[34-minute PowerPoint video of keynote speech opening the fifth annual Personalize MEdia Conference (formerly Individuated Media conferences), Boulder, Colorado. June 20, 2011. How traditional media companies have gone astray by misperceiving consumers' switch from analog to digital formats to be the greatest trend underway; why the abundance of content instead makes personalization (i.e., individuation) the greatest trend of 21st Century media; and what the media industries need do about it.  All images public domain. If otherwise, please contact vin@digitaldeliverance.com.]

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Welcome. My name is Crosbie.  Vin, as in Vincent, Crosbie. Welcome to Boulder! And Welcome to Personalize Media 2011! Welcome to the Chautauqua Center.

I’m glad the conference organizers decided to hold this meeting here at Chautuaqua. It’s is a wonderfully symbolic location for this conference. Behind the projection screen, on the wall of this hall, is a photo showing the first Chautauqua meetings ever held here. The year was in 1898. Everyone here was living in tents. Canvas tents. Back then, it wasn’t the high-tech Boulder you see outside the windows today, but a pioneering group, meeting to discuss what would become.

We’re figuratively those pioneers today. Thanks for asking me to keynote the conference. I’m going to start this conference with a very bold statement. A bold statement I’ll then justify. Personalization (individuation) is the major media trend of the 21^st Century.

Some executives think these are dark times for media. Well, in case there are any historians in the audience: that’s like saying the Enlightenment was a dark time for the Feudal system.

If your business today dates from the Industrial Era – in other words, if your business is Mass Media—media based upon the practices that arose from the technological limitations of the analog press or analog transmitter—media in which all readers receives the same edition at once or all listeners or viewers see the same broadcast at once – then these are dark times indeed. The era of Mass Media’s feudal primacy is over. Something new and enlightened has replaced it.

Most media executives, schooled in Mass Media, don’t really understand what has happened

I’ll start explaining what’s happened by telling you about my own industry: the daily newspaper industry. The daily newspaper industry is among the oldest and most hallowed of media industries.

I’m here to tell you how lack of personalization, the lack of individuation, is destroying that industry in every one of the world’s post-industrial countries. In every country where people’s access and choice of media is no longer relatively scarce, but abundant.

Here in the U.S., the daily newspaper industry earned revenues of nearly $49 billion in Year 2000…. Ten years later, last year, that same industry earned only $25.2 billion. The U.S. daily newspaper industry has lost almost 50 percent of its revenues during the past ten years.

Some newspaper executives like to blame the 2007 recession for the loss. However, the facts are that less than half of that loss occurred during the recession. Most of that loss happened during the non-recession years, the years before and after the recession. An industry over 200 years old in this country has lost approximately half of its revenues during the past ten years.  Why?

I’ll tell you why: The reason is that newspapers and other media industries got caught in a conceptual trap—a conceptual trap into which most media executives fell as they tried to understand the greatest change in media history.

Most major languages have an adage about the conceptual trap into which most media executives have fallen: L’arbre qui cache la forêt. Los árboles no dejan ver el bosque. Er sieht den Wald vor lauter Bäumen nicht. ИЗ-ЗА ДЕРЕВЬЕВ ЛЕСА НЕ ВИДНО. Μπορεί να δει το δέντρο και όχι το δάσος. 见树不见林. 木を見て森を見ず. Because I speak English, the version I use is, they don’t see the forest for the trees.

Most media executives today mistakenly believe that the greatest change underway is that people are simply switching media consumption from analog to digital formats. These executive misperceive a trait or characteristic as the change itself.

They see the trees, but not the larger perspective. And their myopia has led of them to formulate the wrong strategies for adapting to the gargantuan changes underway in media.

Because most media executives misperceive the change underway to be that consumers are simply switching from analog to digital, these executives believe that what their companies must do to adapt is simply do in digital what they’ve always done in analog.

The executives believe that all their companies need to to is use the same business models, the same production practices, the same packaging, the same products, and the same content in digital as they’ve always used in analog — albeit with the addition of some hyperlinks, audio, video, and animation, and publicized via Social Media.

That’s the root of their not seeing the forest for the trees problem. (It’s about as apt a strategy as putting the Olsen Twins in the deep woods.)

Unfortunately, any strategy based upon a misperception will not only fail to yield successful results but will fail to explain why successful results aren’t yielded.

