day. You (er, me…) can say too much at some points.

Many who inhabit this ’space’ of ours have already banged one or two nails on the head; so I would commend the thoughts of Will Perrin and the TalkAboutLocal team; and those of Andy Dickinson.

Will first; his tribute to the three BeatBloggers concerned – whose futures are now ‘uncertain’ – is spot on.

http://talkaboutlocal.org.uk/guardian-local-closes/

He also touches on the great tension that faces all community publishers – local, niche or otherwise. Getting the ads to work.

Particularly when you’ve got bigger fish to fry than putting a dedicated sales team into three, separate city spaces – not when commercial bodies are in such short supply.

‘Traditional online advertising at a local level is tough if you don’t have a dedicated sales operation and not highly lucrative even if you do it would seem. 

‘Local newspapers and directories like Yell have spent decades tending and nurturing their local ad networks offline and trying as hard as they can online. 

‘Without a dedicated local ad sales operation, but carrying the costs of treating its staff decently Guardian Local was always going to rely on subsidy from their charitable parent…’

Charity that is – inevitably – in short supply these days. 

Andy hits another point on the head; just who were the punters ‘buying’ into here? The Guardian ‘brand’? Or that of the individual journalists concerned?

Suddenly people found someone willing to hold the local council to account… and for most that was a Hannah, not a GuardianCardiff. They had, for all the automated data feeds beloved by Guardinistas the world over, given Cardiff a human face…

Here’s the post… http://www.andydickinson.net/2011/04/27/guardian-localfailed-experiment/

And the lines, for me, that matter?

‘Talking to community managers from the small hyperlocals to the big players like Propublica it’s clear that there is real value in the experience of handling a crowd at grass roots.

‘I’m sure that Hannah, John and Michael have that in spades. I never met John and Michael but did meet Hannah. She is whip smart. I’ve no reason to assume that John and Michael are any different because Sarah, who drove the project, is planet-size smart when it comes to this stuff…’

Read the 191 comments that follow Meg Pickard’s announcement and Andy’s point screams out at you… time and again it is ‘Hannah did this…’ or ‘John did that…’

http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/insideguardian/2011/apr/27/guardian-local-update

It’s not the platform, it’s the people… that’s what people are really upset about; you gave us a face… you gave us a person to connect with, relate to and gather round.

And now you’re taking them away; their fates ‘uncertain’. Which in the current ‘uncertain’ world of journalism must be a difficult place to be. All concerned had built bridges, engaged communities and given the big brand, a human face.

And people do people. People tell people their stories – particularly people they grow to trust and admire; for the very fact that they are seen to care about the same local issues that they do.

And you can’t do that with a machine. Or an algorithm. All the data in world still needs someone to tell the story of what it actually means on the streets of Cardiff, Edinburgh and Leeds.

The big point here is that all of the above applies just as much to the local ad rep – as it does to the local story-teller. It’s Batman without Robin. Morecambe without Wise.

Across those three sites, PaidContent suggested we made GNM some £500 in the year off those two, self-served, tenner-a-week text ads. In that ball park; we didn’t re-invent GNM’s commercial fortunes.

Nor would we even with a Leeds-based Morecambe to run alongside John Baron’s Wise.

It’s Will’s point. It’s one that we’ve made before; that not everyone can be a Howard Owens of The Batavian. Not when you’ve got an evening council meeting to attend.

http://rickwaghorn.co.uk/2011/02/27/on-the-basis-that-we-cant-all-be-a-howard-owens-were-not-all-hitting-the-heights-of-the-batavian-lets-try-a-tool-for-crowd-selling/

So we build a ‘crowd sales’ tool – to enable that Leeds community that gathered to listen to John’s thoughts to sell ads in and around his ‘brand’. People who know what they’re doing; people who recognise the local ad value of 30,000 monthly, Leeds-focussed readers who are likely to be (relatively) moneyed, literate, engaged and active. Habitat (Leeds) heaven.

Automate the commission process, offer the usual transparency and accountability and give the publisher full approval rights over that ad… is it relevant to my Leeds-centric audience? Or is it a generic bra ad taking up that prime, banner ad spot… dropped into that ‘local’ space from somewhere on high?

A few other quick thoughts; I *get* the decision in the sense that the world is going one of two ways – you’re either global or local; there’s nothing in-between. Being ‘regional’ is not a good place to be.

I listened to Matt McAlister deliver almost his inaugural public speech as GMG’s new Director Of Digital Strategy with the kids at Leeds Trinity University last year. They could now put a face to a name. He was there, in person, in Leeds.

Today and Matt is mine host at ‘ActivateNY’ as brand ‘Guardian’ does the ‘US event’ thing on the streets of Manhattan; a million miles away from the streets of Morley and Pudsey. Or, indeed, Morningside. Or Ely and Splott.

They have the US State Dept to hold to account whenever the next batch of Wikileaks fall into their laps; holding Leeds City Council to account won’t be their job anymore, though – hopefully – it will be John’s. In whatever new guise brand ‘John’ that emerges.

Because people liked him as their story-teller. As they did Hannah. And did Mike.

If there is a lesson to be learned it’s that – that GuardianLocal has reinforced the importance of the human in the news-gathering process. Particularly at a local level. Be it to sell or to story-tell, people need to see a human face. It’s why for thousands of Norwich City fans, I remain TheirFootballWriter…

Get a machine, get a bra advert. Which is why we need to put the person back into the sale… why we, Addiply, need to learn from GuardianLeeds.

We need to keep it human. And keep it simple. And that way, help to keep someone in the city halls of Leeds, Edinburgh and Cardiff.

In many ways, what follows is simply an exercise in joining dots; stumbling across one piece of evidence to help explain ‘X’ – and using that to then better understand ‘Y’.

It will have nothing to do with the future provision of local news in the UK; so new media wonks walk on by. There will be nothing to see here.

For those who like a little bit of revolutionary discourse with their royal wedding celebrations there may however be something to ponder – why our world appears intent on ‘turning upside down…’

Woken in the early hours by a rain-storm in downtown Cringleford, I read this on Twitter – delivered to my door by the excellent @umairh

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/27/how_goldman_sachs_created_the_food_crisis?page=0,0&sms_ss=twitter&at_xt=4db9fd0b880c0b19,1

It is fascinating – if still hard to follow for those of us that have never stepped on a trading floor. But know a few that did.

Because if we are beginning to twig that – potentially – we are *starting* to see the collapse of complex business models unfolding about us, then we have another reason to point an accusing finger at the door of the bankers when it comes to…

…the price of bread.

I’m not suggesting everyone sit down and read every word of Frederick Kaufman’s worthy tome, but in essence what he is suggesting is that over the last ten years, the natural ebb and flow of commodity prices – coffee, hogs, wheat, maize, soya and the like – have been hi-jacked by the big banks.

That by inserting a ‘Goldman Sachs Commodities Index’ into the market-place, the boys found themselves another lucrative pile of chips to play with at the casino. Only, as ever, the dice were loaded.

They inserted a mathematical formula into the business of trading the staff – and the stuff – of life. They let the ‘quants’ come up with an algorithm.

‘They weighted the investment value of each element, blended and commingled the parts into sums, then reduced what had been a complicated collection of real things into a mathematical formula that could be expressed as a single manifestation…’

The GSCI. But in taking the ‘human’ out of the natural growing cycle that was years of feast and famine:

‘… Goldman’s index perverted the symmetry of this system. The structure of the GSCI paid no heed to the centuries-old buy-sell/sell-buy patterns. This newfangled derivative product was “long only,” which meant the product was constructed to buy commodities, and only buy…’

And where Goldman led, the others swiftly followed; soon they were all sat at the ‘commodities’ table… ‘Barclays, Deutsche Bank, Pimco, JP Morgan Chase, AIG, Bear Stearns, and Lehman Brothers…’ The gang was all there. Still are. Upsetting a centuries-old market. Going long – and ever longer – on the price of bread.

The price of food has soared and, claims Kaufman, the world’s poor are now the victims of a ‘food bubble’ as bushels of wheat that once traded at $4-6 now command a price of $25.

Put ‘bread’ and ‘price’ into a Google search-box and you come across this:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/paulmason/2011/04/revolutions_and_the_price_of_b.html

Paul Mason, economics editor on Newsnight, linking the price of bread to revolutions. The chart speaks for itself. Go back to the English Revolution and the decades 1620-1650 were widely claimed to be some of the roughest times, economically, for centuries. The people were not only revolting, they were hungry.

The World Bank has sensed the same…

http://brusselsblog.agra-net.com/2011/are-food-price-spikes-contributing-to-middle-eastern-unrest/

‘World Bank chief Robert Zoellick has said that food price spikes were a “toxic brew of real pain contributing to social unrest”.

A special focus on the Middle East and North Africa shows double-digit food price inflation in Iran, Egypt and Syria…’

Go back to 2008 when the price of food witnessed it’s first real spike – as the speculators fled from the scene of their sub-prime crimes and started to ride on the tail of the agrarian tiger and you can see just how much importance the Syrian authorities placed on maintaining the price of bread at stable and affordable levels… just as an army marches on its stomach, so do any aggrieved people.

http://www.syria-today.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1850:bread-prices-are-sacred&catid=316:business-news&Itemid=64

So they subsidised the price of bread; but warned that situation could not continue forever…

‘The government made clear that it would not be able to “bear the burden”, warning of serious consequences by 2010 and 2011…’ was the crucial line from that Syria Today report, penned back in 2008.

