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The Organization Mindset

Because of this prevailing state, MSM, regardless of their traditional core-competencies, must transform from television and radio stations, newspapers and magazines to a true media company. Only through fully leveraging the talents, skills and expertise of its staff can it not only withstand the economic pressures currently endured, but ultimately reaffirm itself as the definitive source for in-depth, enterprising, local news, opinion and information. This organization must recognize that the core service provided is not in its distribution channel, but rather in its news production.

Change needs to be embraced and initiated by top-level executives and communicated company-wide through education, enthusiasm and assurances. “Evangelists” must constantly communicate that this is not simply semantics but rather a core philosophy at the heart of the organization and that alternative distribution channels have unique benefits not only for the brand but for the employee as well:

• Television, Radio - Passive audience and core revenue stream
• Print - Detail oriented audience and core revenue stream
• Web - Engaged, community oriented audience with positive trending revenue growth
• Mobile - Service oriented audience with positive trending revenue growth

Monday: The tail wagging the dog

The prevailing mindset of those embedded within mainstream media (MSM) is one of a deteriorating and declining industry riddled with lay-offs and steadfast revenue-streams that have gone south. The Newspaper Association of America reported in March 2008 that, in 2007, the industry had its sharpest drop in advertising revenue of 9.4 percent. This attitude is so pervasive and so discouraging that it reinforces itself into a seemingly irreparable state of morale decline.

Terry Heaton, senior vice president of AR&D’s Media 2.0 arm which covers everything from the internet to mobile devices, makes an astute observation on his PoMo Blog paralleling this debilitating attitude permeating most MSM newsrooms to Elisabeth Kubler-Ross‘ five stages of grieving:

1. Denial
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Acceptance

The good news is that most newsrooms are depressed having recognized that the industry has fundamentally changed, that the internet may be a viable focus of anger but unlikely to result in anything, nor will short term compromises, band-aids or negotiations. The nostalgic notion of the traditional newsroom is gone with those left standing faced with the challenge of accepting and adapting.

Friday: The organizational mindset

Throughly geek interest makes up the top five whether its the new line of LCDs from Toshiba that come standard with ethernet and DVR capabilities, Julia Allison dressed for Halloween, HP’s Mini-Note is available on Amazon, or Julia Allison.  Here are a few of the other influential articles from the day:

1. HP 2133 Mini-Note PC on sale now
   
2. Toshiba’s 10 new REGZA LCDs: 3x Ethernet,…
   
3. Bill Maher: New Rule: More Material, Girl
   
4. TUAW first look: Papaya personal filesharing
   
5. Owen Thomas ruins Julia Allison for the rest of…

Given the success of Scrabulous, its not unexpected that Rafat Ali topped the top ten with his article on RealNetworks quietly rolling out “Scrabble by Mattel” onto Facebook after professing a neutral position in the copyright controversy.  Here are a few of the influential articles from the day:

1. RealNetworks Doesn’t Buy Scrabulous; Launches…
2. DimDim: A good, free, and open source Webex…
3. Interactive Agency Special Ops Media Sold To…
4. MTI Micro trumpets fuel cells for mobile…
5. More details on Acer’s Eee PC-competing laptops…

Google has officially launched their Google App Engine for full-stack, automatically scalable, hosted web application platform as of 9pm PST last night. The architecture offered consists of Python application servers, BigTable database access, and GFS distributed data file servers.

Obviously, this service is intended to go toe-to-toe with the Amazon suite of web services; more specifically S3 for data storage, EC2 for virtual servers, and their SimpleDB for database access.

Robert Scoble and Mike Arrington were at the event last night. Scoble posted several videos from the event. Arrington, as always, expatiates on the functionality, usage and monitoring of the service. Google also posted their official video from their announcement as well as a demonstration video.

From Google:

Run your web applications on Google’s infrastructure.
Google App Engine enables you to build web applications on the same scalable systems that power Google applications.

• No assembly required.
  Google App Engine provides a fully-integrated application environment.
• It’s easy to scale.
  Google App Engine makes it easy to build scalable applications that grow from one user to millions of users without infrastructure headaches.
• It’s free to get started.
  Every Google App Engine application can use up to 500MB of persistent storage and enough bandwidth and CPU for 5 million monthly page views.

The real question for me is whether this will truly be for business and enterprise level applications or for the small, supplemental apps developed on a tight deadline.