July 20th, 2009

The King is Dead, Long Live the … Wait a Minute…

Posted by mjdavis

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.

July 10th, 2009

The NCAA is Killing Rowing

Posted by mjdavis

Sports have such an enormous impact on our society that what happens in sports is often reflected in business and our broader culture. And often, when sports becomes a business, what happens in business is reflected in sports.

The NCAA is a business, a big business, and big businesses often acquire smaller companies and products that they hope will provide growth for the larger entity. Sometimes those acquisitions end well, other times they result in the suffocation of whatever life the smaller company had. The NCAA’s “acquisition” of women’s heavyweight rowing is leading to the suffocation of the sport.

Purely by the numbers, the growth of women’s heavyweight rowing in recent years has been phenomenal. Since athletic directors realized the sport could act as a Title IX offset for large male sports such as football, they began turning previous club programs varsity and starting brand new varsity programs where clubs didn’t exist. All of these varsity programs, however, needed women to fill out their ranks, so high school girls who never took a stroke with an oar found themselves receiving scholarships. The gold rush was on and heavyweight women’s rowing became the sport of choice for families looking for scholarships and admissions preference. Although this growth resulted in too few qualified coaches and women claiming to be varsity athletes who had no business pulling on a uni, it got lots of women on teams. And it was NCAA recognition, giving the sport instant credibility as a Title IX offset, that enabled it.

Once women’s heavyweight rowing became an NCAA sport, that category was required to have its own, separate, championship. Previously all four categories of rowing (men, women, heavyweight, and lightweight) joined together in a national championship that was a true festival of the sport. Men and women competing at the same event in equal numbers, celebrating one of the few truly amateur sports left. The NCAA tore that apart. Heavyweight women have their championship, while on another date in another part of the country the heavy men, light men, and light women, together have their own.

Even more pernicious, however, is the fact that the NCAA made rowing a team sport. This meant that the NCAA women’s heavyweight champion was determined by points awarded for finishes in the first varsity eight race, the second varsity eight race, and the third varsity four race. Here’s the thing though – no one other than the competitors and their families gives a damn about anything but the first varsity eight. It’s like deciding the national football champion by who wins the first string game, the second string game, and the scout team game. We’ve many times had “national champions” who didn’t win the first varsity eight race. Absurd.

Furthermore, this team sport designation is already strangling lightweight women’s rowing. Heavyweight coaches fight against the existence of lightweight programs in their boathouses because they need those women to fill out 2V and 3V four boats. Women who could be national champions as lightweights are relegated to 2V eights because the NCAA says rowing is a team sport.

Now we have word that the Division I Rowing Committee recommended “eliminating awards for individual boats at the championships. If the Championships/Sport Management Cabinet accepts the recommendation, only the top four teams overall will be recognized, unlike in previous years when the overall team champion was honored in addition to individual champions in the I Eights, II Eights and Fours.” Yes, that’s right, the winners of the race, the varsity eight, will not get an award. Who are these people? This is not rowing, this is NCAA bullshit. And to think there are coaches, led by Stanford’s Craig Amerkhanian, who want men’s heavyweight rowing to be an NCAA sport too! These coaches claim to be “forward thinking.” Forward thinking is no varsity eight medal? Ridiculous. Why don’t we just use motors instead of our bodies – that’s forward thinking isn’t it? Know too, that the heavyweight men as an NCAA sport would kill all lightweight rowing. At some point it becomes another sport, and the NCAA is getting us closer every day. Turns out, if you didn’t know already, that the NCAA is just another big business taking over a smaller organization with a vibrant, growing product, and strangling the life out of it. It doesn’t understand the product but “knows” the right way to do things is the NCAA way. But it’s not. Rowing is about individual boat-to-boat battles down the course. It’s about looking across the lanes at the finish and knowing that you just won or lost, not about wondering how your finish figures into the team points total.

July 6th, 2009

Your Newest Competitor May be a Media Company

Posted by mjdavis

It’s been apparent for some time now, that brands are becoming direct competitors with media companies. Brands are bypassing the media altogether by creating content which they distribute directly to their customers. A recent example is Nestea’s upcoming foray into webisodes. Now, however, we see media companies getting set to turn the tables.

On Junta42, Joe Pulizzi discusses a recent talk given by a Guardian executive in which he says that the company believes “the key to their growth is in creating new, unique and valuable products and services by leveraging the Guardian brand.” It seems the Guardian has been working with over 850 companies to develop products and applications based on its brand. The Guardian isn’t necessarily funding these efforts, but is lending its name. As further evidence of the product trend, one of the commenters to the post notes that the Wall Street Journal sells wine “hand-selected by their wine columnists,” but true to the notion that business models cycle, another commenter notes that the Sunday Times in the UK has been doing this sort of thing for 35 years.

Hearst made headlines a few months ago when it announced that it would be selling an e-reader that would compete with Amazon’s Kindle and similar devices from Sony. This is a bit different, however, since Hearst is launching this reader in an effort to preserve a legacy business model, not create a new one.

TechCrunch is also moving into the world of products with its CrunchPad which it plans to launch later this year. The CrunchPad, a touch screen tablet for Web surfing, is not meant to preserve a business model, however, but is a brand extension. One could argue that TechCrunch doesn’t have a whole lot of expertise in hardware development, but from a consumer perspective it just may work. It’s also meant to fill a consumer need, not a media company need which the e-readers seem to be doing.

As the media company scramble for revenue continues, we’ll see more and more products being developed both as brand extensions and as new brands. Tired of being everyone’s punching bag, the smart companies will want to throw a few punches of their own.

July 3rd, 2009

Technology For Freedom (And I’m Not Talking About Iran)

Posted by mjdavis

We’ve been inundated with stories on how Twitter enabled the protests in Iran. Around the same time we were reading about China’s proposed requirement that all computers sold in China come with the “GreenDam-Youth Escort” Internet filtering software. On the one hand technology seemed to help the cause of freedom, while on the other it harmed it. Now China has backed down from the Green Dam requirement, saying it decided to postpone the mandate.

But this too was a victory for technology. If access to the Internet were not available in China (even though not totally open), and if technology companies didn’t see the huge potential in the growing (both in people and in wealth) Chinese market, opposition to the plan would’ve been muted. Instead, the Chinese people were against this rule and, as Dan Harris says on the China Law Blog, “…Beijing does NOT want to go against the people on something like this. Since there is absolutely no reason to believe the people will ever start liking something like this, there is absolutely no reason to believe the software will return.” (Despite Ministry statements to the contrary.) Dan also links to a Sky Canaves post in WSJ’s China Journal that discusses China’s “Politics of Consent.”

So again, another victory for technology. With the possible exception of North Korea (and even that can’t last much longer, can it?), technology has begun to bring freedom to closed and oppressed states around the world. In China’s case, we remember the country as scary therefore it remains scary, but the walls of oppression are crumbling and they can’t be rebuilt. For those worried about the effect of outsourcing to China on the US economy, there is only one answer – outsource as much as is profitable as soon as possible so we can turn them from hungry capitalists to satisfied capitalists. That’s when it becomes a consumer economy. And as Dan Harris says, “…I know movement has been slow, and I know it has been in fits and starts, but if we were to draw a straight line through the rises and falls, freedom is on a fairly inexorable march in China.”