Cam Barrett, ex of Clarke, now consulting to Kerry, starts. At Clarke, he built an infrastructure for online community. Everyone got to have their own voice and point of view.
Gary Kebbel, News Director for AOL, says that only online news is growing. It's not just the medium. It's the audience. [We are not an audience!] That's why at AOL we've created an election site that hits all the audiences. We're most proud of our "SideShow" page, a partnership with Comedy Central, the Onion, Bill Mahr and others. He reads some cynical definitions from The Onion. It's got audio essays.
Vaughn Ververs is the editor of Hotline (a for-pay offering from The National Journal). He says some stuff about how he uses lots from the Internet but doesn't trust everything. E.g., he doesn't trust Drudge.
Stirling Newberry says that the Net is becoming mainstream. It's like TV in 1952: it can break stories but not drive the discussion. And pay attention to the rhythm of the news cycle. Push messages out from your center — your community.
Q: How do you find that influential center?
A: Technorati.com and other such sites.
Morra Aarons, moderator and director of Internet Communications, asks "Is it our message?" but the audience seems to think, yeah, it is our message.
Q: [Me] You're all using the language of broadcasting: consumers, audiences, messages. Is it possible that that vocabulary is getting in the way?
Stirling: Yes. Cam, what do you think?
Cam: Yes. At Clarke, we built a community.
Gary: What sort of terms could we use instead?
Me [snottily, sorry] The marketing vocaabulary comes from the industrial revolution and the military. We don't need a specialized vocabulary because we have ordinary language to talk about who we like talking with.
Stirling: We do have a technical vocabulary: "Flaming," for example.
Q: How do you pitch to an Internet news source?
Cam: Don't pitch. Let them come to you.
Q: How do they find you?
Cam: Google, industry news partners...
Gary: I use the word "community" instead of "blog" because communities are bigger things. Blogs are just another word for home pages.
Q: How do we create news?
Morra: Personally, I still believe in traditional PR.
Cam: One of the most successful ways to get it done is to have the community talking about your news.
Hotline: The traditional methods are still the best. Call the reporters.
Stirling: Create a story and people will cover it. [My advice: Be interesting.]
I wanted to get down to the unspoken issue on this panel, which Dave and I fundamentally agree on: namely, that the internet is where the active and participatory part of our Democracy has moved - largely fleeing the increasingly souless and controlled "mass media".
It is more interesting because the people in the internet sphere are being more interesting. They don't want to be pushed, and they don't want to be asleep most of the time, only to be aroused by intense shouting about who is in favor of terrorists blowing up the world and shipping our jobs to China, as opposed to being in favor of mom and apple pie.
But to make this society work requires - well, work. The old one doesn't really work - because pyramids get more and more expensive to scale as they get bigger and heavier.
It isn't that we don't have a special vocabulary - it is that a peer-to-peer universe is, fundamentally, different. Yes, it has a "backbone", and centers of activity. Yes, some people are more interesting and important - but it isn't because of their control of a hierarchy or their control of a position, but because they make things that are useful - words, code, tools, ideas, art work - to others.
That is the fundamental difference between the old message and the new message. New message is, not because it is useful to the people who send it out, but because it is useful to the people who seek it out.
Which makes all the difference in the world.
Posted by Stirling Newberry on March 22, 2004 01:25 PM | Permalink to Comment