It is a fascinating thesis, even if some might suggest we can be guilty of seeing a banker under every bed, just as previous witch-hunts would see a red beneath any bed of civil disobedience and disorder.

It was interesting to note that one of the commenters saw Kaufman as ‘left-wing demagogue’; Christopher Hill – author of ‘The World Turned Upside Down – was always cast down as a Marxist ideologue whose views, therefore, needed to come with a large pinch of salt.

Given it was published in 1972, his detractors probably had little to fear. After all, at that moment in time neither the ‘freedom of movement’ personified in the New Model Army and the ‘liberty of printing’ enjoyed by the myriad of pamphleteers that followed in their wake were not as evident as they are today.

Give a new generation Facebook and Twitter and the liberty to ‘print’ that way and, above all, give them a real hunger in their stomach and the world can turn upside down again. Particularly if its the bankers that are seen to be fleecing the poor; profiteering on the price of a loaf as nation after nation struggles to feed its own.

Given the amount of ‘column inches’ this blog has devoted to the fate of local ‘TV’ in this country – not to mention the small matter of running our very own conference on said subject – it would be wholly remiss not to pause and ponder the latest ‘briefing’ to be delivered by those-in-the-know within the DCMS.

How we’re not actually going to do a ‘central spine’ after all.

Apparently. That’s on hold.

First we’re going to do the local ‘bits’; and then someone might do a spine. The horse is now in front of the cart; just as long as someone wants a bit of transmitter time. We’re not quite at the wholly mobile future that some lad called Eric has long foreseen.

Mr Schmidt senses there’s something in this video-to-mobile thing; that’s where our world might be head…

http://rickwaghorn.co.uk/2010/09/26/web-video-is-the-new-television-if-that-is-the-case-then-someone-tell-ofcom-their-world-is-turning-upside-down/

Deep in the bowels of OfCom and last year’s ‘feasibility study’, everyone was still working on the basis that the answer to our local news needs will come from out of that box sat in the corner.

Or rather the 250-foot transmitter mast sat atop Winter Hill…

http://rickwaghorn.co.uk/2010/11/06/lessons-from-1000flowers-and-citylocal-ask-anyone-in-birkenhead-which-way-their-tv-aerial-points-winter-hill-or-storeton-which-silo-are-you-on-boys/

Anyway, on to today’s ‘news’. It is something of a mish-mash; working out just where – exactly – this latest ‘briefing’ is taking us all – other than into the long grass for the forseeable.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/may/10/jeremy-hunt-plan-national-tv-network

There are, however, some lovely lines; not least this notion that the Minister doesn’t now view the world coming from the transmitter down; that in his tour around the country he senses that the world might be turning upside down… A favourite notion in these parts.

‘Jeremy Hunt was very impressed on his recent tour of the country with people really committed to local media who just wanted his help to do their own thing … the whole idea began to feel rather too ‘top down’, it just didn’t feel right for Jeremy’s taste…’

Which might make for slightly uncomfortable reading for anyone who owns a ‘top down’ piece of kit. Like a transmitter mast. Or a print press, for that matter.

Not that it’s wholly bad news for those with a TV box to supply.

‘Now, rather than licensing a network operator for the national spine first, this is now expected to take a back seat to the licensing of local operators based around the use of local geographically interleaved DTT spectrum.

‘Any network to supply shared programming and help sell advertising nationally would only emerge afterwards…’

The ability to sell advertising first locally and only then nationally is something we *might* have an answer to; for now, however, it’s this concept of local ‘operators’ seeking out… ‘the use of local geographically interleaved DTT spectrum.’

Most of the ‘local operators’ I know and recognise in this space would first need to find a dictionary to find out what, exactly, the ‘geographically interleaved DTT spectrum’ was; cos I haven’t got a clue…

… although I suspect it involves this idea that, say, a Richard Jones of www.SaddleworthNews.com fame would look up towards the moors, spot the great transmitter mast beaming out across the breadth of Greater Manchester and would then actively seek out the man who runs said mast and see if he could have a slice of that interleaved spectrum action… 

Or else he will carry on doing what he has been doing. And working with the kids from Oldham College.

http://rickwaghorn.co.uk/2010/10/23/how-do-we-start-to-make-1000flowers-bloom-by-understanding-how-omc-motors-ford-can-work-with-sntv-let-both-tell-their-own-story/

And, likewise, the good folk from http://www.mycornwall.tv/

They have no interest in seeking out the man who owns the Redruth transmitter. Not when part of their audience is teaching the world to dig for tin for a living and are, therefore, out of range of said transmitter.

In many ways, today’s ‘news’ is a recognition that there is a new world order emerging; that, bit by bit, the world is being re-ordered and re-built from the bottom up, not the top down.

And for those still wedded to this notion that what-was-one-their-audience will meekly accept whatever broadcast – and advertising – crumbs they deign to drop off their lofty table, 2011 is not shaping up to be a good year.

The Minister is starting to look at the world in a wholly different light.

This isn’t, of course, our natural habitat – speculating about the speculators.

But having been round that block a couple of times of late and, in particular, wondering aloud if speculation on the commodities markets could in any way be related to the current wave of unrest sweeping through the Middle East, so up pops the ceo of Starbucks with a bee in his bonnet.

OK, so he’s got a book to sell.

But fair play to The Daily Telegraph for spotting the decent line…

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandconsumer/8505864/Starbucks-chief-Howard-Schultz-attacks-coffee-speculators.html

These lines are brilliant…

I know I have an ad system to peddle, but – at heart – I think I remain a closet historian.

One who delights in days like today; when the world does, indeed, threaten to turn upside down as history likewise threatens to repeat itself.

To really understand the huge forces at work this evening as the judiciary (Mr Justice Tugendhat) squares up to the legislature (John Hemming MP) over a certain professional footballer, you have to return to the last time we – as a nation – enjoyed the ‘teeming freedom’ we do now; you have to return to those twenty, glorious years of revolution between 1640 and 1660 when a ‘liberty of printing’ threatened to rip the established order apart.

A ‘liberty of printing’ enjoyed by masterless men that would see the heads of both church and state – Archbiship Laud and Charles I – literally lose their heads.

This fundamental concept of a ‘liberty of printing’ is the key to all that is unfolding right now – be it in the Twitterverse or beyond.

It gives the ‘common man’ the ability to dethrone and debase the ‘men of property’; it gives students the tools to organise and radicalise; it gives protest movements a hash-tag to hang on to; it puts people into city squares. And keeps them there. 

The publication of news, opinion and gossip is no longer the capitalist preserve of said men of property. Even men as lowly as Giles Coren can publish what they think. And have heard.

In looking at the radical sects that emerged in those heady days of the English Civil War, the historian Christopher Hill sensed an ‘intoxicating excitement’ that came with the ability to both print and distribute ideas and opinions both cheaply and widely. Or, indeed, the ‘intoxicating excitement’ that comes with distributing cheap opinions widely. 

The same kind of frisson that a Coren might have secretly enjoyed at being the second, individual name to echo across the floor of the House this afternoon.

So as the New Model Army yomped from one corner of the land to the other – taking in Scotland and Ireland en route – so in their wake came legions of ‘pamphleteers’, churning out all manner of fresh and unconventional thought.

Fresh and unconvential thought – and gossip. In particular, with regard to the human failings of the clergy and their increasingly ‘ungodly’ ways. Dissenting voices that Laud and his church courts had been trying to stamp out whilst the king still had a head on his shoulders. 

So the challenge to authority came from below, from the bottom up, from the ranks of the masses – handed an ability to say and write whatever they fancied by this ‘liberty of printing’ that we, too, now enjoy.

‘… to appreciate what it [the liberty of printing] meant, to recover the intoxicating excitement – not only of being able to print what one thought, but of being able to say what one thought – we have to return to those marvellous decades when it seemed as though the world might be turned upside down…’

And let’s argue that right now it is ‘the men of property we do disdain…’ – be they RBS bankers or over-paid professional footballers – and that history, as is her wont, is simply repeating itself.

‘The more liberty, the greater mischief,’ a Major-General Skippon told Parliament in 1656, as the old order fought to pop the cork back in the bottle ahead of The Restoration in 1660.

The more we all come to enjoy the liberty of printing, the greater mischief we can make – particularly if it comes at the expense of ‘men of property’ who – in cahoots with the lawyers and the judiciary – believe that they can cover their adulturous tracks with a wad of our cash.

And impose a silence and an order on the teeming masses from on high; from the High Court down.

And it is ‘our’ cash – we pay for their lavish life-styles via season tickets and Sky subscriptions; or by our taxes in the case of RBS.

By what makes this period and the last (1640-60) in our history so fascinating is the richness and invention that pours forth from the ‘masses’ once they are empowered with the the tools to write, to print, to publish and to distribute. And, ideally, to monetise.

For most of that, too, ain’t nothing new.

Handed such rare freedoms, Thomas Milton would take pride in a nation that was ‘not slow and dull, but of a quick, piercing and ingenious spirit, acute to invent, subtle and sinewy to discourse…’

For those that wander the highways and by-ways of the Twitter-verse, those words ring very true as new and ingenious ways are found to out-wit a ’super-injunction’ – in just the same way that our ‘liberty of printing’ enabled new and ingenious ways to be found when it came to ‘Kettling: the avoidance of…’

Game play met social media met The Met… and the winner was?

The ‘quick, piercing and ingenious spirit’ of the English nation.

