Category: News Metaphor

Metaphor: Cortes’ boats

Boats for buring Marc Andreessen, quoted by Erick Schonfeld in Andreessen’s Advice To Old Media: “Burn The Boats”

Legend has it that when Cortes landed in Mexico in the 1500s, he ordered his men to burn the ships that had brought them there to remove the possibility of doing anything other than going forward into the unknown. Marc Andreessen has the same advice for old media companies: “Burn the boats.” Yesterday, Andreessen was in New York City and we met up. We got to talking about how media companies are handling the digital disruption of the Internet when he brought up the Cortes analogy. In particular, he was talking about print media such as newspapers and magazines, and his longstanding recommendation that they should shut down their print editions and embrace the Web wholeheartedly. “You gotta burn the boats,” he told me, “you gotta commit.” His point is that if traditional media companies don’t burn their own boats, somebody else will.

via Mimi Johnson

Metaphor: aging virgin

An aging virgin
Merlin Mann writing on Kung Fu Grippe about the thought process behind the decision to pull full-content RSS feeds from TheAtlantic.com during a redesign

This reeks of the same bush-league decision-making that hobbled Hulu, gets music fans sued, and keeps high-quality content locked in a tower like an aging virgin — too special to be manhandled by the riff-raff who are reluctant to pony up the lavish dowry that was the fashion fifty years earlier.

Update
The Atlantic’s James Fallows says the lack of content in the RSS feeds was a bug in the new CMS.

Metaphor: aging, impotent beasts

An aging, impotent beast
Mimi Johnson’s “Did it ever occur to you that even the most deathless love could wear out?”

The people who run newspapers and those who work for them are engaged in useless foreplay. They cling tightly, trying again and again to make the way they’ve always done it still work, but the passion is gone. They talk change: tearing down silos, building audience and monetizing content. But talk is their only capability. They eye non-profit status with government subsidies like it’s Viagra for print. They tussle through regrouping, “right-sizing,” and stripping down to “lean and mean.” They reorganize, then reorganize again, then grope their way back to same old position that no longer works. The wretched gyrations are hideously frustrating for the poor souls involved, and sadly fruitless. They give birth to nothing new. The newspaper business is an aging, impotent beast, bringing down a lot of good journalists who are tangled in its foundering arms.

Metaphors: lawns and mass extinction

Mass extinction
Alan Mutter’s Journicide: A looming, lost generation of scribes

But the loss of a substantial portion of what would have been the next generation of journalists also will be tragic for society. The loss will deprive citizens in the future with the insights that only can be delivered by dedicated professionals with the time, skills and motivation to dig deeply into difficult stories.

Grass
Jeff Jarvis’s Get off the lawn

What we need is a level lawn where the tender shoots of these new businesses can grow without government trampling them on its way to try to protect the legacy players.

Metaphors: stores who hate customers, customers who don’t buy and a bunch of clichés

A headline shop
Danny Sullivan’s If Newspapers Were Stores, Would Visitors Be “Worthless” Then?

At the store, the news exec owner greets visitors by asking them what the hell they want. Perplexed, they visitors say they heard about these stories and wanted to know more. The exec shouts at them. “Get the hell out of my store, you freeloader! This is for members-only. We don’t need riff-raff like you in here.”

Jerks who look but don’t buy
Steve Yelvington’s Lookie Lou isn’t really a customer

To use the storefront analogy: When I have people in line to buy big-ticket merchandise, I’m not going to shut down the cash register line so I can provide personal assistance to the guy who’s agonizing over whether to buy a 50-cent postcard.

And the “Lookie Lous” who are shopping but not buying? So long as they don’t get in the way of the real customers, or start knocking the china off the shelves, they’re not really a problem. But I’m not going to go out of my way to serve them on the off chance they might accidentally drop a quarter on the floor.

Jerks who eat but don’t drink
Steve Yelvington’s Lookie Lou isn’t really a customer

A more appropriate analogy — and one more easily understood by journalists — might be that of a bar. If you’re sitting in a bar warming a seat but not consuming anything, are you a customer? If you’re eating the free peanuts but not drinking, are you a customer? Not all visitors are customers.

Every cliché under the sun
Arianna Huffington’s Journalism 2009: Desperate Metaphors, Desperate Revenue Models, And The Desperate Need For Better Journalism

They were asleep at the wheel, missed the writing on the wall, let the train leave the station, let the ship sail — pick your metaphor — and quickly found themselves on the wrong side of the disruptive innovation the Internet and new media represent

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Metaphors: socially useless supervillians and the Titanic, yet again

Skeletor, Gargamel, Cobra Commander or Wile E Coyote
Umair Haque’s “Is Your Business Useless?”

Business supervillains have something in common with the cartoon supervillains above: they rarely win. That’s because socially useless business is built on shoddy, poor economics — and like most things too good to be true, it rarely lasts for long.