So, it’s not surprising that these media executives are mystified why the digital versions of their traditional newspaper and magazine editions and traditional broadcast programs aren’t earning anywhere near as much revenue online than those traditional products did in print—even in the cases when the digital products have more monthly users.

Moreover, these executives can’t explain why the average user of the digital version uses it much less frequently and less thoroughly than the average user of the analog version does.

Such are the captains of most media companies today: mis-navigating their companies through stormy times; captains of business who, misperceiving the great change in the media environment to be that consumers are simply switching consumption from analog to digital, hold true to the wrong course. They are myopic navigators leading media industries into financial ruin, layoffs, and catastrophe.

While they’re fishing for answers, wondering why their business as usual doesn’t work in digital – or New Media at all – we’re here. We know the answers. That’s why we are attending the fifth annual international Personalize MEdia Conference because we understand what’s really happening. We can see the forest for the trees.

We understand the greatest change in the history of media. We know that it’s not merely a change from analog to digital. We know that the greatest change is really that within only a generation people’s access and choice of news, entertainment, and information has changed from relative scarcity to surplus, even to surfeit or overload.

Look at how things were 40, 30, 20, or even ten years ago in post-industrial countries. News, entertainment, and information used to be relatively scarce. For examples, billions of people worldwide who wanted access to daily changing information had perhaps just one or two or three locally-distributed printed newspapers, plus one, two, or three television channels and a dozen or two radio stations within antenna range.

But all that has changed. Today, we’ve certainly a surplus of news, entertainment, and information. In fact, the main problem nowadays is overload. We’ve got a vast buffet or cornucopia. The problem is picking the exact items we want. And that’s the beauty of it. The exact items we want.

Yes, it’s true that people are switching consumption from analog to digital formats. But that’s not for format’s sake. They’re switching because digital technologies provide them with more choices and access to the news, entertainment, and information that specifically fits their individual mix of needs & interests. It isn’t the format they’re after, but its greater access and enormous choice of specific content.

The fact is that each of us is different. Each of us is an individual. Sure, we might share a few common interests: the weather, for instance. But that’s about it for common general-interests. Each of us, each of you, have dozens, hundreds, of specific interests. Each of us is a unique mix of those interests. And each of us gravitates to whatever content satisfies our own unique mix of individual interests.

Let me put it this way to you: Imagine that during most of your life you had no choice of what you ate. It varied daily, but it was exactly the same meal that everyone else in town ate that day.  What would you do if that situation changed and you instead had your choice of specific items from a gargantuan buffet? Would you continue to eat the communal, general-interest meal each day? No! You’d use the gargantuan buffet and satisfy your individual interests.

Indeed, that’s exactly why billions of people now use search engines daily. Nowadays, billions of people are manually personalizing, customizing, or individuating. They are finding the stories, videos, or other items of content that specifically match their own individual interests. They’re hunting and gathering all that themselves.

As Peter Horrocks, director of World Services for the British Broadcasting Corporation, recently said: “The consequence of this change in users’ consumption has only dimly been understood by the majority of journalists. Most of the major news organizations had the assumption that their news product provided the complete set of news requirements for their users. But in an internet world, users see the total information set available on the web as their ‘news universe’. I might like BBC for video news, the Telegraph or Daily Mail for sports results and The New York Times for international news…”.

People no longer consume generic packages. For example, take a look at these data from Nielsen about U.S. newspaper websites. The first assignment I give my graduate students is to tell me what remarkable about it. Students trained in traditional media, in Mass Media, tell me the answer is the huge number of people who use these websites.

However, the smart students point to the other data. For example, did you know that the average user of the The New York Times’ website visits it only 4.05 times per month; sees less than 27 webpages (which probably means less than 20 stories, because that site stretches most stories over more than one webpage); and spend an aggregate total of less than 20 minutes on the site all month. That‘s a visit only about once per week!

Unpersonalized, uncustomized, unindividuated content is used far less frequently and far less thoroughly online. People use New Media radically differently than they used traditional media.

And that radical difference is personalization, customization, individuation.

Another example, at the National Association of Broadcasters conference this April, Edison Research and Arbitron released a survey of American adults who use online radio. Fifty-three percent of those people knew of Pandora radio, which broadcasts personalized music. A quarter of all online radio listeners had used Pandora. One sixth had used it that month. One in ten people had listened to Pandora that week.

