On the one hand, information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable…On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other. [Emphasis added]

So said Stewart Brand at the first Hackers’ Conference, in 1984. In its entirety, the statement was true and far-sighted, but most of it has been forgotten. That famous italicized fragment, taken out of context, became the call-to-arms of an ideology loosely known as Web 2.0, embracing a broad challenge to principles of copyright, the concept of intellectual property and the usefulness and viability of “old media.” The fight that Brand predicted now verges on cultural war.

Despite my long background at Time Inc., I have sometimes sided with those who blithely blame “old media” for their own distress, faulting them for blindness, arrogance and failure to adapt. As someone who has moved into digital publishing myself, I have a stake in the success of the new models that threaten their existence.

Online Arrogance

Nevertheless, I have to confess some discomfort with the digital revolution as it has unfolded to date, and with those who take delight in all its works.  At some of the forums on interactive media at the recent South by Southwest Conference, the air was thick with self-congratulation, and the phrase “careless plunder” kept coming to mind.

There is obviously a great deal to celebrate about the Internet and the promise of digital broadband, especially a vast increase in access to knowledge, global communications and opportunity. But there is much that should give us pause as well, including the absence so far of a healthy business model for content creators and publishers. “How long is too long to wait?” Jaron Lanier asks on behalf of Internet-starved musicians in his new book, You Are Not a Gadget. “Isn’t 15 years long enough to wait before we switch from hope to empiricism?”

The most promising new business models for journalism are not promising at all. Consider “content farms” like Demand Media, a factory of drive-by, slave-wage piecework on such enervating nano-topics as the best way to unbend knitting needles or scour a soiled hubcap. Why such subjects? There is an algorithm for that: Simply mine billions of search results, match keyword results to ad-adjacency rates, then cross-ruff the likeliest terms with their search rankings and assign the result to reporters ($15 per piece), videographers ($20), a copy editor ($2.50) and a fact-checker ($1). Demand Media publishes 4,000 articles and video clips every day. Their goal for next year is a million a month.

Demand Media started out doing its work the usual way, but its editors lost their jobs when it was discovered that the algorithm could do all the assigning while delivering almost five times the revenue and 20 times the profit. Presto: “You can take something that is thought of as a creative process,” the algorithm’s inventor told Wired, “and turn it into a manufacturing process.”

A New Social Disease

What we have here may be the early symptoms of a new social disease—call it algorithmia—in which the magic of literally unthinkable, computer-enabled mathematics can mesmerize the culture, just as it dazzled the best minds of Wall Street and nearly took down the U.S. economy.

The Internet’s principle effect on commerce has been disintermediation, a fittingly clinical term for cutting out the middle of the supply chain between producer and consumer.  But the holy algorithms of Web 2.0 enable an even more fateful and ugly disruption: the disintermediation of content and meaning.

We can comfort ourselves with the thought that more people are reading more “news” than ever before, but in fact most real news is still being reported by our increasingly enfeebled newspapers, and our common wealth of information is declining as their staffs do. What has really increased is dissemination and opinion, a lot of reheated rephrasings meant to thicken the aggregatorial stew.

It is difficult to see the way from here to a more humane digital world, but it is not hard to see some aspects of the business model that will get us there: It will place the power of granting significance back into human hands, reward the pursuit of truth and beauty and put digits to the work of hearts and minds.

A New Model Aims to Reinvent Web Publishing

When we last spoke with Jim Gaines, we talked about the future of digital publishing. Recently we had the opportunity to catch up with Gaines again. This time, he had a story to tell.

Traveling Down StoryRiver

Gaines has left FLYP Media, where he was the editor-in-chief, to take on a new adventure. He is the driving force behind StoryRiver Media, a company with a transformational web publishing model that aims to combine all possible media — including video, audio, information graphics, motion graphics, animation and text — into a single, seamless experience.

By creating device- and platform-agnostic multimedia content across all publishing genres, StoryRiver, which is slated to launch in April, hopes to advance the art of digital storytelling. Integrating media to create a dynamic and collaborative web-based masterpiece can benefit all types of organizations as they look to make their stories come alive online.

From higher education to government agencies to corporations, stories are at the root of their client communications, whether they know it or not. By being able to provide a cinematic look and feel, or a soundtrack designed to add perspective, Gaines is confident that he can help businesses seduce users through a digital narrative.

A new biography of Henry Luce recounts how hard it was for him to raise funding for what, in 1922, was still called Fact, “the weekly newspaper.” “It’s an awful strain on the nerves,” he wrote, “because one has to believe and believe and believe.”

