Part 1: Birth, Death and Transformation

We’re in the midst of a massive shift in media consumption patterns. People consume more news than they ever did, but they don’t read newspapers anymore. Magazines, even on tablets, are slowly dying. And, as for books, The New Yorker published an article titled “Twilight of the Books”…on December 24, 2007, before eBooks were even a significant part of the business. Statistics in the article show that the market for books has been declining for at least 30 years. U.S. movie theater ticket sales peaked in the 1950s; the only things that have kept the industry going have been home video sales and higher ticket prices. But, home video sales are also dropping—they’re being replaced by rentals from Redbox, and online streaming from Netflix, Amazon and others.

Let’s be clear: Movie attendance has been declining for half a century, but no one seriously expects the movie business to disappear. The same is true for books; readership will continue to decline, but it’s hard to visualize a world without books, even if most of the remaining books are digital instead of paper. Nevertheless, the balance has shifted. Consumers want their media faster and cheaper. Readers want their news from the Internet, as it happens (if not sooner, leaked out via Twitter.) One can argue that attention spans have gotten shorter—look at the popularity of viral videos on YouTube—but videogames, both casual and complex, can engross players for hours or even days.

The transformation of media in the 21^st Century is being driven by three forces: The Internet, mobile devices and wireless broadband. The Internet provides a conduit for every kind of content. There’s no need to ever leave your house to purchase any kind of media, and it makes possible entirely new types and combinations of media that didn’t exist prior to the rise of the World Wide Web. Mobile devices and wireless broadband make that content available anywhere, anytime, and open the digital world to hundreds of millions of people who can’t afford personal computers or high-speed Internet connections.

Togather lets authors crowdsource book tours

Here's an interesting idea for author promotion--although it's just entering beta testing. Togather is a new website that brings crowdsourcing to book tours. Authors post their profiles and calendars of days available for promotional events. Fans can then propose events, or authors can create their own events. Togather lets authors negotiate terms and conditions for appearances within the service, including pricing (which is going to be moot for most authors, especially new ones.) Once the events are created, people are encouraged to promote them to their friends on social networks. Authors can set criteria for confirming their appearance--number of tickets sold or RSVP, or number of books sold--and when the goal is reached, ticket and book sales are processed by Togather and the event is on.

I can see Togather as being very valuable to established authors as bookstores close and the number of legacy venues for book tours declines--although authors with big social media presences can do much the same thing from their own Facebook pages and websites. I'm not sure how valuable Togather is going to be for new authors, unless it's one component in a much bigger marketing campaign.

NBC's 48-year-old Olympic playbook

Comcast division NBC is being blasted for how it's broadcasting the 2012 London Summer Olympics. Despite broadcasting events on NBC and its Spanish-language Telemundo broadcast network, cable networks NBC Sports Network, MSNBC, CNBC, Bravo and two networks started specifically for the Olympics, as well as online, NBC couldn't find any place to show the opening ceremonies live as they happened. Instead, they were delayed by three hours for broadcast in the U.S.'s Eastern and Central time zones--and the events that U.S. viewers saw were edited. Viewers on the Pacific Coast were forced to wait another three hours to see the ceremonies.

NBC is tape-delaying its coverage of most events that it thinks U.S. viewers will be interested in to "prime time" hours, in order to maximize advertising revenues. That decision, along with an almost total focus on U.S. athletes, has led to an initial barrage of complaints by viewers on Twitter, followed by similar complaints on websites and in newspapers. NBC spokespeople and executives have either dismissed the complaints or pedantically reminded commenters that most events are being streamed live on the Internet. And yes, the events are covered live on the web, as long as you can prove that you subscribe to a participating cable, satellite or IPTV video service provider, and providing that the stream doesn't freeze up mid-event. NBC lards the web streams with plenty of commercials, so it can't claim that it has to limit viewership to only those who subscribe to a multichannel video service. (Or, perhaps being owned by Comcast has something to do with it.)

Now, a U.S. editor for the U.K.'s Independent newspaper has been banned from Twitter, ostensibly because he tweeted the email address of an NBC executive. NBC admitted that it filed the complaint against the editor, Guy Adams, although anyone with an IQ above breathing can figure out the email address for any NBCUniversal employee through Google. I can just imagine the drone in NBC's corporate communications department saying "Now we've got 'em!" after seeing the tweet go out. (Update, August 1, 2012: It was actually a drone at Twitter who found the tweet, contacted NBC and told them how to file the complaint. Then, the mindless drone at NBC filed the complaint and rubbed their hands in glee. I made up the part about rubbing their hands in glee.) The only problem is that, as Reuters' Felix Salmon pointed out, that the Twitter rule covers "non-public, personal email addresses," neither of which applies to the address that Guy Adams tweeted--it's a corporate, public email address.

