EVERLASTING NOW

I’m suddenly surrounded by a gaggle of “recovering reporters.” At least that’s what they call themselves these days, and I’m beginning to feel at home (for the first time in a long time). For years I’ve been imploring my clients to fundamentally reorganize and set themselves up as their own version of a publishing organization. Meanwhile, the publishing industry crumbled around us. It appears this predisposition is now channeling its way by virtue of circumstance into my own experience. A bunch of forty-something guys are now in and out of my office on a regular basis. They use bigger words than I do, spout random philosophy on the fly, and write constantly… as if in the air, just by talking to each other, before the typing begins.

These are the people. The ones who fell out of the old machine and needed to find homes in a new one. We haven’t arranged them fully just yet, but I can feel it forming around me. I couldn’t be happier. I am after all, a recovering English major myself.

These outstanding minds are finding their way into new situations all over the place, not just in my business. They’re too smart not to. And the business “leaders” with their upside-down financial models are losing these intellectual capitalists in droves. And losing their shirts in the process. I’m told Tribune and others are all but done, short of full liquidation, which’ll be a fall-out that washes across us all in what will seem to be fear and upset, but more accurately a rebirth.

One brilliant “recovering reporter” asked me the other day, “What happens when the AP goes under?” I said I didn’t know and didn’t understand why it would. Better understanding his point, that in the not-too-distant-future there wouldn’t be anyone ready and able to buy legitimate content (newspapers and other bankrupt patrons), it began to become clear. So i rejoined his question. “The internet shrinks, that’s what happens,” he finished.

No fodder for bloggers to riff on. Pundits without fuel for their complaints. And, as I heard recently in a conference for media publishers, a halcyon time for corruption in government. Bloggers and Twitterers and Facebookers are pundits in an ever-expanding economy of opinion, which O would have to predict is the largest bubble we haven’t seen yet. And no one’s really addressing it because we so love to hear ourselves talk. It’s freedom for the “common man,” right, Ashton?

The last papers are trying to organize with each other in order to begin charging for their content online, unraveling one of the most ridiculous business models ever rushed into online: free content for everyone! Yay! And 40% margins demanded by shareholders. That didn’t work, but maybe it was just them. Well, except for the music industry’s attempt to stop the free flow of music earlier on. Oh, and TV trying to control channel distribution… and, well, radio and movies and magazines and books… oh my.

The Internet, the Great Leveler, continues to pull business models down. Fighting it, we generate fad-based businesses instead (Facebook and Twitter) and we continue to commit the same sins we did in 1999/2000, minus the foosball tables and in-house baristas. Only ten years later, here we are still running at falsely contrived models like YouTube (losing money by the bucket-load), Facebook (continuing to eat VC cash, most recently contributed by a Russian contingent), Twitter (still “figuring out its business model” while turning away buckets of cash from its false-economy cousin), and the list goes on.

Meanwhile, those who actually produce wander the planet in search of a safe place to ply their trade.

Get ready for a return to news guilds, bands of not-for-profit investigative reporting organizations, a total fragmentation of what we once knew as the newspaper/publishing/media industries. And keep an eye out for the smartest new models rising, like Monocle (www.monocle.com). There is hope. We’ll just have to be a little patient. Or write our way to our own new destiny.