This is a test that mere proprietors never have to face. When I took over as managing editor of TIME in 1992, the founder’s belief was no longer necessary, having 70 years’ confirmation behind it. The TIME staff executed Luce’s vision without the slightest thought that it was once only a theory and an ambition rather than a magazine, and without the slightest fear that it could fail.

Having recently started StoryRiver Media, a multimedia publishing company, I know now just how stark the difference is between steward and entrepreneur. On a good day, it seems like the difference between warm and cold. On a bad day, it’s the difference between being a vampire and being the victim of one.

New Models Emerging

“Entrepreneurial journalism” is the hot new phrase, but let’s be clear: It is a term mothered by dire necessity. The businesses that sustained journalists for so long are foundering, and new models must be devised for the world that engulfed them, which is to say the world of the Internet. That such models are needed is easy to postulate. It is another thing entirely to bet your time, life and fortune on one of them.

Which is why you have to admire Luce, who had barely placed his bet on TIME before he started Life and Fortune (not in that order). He started Fortune, the gorgeous, oversized business magazine, in 1930, as big a publishing gamble as ever was made. And maybe the second biggest gamble came a few years later with Life, a gorgeous, oversized general-interest magazine that was so successful that Luce nearly lost the company its shirt (he insisted on charging only a dime for it and locked in ad rates the first year at an enormous loss).

I am no Henry Luce, and my tiny startup is no Time Inc., but in a small way now I know his pain. Working over due-diligence spreadsheets that stretch from the heady but chimerical “Year One” into the almost wholly fabulous “Out Years” is about the bravest exercise I can imagine undertaking without a weapon. Quite apart from the matter of your own success and security is the responsibility for those you ask to come along as investors and employees. Then there is the matter of the work itself—will it be as good as your imagination tells you it can be? Can it really be as transformative as you think?

Yes and yes, always yes. No other answer is useful. When others occur, as from time to time they will, spouses can sometimes be a source of inspiration.

“You know, Karen,” I said to my wife while writing this column, “they say startups are always 10 times harder than you expect. I don’t know if I can work 10 times harder than this.”

“Who are you kidding,” she snarled.

In my previous life, I did not need that kind of . . . support. When you go to a job you know how to do—a job that was created decades before, one that lots of people have done before you and for which you have spent years preparing—you do so without the sense that there is a future-shaped hole in your gut and soul. Every leadership role requires self-confidence, but starting your own business demands something more like religious faith—not a belief in God as some kind of Gorilla-Backer in the Sky, but a deep sort of trust in the acuity of your vision.

Mine tells me that we are at a tipping point for media, one as fundamental as the migration from manuscript to print. The broadband Internet is not a new distribution channel for print but a new medium, one as distinct in its capabilities as radio, television, film or ink-on-paper.

Journalism will be changed in this new medium, but story-telling has lost none of its power in any of the media transitions since humans began painting on the walls of caves. The story is still as compelling and as riveting as fire, and the digital tools available to story-tellers today are more potent than ever before.

That at least is my story, and I’m sticking to it. You just have to believe, and believe, and believe.

For all the shiny new toys on display at last month’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas—from apps for everything, to TV everywhere, to e-readers that make breakfast—the scene was stolen by the one that wasn’t there: Apple’s breathlessly anticipated whatchamacallit. By the time you read this, it should have a name, the anticlimax will have passed and we will be on with life, which is a good thing. There is a lot of work to do.

All that speculation was actually never really about the device: It was a symptom of general media upheaval, which has been especially acute in publishing. All the new devices provide hard evidence that was once just a vague possibility and has now become manifest destiny for publishers: the obsolescence of an old model—requiring an elaborately manufactured product to be carried by truckers to newsstands and postal workers to mailboxes—in favor of a more elegant and environmentally-friendlier form of composed communication that is more robust in every way than the one Gutenberg built.

Most Likely To Succeed

We don’t know much yet about what digital broadband publications will look like, or even what functions they will serve. The one certainty about early prototypes from Time Inc. and Conde Nast is that they will be quickly dated. Major publishers will very likely be the last to exploit the full potential of broadband multimedia “publications,” focused as they must be on their core businesses. Large property holders do not make good revolutionaries.

More likely to succeed as pioneers in this new frontier are future journalism and multimedia stars now in high school or j-school. The next Henry Luce is probably in his bedroom playing World of Warcraft right now.

Second most likely are publishers whose brands are at the brink of extinction already, victims more of recession than systemic change. Nothing focuses the mind quite like the threat of dispossession.