Tonight as the men of property, the revolting masses, the judiciary and the legislature all go to war, the point needs hammering home.

There is nothing new in events of late; this is simply history repeating itself.

We have all been here before.

Groupon. Wow… An IPO valuation of $30 billion; having long ago turned down an offer from Uncle Eric and Google.

They are the fairy-tale story of our fevered times. Or, for others, the biggest piece of froth in an already over-blown bubble.

Ie The Golden Nugget of The Guardian’s thinking…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jun/11/groupon-internet-andrew-mason-interview?CMP=twt_gu

Or a ceo who wants to bail at the first opportunity… according to Fortune.

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/06/06/does-mason-want-to-get-out-of-groupon/

I’ve never partaken of a Groupon voucher; nor spoken to a merchant who has offered a Groupon deal. All I am is the ceo of a tiny local advertising start-up. That’s a million miles away from an IPO.

So, whether it works for merchant or customer, I’ve no idea. It clearly works for those in charge of Groupon. And, you presume, will also work for those running the impending IPO.

One of whose number, per chance, includes Goldman Sachs. Fancy that.

So, I’ve no idea what the user experience is for either merchant or customer. And I’m not about to speculate. Not my place.

The only ‘bit’ of the Groupon model I get is the cost of running a local ’sales’ force – I’ve done that for the last five years. Our Kev has been pounding the streets of Norwich twisting every last arm he can find in a bid to take out a £150-a-month banner ad on http://norwichcity.myfootballwriter.com/

It ain’t easy. Nor cheap. Not if – as Howard Owens discovered – it can take up to eight visits to get one local ‘merchant’ to sign up for one banner ad.

We must be up to at least that for Gasway here in Norwich. Not only has the simple ’sale’ taken three months to get to the signed order form, we’re now into another two months getting the lad to sign off the banner creative – he can’t decide which offer they are going to punt.

Our ad creative work is out-sourced to Ben at EclipseDesign. He’s great; turns it round in 24 hours, usually. But there’s another cost.

So, in my tiny, tiny world, I know the time and cost it takes for a local ‘merchant’ to agree, design and approve a simple banner ad. I know the cost and support it takes to put *one* local sales rep into the field. And the hours and hours of heavy lifting it takes to yield one ad.

Or one offer. Or one coupon.

Particularly if you think you can tap that rich seam of local, independent merchants that aren’t a Subway or a Starbucks. That you can put two Groupon reps into, say, a Newcastle and the local marketing money will turn on like a tap – just like that.

With no return visits to discuss the ‘message’; the offer wording; the look of the coupon.

So, as I read the prospectus – or other’s do – it is their staffing costs which enthrall me; the cost of shoe-leather on the streets of Chicago and beyond – and the 400 staff writers knocking up the catchy coupon blurbs.

Sales, marketing and admin expenses hit $387 million for Q1 of 2011 – up from $11 million for the corresponding period the year earlier.

Shoe leather doesn’t come cheap.

I spoke at City University the other week. Jeff Jarvis joined the day via Skype after the break. He was, as usual, great value.

And spoke well of the need for a new model army of entreprenuerial sales teams to work that ‘local’ patch. Or, indeed, Patch.

Writing in April he, rightly, concluded that: ‘‘Scaling local sales is the key opportunity… establishing new, independent, entrepreneurial sales forces…”

Who can then be the sales Robin to a story-telling Batman. Work that local ‘patch’ together. As as a team.

One knocks on doors to talk about the 17-year-old son tragically lost in a motor-bike accident – the other knocks on the door of the local pizza parlour seeking that $20 a week ad. The two are a tag-team.

The question, of course, is who pays?

In the case of Groupon, the fear is that it will be a whole raft of pension funds and investment managers who pile into that $30 billion IPO and find themselves picking up the tab for the greatest local ad sales force the world has ever seen.

For us, we see a different model. One that remains independent of both publisher *and* ad network.

That with the 90% revenue return Addiply offers to its publisher clients, out of that ‘pot’ you can then look to drive out-sourced ad sales with an automated *commission* programme. One that, crucially, still empowers the publisher to approve or disapprove any ad out-sourced in this fashion..

‘Heh, you’ve got me an ad… cheers… OK, let’s have a look… OK, cool… that ‘fits’ with my community, my audience… I’ll approve… and let you have the 25% commission we agreed earlier… means I’m still picking up 65%. Neat.

‘And now I can get back to story-telling…’

That’s what we have in mind; a community ’sales’ tool. An ability for the crowd to sell. To build a tool that out-sources that sales function to those that can… and we build ‘new, independent, entrepreneurial sales forces…” of Jeff’s imaginings and avoid anyone picking up a Q1 bill of $387 mill.

Clearly there has been a little spot of news in this neck of the woods recently – one which, certainly, deserves (a) a big, public ‘Thank you!’ and, probably, (b) a little explanation of what this might mean for the good ship Addiply going forward.

If you have missed our ‘news’, where have you been?

We have had a *little* funding moment; we have a six-figure sum to play with. Which buys us a precious window of time and opportunity to get our platform right. Or nearer ‘right’ – no-one is ever going to crack this web nut with one piece of ‘kit’

Ain’t nothing out there that is ever going to fit all.

So here we go…

http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/story_attachment.asp?storycode=47286&seq=2&type=P&c=1

The first, heart-felt ‘Thank you!’ clearly has to go to Richard, Michelle and everyone else at www.NorthStarVentures.co.uk who – hopefully – *got* where we intend to head and have demonstrated a faith in the team, the thinking and the product that has been in a God-send in these testing times.

Dr Richard Exley is the one in the middle; Ian Thurbon – Addiply’s tech genius – is the one to Richard’s left.

And a swift – and personal – thanks to Ian, Louise Northwood, Matt Waring and our two new, non-execs – ex-Rothschilds banker Kevin Joyce and Andy Baker, MD of EMAP’s Health and Local Government division – for their faith in both me and the platform over the last four years.

Because it’s a tough, tough world out there. A digital start-up working with a local High Street bank? You’re having a larf, clearly. Supporting ‘Enterprise Britain’? Yeh, right…

So, NorthStar have been a breath of fresh air in that regard. And it’s nice to embed ourselves ever more deeply into that North-East community and give the likes of Louise Northwood the chance to work her hard-earned network to everyone’s benefit.

The fruits of her labours – and those of JesmondLocal – arrived this morning in the shape of a very first, £5-a-week text ad on www.JesmondLocal.com

Is that going to turn the financial fortunes of Ian Wylie and his JesmondLocal massif overnight? Nope.

Is that going to drive booking after booking through a local, Newcastle-based nanny service? http://www.kidsdeservethebest.co.uk/ Who knows? That’s advertising for you; but there’s some well-heeled folk in the leafier ends of Jesmond. There ought to be a good ‘fit’ there.

But the point is that two, Jesmond-focussed businesses have been able to engage with eachother without having to ‘meet’ at the whim of an algorithm sat beneath a suburban mountain in a distant California.

ie, in our tiny, tiny way we are starting to re-build the local media eco-system in the North-East from the streets of Jesmond *up*. We are a *bottom up* ad platform that also empowers *top down* advertisers to reach those hard-to-find local spaces.

The next trick might be to knock on the door of our good friends at www.emo.uk.com and see if they have a national ‘ad’ brand that might like the look of that Jesmond demographic.

What also interests me about JesmondLocal is their interest in video.

As in here… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NJ8XYNUDvw&feature=player_embedded

Because part of this funding round will enable Addiply to explore that local video space by way of a text over-lay ad.

ie for same Newcastle nanny agency to place her own transparent text ad over that JesmondLocal video content.

Now, in my little world, that’s the start of Jesmond ‘TV’. As much as it will ever be ‘TV’ as we currently recognise it.

But seems to be part of Jeremy Hunt’s new thinking at the DCMS as they abandon plans for the development of a ‘national spine’ and seek a more ‘bottom up’ way of thinking in terms of the delivery of a new, Local TV platform for the UK as ITV prepare to head for the hills after 2014.

All of which have left ‘Channel Six’ and their own ’spine’ proposition at something of a loss; scrambling around for a new ‘hybrid’ model that can – somehow – bridge this gap between ‘top down’ kit and ‘bottom up’ thinking.

Frankly, reading Richard Horwood’s comments, I think they are going to struggle.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jun/16/richard-horwood-channel-6-jeremy-hunt-local-tv

“To work the local TV services need support for everything from compliance lawyers to studios, infrastructure, transmission architecture, you name it,” he said…

Really?

What *transmission architecture*, exactly does JesmondLocal need to acquire to get JesmondLocal ‘TV’ to work for them?

The same *transmission architecture* that Richard and www.SaddleworthNews.com need; the same *transmission architecture* that Dorian and the www.MyCornwall.tv people need.

None.

The new reality – being hammered home to the hard-working staff in King’s Place as we speak – is that if you own a print press, a TV transmitter mast or a telegraph pole, you’re in trouble.

Those of us that don’t, are building our own visions of a new future. That if nothing works, seeing if this just might…

Colours to the mast. My Old Man was a Manchester Guardian boy. From Slough.

Roy Jenkins was the poster boy of our left-leaning, liberal household. I grew up with The Guardian on the coffee table. I avoided door-knocking with my SDP rosette on my school pull-over. But only just.

So, what follows is not a dance on anyone’s grave. It’s born more of frustration with an institution that – to my mind – is losing touch with its roots. Its core audience. Me, in short.

