Nothing But Blue Seas (Nothing At All)
Digital disruption is killing journalism’s first loyalty to its community.
By David Cohea (@kfwstweet)
In their book Blue Ocean Strategy (2015, expanded edition), W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne argue that lasting success in business these days is less a product of surviving cutthroat competition as creating “blue oceans” of untapped market space capable of unlimited growth.
The example they lead off with is Cirque du Soliel, the Canadian circus company that in 20 years — and despite competitive pressures that have never been worse — came to lead the entertainment industry (40 million attendees in ninety cities around the world, and a near-lock on every Las Vegas venue). By creating a new mix of old-school circus, artistic acrobatics and stylish techno, Cirque du Soliel made competition irrelevant and tapped into a vast new market.
Kim and Mauborgne write,
In the red oceans, industry boundaries are defined and accepted, and the competitive rules of the game are known. Here, companies try to outperform their rivals to grab a greater share of existing demand. As the market space gets crowded, prospects for profits and growth are reduced. Products become commodities, and cutthroat competition turns the red ocean bloody.
Blue oceans, in contrast, are defined by untapped market space, demand creation, and the opportunity for highly profitable growth. Although some blue oceans are created well beyond existing industry boundaries, most are created from within red oceans by expanding existing industry boundaries, as Cirque du Soleil did. In blue oceans, competition is irrelevant because the rules of the game are waiting to be set.
Just about every major success in business these days stems from successful understanding and deployment of blue ocean strategy — Google, iTunes, eBay, Facebook, FedEx, Starbucks, and yes, Viagra. They point to research that states that while only 16% of business launches start with a blue ocean strategy, blue ocean launches reap 61% of the profits.
Several of these players dominate media to such an extent that any attempt by news organizations to compete with them seems increasingly moot.
Since newspapers are especially inept at disrupting themselves (so observes Clayton Christiansen), that may also render them incapable of finding blue oceans. The New York Times has been gamely at it, (at least, their Innovation Report provided the playbook), but platforms are unmerciful. Many wonder what the Grey Lady could possibly remake herself into that those who love what it stands for could possibly want? (The NYT’s head of brand and marketing Max Pfenninghaus put it another way: “When people love who you are, they don’t want you to change. If they love you as the Grey Lady, then they have a hard time seeing you nerding out with clever apps. It’s like seeing your grandpa at a nightclub.”)
Roll over, Beethoven. Indeed, the only news orgs that look like they even have a pulse in blue ocean strategy are the born-digital startups — Vox, Huff Post, Vice, Buzzfeed. They have no legacy freight to slow them down — no presses to pay for, nor print advertising to lose.
But it’s hard to believe they’ll ever be able to find susbtiantial and profitable market share while being forced to play ball on the latest generation of platforms apps like Facebook Instant Articles, Apple News or Snapchat Discover.
As fragmented as things are now, the only way the big media players can get coherent visibility is to publish content on every channel. You might think that eventually this would be CMS fix — once a reporter uploads a story, the software then packages and freights it out to the various platforms — but as John Herrman observed in his July 30 post “Mutually Assured Content” at The Awl,
The first thing you notice when you spam your content across platforms is that it’s rare, in 2015, for one thing to do extraordinarily well in more than one or two venues without significant modification. The next thing you learn is that the best way to succeed on a given platform is to write/film/record/aggregate with that platform explicitly in mind. The next thing you learn is that doing so makes that content extremely weird when taken out of context, which makes it incompatible with other venues.
Since few news organizations will have the resources to re-tool content for every channel, eventually most will find
… that the energy and creativity used to create new content management systems and layouts and ways to display news and information will be redirected to a narrower — or, at least, externally determined — purpose: getting an edge within the arbitrary confines of a platform.
But it gets worse. The transfer of power from content creator to content distributor also relocates crucial decision-making about editorial process; once a platform gets sued for an investigative report filed by a news organization, be sure that the platform will exercise a stronger say in what gets posted. And if editorial only provides marginal income for the tech giants compared to the vast swath of advertising dollars awaiting to be capitalized from entertainment, how long will platforms remain interested in publishing anything but mainstream content? (Probably until everyone else goes broke.)