Of these, the titles most likely to succeed at the print-to-digital migration are those with clear editorial missions. In this respect, Gourmet, Vibe and Southern Accents come to mind as last year’s most unworthy deaths—and as object lessons for brands on the brink.

All three of these magazines had clear market positioning, loyal readers and remnant, if not robust, ad franchises. Take away the cost of paper, ink and distribution, add the vibrancy of video, audio, information graphics, animation and reader collaboration, and think about the changes that were possible: Southern Accents interiors come to life with virtual tours, Gourmet’s recipes are prepared before your eyes, Vibe goes live with the music itself (click to buy), readers enter into a back-and-forth with their ever-more-favorite “magazines” in real time, and advertising in their “pages” is transformed from passive still-life into an engagement with sight, sound and motion. The brand delivers more to readers and to advertisers: What’s not to like?

Don’t Swap Service for Bells and Whistles

This virtuous cycle only works, however, when the mission for the existing brand does not change, and when multimedia technologies and broadband delivery serve that mission clearly and directly. Before attempting the print-to-digital migration, nothing is more important than understanding precisely what that mission is, at its most basic level, to the publication’s most avid customers.

Publications whose mission is less than entirely clear are likely to confuse their readers and themselves as they attempt such a transition. General-interest titles in particular are going to have a tough time pulling it off, and if “cool” or “hip” have any place in the mission, watch out: Nothing says the opposite like geolocational and augmented-reality hijinx undertaken just to be edgy, as we have already seen.

It’s a curious irony of this new world that it may just make those publishers lucky enough to have special-interest publications more likely to “stick to their knitting,” as one of my favorite bosses used to say. As transformative as publishing technology may become, the new forms of communication it makes possible must still be yoked to the real needs and practical desires of customers. Those who will succeed in deploying that new technology will be those who listen to those needs and desires, not to bells and whistles.

Interview: Jim Gaines on Experimentation in Digital Publishing

FLYP is more than a magazine. Its dynamic, interactive insights about American and world culture engage users through a variety of text, video, audio and animation and have proven to be a journalistic endeavor that turns news and information into a multimedia experience.

FLYP has been described as Life Magazine for the Web 2.0 era so it’s only fitting that Jim Gaines, former managing editor of People, Time and Life magazines is editor-in-chief. A veteran news journalist, Gaines is committed to multimedia initiatives and advocates for experimentation and change within the digital publishing landscape.

We had the opportunity to talk with Mr. Gaines about the future of digital publishing. He shared many insights about how the web publishing industry can best position themselves in the New Year and what he considers to be important in the years ahead.

To read the rest of this article, click HERE.

Kicking off Day Two of the Federal Trade Commission’s recent hearings on the dismal economics of journalism last month, Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee, declared that government would have to step in, “one way or the other,” to help the publishing industry survive a “market failure” that threatens independent journalism. He wasn’t specific about the nature of such aid, conceding “Congress can’t impose a solution.” But he left no doubt that he believes it’s the government’s role to spring to journalism’s defense.

This pledge appealed to some participants, like those representing public-media entities including PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. “Congress should adopt legislation that would provide substantial additional resources to public-service journalism,” said Mark MacCarthy, professor of communications at Georgetown University, arguing that government involvement in the arts, sciences and other fields is “traditional, mainstream and all-American.” “This is not some weird, strange aberration and alien intrusion into our life,” MacCarthy said. “This is the way we do things in this country.”

Words of Warning

For any publishers tempted by such a government rescue, I would invoke six words of warning: Robert Mapplethorpe, Ken Tomlinson, Enola Gay.

These names are loaded for a reason. Mapplethorpe was a notable art photographer before he became a cause célèbre, one of several artists whose work caught the attention of conservative groups when exhibitions were funded by the National Endowment of the Arts. In the 1990s, the NEA received between $160 and $180 million to underwrite arts in the U.S., but under pressure its funding was halved in 1996 and has yet to recover. The NEA stopped funding individual artists’ work.

Ken Tomlinson was named chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting by president George W. Bush in 2003 and immediately began hunting for “liberal bias” in public television, funding an investigation of Bill Moyers, and violating both CPB regulations and federal law by raising money to underwrite a program run by the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal.

The Smithsonian’s abortive effort to mount an exhibit around the WWII bomber plane Enola Gay was attacked by the Pentagon, veterans groups and members of Congress. This ended the tenure of the secretary and the curator of the Air and Space Museum, leaving the institution’s credibility in tatters. The new secretary was forced to cancel the exhibit to keep funding intact. It’s unclear what was foregone later to avoid political fallout.

