WesHanson.com

Communications

Making Content Pay

What do the following have in common — The Wall Street Journal, Consumer Reports, and ESPN?

They are among the news organizations (now called “content creators”) that are successfully charging folks to read their content online. That is, they have walled off their valuable content so that readers have to pay to enter.

Their success in this endeavor is studied with great interest by hundreds of other media outlets starved for funds and perplexed how — in this information-wants-to-be-free era — they will ever get back paying subscribers and the advertisers that go with them.

Will people pay for local news coverage? Mike Klingensmith publisher of the Minneapolis Star Tribune more than hopes so. He’s planning on it.

“It’s not an inexpensive process to create the proprietary content we create,” he explains, “and we have to be compensated for it in the future. As I believe almost all content providers will have to be.” [See the original interview by David Brauer in full: http://bit.ly/StarTribInterview]

He favors a web-based product that with all-inclusive, as opposed to a la carte, pricing – with free samples available via as many links as possible. Content that is completely free vs. partially free (a sample) might depend on the reader’s location or story source (such as AP or staff).

His team is not just redesigning the news organization’s website, but rebuilding it into a platform, to act as more of a “content tent” that embraces staff-generated news, vendor-generated services and user-generated content.

The content has to display on whatever type of device consumers use. “We’re going to follow our consumers in that regard,” says the man with deep experience in magazine journalism, which is generally more advanced in consumer marketing. “It’s not for us to dictate; it’s for them to tell us.”

The Power of Brevity

Here’s an interesting counterpoint to my recent posts on the peril of overly relying on PowerPoint to communicate clearly and thoroughly:

“[Business schools] should teach students how to communicate in five-sentence e-mails and with 10-slide PowerPoint presentations,” Alltop founder Guy Kawasaki tells the New York Times’ Adam Bryant (3/19/10). “If they just taught every student that, American business would be much better off.”

No one wants to read “War and Peace” e-mails. Ditto for 40 info-impacted PowerPoint slides. The more you explain, the more points you try to impart, the more overwritten your language, the more you’re likely to be ignored or, ironically, misunderstood. Little to nothing stands out — except, perhaps, little bits here and there that can be taken out of context and used against you later. (You know how some workplaces can be…)

Lesson: If you can’t say it in a few lines, have a face-to-face and follow up on that conversation with a memo of understanding. Okay, I’ll stop now.

Deadly Bullets

The U.S. military finds bullets a very useful means of sending a message.

We’re not talking field ops, but the type of bullets that riddle projection screens and communiqués.

The little buggers are awfully useful for highlighting and summarizing. Problem is, they can also greatly oversimplify messy, complex situations beset by interconnected political, economic and ethnic forces. Like combat conditions, bureaucratic tangles, or the average American workplace.

“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” says Iraqi commander Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster in The New York Times. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”

That doesn’t quiet the staccato bursts of pseudo info, of course.  In fact, a whole cadre of officers spend so much time making presentations they are nicknamed PowerPoint Rangers. You can’t blame policy-makers and strategists for trying to bring sanity, hierarchy, and order to a messy world.

But, according to the Times, commanders say that the slides don’t impart as much useful information as a five-page paper and generally lack polished, analytic, persuasive prose – and, worse, can stifle discussion, critical thinking, and thoughtful decision-making. “PowerPoint makes us stupid,” sums up Marine Gen. James N. Mattis.

And such stupidity can be costly. According to the book “Fiasco” Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the commander at the time of American forces in the Persian Gulf region, wouldn’t issue orders that stated explicitly how he wanted the invasion conducted. Instead, he just passed on to Lt. Gen. David D. McKiernan, who led 2003 Iraq invasion, a series of vague slides that he had already shown to then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Still, it’s not going anywhere. It’s too imbedded in the culture. Gen. David Petraeus, who today oversees the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and says some PowerPoint briefings are “just agony,” uses the program himself because he appreciates its ability to display of maps and statistical trends.

Communication tools can facilitate communication, not substitute for it. Overcomplexify or oversimplify — there are perils everywhere. If you try to visually capture the complicated interrelationships and levels in a messy situation, you get a perplexing mishmash (as I noted in an earlier post). Or you could simplify and risk eliminating the nuance that’s necessary for true understanding and wise decision making. You’re stuck between Iraq and a hard place.

Death by PowerPoint

Back when your trusty editor was the publications and communications director at a prominent nonprofit organization, a fellow executive took it upon herself to map out the creation/approval/distribution process she thought should be involved in putting out a newsletter. Up and down, back and forth, in and out it went – the crazy Etch-a-Sketch of lines and arrows was absolutely ludicrous. … Really funny too, when you weren’t despondent over what had become of your career and purpose in life.

And that was just a little nonprofit newsletter. Imagine trying to capture and visually illustrate all the players, procedures and factors to consider in modern military operations … Consider Afghanistan, where the Army is batting an unexpectedly tenacious enemy: PowerPoint presentations.

The New York Times reproduced a U.S. Army diagram (originally publicized by NBC’s intrepid foreign correspondent Richard Engel) showing American strategy in Afghanistan. The purpose of info graphics is to communicate visually, but this think looks like a bowl of spaghetti. Dropped on the floor.

If you want a good laugh, or cry, check it out: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/world/27powerpoint.html?scp=1&sq=powerpoint&st=cse

When he first saw the info graphic at a PowerPoint presentation in Kabul last summer, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan reportedly said, “When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war.”

So that’s why this damn thing is taking so long! Hopefully, another way to win the war will emerge that doesn’t depend on tangled intentions and garbled communications.

The Unfortunates

There was a great photo in yesterday’s New York Times of Fabrice P. Tourre, the Goldman Sachs bond trader who helped devise the mortgage instruments his bank sold to investors – and then shorted, thus piling up enormous profits as the country plunged into financial chaos and massive loss.

Monsieur Tourre, who hails from France and likes to call himself “Fabulous Fab,” is looking over his shoulder at a non-too-sympathetic mob of Bastille-stormers while seated before a U.S. Senate subcommittee investigating the role of investment banks in the financial crisis, with a particular focus on Goldman’s mortgage machinations. The S.E.C. also accuses the firm and Tourre himself of fraud for selling an investment package created with an outside hedge fund, which then made billions by betting against the success of the booby-trapped vehicle.

It won’t help Goldman’s case — whether legal or in the court of public opinion — that private memos between its executives describe at least some the deals they were selling to unwitting investors as “shitty.”

When Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) asked about the email’s fragrant (and, as it turned out, accurate) choice of words, Goldman CFO David Viniar said, “I think that’s very unfortunate to have on email.”

Unfortunate? … Snickers rose from the crowd who thought perhaps they were witnessing a historic “let them eat merde” moment of tone-deaf response. But aside from word choice, do the various Goldman executives who testified for 11 hours feel any remorse, or even responsibility for the financial meltdown or exacerbating its effects? No, not at all. “I don’t have any regrets about doing things that I think were improper,” said former Goldman mortgage chief Dan Sparks, who did allow that his bank had “made some poor decisions in hindsight.”

Sen, John McCain (R-AZ) said that he did not know if the world’s largest and most profitable investment bank did anything illegal but there was “no doubt” the firm behaved unethically. It remains to be seen if that judgment hurts the bank, which ironically tells its employees they should do nothing that would embarrass the firm if printed on the front page of a business newspaper.

However you feel about the matter at hand, at least one objective lesson is clear from a communications standpoint – be very careful what you say in emails. They live on past your delete button — and the really juicy ones, the ones that make you look foolish or dishonest, are bound to make it into business publications. … Maybe even Senate hearings.