The Titanic, yet again but different!
The New York Times‘s publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., quoted by New York Magazine‘s Jada Yuan in “Times Publisher Compares Print Media to the Titanic”

He thinks that physical newspapers will stick around as well. “The best analogy I can think of is — have you ever heard of the Titanic Fallacy?” he asked. We hadn’t. “What was the critical flaw to the Titanic?” We tried to answer: Poor construction? Not enough life boats? Crashing into stuff? “A captain trying to set a world speed record through an iceberg field?” he said, shaking his head. “Even if the Titanic came in safely to New York Harbor, it was still doomed,” he said. “Twelve years earlier, two brothers invented the airplane.”

Metaphors: Greek tragedy, the French Revolution and wild boars

Wild boars or something; I mean, you don’t want to die with your dick hanging out, do you see what I’m saying?
Primary Colors

The French Revolution
John McQuaid, on Twitter (here, here and here)

When I say “citizen journalism” has a French Revolution vibe, I mean a couple of things (1/3)

Citizen journalism/French Revolution I: CJ reflects a chaotic, democratic power shift as old, monolithic institutions fade (2/3)

Citizen journalism/French Revolution II: the (overblown) fear in the 4th Estate that angry mobs of “citizens” will destroy journalism 3/3

Greek tragedy
Steve Yelvington, on Twitter

Strangling your own website: When the parent sees the child as a threat, the stage is set for a Greek tragedy.

Metaphors: General Motors

An industrial giant in bankruptcy
Jack Shafer’s “How Condé Nast Is Like General Motors,” in Slate

Although the privately held Condé Nast isn’t as financially distressed as the bankrupt General Motors, and although the magazine business couldn’t be more unlike the car business, the two distraught companies share woes. Both succeeded in segmenting the market with semi-independent divisions that were once unique and distinct but that have since faded into one, much to the confusion of consumers. Both have dramatically dumped once-valuable properties. Both have allowed divisions to operate like independent fiefdoms at the expense of the company’s greater financial good. Both have established cultures of privilege for top employees, and both appear to have woken up to their problems too late.

Metaphors: Ford Motor Company, burning raft, John Huges’ loving teen

Raft on fire!
Jason Fry’s Reactions to Nieman, Part 2

…the print-centric business model is a burning raft — and when you’re on a burning raft, you have to plan differently.

Ford
Geir Stene’s Media business revenues are dropping so might your Company’s!

The challenges are huge and concern all of us. Rapid changes are hard to handle. I put an image of a car with this blog posting. What does that have to do with the media industry? Henry Ford’s introduction of the automated assembly line changed the car industry.

A teen who thinks Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is all about him
Megan Garber’s “The Washington Post, Angsty Teenager” in the Columbia Journalism Review.

Reading the text of The Washington Post’s new guidelines for its staff’s use of Facebook, Twitter, and the like, I couldn’t help but think of…John Hughes. Almost every movie the director ever made revolves, in its way, around an axis of insecurity, its key characters so preoccupied with what other people think of them that they risk losing themselves in the angsty inertia of it all—until, by way of an hour or so of zany events, they come to realize that the most noble thing they can be is, of course, themselves.

Metaphors: Adam and Eve, horny teens, Titanic (again)

Priests, or going down with the Titanic
Jeff Jarvis, paraphrasing Howard Owens in The real sin: Not running businesses

Like priests looking for someone to sacrifice, Alan Mutter, Steve Buttry, Howard Owens, and Steve Yelvington have been on the lookout for the sin that led newspapers astray. For Mutter, it’s not charging; for Buttry, it’s not innovating; for Owens, it’s tying online dingies to print Titanics (my poetic license); for Yelvington, it’s inaction.

Teenagers experimenting with sex
David Armano, paraphrased in the Charlotte Observer

Keynote speaker David Armano told a spillover crowd that businesses on social media today are like teenagers experimenting with sex: They don’t know what to do, but they really want to do it. Then they’re disappointed when they finally get to do it.

Original Sin
Alan Mutter’s Mission possible? Charging for web content (with bonus TV Show title joke cliche)

It is going to be just as tough for publishers to overcome their Original Sin as it has been for mankind to get past the original Original Sin committed when Adam and Eve partook of the forbidden fruit.

Steve Buttry’s Newspapers’ Original Sin: Not failing to charge but failing to innovate

Mutter is right that newspapers are still paying for an Original Sin committed in the early days of the Internet, but he (along with the AP story and lots of newspaper executives today) chose the wrong sin.

Howard Owens’ The Newspaper Original Sin: Keeping online units tethered to the mother ship (with bonus spaceship metaphor giving it a Scientology quality)

The Original Sin was? Failure to create separate business units for online.

Steve Yellvington’s Original sin? I don’t think so, but ….

Having been on more than one side of that question, and having been one of the originals, I categorically reject the notion of any “original sin.”

Unless, of course, you think inaction is a sin.