There are more than 6,000 radio stations webcasting in the United States, but one sixth of all online radio listeners listen to Pandora. I dare you to show me a traditional broadcaster or traditional print media site that one in ten of all people online use monthly. The most spectacular success in online broadcasting is personalized, customized, individuated. Pandora also is one of the most successful apps on smartphones and tablets.  And personalized, customized, individuated broadcasts such as Pandora and Last.fm are now having a radical effect on the radio industry.

This year, Clear Channel Communications, which owns more than 1,000 radio stations in the United States, more than any other company, announced that it will launched personalized, customized, individuated versions of its stations online.

Movies watched at home provide another example. Netflix is now the world’s largest distributor of videos. Is that because it has no stores? Is it because Netflix lets you rent a video for as much time as you want? No! It’s because of choice and personalization. Netflix gives each of its customer choice and access to tens of thousands of movies, enough to satisfy anybody’s unique mix of individual interests and tastes. Netflix wouldn’t be the world’s leader if it offered only the number of videos titles you could fit into a storefront.

Neither would Amazon be the leading bookseller.

In traditional media, Mass Media — in other words, Industrial Era media – every users sees exactly the same things at the same time as every other users. So, Is Facebook a Mass Medium? With more than 560 million users, it certainly has mass scale. Yet every user of Facebook sees something different than every other user of Facebook. What they see depends upon the user’s own individual mix of friends and interests. It’s not Mass Media, it is Individuated Media.

And that’s the point of my keynote today. We are right. People want Individuated media. Not Mass Media. Mass Media, and the practices and business models associated with it, were based upon scarcity, not surplus or abundance. Nothing wrong with that during its era. But that era ended at the end of the past century. What we’re clearly seeing nowadays, in the 21^st Century, is the rise of Individuated Media (what we’re at this conference calling Personalized Media)

We know that the ramifications of billions of people having virtually instant access to all the world’s information are gargantuan, far greater than Gutenberg’s invention of moveable printing type or Marconi ’s and Tesla’s invention of broadcasting, and will affect not only the media industries, but every other realm of commerce, culture, politics, society, and civilization. But the fact that billions of people want a personalized, customized, individualized selection of content has gargantuan ramifications for the media industries.

First, hunting & gathering are primitive ways to acquire things–be those things food and shelter or news, entertainment, and information. There are huge business opportunities for media companies here. Facebook knows that, which is why it allows its users to automate feeds of news, entertainment, and information into users’ Facebook experiences.

The media industries need to adopt production practices and technologies that deliver to each individual the personalized, customized, individuated news, entertainment, and other information (including advertising and other product & service information) that that the person wants.

All sectors of all media industries need to work together, something unprecedented. People don’t consume just newspapers or just magazines or just broadcasts or just pure-play Internet content. They consume the mix, and won’t deal with different business models per media industry. Walls between traditional media must fall.

Nor will people consume just their own nation’s media. The world’s media industries need to globalize. There are no borders online except language.

All this will require huge changes in the practices and business models of media. Likewise, huge changes in the production and delivery technologies. Yet all of the technologies necessary exist today. These technologies and their successors are necessary for media companies to survive during the 21st Century. We are the pioneers of these discoveries.

During the next two days, we’ll examine personalized books, personalized magazines, personalized newspapers, personalized advertising, personalized greeting cards, personalized home printing, and other related subjects.

We’ll look at the technologies, the products, and the business models.

Like the early automobiles, early aircraft, and early computers, some of these might be embryonic or have gaps in their production or business models. But they are the future.

We are the future. The future of media is here with you now.

Thank You!

Many of the media industries for which journalism and media professors prepare students are, if not yet dying, seriously ill, stumbling if not yet in collapse due to titanic changes underway.

Ten days ago, I published here a call for American journalism and media professors to conduct more practical research because too much of their research is too esoteric to help those industries. Rather than write this call all by myself, I heavily quoted Earl Wilkinson, the executive director of the International Newspaper Marketing Association (now the International News Marketing Association). I timed it for the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication‘s (AEJMC) annual conference, the largest convention of American and Canadian journalism and media professors, held last week in Denver. Wilkinson had attended AEJMC in 2002 and spoken at the AEJMC 2003 conference.