And the 40,000-odd mes that probably bought into The Guardian Leeds ‘brand’ every month; and the 30,000-odd in Edinburgh; the 40,000-plus in Cardiff.

Those that bought into this notion that local government needed to be held to account by the likes of a Mike, a John or a Hannah; just as much a Michael White might hold those in the corridors of Westminster to account. There was a balance there; and a nod to history. The ‘Manchester’ Guardian had morphed into something more befitting a 21st Century media stage.

We now had a ‘Cardiff’ Guardian, an ‘Edinburgh’ Guardian and a ‘Leeds’ Guardian. Only minus a print press, a delivery van and a paper boy.

And it was a network. One in which, advertising-wise, an Alfa (Cardiff) could target; just as much as a Habitat (Edinburgh). Or a Harvey Nicks (Leeds).

Why wouldn’t they? 50,000 Guardianistas gathered under one, city-specific digital roof every month? It’s BRAD heaven.

Which is why – personally – I think GMG have missed a huge trick here. GuardianLocal involved three journalists, three desks and three lap-tops. Their overheads were minimal. Their impact – given the furious reaction which followed news of their axing last month – huge.

People bought into people; they engaged with them. Like most people don’t do with data. People like to see a human face fronting up tales of Cardiff pot-holes - or the location of Leeds grit bins.   

So, *all* anyone had to do was to find 17 more Johns, Mikes and Hannahs, 17 more lap-tops, 17 more desk spaces and you had a 20-strong, UK-wide city-based network that would start – only start – to address the very real prospect that ‘for the first time since the Age Of Enlightenment’ (A Rusbridger) we had a major UK city without a newspaper of daily record.

So, in theory, should The Sheffield Star ever meet its maker, there would be GuardianLocal/Sheffield to mop up afterwards – on the one hand to hold Sheffield City Council to account, on the other to mop up all the local, digital advertising opportunities left bereft by the disappearance of The Star’s weekly motoring supplement.

Where else was Alfa (Sheffield) to go? Ah, how about running a Sheffield-focussed campaign aimed at all those Guardianista ABC1s now reading GuardianLocal/Sheffield on-line?

Pie in the sky? Or a possibility that might have been no more than 12-18 months distant as Johnston Press try to keep the bankers at bay for another year?

OK, we have an ad network to flog; one that could have linked Alfa (Sheffield) to GuardianLocal/Sheffield; and – come September – have enabled GNM to open up that Sheffield ad space to an army of ‘crowd sellers’ as we look to launch our third-party affiliate sales programme.

So, GNM wouldn’t need to start installing individual city-based sales reps; their community could ’sell’ for them – in return for keeping their city council cuts to a minimum. And a pre-agreed slice of that 90% revenue return, clearly.

As a ’strategic’ vision, I might suggest that it would sit slightly easier with the thoughts of a CP Scott than trying to crack America from a New York launch pad.

Because what Guardian Leeds, Edinburgh and Cardiff demonstrated, beyond argument, was the ‘brand’ benefits of driving deep into a community; the deeper you got under the skin of that community, the greater the engagement the audience enjoyed with that 190-year-old brand.

And off such thinking, the greater chance you have of earning better bucks for your digital ad space. Or a monthly subscriber for a GuardianLeeds app.

The challenge now for Mr Miller and Co is to ‘get under the skin’ of the United States of America in rather less time than the 190 years they have enjoyed in this country so that they can then earn better dollar for their billions of page impressions than a HuffPo, a Gray Lady or whoever else is out there beyond the Pond. Or, rather, beyond the banks of the Hudson River.

Which might be their first challenge.

All of which will, clearly, demand that GNM collaborate ever more closely with not a new army of community ad sellers that they could have found staffing the streets of Cardiff for them, rather the ad networks – who are going to secure the financial future of The Guardian from the ‘top down’.

Trusting that ever more smarter ad technology will make all those US-focussed pages earn ever more greater reward by – in part – being ever more appropriate to the new communities that they seek to serve.

The picture at the top is a freeze frame from the ‘home’ page of Guardian Sports.

And, for those hard-working Guardian sports journalists wondering whether or not there will be enough column inches in the slimmed down print version for them to pay their family’s mortgage every month, it must come as something of a relief to see an ad for Barry Wanderers Cricket Club turning up via that great algorithm that sits beneath Google’s mountain.

‘Barry Wanderers offers cricket for all ages and abilities…’

I’m sure it does. It’s that living in Norwich, it’s a bit tricky for me to get my 11-year-old boy to nets by 7pm on a Thursday night.

So it’s a wasted ad on me. Now, if I lived in Cardiff, read The Guardian and played cricket, I might well be interested. And if I am the Secretary of Barry Wanderers CC, I too might fancy being on Guardian/Cardiff. Or would have fancied.

That way I avoid wasting my ad time and expense on Norfolk punters like me. Be it Norfolk, UK, or – presumeably – Norfolk, Virginia, USA.

I might even have been tempted to pay a tenner a week to pop such a text ad in front of 40,000-odd engaged Guardianistas in Cardiff. It is, after all, the kind of postcard ‘ad’ you see in Post Offices windows the world over. ‘Players wanted…’

The point is quite simple. Since putting ‘digital first’ from at least 2006, The Guardian have led the way – globally – in collaborative journalism. The ‘Age Of Participation’ was, in every likelihood, born on a white-board in Emily Bell’s corner office.

There are clever, clever people in King’s Place delivering new and ever more fabulous ways of enabling communities to collaborate together to tell the story of what’s at the bottom of Sarah Palin’s e-mail drawer.

The big challenge is not in collaborating over stories, it’s collaborating on the act of ad sales. 

I suspect you had a small army of people on the streets of Edinburgh, Cardiff and Leeds who might have put the shoulder to the wheel in that ’sales’ regard if they thought you – by way of return – would keep a beady eye on Leeds City Hall. Or whatever next for Edinburgh’s proposed tram system.

That and an engaging commission rate.

That space you have now abandoned. You have placed your faith in the boys with the biggest toys; those big, old algorithms that take the human out of the act of sales – just as those Wall Street algorithms take the human off the trading floor.

The algorithms that slap a Barry Wanderers CC recruitment ad in front of me in Norfolk; 250-odd miles away from nets on a Thursday night.

Your future is tied to the old numbers – and the ads – that come from the top down. Not from the new numbers that could have been driven from the bottom up.

And that, for a lad that read The Guardian on his father’s knee, would worry me. Particularly if this world of ours continues to turn upside down….

As most people know, I’m not the biggest fan of data.

Data, for me, is a means to an end – not an end in itself.

Most of the time, data is a different means by which we visualise a story. But I – being lazy – still want someone to tell me what the story is. I want a P2P relationship with my story-teller… I don’t want that relationship to be with a data stream. Or a data map. However pretty.

I still want to know what the story is. I want a human face to my data.

I’m not smart enough to work out what the story is via the data alone.

But, in certain instances, data can be a means to another end… it can, for example, be a means to save local and central government £000s in mis-spent health advertising. Data can – with the appliance of a little joined up thinking – actually earn local governments £000s *if* people started to see a few bigger pictures.

This was interesting… yet another data map from The Guardian… this time using the data from the regional health observatories to deliver a health ‘map’ of England.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/interactive/2011/jun/28/health-map-england

Lovely. Nothing you couldn’t have done in January, 2009, when we first went round this particular block…

http://rickwaghorn.co.uk/2009/07/01/how-do-we-join-the-dots-in-a-digital-britain-how-do-we-find-a-little-pot-of-hyper-local-revenue-gold-from-that-data-mine-that-is-the-doctors-surgery/

Two and a bit years later, let’s try this again…

The map at the top is the county of Norfolk. It is a map of ‘Early Deaths From Heart Disease and Stroke’. And shows, clearly, that the county has a medical ‘issue’ in that regard in Norwich and in Yarmouth. Where twice as many people are likely to die earlier from heart and stroke conditions than in the ‘greener’ ‘burbs to the richer south and north of Norwich.

None of which should come as any great surprise, but after we’ve now all data-mined the local GPs’ surgery data, there it is in black and white. Or rather yellow, red, green and orange.

So, I – as a Department of Health advertiser - know that what little that’s left of my former COI ’spend’ is better targetted into Norwich and Yarmouth than it is into Cringleford. Or Reepham.

Now if I am a publishing platform that covers the county of Norfolk – and has access to both such data and does ‘the circuit’ with the local big-wigs on the Primary Health Care Trust, I could open up my web-space and allow them to drop their ads in front of the appropriate audience.

If, of course, I had a simple, transparent ad platform that would enable me to do this.

Local Primary Health Care Trust gets to better target its message…

Residents in Norwich and Yarmouth get ‘exposed’ to the appropriate messaging and – ideally – their life expectancy *might* be seen to rise on the back of the right educational messaging…

The burden on the Norfolk & Norwich University Hospital declines…

And Norfolk County Council starts to make a few quid out of appropriately targetted advertising now that it has taken the first step in that regard by opening up ad space on its pages…

Which it is. Hurrah…

http://www.norfolk.gov.uk/

Amongst ads for the London School of Business, they are also dropping in Groupon ads…

And look, you can now get 70% off burgers and 60% off ‘donuts’ – all being promoted courtesy of Norfolk County Council’s own website.

A triumph.

Still, keep the NNUH in customers from Yarmouth for the forseeable.