Herrman, again:
This is the question for platform publishers. What does a journalistic church-state negotiation look like when the advertising side is not a valuable partner against whom editorial keeps some leverage (in the form of its control over audience) but an entity that is both vastly larger and owns both audience and the means of producing revenue?
Maybe a publisher can come up with some weird form of sustaining revenue on its own — subscriptions, say, or a way to hijack high-eyeball traffic like video stars — and chart a blue ocean of their own.
But for everyone else — the papers and magazines that became sites, the sites that became blogs, the blogs that became generalist news organizations — accepting the platform bargain is accepting that most of what they did before is legacy and burden. … The transition from web to apps, from sprawling web publishing to platform partnerships and captured competition, should it proceed long enough, is more profound than any of these people are prepared to deal with or, for now, acknowledge.
Herrman concludes rather chillingly, “An audience of hundreds of millions is, even with strings attached, or a limited timeline, a huge opportunity for someone. Just … maybe not you.”
No blue oceans for publishers …
* * *
Blue ocean strategy is so integral with digital disruption that it may simply be a sunnier way of saying the same thing.
Because there is only one way to win at digital disruption, only those who surrender completely to its exponential logic can win at the game. Unless you are a tech giant capable of analyzing hundreds of millions of user actions stored in your data siloes, nothing done yesterday has any value tomorrow.
Tiny, fast changes — the procedure of digital disruption — create maginal difference which then grow into expansive, happy blue oceans. But is anyone but the robot squids of Google and Apple fast enough? In her 2014 New Yorker article, “The Disruption Machine,” Jill Lapore finds the engines of disruptive technology wanting; observing the New York Times’ desperate attempt to join the 21st century by disrupting itself, she writes,
A pack of attacking startups sounds something like a pack of ravenous hyenas, but, generally, the rhetoric of disruption — a language of panic, fear, asymmetry, and disorder — calls on the rhetoric of another kind of conflict, in which an upstart refuses to play by the established rules of engagement, and blows things up. Don’t think of Toyota taking on Detroit. Startups are ruthless and leaderless and unrestrained, and they seem so tiny and powerless, until you realize, but only after it’s too late, that they’re devastatingly dangerous: Bang! Ka-boom! Think of it this way: the Times is a nation-state; BuzzFeed is stateless. Disruptive innovation is competitive strategy for an age seized by terror.
When the lifeboat is rocking so violently, it makes it hard to find steady journalism. A recent J-school graduate listed some “basics for today’s journalism,” and of the 10 qualities (including “produce on multiple platforms,” “understand the economics,” “learn basic coding” and “know your audience”) only two had anything to do with journalistic practice: “clean copy” and “keep it short.” It’s hard to tell if we’re talking about journalism at all.
Blue oceans may actually precipitate the worst journalism because loyalty to the agnostic functions of disruption is far more important than journalism’s first principle of telling the truth to a community. Jackie Calmes, a Joan Shorenstein Fellow and national correspondent for the New York Times, has just published a paper, “’They Don’t Give a Damn about Governing’: Conservative Media’s Influence on the Republican Party” where she argues that the conservative media — radio and TV personalities, bloggers and social media pundits — have so disrupted Republican party politics they are now shaping the agenda of the party, pushing it to the far right. As a result, the Republican leadership is increasingly unable to govern and the party unable to pick viable presidential nominees.
The procedure of conservative media has been increasingly burnt-earth: liberals as antichrist and moderate Republicans fair game for their rage. Accuracy and truth are dispensed with, and party victory is no longer the end. Calmes quotes a Republican staffer who preferred to remain anonymous lest he invoke the wrath of the far right:
It’s so easy these days to go out there and become an Internet celebrity by saying some things, and who cares if it’s true or makes any sense. It’s a new frontier: How far to the right can you get? And there’s no incentive to ever really bother with reality.
Compromise is becoming impossible, says the staffer:
There’s no money, ratings or clicks in everyone going along to get along … the loudest voices drown out the sensible ones and there’s no real space to have serious discussions.
Blue ocean media is journalism without the baggage of truth, leaving news organizations behind to struggle in vain for a legitimate voice.