All support comes with strings attached, of course. Corporate ownership of publishing can be chilling, and even philanthropists have friends in high places. By comparison with government support, though, such pressures are benign. Even the effects of advertising on journalism are mild in contrast, since the sources of revenue are multilateral.

Dual Revenue Stream Model Not Broken

Turns out, the dual-revenue stream model for newspapers and magazines is about as ideal as a business model can be, at least for independent journalism.

And that model still works. It has a bright future in the world of digital broadband to which magazines—at long last—are migrating. As the new generation of tablets and their descendents change the Internet from a “lean-forward,” desktop information utility to a “lean-back” immersion experience, all the video and rich media advertising that has been on the sidelines for lack of a proper home will find its way to those places where consumers will pay to be—and the best kind of public support, the kind that independent journalism can really rely on, is circulation revenue.

Will people pay for journalism? Of course they will. It is hard to imagine why this question persists. When have people failed to pay for what they want and need?

Government has a role here, but it’s about the distribution channel, not the content. Broadband penetration brings the digital divide issue into sharp relief. Where government funding is needed—indeed, critical—is to ensure universal high-speed access to the Internet and the broad availability, especially of broadband learning devices in schools. Until government can be trusted to take over the role of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable—and the health-care debate hardly suggests that moment has come—journalism should continue to make its own way.

So far, publishers have demonstrated more fervor than conviction in their attempts to embrace digital innovation. With a few important exceptions—notably The Atlantic—general-interest magazine sites have given themselves over to opinion and aggregation, chasing the headless eyeball and revenue from desolate banner ads while leaving behind all trace of the narrative and design richness of the parent publications.

There is a desperate, shotgun quality to print-digital marriages, as well—like Entertainment Weekly’s “video in print” ad for CBS in September, GQ’s iPhone app in October and Esquire’s experiment with “augmented reality” on the December cover. Popular Science got there first in July, by, as they say, holding up the magazine cover to a computer’s webcam so readers can see “a 3-D landscape dotted with wind turbines popping off the page; by blowing into your computer’s microphone, you can even make the turbines spin faster.”

And as the song goes, you would cry too if it happened to you.

Help is On the Way

Happily, help is on the way, though at first glance, it has a decidedly menacing aspect. Like a hologram, it takes a little squinting to see it for what it is.

The much-rumored whatchamacallit from Apple (iTablet, iPad, whatever) will be just the ancestor of a new world of digital devices whose capabilities are going to lift the greatest burden of publishing (the cost of paper, ink and distribution) bringing HD video, animation, eloquent info graphics and the engaging arts of video gaming to the task of journalism and most other purposes of non-fiction story-telling, including education.

Just as transformative, the iWhatever and its descendants will liberate users from the lean-forward nature of the desktop experience by putting the screen in our hands. The Internet will still be the best way to find what you’re looking for fast, but it will be a great deal more than that, as well. Thanks to broadband penetration, print has lost its monopoly on ubiquity.

When I was the editor of People, I used to say magazines were safe until fiber optics made it to the bathroom. That was a long time ago. What I could not imagine then was how much more robust story-telling could be when liberated from paper and ink, or how you could ever feel like curling up with a computer.

Perhaps most importantly, multimedia story-telling will endow “print” journalism with the brand-enhancing asset that has kept advertisers investing in broadcast and cable: the engaging energy of light, sound and motion. Industry analysts have yet to make the leap from Web as a distribution channel to revolutionary medium.

“The strategies that make media companies successful will require new capabilities,” according to one recent study, which enumerated them: “tracking and research to gain deeper insights into audience interests, informatics to manage and direct Web traffic, database management, custom content and applications development, and the ability to manage a network of partnerships.”

Well, yes. But the way to enhance those relationships is not through database management, but by building trust and engagement—by telling great stories in a way that makes people want to read and experience them.

The Next “Magazine”

This will not be easy. ASME will need to get over itself and stop treating advertisers like enemy occupiers. ABC rules and circulation practices will need to change so that print brands can re-imagine themselves without losing credit for the loyal adherents who follow them there. Publishing giants will have to act like startups, inviting story-tellers from the worlds of film and gaming to join writers and designers with a serious claim on resources and the mandate to fail until they succeed in perfecting the crafts and arts of multimedia story-telling.