And who needs decent ways and means of targetting appropriate health messaging via all that gold-dust data when you can promote cut-price ‘donuts’ to your community…

Given, to quote @LloydShep, ‘We’re all media kommentators now…’ it would probably be rather remiss not to offer some passing thoughts on the passing of The News Of The World.

And the fact that it was, clearly, The Guardian wot won it.

For me – since Tuesday, to be fair – short-term political expedience and medium-term structural need was always likely to morph into a closure.

Brand #notw – that term so derided by certain journalist of late – was bust beyond repair. It was ‘in the sewer’, to quote one decent piece I read. And unlikely to ever come up smelling of roses again.

There are aspects to events of the last 48 hours that could prompt a re-visit to the whole, ‘World Turning Upside Down…’ thesis that is so beloved in these parts. Not least what ‘a liberty of printing’ can now achieve once the masses are roused to the kind of indignant fury that engulfed NI and is unlikely now to be sated until it is granted Rebekah’s head on a platter.

‘The women of property we do so disdain…’

It is a block we have been round before… but these lines are worth repeating… from this the other day…

http://rickwaghorn.co.uk/2011/05/23/tonight-and-a-simple-point-needs-hammering-home-this-is-nothing-new-the-liberty-of-printing-has-taken-us-down-this-very-path-before/

‘…what makes this period and the last (1640-60) in our history so fascinating is the richness and invention that pours forth from the ‘masses’ once they are empowered with the the tools to write, to print, to publish and to distribute. And, ideally, to monetise.

For most of that, too, ain’t nothing new.

Handed such rare freedoms, Thomas Milton would take pride in a nation that was ‘not slow and dull, but of a quick, piercing and ingenious spirit, acute to invent, subtle and sinewy to discourse…’

For those that wander the highways and by-ways of the Twitter-verse, those words ring very true as new and ingenious ways are found to out-wit a ’super-injunction’ – in just the same way that our ‘liberty of printing’ enabled new and ingenious ways to be found when it came to ‘Kettling: the avoidance of…’

The same ‘quick, piercing and ingenious spirit…’ that cost both the Head of State and the Head of the Church their, er, heads… has now started to dethrone the most powerful media kingdom on the globe; brands of global import run before the displeasure of the masses…

Only the most arrogant and removed of their number – and that’s you, Tesco’s – believe they can King Canute-like ignore the tide of public opinion; had Tescos been the last advertiser standing this Sunday, it would have made for an interesting night outside the Stokes Croft branch as the descendents of those ‘.. tried and notorious Foresters of Dean’ made their feelings plain…

http://rickwaghorn.co.uk/2011/01/09/i-wouldnt-mess-with-the-people-of-the-forest-of-dean-last-time-someone-did-it-cost-charles-i-his-head-be-warned-mr-cameron/

But two things are worth a wider airing.

James Murdoch is no inkie… he’s a child of Sky. The deal to watch was the purchase of The Cloud… it gives NI a foothold into the *localised*, wifi-wireless market… that’s their new printing press; the box sat in the corner of your local Weatherspoons.

Brand ‘Sky’ now has a way of delivering local ‘TV’ straight into the palm of your hand. The News of the Screws was always off to meet its maker. Sooner rather than later.

The other point of interest is The Guardian, who – likewise – is also off to meet its maker. In the next three-to-five years, according to the latest estimate delivered by its owners.

There lies the challenge. ‘Arise Sir Alan…’ can’t be that far away; the man and his paper can walk on water right now; he holds a nation of Newsnight watchers in thrall. Nick Davies must be walking nine-foot tall. High-fives echo through King’s Place; drinks on him at The Driver.

Brand ‘Guardian’ has never been more respected or revered… it’s value has soared, as NI’s has plummetted. Quite handily share-price wise.

Walk into any city in the UK, say you’re an ad sales rep or a story teller from ‘The Guardian…’ and you’ll command near-instant respect. You will be granted a hearing – even in these straitened times.

Now walk into Idaho, Ohio or Illinois and see what repute you’re held in; do a survey on the streets of Manhattan as to who ‘Alan Rusbridger’ is – and compare to the results you garner from the streets of Manchester.

The greatest market opportunity always lies in the area of the greatest market failure. Right now, The Guardian’s ‘brand’ can sweep all before it in the UK… if each and every provincial UK city and its incumbent regional newspaper faces a challenging future, why oh why look to monetise the brand in US dollars instead of UK sterling?

GdnSheffield, GdnNewcastle, GdnNottingham would be a walk in the park… GdnChicago? GdnUSA?

Don’t get it. They, in every likelihood, won’t ever get it.

Having done this nation the greatest of services in its own 190-year odd history – to have started to hose out the Augean Stables of the Chipping Norton set – now is not the time to walk across the Pond.

Right now Alan Rusbridger can walk across the Thames; walking across the Atlantic, however, might be a feat beyond even the greatest national newspaper editor of modern times.

I think it is fair to say that most right-minded folk would like to see The Guardian survive through the tumults ahead.

Most, not all. After all it’s fluffy, left-leaning, liberal intentions are not to everyone’s tastes. I can’t imagine a Gdn/America editorial would go down too well with the American Right; but then I can’t imagine ‘brand’ Guardian ever quite crossing that cultural divide in the first place.

We digress. Let’s stick to the heartland that might have been Leeds, Edinburgh and Cardiff and suggest that for holding the powerful to account in this country, right now The Guardian is at the peak of its ‘brand’ powers.

We have every reason, as a nation, to thank those at the helm of that institution that they can still indulge the likes of a Nick Davies with the kind of free rein he needs to pull such an extraordinary and far-reaching investigation together.

Which, I would suggest, helps explain why at least three Guardian readers could be found offering their ’support’ to the newspaper of late… willing to dip their hands in their pockets to keep the Davies’ of this world in hose and hot water as he and his ilk begin to wash the worst excesses out of The British Establishment…

The three, willing supporters of the works of GNM were to be found on Martin Belam’s recent blog piece; one responding to the raised eye-brows that followed a link to ‘Six Ways You Can Support The Guardian’…
http://www.currybet.net/cbet_blog/2011/07/support-guardian.php
It’s worth a read; Martin always is. But the comment posted by a Dave Boyle is particularly worth reading… and his conculsion:

‘The mutual sector is booming, and membership in organisations like the Co-operative is rising year on year. This fits with the times, and thanks to technology, membership interactions with the organisation and with each other have never been easier to manage…’

I presume, Mr Boyle is proposing a collaborative, co-operative future for The Guardian and it’s works… which, in fairness, is a vision that the editorial floors of King’s Place have long embraced. We are all part of the story as the doors open to the latest live blog… be it from the back seats of a Westminster committee room or the streets around Tahir Square.

We are all part of the news process. In that regard, The Guardian have accepted the help of their community; they have led the way in being open, collaborative and co-operative in the way we now tell stories.

But what if we were able to offer that same opportunity to the way that we now sell advertising? What if, to quote Mr Boyle: ‘… thanks to technology, membership interactions with the organisation and with each other have never been easier to manage…’

Because that’s exactly what the V3 Addiply will seek to deliver; the ability for communities to rally round their local hard-pressed publisher and lift the burden of ad sales off the story writers in their midst.

We will deliver an automated commission programme that will find Addiply offering home to those that want to sell space (publishers), buy space (advertisers) and sell someone else’s space (affiliates).

So, go back to those six ways we can support The Guardian, and we have a seventh – the technology to enpower members within that organisation – the great Guardian ‘family’ – to sell ad space for GNM. Commercially, as well as editorially, we can rally round Alan, Nick Davies and Co and arrive at the door of King’s Place bearing gifts of appropriate, digital advertising for them to either approve or disapprove.

Rather than, as things currently stand, relying on us to buy books off their books shelves as opposed to going straight to Amazon; of buying holidays off their travel shelves as opposed going straight to Expedia.

Right now, I suspect that Guardian Commercial have little or no interest in opening up their space for other’s to sell; no desire to share the burden of sales with those now technically empowered to help. They can’t even do PayPal.

In their world, monetisation of all those billions of page impressions comes from the top down; comes from whatever Google sees fit to deliver onto those text ad spaces… be it SpreadBetting, GrouponCoupons or whatever else Mountain View churns out by way of a collaborative and co-operative advertising experience.

That starts with Google and finishes with The Guardian and invites no help from anyone else in between.

It’s strange. The web has been with us for the better part of a generation now; editorially, The Guardian have long ago mastered it; bent it to their will when it comes to telling the greatest stories of our turbulent times.

Commercially, however, and as ceo Andrew Miller admitted, they are on course to disappear off a precipice ‘within three to five years…’

Because rather than opening themselves up to accept the help of their community, they are locking themselves away behind walls of imposition… you *will* see this ad that Google delivers; you *will* buy a book from us; you *will* book a holiday from us; you *will* sign up for our new iPad app.

Why is it that ‘The Age Of Participation’ that Emily Bell long foresaw ends on the editorial floor? What’s so scary about letting your community participate in your future, commercially?

Strikes me, these days, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Top down imposition is bust. Bottom up participation, however, might keep this nation in Nick Davies’.

This is interesting on many, many a level.

It is the on-going row between many a news and picture agency – alongside The Guardian – with regard to the level of access to content any of the above can ‘enjoy’ at the 92 professional football clubs this season.

Or rather, having accessed that content through a DataCo Licence Agreement, what they are then allowed to do it with thereafter.

Flog a pic to a third and unlicensed party, for example.