My call provoked a dozen remarkable comments, from professors and from industry change analysts, about if they should be solving the industry’s problems, if those problems are caused by business people or the people who create the industries’ content, and if whatever problems exists just in US academia. On the AEJMC Newspaper Division’s blog, it prompted blogmaster Bob Stepno,  a journalism and media professor of Radford University, to retrieve Wilkinson’s correspondence with AEJMC and  the AEJMC’s own qualitative and quantitative surveys about the focuses of its research. All worth reading if you’re a media academic, student, or someone who’s looking for answers for the media industry’s problems.

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According to their tweets, many professor at AEJMC10 were disappointed that the venue (the Denver Sheraton) didn’t always have a WiFi field available in the conference hall. Some of the professors are now tweeting that a working WiFi field should be requirement for the AEJMC11 venue.

Fine idea. However, the problem says more about the professors than the venue. Most of those professors should be teaching their students how to get online when WiFi isn’t available—such as when filing a news story from the scene to their newsroom. You’d think they’d know how to do that themselves. Never rely on there being WiFi. Real world practitioners don’t. When I don’t find WiFi where I am, I plug an inexpensive USB cell modem stick into my computer. It’s gotten me online in Malaysian jungles, atop alps, and in hotels that don’t have WiFi.

Southern Methodist University Professor Jake Batsell rightly told me that there wasn’t a solid cell signal deep inside the Denver Sheraton, so this method probably wouldn’t have worked there anyway. I was just surprised how dependent professors are on free WiFi, upon which the journalists they train shouldn’t be.

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Did I say that many of the media industries  are, if not yet dying, seriously ill, stumbling if not yet in collapse due to titanic changes underway? I’m sure that some professors and some media industry executives (what’s Gavin O’Reilly up to these days? He’s being uncharacteristically quiet) will still disagree with me about that, despite all the data evidence.

Speaking of which, I had to chuckle at former Guardian editor Peter Preston‘s column in The Observer on Sunday in London. Triumphantly entitled Newspapers beat the doomsayers’ final deadline, it states:

Not long ago, the experts predicted 10 US papers would be gone in 18 months. They were wrong. And prospects for print are looking better, not worse, than they did in the depths of the crunch…. In America, where the direst predictions flourished,Time ran a March 2009 article on the nation’s “10 most endangered newspapers” and forecast that ‘eight would cease publication in the next 18 months’. Well, that was 17 months ago, and all 10, from the Miami Herald to the San Francisco Chronicle, are still publishing.

What a splendid example of fatuous retorting of fatuous reporting!

First and foremost, what “experts predicted 10 US papers would be gone in 18 months”? Not any newspaper industry analysts I’ve ever heard or read, and my profession has been as a newspaper analyst for the past 17 years. No, the “experts” Preston cite is Time magazine itself, that fading and ever-more People magazine shadow of what had been a decent news magazine 30 years ago.

And what “experts” did Time itself quote in the 10 most endangered newspapers story that Preston quotes? A website in New Rochelle, New York, called 24/7 Wall St. whose six-person news staff writes stories and opinionson the subject of:

For several decades most business journalism was dominated by Business Week, Forbes, Fortune, and The Wall Street Journal. While all of them have online editions, new web operations from Marketwatch, TheStreet.com, Bloomberg.com, Reuters.com, The Fool, and a dozen blogs and commentary sites have begun to take the place of print. Revenue is also flowing out of print to the web allowing financial websites to spend more on writers and content.

In other words, Time based its 10 most endangered newspapers story on a single source which has a vested business interest in seeing printed editions fail and being replaced by companies like that single source. In fact, if you’re planning a conference and a speaker on that subject, the 24/7 Wall St. website says they’re the speakers you want about how companies like theirs are replacing printed news publications. Moreover, 24/7 Wall St. is hardly an expert about the newspaper business. Ask people, either pro or con the future of newspapers, within the newspaper industry or any academic who follows that industry. There are plenty of experts about the newspaper industry, but 24/7 Wall St. isn’t one. Go to its site, particularly its About page, and judge for yourself.

Indeed, no real or credible “experts” about the newspaper industry has ever said that eight out of the ten newspapers on the list that Time got from 24/7 Wall St. will fail in 18 months. Or even 36 or 72 months. But Time‘s fatuous reporting provide a London columnist and former newspaper editor a chance to say the talk about newspapers being in jeopardy or dying was much ado about almost nothing.