NBC's response to the fracas has been uninformed, manipulative and dismissive--but that's just a knee-jerk reaction, not the real problem. The real problem is the game book that NBC's playing with, a game book written by Roone Arledge in 1964 when ABC first broadcast the Innsbruck, Austria Winter Olympics. Tape and film from that first ABC Olympics had to be flown to New York for broadcast. Over the 20 years that ABC held rights to the Olympics, Arledge introduced the policy of tape-delaying and editing opening and closing ceremonies. Even after it was possible to broadcast live from anywhere in the world, Arledge continued to tape-delay events and ceremonies for broadcast in prime time. To attract more female viewers, he came up with the "up close and personal" concept of taped background packages on selected athletes designed to generate human interest. Event coverage focused on the performance of U.S. athletes, and created controversies even when none existed.

I'm not dumping on Arledge: He's one of the fathers of American sports broadcasting, and ABC's coverage of the kidnapping of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Summer Olympic games, most of which was reported by ABC's sportscasters, not newspeople, was the birth of American television sports journalism and one of the most honored events in American television history. What Arledge did was right for the available technology and the times. The problem is that Arledge stopped running ABC Sports in 1986. The Internet didn't exist as anything but an academic curiosity when he retired, but with the exception of offering real-time event video streaming, NBC is doing the same things that Arledge did in 1964--just more of it, on more channels.

Roone Arledge died in 2002 at the age of 71. If he were still alive today, I think that he's tell NBC's management the following: "Times have changed, and so should you."

Clueless publisher to release book based on "Text from Dog" Tumblr posts

Publishers are desperate to find the next "pre-sold" property...and here it is: The Bookseller reports that British publisher Headline has paid an undisclosed amount to animator Joe Butcher for a compilation of his Tumblr posts called "Text from Dog." The characters in the Tumblr, October Jones and his dog Cooper, have more than 100,000 Tumblr fans and 40,000 Twitter followers. Hence, a pre-sold audience. Here's a quote from Headline deputy publishing director Sarah Emsley (and I'm not making this up):

"October and Cooper have been brightening up our days for months and we could not be more thrilled to be working (with) them. Buy your copy this autumn to see if it will be BATDOG or CATCAT who reigns supreme this Christmas."

John Biggs at TechCrunch read the Bookseller story, and demolished it. Here's a quote:

So look, here’s what’s up: you guys are killing yourselves. Like this. You’re paying what? Probably six figures for a book based on Text From Dog, an arguably funny Tumblr that, in book form, will sell a maximum of 5,000 copies and then disappear from the cultural Zeitgeist. I mean you wouldn’t pay some no-talent asshole to pretend to write a work of fiction and then capitalize on her name to sell some garbage, would you? Oh wait, you would. But still. Why? Why are you doing this? Stop.

And another one:

I can see the wheels turning. “This is funny! It’s on the web! We can monetize it! People love dogs! People are stupid! This could make our quarter!” Stop.

You’re about to be flattened. Book piracy is about to smash your top shelf revenue while books like Text From Dog are going to kill any respect we once had for the big six. You guys clearly have no idea what you’re doing and you’re depending on your recent Yale-grad philosophy major Assistant Editor to bring you some hot, hot web trendz to capitalize on. Real fiction and non-fiction? Blah, that’s for old people and nerds. What the kids want to do these days is go into a book store and buy a book based on a Tumblr blog. Because kids are stupid. Also vampires. And sex.

AngelGate: Send in the clowns

If you haven't been following the increasingly comical affair being called AngelGate, I'll run it down for you. First, a few definitions:

• A venture capitalist (VC) is an individual or firm who invests in start-ups and small private companies with the hope of selling their stock for a large profit, either on the public market or to a larger company that acquires a company that they've invested in.
• Angel investors are individual venture capitalists who invest their own money in start-ups, usually very early in the companies' lives (typically seed or first rounds).
• Superangels are individuals or small groups of investors that invest in a larger number of start-ups than an individual angel would normally invest in, but still focus on very early rounds.
• Conventional Venture Capital firms invest in a lot of different companies at many stages of development. They have a lot more money to invest than the angels or superangels, and usually invest in later rounds.

