Essays

Underestimating the Audience

June 12, 2009 -- The debate about how we, as a culture, are going to fund journalism in the future is lacking discussion about certain assumptions, core beliefs about journalism that simply must be challenged, if we are to truly find our footing in a networked and distributed media world....

The Web's Widening Stream

May 22, 2009 -- Media companies attempting to reinvent themselves in the face of disruptive innovations must feel like they're playing cards with a 5-year old who keeps changing the rules to avoid losing. How we wish the bloody thing would just sit still for a minute, so that we...

Is the Mainstream Winning

April 25, 2009 -- In the Marketing Warfare world of Ries and Trout, there is a "rule" that the market leader can crush the efforts of all others, if it is paying attention and chooses to do so. So powerful is this concept that, in a period of challenge, market...

Using Free to Sell Paid

March 30, 2009 -- There is a misconception in the world of journalism that news has only one definition — one set of rules and guidelines — and that the demand for news, therefore, is limited to what those rules and guidelines can produce. Moreover, there exists an ancillary misconception...

We Don't Need No Stage!

February 23, 2009 -- As a child growing up in Michigan in the 1950s, our telephone was connected to elaborate circuitry known as switchboards. The "operator" connected circuits as calls were made, and the technology to automate all that was just coming into being. These operators were often featured in...

Advertising Loses its Balance

February 16, 2009 -- In his brilliant speech at the 2007 Supernova conference, former McKinsey and now Deloitte and Touche business guru John Hagel posed fourteen unanswered questions about business in the age of digital connectivity and information technology. The first was highly provocative: "What if there is no equilibrium?"...

Protecting the Stage

January 31, 2009 -- My two brothers and I played in a bluegrass band as teenagers in the early 1960s (that's me on the right with the banjo). We played at various coffeehouses, hootenannies, and gatherings around the state of Michigan. I loved the stage, and, rather than fearing the...

2009: The Great Beginning

December 15, 2008 -- "Some of the worst things in my life never happened" is the lament of those whose imagination often leads to the elevation of life's molehills into mountains. Some people were born with the innate ability to get ahead of themselves, and while this has fueled creative...

Embracing the Disruption

December 1, 2008 -- When Antonio Perez took over as CEO of Eastman Kodak in 2003, it must have been a little like taking the wheel on the bridge of the Titanic. What has happened since is a story that will be told in business schools for many years to...

The First Law of Social Media

November 28, 2008 -- In the new HBO hit series True Blood, we're introduced into the fantasy world of vampires in Louisiana. It's a fun series, because the books upon which it is based give us a world where vampires have just won civil rights. Conflict is everywhere, and author...

Journalism's New Values

November 14, 2008 -- "Time is the new currency," Bob Jeffrey, CEO of J. Walter Thompson, noted in 2004, and it's no wonder. The amount of leisure time the average working American has is much less than that of previous generations. According to Roper, the average American worker had 26...

The Back End's the Thing

November 10, 2008 -- In David Weinberger's fascinating book, Everything Is Miscellaneous , he writes that the ability to sort information "on the way out" of a website beats sorting "on the way in," and that this is a core competency of the Web. This back door approach to organization...

Your Personal Brand

October 6, 2008 -- One of my large-market televisions station clients made an interesting discovery while developing a unique hyperlocal news and information portal covering the community they served. The station employed people to probe each community and make contacts to establish themselves in these, often small, suburbs. Along the...

Personal Walled Gardens

September 20, 2008 -- In Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden, Archibald Craven sealed up his wife's walled garden after her death and hid away the key. Being inside was too painful, for the memories of his wife were too difficult to bear. To Mary Lennox, however, it was a...

Failure at the Top

July 31, 2008 -- In his famous 1960 paper for the Harvard Business Review, Marketing Myopia , Theodore Levitt first articulated the idea that many business failures stem from an inability to recognize what business they're actually in. The paper first articulated the oft-repeated claim that if railroads had understood...

The Cost of Interaction

May 23, 2008 -- COST OF INTERACTION: A form of web currency — the price users are required to pay to view, use, consume or interact with web content. In the business world, the biggest number on the expense side of the ledger is generally...

A Reasonable View of Tomorrow

April 25, 2008 -- As the disruption to the mass media business models of traditional media becomes more acute, more and more veteran journalists are beginning to ask how the business of news will be funded. Of course, this question comes from a belief that professional news — that which...

