All the talk about newspapers and other publishers charging for digital content is growing ever more tiresome. We’re left breathlessly waiting for the implementation of pay walls, as if their success means salvation for the content industry. Only it doesn’t. If these publications can retain a substantial portion of their audience (a big if), it may mean some incremental revenue, but anyone who has ever modeled a subscription scenario knows that’s the best to hope for. Survival will depend on what it always has – connecting businesses with consumers. Whether transactional or branding, we call it advertising. The paywall discussion is one we need to have, but how to make advertising pay is the key question for online content.

In a recent New York Times article on Apple’s new iAds mobile advertising system, Steve Jobs delivered an interesting quote:

‘Search is not where it’s at’ on phones, he said. ‘People are not searching on a mobile device like they are on the desktop.’

A Google spokesman responded with some stats about the growth of mobile search, none of which really addressed the point. Intuitively Jobs seems to be correct so, if he is, what are the implications?

In the last website redesign I did, we were keenly aware that Google had become the web’s homepage and that users dipped into the interior of our site for a story and then backed out to a search results page. This means that we could no longer count on our audience entering the site from our homepage and had to try to keep search engine visitors by some means found on interior pages. Search engines are now homepages and site homepages are becoming increasingly marginalized.

Now look at mobile. People don’t use search engines the same way. On a smart phone they go to an app that will solve their current problem. Many of these apps, of course, are search based, but that search is typically controlled within the app. Some examples are Yelp, Siri, Fandango, and Shazam – very useful search based apps, but controlled. On mobile devices, and now the iPad, product and brand are regaining the value they once had, but which was stripped away by search engines. For many pundits, this is cause for great consternation, but they forget one important thing – people want to be led.

People want to be led for a variety of reasons – lack of expertise, time prioritization, timidity, ignorance  – but we all sooner or later reach the point where we think, “Good heavens, just get me to the good stuff!” We’ve been through the phase where to avoid being told, “You just don’t get it,” everyone had to praise the chaos of crowd sourced news, RSS readers, and open source everything. In each of these cases, and many others, companies emerged to make sense of the chaos and bring people products and information they didn’t have to create or curate themselves. To lead users to the good stuff. Crowd sourced information and design, user generated content, and open source software will continue to be critically important components of our world, but there is also room for products that do more of the work for us. For any given product or service, most users don’t have the desire or skills to be creators, leaving the largest market open to those brands who are able to lead people to the good stuff. People who want this leadership aren’t losers who “don’t get it,” they simply have different priorities. Maybe the guy who works all day on open source code just can’t be bothered to cull the web for his favorite RSS feeds so he just goes to NYT.com for his news.

So back to mobile. Apple understands that people want to be led. Their closed systems bother me, but I still buy their products, and so do a lot of people so it’s awfully hard to criticize their strategy. For the rest of us, this is an opportunity to create and leverage brands in the digital world. With that comes the necessity of building a great product, but the potential is there. To be sure, this isn’t a reversion to some glorious time in the past, it’s simply another evolution of our world. We don’t know exactly how it will play out, and we know it will continue to evolve, but right now, there is an opportunity to be seized.

Crowdsourcing news from citizen journalists is so old-hat now that talking about it is boring. It’s still not easy to do, or efficiently done, but it’s been discussed so often that it’s become a cliche. Mother Jones, though, is crowdsourcing with a twist – the publication is using professional journalists. MoJo has decided that “climate change is the most important story of our time,” but is being covered “piecemeal” and therefore ineffectively. To rectify that problem, it’s “forging a collaboration with a range of news organizations—magazines, online news sites, nonprofit reporting shops, multimedia operations—because we each have different strengths, but working together we can cover this story better than any of us could on our own.” This initiative has resulted in some good press about this new kind of crowdsourcing. But I think focusing on professional crowdsourcing misses the really interesting aspect of the move – it’s more evidence of the rise of advocacy journalism.

Today I came across a story in Slate by Seth Stevenson wondering if it’s smart to put your CEO in your ad campaign. An earnest Stevenson gets quite analytical over the question, but I could’ve saved him some time. The answer is, For the love of God, no!

So maybe this is one of my pet peeves, but unless you’re Frank Perdue, your CEO starring spot is awful. What these ads do is remind people how soft and flabby, and country club looking, corporate CEOs are. And how if they’re not wearing suits, they’re wearing suits with no ties (a truly ridiculous look if there ever was one). They’re usually horrible actors giving you the feeling you’re driving by a wreck on the side of the road that you just can’t look away from. When I see these ads, I can’t help but act out the marketing meeting in which it was decided that the CEO should star: “Yeah boss, that’s a great idea! You’d be great in that ad!”