2007-2009 declines, by percent

Here’s that almost nothing, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In the US, combined print and online newspaper ad revenues dropped 27.2 percent just in 2009. That’s a plunge from $37.8 billion to $27.5 billion. US newspapers’ online revenues, which were already less than a tenth of those newspapers’ revenues, dropped 11.8 percent.

Most real experts about newspapers have talked about the real possibility that half of the 1,408 daily newspapers in the US could fail during this coming decade. Just because 8 of a fatuously cited endangered 10 didn’t fail within 18 months doesn’t mean their danger is over.

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Hundreds of thousands of people in the UK might have read Preston’s column in print Sunday, but people wanting to read the Montreal Gazette could do so only online that day and future Sundays. After 22 years, the Gazette ceased print publication on Sundays, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief Alan Allnut announced.

At the end of this month, Jornal do Brasil, one of the oldest newspapers in South America’s largest  country, will stop publishing its print edition and will be only available online. in 1995, Jornal do Brasil was one of the first South American dailies to launch a website.

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The natural way in which media conferences about online business models have been organized is either to invite company chief executives and online media pundits to speak or else to collect workers from a rank (such as journalist) of the media industries to compare notes. The hope in either case is that the speakers or workers will collectively discover why traditional media business models are failing and what the new media business models are.

Unfortunately, the latent flaw in these conference organizational methods is that these speakers and workers should long ago have discovered why the traditional media business models are failing and what the new media business models are. In other words, the organizers are asking the very same people who led the media industries into the predicament to identify the problem those same people caused and to lead the industries out of it. As Einstein reputedly said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

It is highly unlikely that media company chief executives are going to say that the business models they’ve implemented at their companies during the past many years, the business models upon which they’ve based their careers, are now impractical, obsolete, or wrong. Moreover, it is very highly unlikely that any chief executive of a publicly-held media company will do that. If they already knew and had implemented the answers, it would be fine. But the fact is that they don’t, and their companies’ their readership, listenership, viewership, and gross revenues (compared with their pre-recession revenues) aren’t increasing. Many of these executives don’t even have a clue. They are invited to speak simply because they are chief executives of media companies.

As for the online business models conferences that involve just a single rank within the media industries, little more than this needs to be said: any newspaper, magazines, radio or television program, channel, or network, or even pure-play New Media website are organizations that involve multiple ranks. Without the other ranks, no single rank can formulate the solution.

Media conferences in which company chief executives and online media pundits speak or workers from a single rank of media companies collectively meet almost always tend to reinforce traditional orthodoxies. Groupthink and peer pressure discourages critical examination of the new media business model problem. This dynamic is one of the reasons there has been a conference held somewhere about this problem approximately once a month for the past several years.

Thus, Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications and I have organized a new media business models conference in an ‘unnatural’ way. We’re inviting only speakers who we think have the answer—regardless where they are from or what they’re rank. We believe these are the people who together have all the facets of the solution. Moreover, they’ll be working in coordination with each other at the conference.

We call this event the M.O.B. Conference, for Monetizing Online Business [I tip my hat to Tom Showalter for coining the acronym]. The day and one-half conference will be held at the HBO Theatre overlooking Manhattan’s Bryant Park on Thursday, June 24 and Friday, June 25. Admission to it, including Thursday lunch and afternoon cocktails, is $250 (registration). Approximately 50 seats are left.

Here is the program:

M.O.B. Conference, HBO Theater, New York City

Thursday, June 24, 2010

Theme: The Greatest Change in the History of Media

Moderator: Vin Crosbie, adjunct professor and senior consultant on Executive Education in New Media, the Newhouse School.

8:30 a.m. – Continental breakfast

9:30 a.m. – Welcome from Newhouse Dean Lorraine Branham

1:30 p.m. – How Viral and Social Media Affect Business Models. Presented by Adam Penenberg, investigative journalist, New York University assistant professor, and author of Viral Loop.

2 p.m. – How Media Companies Must Metamorph. Publish2 CEO Scott Karp, whose company aims to “replace the Associated Press in the 21st Century,” describes what the new information ecology means for media companies.

3 p.m. – How Broad is the Spectrum of Change? Vin Crosbie outlines how the change affects pricing, packaging, community, locality and even storytelling in the 21st Century.