Legacy isn’t only presses or advertising or even home pages: it’s also the truth.
* * *
The media’s vain pursuit of blue oceans has helped create the local news desert. Gaming for platform visibility, national media has lionized the small share available on its bandwidth, leaving almost no room for local news.
Strangely though, if there’s any counterforce to blue ocean news blues, it may be found exactly where it first disappeared, back on the local level — by earning the trust of the community all over again.
As corporate influence divests (hopefully not taking every newspaper asset with it) and traditional advertising sources wither, the only sustaining support for newspapers must come from its readers.
That said, “engagement is not just about creating more sustainable news organizations, it is also about creating healthier communities.” That’s Molly De Aguilar, program director for media and communications at the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. The Dodge Foundation has awarded a number of media grants to strengthen the New Jersey media ecosystem, and with a number of partners they are generating some great ideas for reclaiming the local news desert.
De Aguilar writes in “Declaration of Dependence,”
The long-term sustainability of local news depends on deepening journalists’ engagement with communities. Through shifts in technology, economics and newsroom processes, the public has become increasingly central to journalism as creators, consumers and collaborators. Today, news organizations should be vibrant hubs for community information, engagement and debate that people depend on. (author’s emphasis)
The original pact between journalism and its community — the one so lost in blue ocean strategy — turns out to be the only win-win solution, maybe even the one truly blue ocean (though for most local organizations, it will looks more like a lake or a pond.)
De Aguilar lists what newsrooms need to understand about their community, such as a community’s demographics, how different groups access information, historical issues around race, gender and power in an area, the role of key institutions, and that solving community and social problems is a collaborative mission. She also lists critical newsroom skills for engaging community, such as strategies for developing stories by following the community’s lead and encouraging community participation in the reporting process.
Similarly, there are things that communities need to understand about newsrooms — how stories are constructed, sources are chosen, how newsrooms are funded, what newsroom ethics are, and how to provide input and feedback. And communities need skills for engaging newsrooms — like how to contact a journalist or editor, address concerns about coverage, constructively contribute to an article before, during and after reporting and publication and know citizen journalism skills.
A great of example of how this can work and why it’s important is found in Josh Stearns’ post “Why newsrooms should train their communities in verification, news literacy, and eyewitness media.” Stearns is a co-fellow of the Dodge Foundation project (he is director of journalism sustainability) and is a member of the First Draft coalition.
Increasingly, citizen journalists serve as the boots on the ground for community coverage, so it’s vital they learn basic journalism skills. He writes,
Bringing communities into the news process is a powerful way to spread journalistic values, train residents on reporting processes and foster user generated content that is more useful for newsrooms. Newsrooms are well positioned to become participatory journalism laboratories, helping more people navigate, verify and create powerful stories online and via social media.
The more newsrooms work to regain the trust of their communities through engagement and listening, the more communities will come to value them as the news source they depend upon to make the best, most informed decisions.
* * *
A final observation. Something has disappeared from our digitally-disruptive, socially cranky, zealous and platform-worshipping existence: Any sense that we are working to leave things in better shape than we received them.
That apparently is contrary to the blue ocean ethic and its disruptive opportunists. In the same essay, Jill Lapore writes of venture capitalist Josh Linkner, who recently published The Road to Reinvention. “His job appears to be to convince a generation of people who want to do good and do well to learn, instead, remorselessness. If you start a business and it succeeds, Linkner advises, sell it and take the cash. Don’t look back. Never pause. Disrupt or be disrupted.” Not exactly what you hope to hear when Dad hands you the car keys.
The inequities are great and becoming dizzyingly more disproportionate as the engines of digital disruption kick into high and higher and higher gear. The few and fewest win big and more while everyone else trudges home with less than they had before.
Maybe the fall is inevitable: newspapers go out of business, local retailers close their doors, the platform oligarchs own everything and the land keeps getting hotter.
Forget about finding blue oceans — they’re coming for us anyway,’
Whatever opportunity might have been in sight when we first imagined the Internet’s potential, it is long gone. It wasn’t for us.
What we have left is small. And yet, it contains all we ever needed.
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