Last Tuesday, Mike Arrington, the publisher of TechCrunch, learned about a secret meeting of superangels being held at a restaurant in San Francisco called Bin 38. He was told that he wouldn't be welcome at the meeting if he attended, but he went anyway, and in a private meeting room, he found "ten or so" of the largest superangel investors in Silicon Valley. They basically went into a silent stupor when they realized that he was in the room, and he left shortly afterward. Later, "sources", which Arrington says were three people who attended the meeting, told him that the following subjects were discussed (I'm going to quote directly from the TechCrunch article:):

• Complaints about Y Combinator’s growing power, and how to counteract competitiveness in Y Combinator deals
• Complaints about rising deal valuations and they can act as a group to reduce those valuations
• How the group can act together to keep traditional venture capitalists out of deals entirely
• How the group can act together to keep out new angel investors invading the market and driving up valuations.
• More mundane things, like agreeing as a group not to accept convertible notes in deals (an entrepreneur-friendly type of deal).
• One source has also said that there is a wiki of some sort that the group has that explicitly talks about how the group should act as one to keep deal valuations down.

Venture capitalists, whether large firms, angels or superangels, are competitors. They do work together at times on deals, but generally, they compete with each other to make investments. There are U.S. Federal laws that deal with collusion between competitors to fix prices, terms and conditions, and to keep out or limit the activities of other competitors, and they have nothing to do with monopolies or market share. The very act of competitors conspiring secretly as Arrington says they did could be interpreted as illegal.

The best thing for the participants to do would have been to say nothing and refuse to comment if asked by the press, but that's not what happened. The day after the TechCrunch article was posted, Dave McClure, a superangel, claimed that Arringon's charges were a "bullshit superangel consipracy theory", admitted that he attended the meeting, gave his take on what was discussed, and then finished his screed with this line (and this is a direct quote: "(sic)i'm here to Disrupt, motherfucker. (sic)so go right ahead & Hate On Me."

Yesterday, Ron Conway, founder of the Silicon Valley Angels and one of the earliest angel investors, wrote a long email to attendees of the Bin 38 meeting to say that:

• He didn't attend either meeting (apparently there were two meetings), although one of his partners did
• He didn't agree with the agenda or process of the meetings
• He'd really appreciate it if the other superangels not talk to him again
• His only interest is the entrepreneurs that he funds
• And by the way, Dave McClure, don't write or say anything about this email

One of the most endearing things about Dave McClure is that he's incapable of keeping his mouth shut, so almost immediately after Conway sent his email, McClure demonstrated his mastery of Twitter by sending the entire world a message that he had intended to send only to another attendee of the dinners. In it, he confirmed that there were two meetings, said that he and other attendees were being "thrown under the bus" by Conway, and confirmed the identity of another person, David Lee, Conway's partner, who attended both meetings. McClure deleted the errant tweet, but not before it had been copied and widely distributed, including to TechCrunch.

TechCrunch ran McClure's tweet, and then they received a copy of Conway's email and ran that. McClure is continuing to respond to other postings around the web that agree with his point of view, when the best thing he could do right now is visit a foreign country with no Internet connectivity.

Whose story of what happened at the meetings is right, Arrington's or McClure's? Arrington didn't name any of his sources and didn't go into any specifics about what action(s) the group agreed to undertake (if in fact it agreed to do anything.) For his part, McClure didn't mention the fact that there were two meetings, not just one, in his response to Arrington's story, which certainly detracts from the authenticity of his account. Also, his tweet in response to Conway's email didn't say that Conway's or Arrington's charges were wrong, only that he (McClure) and other attendees were being thrown under a bus by Conway.

What conclusions can we draw from this mess (so far)? In the song "If I Was a Rich Man" from "Fiddler on the Roof", Tevye sings:

The most important men in town would come to fawn on me!
They would ask me to advise them,
Like a Solomon the Wise.
"If you please, Reb Tevye..."
"Pardon me, Reb Tevye..."
Posing problems that would cross a rabbi's eyes!

And it won't make one bit of difference if I answer right or wrong.
When you're rich, they think you really know!

Now we know: Being rich doesn't make you smart or give you common sense.