It is a row that invariably erupts this time every year. How do I know? Because about this time every year, I too join the queue of agencies and editorial outlets seeking access to someone else’s content for http://norwichcity.myfootballwriter.com/

My application – along with an insurance certificate proving my £5 million ‘worth’ when it comes to public liability and 30 examples of match-day work – sits on our Kelly’s desk waiting her approval.

So, as this debate flows….

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2011/aug/06/dispute-guardian-coverage-football-league?INTCMP=SRCH

…so I can come to the party with a degree of knowledge; things like the number of ‘tweets’ any one reporter can make from a Press Box in six ‘windows’…

Well, we’ve been there, seen that and figured that… we ‘out-sourced’ that live crowd commentary to the 25,000-odd punters in Carrow Road who, likewise, have an opinion on how a game is progressing.

And courtesy of being the first project to be funded by 4iP in December, 2008, they then found themselves with a #ncfc Twitter ‘tag’ to play with. Now they could make their voices heard; they were participating and collaborating in the story of the game….

http://rickwaghorn.co.uk/2008/12/05/a-warm-friday-afternoon-welcome-to-backchat-or-rather-the-ncfc-version-a-4ip-funded-project-suddenly-made-web-flesh/

Those final few pars make for interesting reading – in the light of the above row.

‘Bottom line? I firmly believe that journalism cannot afford – in any sense of the term – to live in its ivory tower any longer; our futures lie in the heart of our audiences; in the midst of their conversations.

‘If we don’t – and if we’re not – they’ll move on. Leave us behind; talking to no-one, in particular.

Read the comments to The Guardian’s bleat about the way it and the picture agencies are being hampered by FootballData Co’s insistence on ever greater control of their content and that would be my real fear if I was Guardian Sports Ed.

Certainly, supporters of the 72 Football League teams – those that are quintessentially ‘local’ in their outlook and audience – have moved on elsewhere. The Guardian sports pages are not their first place of call; neither, in fairness, are the pages of The Telegraph, The Times, The Sun or The Mirror. Every national newspaper has retreated from that space.

The Guardian – for better or worse – has decided that it is better served pursuing the ad dollars that will surround a live blog of the NBA draft than ’staffing’ a Carling Cup tie one Tuesday night at Edgeley Park where once-upon-a-time, of course, they could call upon the services of the MEN’s Stockport County writer.

They’re outta there, remember?

Left to their own devices by shrinking staffs, tiny freelance budgets and this curious conviction that salvation lies with the Red Sox and Lakers and not the Hatters or the Bluebirds, Football League supporters have followed the example of their English revolutionary forebears…

‘… This book deals with what, from one point of view, are subsidiary episodes… the attempts of various groups of the common people to impose their own solutions to the problems of their time, in opposition to the wishes of their betters…’

That faced with the problem of retreating coverage from the national newspapers – whose devotion to the timetables of a printing press and the loss of their monopoly of access to that content as Arsenal ‘TV’ and its ilk took to the airwaves of the Web has left them playing catch-up with what was once their audience – so the common people [supporters] of Hill’s imaginings have tried to impose their own solutions to the problems of their times…

Via blogs, Twitter conversations, FaceBook communities, etc etc… None of which demand the intervention of a professional football writer. Or at least not one that can’t write and doesn’t know his local onions.

To be honest, if Kelly and Co gives http://norwichcity.myfootballwriter.com/ the thumbs down over the next few days and I’m left bereft of a Press Box seat for the forthcoming season, I won’t be too distressed.

I pay a TV licence fee; I can listen to BBC Radio Norfolk, link to their content and – just about – write a decent footie story off that. Commercially, sometimes needs must. I have to cut my cloth according to my local advertising income. For now, it doesn’t extend to Wigan (a).

But we’re doing OK; we’re still handing our advertisers all the numbers they need via www.twadservices.co.uk

The other, big point to remember is that, when all is said and done, it isn’t *our* content; they are not *our* players we are talking to or photographing.

They are Norwich City’s. Who are now as much of a ‘media’ organisation as the rest of us.

And, yes, it’s crap that FootballData Co see fit to charge publishers for re-producing their fixture lists. But then there’s a clue in their name – fixture lists are just ‘data’. Which has a value. Particularly in the hugely passionate niche that is sport.

The difficulty for the likes of The Guardian who – to our immense benefit, clearly, as a nation – are wholly embedded with this notion that all data should be free, they are going bust.

In three to five years time, by the latest boardroom estimate. Because they can’t get the data that they ‘own’ to pay.

The Football League – and the Premier League, in particular – are masters of that particular trade. They know the value of their content; it’s just that their ‘pay-walls’ are a turnstile and a TV deal – access to which, for now, our former audience are still prepared to pay.

As both regular readers of this blog will confirm, I do like my Christopher Hill.

If I had my way, ‘The World Turned Upside Down’ would be force fed to politicians of either ilk; and there’s a whole swathe of folk at OfCom who – in the light of last week’s LocalTV pronouncements – need to *really* understand that the history of the world in the 21st Century will not be broadcast off a TV transmitter mast.

It will be re-broadcast via a mobile video platform. Revolution sits in the palm of my hand; it’s not three-foot long, spiky and strapped to my Mum’s chimney.

Hill – as we all know – chronicles the thinking of the ‘meaner’ sort of people who took to the streets of England during the last great period of social upheaval in this country. He cites ‘freedom of movement’ exemplified by the travels of the New Model Army and the ‘liberty of printing’ enjoyed by the 00s of itinerant pamphleteers as two of the great driving forces of the time – that, together, cost both the head of state (Charles I) and the head of the church (Archbishop Laud) their, well, heads.

It was the ‘men of property’ that people did disdain – their excesses reviled in a period of real economic hardship and strain.

But if history can be our guide when it comes to the forces of revolution in the two decades of ‘teeming freedom’ up until the point that the monarchy was restored in 1660, can it repeat the feat when it comes to ‘The Restoration’ of law and order in this country in 2011?

How was authority re-established in the wake of such tumult? What forces of technology and thinking returned this nation to good governance and prosperity? How did the State put the cork back into the bottle marked ‘Law And Order’? How did it ensure that their world didn’t turn wholly upside down?

The picture is of Robert Naylor; a leader of the new-born Quaker movement. In the biggest, single act of religious (and therein, the State) defiance, in 1656 he rode into Bristol on the back of an ass; the women of that city strewing ‘palms’ before him.

The force of that act was, said one witness, magnified that much more by the fact that Naylor was an ordinary man. He was Joe Public.

‘…he looked but like a plain, simple countryman, having the appearance of a husbandman or a shepherd…’

In short, he looked like a nobody – and, to this day, nobodies are supposed to do as they are told; to stay, out of sight and out of mind, in the sprawling council estates and tenements of inner city England.

Naylor’s punishment – as the Commonwealth of Oliver Cromwell sought to give such nobodies a warning – was to be flogged through the streets of London; his tongue was bored with a hot iron; his forehead branded. He was flogged again on his return to Bristol.

‘Naylor underwent his ordeal with fortitude,’ Hill records. ‘But physically, he never recovered from it; he died three years later at the age of 43.’

It was rather more than six months inside for handling a stolen a pair of shorts, but the message delivered from the ‘top down’ is still the same 350 years later.

Evictions too, were common place, while the kind of social movement enjoyed by both radicalised soldiers and pamphleteers alike was denied by the ‘kettling’ of the common people in their parishes; local JPs – the ‘men of property – were handed new, harsher powers to stop ‘masterless men’ from wandering. Going off message and off patch.

And, more importantly, they were stopped from publishing; from pamphleteering their way up and down the land. The industrialisation of the printing press took mass communication out of the hands of the common man. Local censorship added the big stick. People would be pilloried for their opinions. Literally. Not in the Liz Jones sense.

The liberty of 17th Century man – and, indeed, woman – to move and publish was denied. ‘The greater the liberty, the greater the mischief…’ was one observation.

Hill’s work, published 40 years ago, talks about a ‘liberty of printing’; in that, he’s wrong. Courtesy of mobile, of Apple, of video, of Android… we now enjoy an unprecedented ‘liberty of broadcasting‘ Or rather re-broadcasting…

As David Starkey discovered to his cost this week; gone in 37 seconds courtesy of re-broadcast after re-broadcast. ‘The whites have become black….’ No, David. The poor are being the poor.

The challenge, therefore, for the State is how do you deny the ‘revolting masses’ this new-found ability to enjoy a ‘liberty of re-broadcasting’?

You either carry on rolling out inner-city mobile/wireless with the same pace and vision that we’re already doing – and, ergo, wherever two dozen or more protestors gather together in one space at one time, thou shall’t pull over the service – or else pull the plug on the mobile phone networks from above.

Deny them that liberty of ‘re-broadcast’ – just as BART regional transport system did last week in San Francisco when faced with the prospect of mass protest on their platforms.

http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/2011/08/bart-cellphone-blocking-raises-uproar

Coming to a postcode near you, next time there’s a long, hot summer of discontent.

But, as Louise Mensch MP noted, that’s a short term fix; how was order restored long-term in 1660? Was it simply a case of State-sponsored suppression and denial? Or did the State allow and facilitate other factors to ride to their own rescue through the latter half of the 17th Century and beyond?

Growth.

Fens were drained; forests felled; commons enclosed; fields created. Navies were launched, empires were built. Iron furnaces were fired; steam engines were invented. Tin was dug, cotton was milled, people were employed. Or rather tied to a manufacturing machine. ‘A nation of prophets became a nation of shopkeepers…,’ says Hill.