When that happens, some enlightened American company—publisher, ASME, maybe even an advertiser!—knowing that its brand equity is intimately tied to the values it promotes, will put its name (and money) behind the next great American “magazine.”

That could very well be a broadband multimedia experience whose mission is the same one that has always informed America’s publishing at its best—to share experience, in a spirit of generosity, to bear faithful witness, to bring coherence and light to the gravest problems and greatest purposes of American life.

Or, as Henry Luce once put it: “To see life. To see the world. To eyewitness great events ….”

Now that’s an app.

The feedback has been really wonderful. Below is an excerpt from the 11/29 Times. For the full version, please click HERE.

Over 60, and Proud to Join the Digerati

In the summer of 2008, just before I turned 61, I went to work at FLYP, an online digital publication that combines text with Flash animation, motion graphics and streaming audio and video to tell stories. It’s part of a larger effort to explore new forms of multimedia journalism.

Photo courtesy of The New York Times

FLYP’s founder, Alan Stoga, is several years younger than I am. The other people on the staff are decades younger than either of us. Most of them, I suspect, have body piercings or tattoos of some sort. You can say 60 is the new 40 all you want. Where I work, even 40 is pretty old.

I used to be the top editor of Time, Life and People magazines (back when print was king). On my first day at FLYP, I was introduced to the staff as someone who “has forgotten more about magazines than any of us has ever known.” This comported nicely with my self-image. I thought that by this time in my life, kids coming out of college would be lucky to work with me, pleased to learn from the experience that I’ve worked so hard (and proudly) to achieve.

It hasn’t turned out that way. The young digerati at FLYP are ambitious, smart, thoughtful and hard-working, and in fact, I feel lucky to be working with them.

Click HERE to read the rest of this column.

To hear Arthur Sulzberger Jr., tell it –in New York Magazine following the Oct. 26 benefit for The News Literacy Project–the “critical flaw” of the RMS Titanic was not iceberg detection, not an inattentive crew, not a shortage of lifeboats, not overestimating the ship’s construction, nor underestimating the staying power of ice. It was this: “Twelve years earlier, two brothers invented the airplane.”

This is the so-called Titanic Fallacy, which is aptly named. Tell it to the 1,517 people who died in the water that night, several hundred miles short of New York.

I really wish he had kept that analogy to himself. With all the digital cheers going up around the deathbed of print, the media world does not need a Pinch of snuff-porn, any more than it needs a Sulzberger Happy Meal.

The truth lies where it so often does, somewhere between hope and despair. But the outlook for media today is a lot better than the future for luxury cruises was in 1912. It’s bracing, to be sure, but in the way a good long run or a complex, stimulating book can be.

Consider, for example, Elizabeth Eisenstein’s magisterial two-volume work, “The Printing Press As An Agent of Change” (Cambridge University Press, 1980). I’m in the middle of reading it now, and it is a long, bracing run indeed—a minute and skillful examination of just how massive the disruption was, a story previously taken for granted by historians but never so exhaustively studied and eloquently told.

All that is commonly remembered now of that fundamental shift is that reading became more common and knowledge more widespread. We do not mourn the monks whose craft and art of illuminating manuscripts was torn from their hands by that revolution.

Neither should we mourn the printers or print publishers of today. Instead, we should applaud the digital shift, which is actually fulfilling the manifest destiny set out for information by Gutenberg’s bright idea in the 15th Century.

Thanks to the digital revolution, there are millions more people consuming news and information than ever before. As Moore’s law works 24/7 to double the capacity of new devices, the much-rumored Apple Tablet, said to be coming out in a few months, will be just the ancestor of a new generation of digital hardware that will bring text, movies, music, motion graphics—all the tools of multimedia—off your desk and into your hands.

As that happens, the world of media will be transformed. In addition to inviting users to “lean forward” to find the information they want and need through search engines and databases, information on the Web—and more generally in the world of digital broadband—will encourage users to “lean back” and experience the new ways data can combine into coherent, narrative forms. Otherwise known as stories.

Maybe Sulzberger was misunderstood. Let’s hope so. Let’s hope he realizes how lucky he is that some of the media inventors with the Wright stuff are in the Times’s own multimedia department, doing the hard work of inventing the crafts and arts of digital story-telling and so our information future.

Any day now he should get them out of the factory and let them fly.

You can listen to the interview here

It is my hope–and I trust it’s more than a hope–that when digital multimedia narrative becomes a practiced fact, rather than a distant dream, a common well of stories sympathetically told will encourage a new sense of community, of common understandings, that will help to bridge the partisan divide.

Let me know if you agree–or not.