The Problem With Web Advertising

April 20, 2008 -- Is it not self-evident that every human being has an inalienable right to avoid unwanted messages? This is a profound question for a culture that has evolved to become the world's salesman, for how does one sell without a perceived inalienable right to bombard others with...

It's Always About the Money

March 16, 2008 -- When the Internet bubble burst early in the new millennium, many smart people learned the harshest of all business lessons: when the money's gone, there is no business. Great ideas aren't self-sustaining, and when the investors decide they've given enough, it's over, unless you can actually...

The Public Journal

January 29, 2008 -- Slowly but surely the path that leads to journalism's future is increasingly one of participation by the people formerly known as the audience. The extent to which the public will be a part of journalism tomorrow is often missed by those who continue the fight to...

It's Not the Same Game

January 8, 2008 - During the Vietnam War, I was stationed at a long-range navigation base in the Philippines with 15 other guys. Our beacon was used by the B-52s to guide them as they bombed North Vietnam. It was considered "isolated duty," and we had a lot of free...

2008: Embracing the (Real) Web

December 28, 2007 -- We got our first television set in 1952 when I was six years old. I had a kidney disease and was bedridden, so the new invention became my friend. Radio held me in its grip with super heroes and Western dramas, but TV made me smile....

The Ultimate Question

December 3, 2007 -- There's a lasting prophecy among humans in the West that technology will one day enslave humankind, and this has birthed myth and science fiction over the centuries. The whole "Terminator" series is based on the premise that machines have taken over the world, so what's left...

News is a Process, Not a Finished Product

November 9, 2007 -- Like everybody my age, I remember where I was when President Kennedy was assassinated. I remember the crushing loss and how it impacted everybody I knew. My parents cried, and so did I. Young people today can read about it in the history books, but you...

Postmodernism's Most Important Gift

October 30, 2007 -- While the academic and religious worlds continue to shake self-serving fingers at what they view as the absurdities of postmodernism (it is absurd to the linear, rational mind), the cultural shift just chugs along. Like an old steam engine with its cowcatcher pushing aside obstacles that...

Google Lifts Only Google

October 8, 2007 -- The aphorism "a rising tide lifts all boats" was made popular by John F. Kennedy when defending his tax cuts to fellow Democrats. His colleagues didn't like the fact that the cuts included the wealthy. In a June 1963 speech, Kennedy said, "As they say on...

Creating Spectrum Within Spectrum

September 20, 2007 -- Mine was the last generation to have known the awe and wonder of downtown, that centralized beehive of retail and business activity in the community. There was no Wal-Mart when I grew up in the 1950s in Grand Rapids, Michigan. There were no malls, at least...

Understanding the Yahoo! Consortium

August 28, 2007 -- The travails of the newspaper industry in the age of the Internet are well-documented, and few would argue that these are dangerous times for those who've made their living via the printing press. What happens to the print industry is of vital importance to broadcasters, because...

News as a Commodity

August 13, 2007 -- In the world of business economics, few words frighten the market leader like "commoditization" or "commodification." In plain English, this means that the market for a unique, branded product that the leader produces is transformed into one that's based purely on price. It takes time, and...

The Future is Niche Media

July 2, 2007 -- I grew up in a little house in a working class neighborhood of Grand Rapids, Michigan. The C&O railroad tracks ran on the other side of a field that bordered our backyard and created a nice dividing line between neighborhoods. They went to a different school...

To Brand or Not to Brand

April 24, 2007 -- My daughter graduates from college next month with a degree in marketing and is rightly asking the question, "What do I do now?" Marketing is a catch-all term these days that includes lots of careers, but mostly, it's about selling. The internet is impacting selling in...

Links, The Currency of the Machine

March 19, 2007 -- Long ago on some distant shore, our ancestors looked up at the night sky and felt two contrasting emotions. The awe and majesty of the heavens awakened a sense of insignificance and aloneness, the kind that comes when confronted with the magnitude of life itself. As...

Voyeurism: Journalism's 21st Century Crisis

In his book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey makes a remarkable observation about life: "You can't talk your way out of something you behaved your way into." This is the single most important problem facing journalism in the early part of this century, for we've...

The Local Web

January 22, 2007 -- In the early days of television, the networks needed affiliates in local communities in order to establish scale for their programs and their advertisers. Back then, the networks paid handsomely for this, so the owners of local stations got a huge chunk of their revenue from...