One of the CEO ads Stevenson analyzes is the GM spot starring CEO Ed Whitacre. While admitting that Whitacre is “plainspoken, unapologetically uncharismatic,” he decides that “The ad is akin to a calm retail manager emerging from the back of the store to soothe a frustrated customer.” I guess, if the retail store is the Lansing Country Club gift shop. I have no idea what he’s saying because I can’t take my eyes off every little tick and eccentricity that Whitacre exhibits. The way his lips move when he talks, the way he carries his arms when he walks, and those odd glasses. Why does he snap his fingers once during his walk through the set? He can’t possibly be so strange in real life, can he?

Here in San Diego, my old employer, the Union-Tribune, is using the new publisher in radio ads. Yup, I’m holding my breath for the TV version!

(In case you missed it, here’s the GM spot.)

Have you ever tried suggesting, in a group setting, that you’re not sure all of those doomsday climate models are precisely accurate? Let me give you a tip – don’t! You’ll be viewed as a doubter, a naysayer, a heretic. People will wonder if you’re an oil company employee or if you’re just stupid, because you must be one or the other. Global Warming has become a religion, a religion which does not allow questions, discussion, or inquiry. To question one aspect is to question everything. And now, Net Neutrality is in danger of becoming one too.

Dylan F. Tweney just published an article on Wired.com suggesting that Net Neutrality may not be all it’s cracked up to be and will likely result in the end of all-you-can-eat Internet access. I’ll leave it to you to read his arguments (and they are persuasive), and will instead point out the comments following the article. Some quotes:

• “What world are you living in?”
• “I’m starting to wonder if Wired has a telecom shill here..”
• “THE WAR IS ON FOR THE WEB!!!!!! HERE COMES ANOTHER REVOLUTION.”
• “So which ISP paid you to write it?”
• “So was it Comcast or Verizon who paid you to post this article? Maybe both?”
• “Nice snow job.”
• “This is such a great example of a paid article! I love it!”
• “THIS ARTICLE IS BUNK!”
• “ROTFL!! this article is biased…. right winger…”
• “Thou hast beshamed thy family name and homeland; begone from us henceforth and dwindle in the land of Cowardly Poopybutts whence thou dost belong-ed! Sink me!”

You get the idea. While not true of every hostile commenter, many start with the assumption that Tweney couldn’t possibly actually believe what he wrote, or that he did some research and came to his conclusions, but that he must be in the pay of some nefarious non-believing forces.

My aim here isn’t to argue against government imposed “net neutrality,” but rather to point out that we are verging on religion. Once we have a religion, discussion, analysis, and inquiry stop, and are replaced with blind obedience. For people who are advocating a “free and open Internet,” their minds are closing rapidly.

It seems to me that lately, the prescriptions for the future of news issued frequently by Internet celebrity (and not so celebrated) journalists and pundits have been including items on “truth.” Most recently, Dan Gillmor, in “Eleven Things I’d Do If I Ran a News Organization,” said,

6. We would refuse to do stenography and call it journalism. If one faction or party to a dispute is lying, we would say so, with the accompanying evidence. If we learned that a significant number of people in our community believed a lie about an important person or issue, we would make it part of an ongoing mission to help them understand the truth.

Truth has been part of journalism’s code of ethics since the beginnings of “scientific journalism” in 1923, when the American Society of Newspaper Editors issued its Canons of Journalism which included the statement, “News reports should be free from opinion or bias of any kind.” The ethics code of the Society of Professional Journalists begins with, “Seek Truth and Report It.”

The reality, however, is stated in a post on 10,000 Words called “10 Ugly Truths About Journalism“:

5. Journalists are biased
There is no such thing as unbiased…it is humanly impossible. While journalists often strive to make sure their stories are as unbiased as possible, many cover particular subjects or issues because they feel particularly strong about them.

Yes, it is humanly impossible to be unbiased. Journalists, by what they cover, how they report what they do cover, and what they include and ignore, bring bias into their reporting. That’s just the way it is. Most of those who today clamor for “truth in reporting,” really mean “my truth in reporting.” Perhaps the most obvious example of this is a post by Mark Adams on American Street which includes the statement:

From my view the FOXization of the media is destroying it’s credibility and function as a true check on government power — the role that earns the press the moniker Fourth Estate.

Fox’s claim to be “Fair and Balanced” may be over the top, but Adams destroys his own credibility when he blames Fox for destroying the media’s ability to act as a check on government power. If Fox doesn’t challenge this administration, who does?

All of which should make one wonder if a media that tries, or claims, to be unbiased is even desirable? When an editor wishes his reporter hadn’t donated to a political candidate because it affects his credibility, isn’t that just a tad disingenuous? Whether or not he donates, his beliefs are unchanged. The transparency of the donation actually improves his credibility because now his readers know from what philosophical base he writes.