And those that still didn’t like it, left. To the New World; founding new Quaker communities in a New England, far from the madding crowds and the daily impositions of the State.

The teeming masses were tamed and sated by a strategy of growth. They were given hope of a better, brighter future; straws to cling to amidst their every day travails.

That’s the challenge for this Government. The big stick – the evictions, the public reputational ‘floggings’ via Twitter, the denial of the ability to publish – is nothing new; this is 1660 all over again.

But out of that first, great English Revolution, one of the greatest trading nations the world has ever seen was born… and the genie of the revolting masses, offered both stick and carrot, returned quietly to the bottle.

This time, however, I think the genie is not for turning; that the world will, indeed, finally turn upside down.

Thus far I have refrained from re-joining the latest round of debates on the future of Local ‘TV’ for fear of simply repeating myself.

For there will, no doubt, be those who read what follows and say: ‘Oh God, here he goes again…’

So, apologies in advance. You may well have heard this all before.

Perhaps people might be best served to simply read Richard Jones’ piece on Ed Walker’s blog… for here is a man actually *doing* Local TV. From the streets of Saddleworth up… not from the nearest TV transmitter down.

http://www.edwalker.net/blog/2011/08/23/local-tv-richard-jones-on-jeremy-hunt-local-television-plans/comment-page-1/#comment-1486

Cards on table, I’ve long been a big fan of Richard and his works; SaddleworthNews ‘TV’ featured at #1000flowers last autumn; the fact that Richard is now going to collaborate with the media studies students out of Oldham University Campus suggests more than ever that, right now, this is the platform to watch…

http://www.saddleworthnews.com/?p=10473

That if our furture media-wise is collaborative – in both the act of story telling AND ad sales – then here is the next generation of ‘TV’ reporters and ad sales reps starting to populate a digital news space.

That has absolutely nothing to do with the nearest TV transmitter.

Clearly for anyone who actually owns or regulates said transmitter, that’s a nightmare. You’re out of the loop; out of the conversation. The world is moving on without you.

In Jeremy’s world – or rather those within the DCMS/OfCom whose adult lives have been wholly devoted to managing and monetising the content that is broadcast off such industrial platforms – this doesn’t compute.

It frazzles their brain that content can now be re-broadcast to the good people of Saddleworth without their intervention; just as it would the Lancashire mill owners if technology had delivered a platform for the local, hand-loom weavers to return to a cottage industry and free themselves from the slavery of the mill.

I wrote this piece over three and half years ago now…

http://rickwaghorn.co.uk/2008/03/30/time-to-make-our-piece-with-the-world-and-make-halifax-the-centre-piece-of-our-survival/

But, to my mind if not those that serve and advise Jeremy, it is more true today than it ever was then.

‘Just as the weavers that weaved cloth for a living found themselves enslaved to the mills, so those that weaved words for a living found themselves with a print press strapped to their back. Dark, satanic press halls and all that. The cloth barons and the Press barons; peas from the same pod. Both made fortunes from the industrialisation of wool and news.

What I don’t, yet, control is my own means of making a living…

BUT with one difference. In 2008, I saw the world through the eyes of a print journalist, not a broadcast one.

Then, I railed against the notion that ‘We are all journalists now…’ No, we’re all publishers.

But now my view has changed; I’ve become a broader church; I’ve seen the video light.

We’re all broadcasters now; and via Twitter, FaceBook and the communities of followers and likers that we build around our hash-tags etc… we’re more than that – we’re all ‘re-broadcasters’ now.

That if we’ve all been struggling to shake off the yoke that is the paper boy, the print press and the cost of newsprint, now we’re equally shaking off the yoke that is the Winter Hill TV transmitter mast, a TV aerial that points in the wrong direction and the notion that Richard and SaddleworthNews would be remotely interested in paying for his slice of a GI Spectrum.

He – and the kids at that Oldham college – don’t need your toys; don’t need your set-top box, Mr Fancy Whitehall wonk…

What we are chronicling here is, to go back to C Hill, ‘the attempts of various groups of the common people to impose their own solutions to the problems of their time, in opposition to the wishes of their betters…’

In the politest possible way, the good people of Saddleworth are giving the metropolitan elite ‘the bird’… they are proving the likes of David ‘Call me a metropolitan wanker…’ Mitchell wrong.

If the people of Saddleworth didn’t like the solution that Richard and the kids were delivering, they wouldn’t deliver the traffic they are; they wouldn’t be threatening to compete with the circulation stats of the Oldham Evening Chron.

The trick and the challenge, of course, is for Richard and the students to grow in the kind of confidence and belief that they need to match the kind of ad rates the Chron still charges to stain dead trees.

At which point there might, just, start to be the first glimpse of a living. Off a web-based platform that delivers local video into the hands of local people.

Ideally, of course, supported by an ad platform that, likewise, can put both local and national brands in front of local people – and not have to go via an algorithm in California in the process.

The answer isn’t 65 – as I suspect Jeremy knows. The answer might, indeed, be 650. It could even be 6,050.

On thing, however, is for certain. The days of the industrial media barons are coming to a close; we have no more need of their transmitter masts, nor do we have any need of their copper telephone cables or their print presses.

‘We are all free men…’

The world has been levelled. We’re building a-new. From off our kitchen tables, from the bottom up…

Sad, start-up ceo that I am, I decided to ease myself back into work mode by watching our old friend Eric Schmidt take centre stage at Dreamforce 2011 last week where, for an hour, he ran through his current thinking with Marc Benioff of Salesforce.

Those kind people at Google posted up a link on YouTube… complete with the relevant chapter ‘headings’.

The one that clearly leaps out is ‘Mobile, Local, Social’ which comes about 37 mins in to the presentation. It’s well worth a view.

For those who can’t be a*sed, here’s what Eric Schmidt says:

‘What I do know is that the next generation of these leaders will be something involving mobile, local and social…’

This is not, of course, the first time that Eric has seen the future as mobile; thataway lay a great ‘unwashed landscape’ of opportunity… and you can’t help but agree. Unless, of course, you’re BT for whom the future is, clearly, still all about a copper wire.

http://rickwaghorn.co.uk/2010/10/09/the-challenge-is-clear-how-do-we-enable-the-first-1000flowers-to-bloom-in-the-great-unwashed-landscape-that-our-eric-says-is-mobile/

But what is *really* interesting for me is the way that Eric has now added ‘local’ to his fields of future exploration.

‘These are the terms that we use today for the way that people live and work,’ he continues, ie that we live, shop, educate, market, connect and congregate ‘locally’… What’s the news that *really* matters to me? The news that starts at the school gates…

Old stuff. We’ve been here before. Google will now look to work on predictive apps that warn motorists off traffic queues before they build; ‘real-time’ tools that help ease our journey into work, to drop the kids off at school. Local solutions for local issues.

He then talks about PCs; his birth-place; his alma mater. A platform that is now ‘30 to 40-years-old’, he reminds his audience. You could, I guess, add a printing press to that argument; now 400 to 500-years-old.

‘We’ve exhausted that platform [PCs]. There’s a new type of platform which is the quick hits, the quick ways to information and there is a new generation that will see this…’

Newspapers may still be many things to many people, it would need the most die-in-the-wool Newspaper Society propagandist to claim that newspapers, in their print form, offered ‘quick ways to information…’

Alas, Eric doesn’t expound further on either local or social… by ’social’ I would hope that he means collaborative and participatory; that in times of disruption and threat, we turn back to our own, hunker down and help eachother out.

And when applied to the field of journalism, that’s not just in the act of story-telling, but of ad selling.

We help eachother out – both commercially and editorially.

That, as many of you might know, is where we’re off to next; building a collaborative, local advertising exchange that allows others to sell your ad space for you… in an open, transparent and social way.

We even have our own ‘forum’ now… a place where people come to meet, to socialise and do business… http://addiply.invisionzone.com/

I’d like to think that would *fit* within what Eric views as ’social’.

But it is his use of the word ‘local’ that really intrigues and delights.

My Old Man died on Christmas Eve in my finals year at Oxford. He had three great passions – left-of-centre politics, jazz music and The Guardian newspaper. The three, then, sat very easily together.

It’s probably why I tend to care, more than most, as to where *exactly* the old ‘Manchester Guardian’ is now head. And why, more than most, it was a big thing for me to be acting collaboratively with the great and the good of King’s Place when it came to GuardianLocal.

Which, to my mind and, presumeably, to Eric’s, sat so comfortably with these a-changing times.

But then you decided to ‘do America…’

To ask us all to sift through Sarah Palin’s email drawer and to keep our interest alive as the whole Wikileaks saga unfolded; and slowly but surely disappeared up its own, ego-driven a*se as the journalist became part of the story.

GuardianNorwich? You’d have had me for life. Working out whose password belongs to who and what encrypted data format file it should not have opened? Nah, lost me… You’re turning me off. And The Guardian newspaper is in my blood.

And, more worryingly, there is a growing sense that you feel you are beyond reproach; that for anyone to suggest that in abandoning all things Leeds and local to fight for the US ad bucks that the MailOnline seeks with its celeb photo spreads you got it wrong, is for Oliver to be asking for more… You are disconnecting with your core audience.