2007: The Battle for Local Supremacy

December 13, 2006 -- 2006 was a year that media historians will view as the tipping point for all media companies in the face of powerful disruptive innovations that are pulling the rug out from under both the theories and practices of mass media and mass marketing. From the music...

Right Brain Renaissance

November 9, 2006 -- What will history call the postmodern age, and what events will it judge as watershed on the road we now travel? The counterculture movement of the 60s? The fall of the Berlin Wall? The modern age essentially began with the "Enlightenment" (including the Age of...

Local Television's Perfect Storm

September 18, 2006 -- There are an abundance of dates and events that observers use to mark the beginning of the digital age, but for the media industry, it began in the New Jersey labs of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study in 1954, when a small group of engineers and...

The Changing Face(s) of Local News

August 23, 2006 -- In the early days of television news, the people who worked in the industry came out of radio or newspapers. I cut my teeth in the business at WTMJ-TV in Milwaukee, a combination radio-TV operation owned by the Milwaukee Journal. That original newsroom was a cast...

The Transparency Marketplace

August 7, 2006 -- When the flamboyant American Basketball Association (ABA) merged with the National Basketball Association in 1976, the deal brought with it more than new teams in new cities. The ABA was a running, gunning and highly entertaining form of professional basketball, so the merger brought with it...

Selling Against Ourselves

June 26, 2006 -- Rounding upwards has been around since people first started estimating. When I hung around with evangelical Christian ministries, we used to call it "evangelically speaking." When standing in front of 501 people, the evangelist would always say, "Looks like we've got nearly a thousand people here...

The On-Demand Trap

May 26, 2006 -- Let's pay a visit to the home of Mr. and Mrs. Media and their spoiled two-year old, Demand. This day is like most other days in the Media home with little Demand wanting what he wants when he wants it. In stereotypical parenting fashion, Mr. Media...

The Real Threat to Local Broadcasting

April 26, 2006 -- Fresh from an encouraging meeting of the Television Bureau of Advertising in New York, it's pretty clear that broadcasters are increasingly beginning to see the light about some of the disruptions that are destroying their business model. In session after session, attendees heard stories of a...

10 Days That Unexpectedly Changed Me

April 16, 2006 -- I'm thoroughly enjoying the History Channel's new series, 10 Days That Unexpectedly Changed America. The History Channel is one of those original niche channels that everybody scoffed at back when cable was in its infancy, but their content keeps getting better and better. And the more...

Investing in a Local Future

March 27, 2006 -- One of the basics of business history is to start small and scale upwards. All of the great franchisers of the late 20th Century practiced this. The name of the game was turning a profit in one community before moving on to others. The speed with...

New Metrics and Principles

March 5, 2006 -- On a recent flight from Nashville to Los Angeles, I had the misfortune of sitting near a two year old boy who was traveling with his father. The boy was completely out-of-control and spent most of his waking hours screaming "no" or "mine" and carrying on...

The Ammunition Business

February 2, 2006 -- Many years ago, I saw a 30-minute drama about a slick televangelist who had an encounter with an angel in his dressing room. On the air, he railed against "the homosexuals" and "the abortionists," but the angel demanded that he "feed my sheep." "But that's...

The Economy of Unbundled Advertising

January 3, 2006 -- My two brothers and I grew up in a small, two-bedroom bungalow in Grand Rapids, Michigan. We didn't have much, and back in the 1950s, there wasn't much on television to remind us of that. TV families always seemed to have enough, but abundance wasn't the...

2006: The Unbundled Awakening

December 22, 2005 -- This was a difficult and troubling year for the broadcasting industry, as a confluence of challenging but predictable disruptions continued to eat away at the industry's value propositions. The stock value of most media companies fell precipitously, with investors sending a clear message of doubt about...

Trusting the Audience and the Readers

November 28, 2005 -- One of the fundamental beliefs of the Judeo-Christian experience is the inherently sinful nature of humankind. Since I grew up in a Calvinist home, this was hammered into us around-the-clock. Calvinism is an extreme form of legalistic Christianity, where good behavior was the impossible goal of...

The Unbundled Newsroom

November 9, 2005 -- My father worked in a furniture factory to support his family in the 1950s and early 1960s. I visited the place once as a child, but I didn't pay much attention to what he did, which was to stand in the same place for eight hours...

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Terry Heaton's Essays