Journalists will never regain their lost credibility until they stop trying to convince the public that reporting can be unbiased. The public knows better. Honest reporting, though, is possible and journalists need to stop pretending they’re unbiased and start convincing us of their honesty.

As networks and studios put more content online, media analysts, Wall Street, and the companies themselves are grappling with the nasty reality that is killing newspapers – you can’t make as much money online as you could from your legacy distribution channels. Credit Suisse’s Spencer Wang says that “a broadcast show makes at least 64% less online than it does on TV and a cable show about 36% less.” (Ratios, by the way, that newspapers would die for.) The solution looks simple – charge viewers or show more ads – but it never really is. As is often the case, the networks biggest obstacle to embracing the future is their biggest partner from the past – cable operators.

As long as people are paying cable operators for entertainment on their TVs, they’re not going to “double-pay” for it online. Although I don’t have the research, my guess is that a large segment of the online audience goes online to time-shift. If that’s the case, if those people were charged to view online they would pay twice for the content – once to their cable operator and once to the online site. That’s not going to happen. Movies may be a different story since viewing them online is less about time-shifting and more about access, but payment there will require the ability to view the content on a larger screen, a process already in motion.

Networks should be partnering with companies working to bring a high quality video experience from the Internet to TV screens. These companies should be the large cable MSOs but, like newspapers before them, they no doubt fear the cannibalization of their legacy business from the Internet.  When consumers can see the shows they want online, output to their TV screens, with a variety that rivals cable, they will be ready to drop cable and pay for online content. That means the networks new best friends should be the phone companies or, better yet, the power companies – anyone who can provide Internet access as a cheap utility.

Of course, even when viewers are paying for online entertainment, the problem isn’t solved. This subscription revenue (if it even is subscription) will be less than what networks currently earn since the audience will no longer be forced to pay for set network lineups. The market will be brutal on marginal shows and networks as viewers only pay for what they want to see. Advertising will continue to be a critical component, but it’s hard to imagine it looking like it does today.

I just don’t understand why Yahoo! is taking so much criticism for it’s search deal with Microsoft. OK, so there were no “boatloads of money,” but does the share price decline mean that Yahoo!’s price had those boatloads baked into it? I guess so, which means that investors actually believed that money would appear – a pretty lonely position.

Moving beyond the upfront payment issue, let’s think about the wisdom of the rest of the deal. In the minds of consumers at least, Yahoo! had long since stopped being a player in search. Yahoo! search is used by people who are on one of the company’s content sites and happen to have the need to search. They’re already there, so why not use the easy to reach search box? But the point is, users are on Yahoo!’s site for the content, not the search. We may want to look back to Yahoo!’s start as a search engine and lament the loss of one of the industry’s former leaders, but that was then, this is now. And now Yahoo! is a content company that aggregates audiences for advertisers.

As a content company, Yahoo! had no business trying to match technology with Google and Microsoft, and knew that it would lose at that game, so this deal allows it to simply buy off-the-shelf technology for a non-core piece of it’s business. Selling advertising into that piece, however, is core and Yahoo! has retained that ability. The resources that Yahoo! had to devote to search can now be redeployed to areas where it can really ad value – content and advertising innovations.

Most of the reporting on this deal has viewed it as Yahoo! selling its search business to Microsoft. As someone who has run content web sites, I view it as Yahoo! hiring Microsoft to take over the burden of managing and developing a technology important, but not core, to its sites. In that respect, I think Yahoo! got a pretty good deal. And all of this worry about whether Yahoo! can succeed without search? If it kept using its own search technology that was never going to make it a success, so the question was always there. If Yahoo! fails, it won’t be because of this deal, but if it succeeds, this deal will have helped.

Walter Cronkite’s death brought a flood of admiring quotes from journalists around the country and offered more evidence of why legacy media organizations have such a hard time with change. As the journalists wish for the days of an “authoritative voice,” most of their audience has long been celebrating the loss of those voices. Cronkite’s most famous and self-proclaimed “proudest” moment, when he declared in 1968 that the North Vietnamese Tet Offensive was “a draw” and that “it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could,” was based on a misreading of the outcome of the battle. While not as egregious as Dan Rather’s reliance on forged documents during the presidential campaign of 2004, had it been uttered today, Cronkite’s statement would surely have been refuted immediately by citizens and journalists alike, as was Rather, deepening the discussion and bringing more clarity to the issue.

Cronkite had a great impact on the media landscape, but that was yesterday, and let us not wish for it today, because it will not and should not be duplicated.