Way back when, I wrote a piece in which the Titanic featured. The band played on, etc…

http://rickwaghorn.co.uk/2009/03/01/me-mr-rushbridger-and-an-e-mail-about-the-titanic-as-the-world-finally-begins-to-twig-that-big-media-is-going-down-fast/

To this day, I will argue that the safer and warmer waters lie to the south… that’s where, I suspect, the chairman of Google would go; to turn towards those lift-rafts marked ‘Local’ and ‘Social’… where we’re all in it together.

But you’ve decided to steer north; to do North America. To abandon local and – commercially – to forget acting collaboratively; exploring new participatory models of ad selling, just as you empower and all-but expect us all to happily rifle through Ms Palin’s drawers on your behalf.

But, there we go. Decision made. And besides what does Eric Schmidt know that you don’t, eh? You are The Guardian newspaper, after all.

In the autumn of 2007, I travelled to New York at the invite of Jeff Jarvis to speak on the revenue panel at his NewsInnovation Conference at CUNY, the City University of New York.

This autumn I will find myself on another revenue panel – or rather, a ‘Business Models in Community Journalism’ panel – at NewsRewired’s latest gig to be hosted once more by Microsoft. I’m not sure my message has changed in those intervening four years. My belief, however, has only deepened.

This world of ours is, indeed, turning upside down…

It was there, in New York, that I first bumped into David Cohn, of Spot.Us fame… he was helping Jeff interview delegates; helping me find a wifi signal… http://newsinnovation.com/2007/10/17/whats-next-rick-waghorn/

At the time, Addiply was little more than a idea sat in the palm of my hand; if truth be known, it’s not that much more now – albeit we have a major funding round now to our name.

Anyway, so I sat there, the lonely Brit, on a stool between the big ad networks guys – OpenX and their ilk – all of whom, it struck me even then, had a rigid view of the world. One that was from the top floors of their Manhattan offices down, and not from the streets of Batavia or Saddleworth up.

If you – the publisher – had the numbers page-wise, they might deign to offer you access to their network; at which point, you stand there with your hands out and see what CPM crumbs fall off the rich man’s table. Run a Britney Spears blog and let’s talk… Run a rural village blog and they’d look at you and laugh.

If you didn’t have the numbers, you didn’t get to play with their toys. That was their view of the world in 2007. And, I suspect, it won’t have changed. The ‘Guardian Select’ ad network is busily touting the same model to independent publishers in the UK… the Liberal Conspiracy website being one to have signed up to its services.

When I looked, it had a nice, big banner ad for the NHS’ Blood Donor service. I guess that’s where the Blood Donor Service who would want to place their brand; I guesss that’s the kind of appropriate advertising the Liberal Conspiracy were looking for…

Crumbs off an ad man’s table…

Where our two worlds collide are in spaces like what once was GuardianLeeds… where Guardian Ad Network will impose EuroStar ads for London to Paris on the 45,000-odd Guardian minded folk that use to gather monthly in a space enslaved to CPM metrics, as opposed to, say, an Alfa (Leeds) ad popping up from below in a space that was suddenly available to be bought on a weekly or monthly basis….

That sense of advertising imposition – ‘This is the ad we’re giving you, suck it up publisher…’ is important to recognise.

Because as we emerge from our latest rebuild in the next few weeks, we are going to take advertising into the ‘Age Of Participation’ that Emily Bell foresaw in the act of news gathering. Right, let’s extend that idea of participation into the act of selling…

Let’s have a conversation between us all as to who, exactly, is going to find me some ads…

In short, let’s get social.

And that’s a key word here. Social. Collaborative. Participatory. Same thing. Peas from the same 2011 pod.

Why is it a key word? Because it is one of the three, cornerstones that Eric Schmidt identified earlier this summer at DreamForce 2011….

That was the line; quizzed as to what platforms would need to be to thrive – OK, let’s start with survive – in the new eco-system of a transformed world, he said this:

‘What I do know is that the next generation of these leaders will be something involving mobile, local and social…’

And that’s my question for the big ad network boys; those that I sat with at CUNY in 2007; those that I continue to bump into on the pages of GuardianLocal and, more interestingly still, on the untapped pages of local Government websites across the UK.

You can do mobile. Clearly… iAds, AdMob, etc etc… Fine.

Can you do local? If I am the butcher, the baker or the candlestick-maker, can I get a top-down ad network to work for me? How do I fit? Where do I join? I only want to be on that site there… I’m not looking to spend any more than, say, a tenner a week… When you say CPM, explain… Have you got a local sales rep that I could talk to, Mr DART, Mr GuardianSelect?

And again, can you do social? Can we have a conversation about this? Can I enable my neighbours to collaborate with you in filling my ad space? Can I get others to participate in the act of sales – and then reward those that can actually sell in my community with a commission-based return?

How are you being social with me? Either as an advertiser or a publisher? Or are you going to continue to impose your ad model on me?

This is what we’re giving you, publisher… Suck it up…

It’s a great line from Mr Schmidt – one that I constantly ask myself with regard to Addiply. Our weak spot, funnily enough, is mobile. But once we get through this stage, our Ian is an iPad/iPhone app developer by day job.

I’m sure he’ll have a plan.

Local? Yep. Social? Like to think so…

And what about you boys? For all your billions of investment, for all your sharp suits and your long, liquid lunches can you do local? And can you be social?

For those who vaguely follow this blog, the name ‘Starbucks’ has crossed our lips before.

The ceo, Howard Schultz, won a big brownie point in this neck of the woods for smelling something fishy afoot in the commodities market; and pointing fingers at certain masters of our universe who were – he suggested – playing fast and loose with the price of food.

As if….

http://rickwaghorn.co.uk/2011/05/11/howard-schulz-smells-something-fishy-in-the-commodities-market-and-its-not-the-sweet-aroma-of-starbucks-coffee-beans-getting-up-his-nose/

But Starbucks had crossed our path once before – last August, in fact – with the news that across the Pond they were delivering free wifi into their coffee shops, complete with localised channels of content… with Yahoo acting as the local ad provider.

It was a fascinating prospect; because if you can do that within the walls of one coffee shop, why can’t you replicate that model out of one rural community? Or, indeed, one ‘Local TV’ station?

But the fundamental premise was simple: ‘What is the news that really matters to me as a I view the world from my local coffee shop…’

Hence this piece: http://rickwaghorn.co.uk/2010/08/17/if-starbucks-are-building-localised-doorways-and-channels-through-their-coffee-shops-cant-we-do-the-same-into-rural-communities/

Because, clearly, if we start to drop personalised/localised news and content into said spaces, why can’t we do the same for localised ads?

And we don’t have to be that clever about it, either. No fancy ‘location awareness’ algorithms to call on; no ‘check in’ required… you’ve just signed into the wifi box in Starbucks (Oakland, 17th and Main), Starbucks (Midtown, 6th and 47th) or whatever.

The chances are – the majority of time – both your news and advertising experience will be best served if it relates to the community around that neighbourhood. Channel me content and ads that will appeal to my coffee shop ‘audience’…

It may be an ‘audience’ that barely bats an eye before stepping through that ‘doorway’ into the free wifi space beyond; but for a brief moment in time, you know where they are… you know the likely demographic of a Starbucks customer… you can ‘find’ them… now grab their attention….

Read this piece, and it appears to be working…

http://mashable.com/2011/03/23/starbucks-digital-network-partners/

Complete with quote: ‘Brotman seems pleased with SDN’s preliminary results. He points to engagement rates that are now three times higher than what they were prior to the release of SDN. Instead of instantly bouncing off the Starbucks domain after signing on to the Wi-Fi, the customer is more likely to stick around and click into network content.

“We’re seeing conversions across all of our content partners,” says Brotman. “Some [content partners] are doing better than others … but we know the model is working.”

Which is good news. Given they have no just announced free wifi across their 650 coffee shops in the UK…

http://thenextweb.com/uk/2011/10/07/starbucks-rolls-out-free-wifi-in-the-uk/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+TheNextWeb+(The+Next+Web+All+Stories)

Now, if I were any one of the major regional newspaper groups, I would be beating a path to the door of Starbucks to offer my, say, TrinityMirror (Cardiff) content for the ‘portal’ that has just opened up every time I open up my lap-top in a Cardiff Starbucks.

It’s a whole new way of finding your audience; that doesn’t involve them buying a copy of the local newspaper from the grizzled old vendor stood outside.

And, of course, I’m biased.

Because there’s 650 ‘local’ outlets that are crying out for a ‘bottom up’ ad network to provide the chance for local businesses to place their message into that space.

We’ve always muttered on about how, at its simplest, Addiply is merely replicating the ‘postcard in the window of your local Post Office…’ model. We can happily re-nose that into the window of your local Starbucks.

So, I think there’s a conversation that ought to be had there.

There is, however, a final point. And another reason why Starbucks – wittingly or not – deserve a round of applause.

News of their free wifi move was announced via Twitter. That suggests they are more of a ’social’ company than most.

And that’s important. Because increasingly I find myself viewing winning platforms through the eyes of Eric Schmidt and his belief that the winners will be ‘mobile, social and local…’
In offering up free wifi to go with your mid-morning latte, I think Starbucks are heading firmly in the right direction. And if their content model can be replicated on this side of the Atlantic, a whole new world of opportunity could present itself…

Particularly, I guess, if you’re BT Vision. Which has always struck me as something of a contradiction in terms… But if they ‘get’ this, as much as Sky ‘get’ what The Cloud and Wetherspoon boozers can do for them, then maybe I need to amend my thinking.

Both, however, could benefit from a little localised, ‘bottom up’ ad thinking. Or, at least, in my humble opinion…