3:45 p.m. – What Are the New Business Models? An audience discussion with Ali, Crosbie, Karp, Penenberg and Picard.

4:30 p.m. – Cocktails.

Friday, June 25, 2010

Theme: Fostering Intrepreneurship in Media Organizations

Moderator: Stephen Masiclat, associate professor, the Newhouse School

[My opening keynote speech at the Second Annual Global Conference on Individuated Newspapers, Denver, Colorado, June 26, 2008]

Some of you here know me. Since 1993 when I began working full-time in newspaper new media, I’ve given approximately 100 speeches at conferences. I’ve given speeches at E&P, WAN, Ifra, INMA, and Seybold. But this is the speech I’ve been waiting for all those years. I may not have known it then, but I know it now.

In it, I’m going to say some heretical things. But please remember that I’m a fifth-generation newspaperman. I literally grew up in a letterpress-era newsroom, can read teletype, work a linotype, cut press plates, and run a press. I’ve sold ads. I’ve driven delivery trucks. I’ve reported, edited, and general managed a daily. I’m a professor at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications. If I speak what sounds like heresy or I criticize this industry, know that it is because I love the newspaper business. It’s my family and my life.

The reason why this is the speech that I’ve been working up to all my life, is it distills all I know about this business and its future. The culmination of all I know as a newsman, newspaper, and professor. We’ve a bold agenda today.

You’ve all been to many media conferences since the turn of the millennium.

You’ve heard of multimedia and convergence. You’d heard about Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 and even Web 3.0. You’ve also heard about the ‘Blogosphere’ and ‘Citizen Journalism’. All those things are important in their own right.

But they are trivial compared to what I’m about to detail and why we are here.

My agenda this morning is no less than to cut the Gordian Knot of New Media.

• I will explain why 1.3 billion people have gravitate online — despite their already having access to mass media in much more convenient formats than online.

• I’ll explain why the so-called fragmentation of audiences is an illusion. How cohesive audiences were instead the real illusion.
• I’ll explain why traditional newspapers’ and news magazines’ circulations, and news broadcasts’ viewerships, must ineluctably decline. And the reason why is not because people don’t want news.
• I’ll explain why most newspapers’ and news magazines’ and news broadcasters’ Web sites won’t save their companies. (In other words, why simply doing in online what you’ve done in print will never result in revenues anywhere near what newspapers had earned.)
• And I’ll explain why people can be even better served by New Media than by Mass Media – if we are successful at this conference. In other words, why the change today is even greater than that during Gutenberg’s era.

That’s a very ambitious agenda, so let’s begin.

If you think you’ve seen change during the past 15 years — you ain’t seen nothing yet.

That sounds trite because everyone talks about change. But let me give you a clue about how quickly things can change. A clue to the type of changes you’re going to see during the next dozen years.

Think not of Denver in 2008 but of Denver in 1908. In 1908, the streets outside this building and all the streets of Denver – as well as those in New York, London, Berlin, Tokyo, and every other city in the world — were full of horse carriages and horse carts.

Although the 20th Century was new, people nevertheless knew that it would be a mechanized age, despite the abundance of horses. The early automobile showed promise. Telephones were beginning to become common in offices and homes. Tesla and Marconi were each experimenting with something that would eventually be called radio. Yet nobody knew how quickly all those things would affect the city’s population, its horses, and its many newspapers.

Moreover, quantum mechanics had been discovered by 1908 and would later give us devices such as television, the transistor, the computer, the laser, and the CD, DVD, etc.

Today in 2008, people still get information distributed on paper pulp or from analog broadcast transmitters that are little changed since Marconi’s time.

Nevertheless, we know the 21st century will be an all- digital age. An age of pervasive information. If the personal computer and mobile phone were our equivalents of the newfangled telephones and automobiles for people 100 years ago, so too can we now foresee things that have only recently been discovered and invented, and we’re starting to have a clue about the things that will shape the 21st century.

The horses were gone from Denver’s streets by 1920, and the streets of every other city — in only a dozen years’ time.

Likewise, the changes between now and 2020 will be phenomenal. If you think you’ve seen change during the past dozen years, you ain’t seen nothing yet!

If you think you’ve seen changes during the past 15 years, understand that we’re only about 15 years into a 30 or 45 year change that will be bigger than the change wrought by Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in 1439.
Here is Gutenberg in Strasbourg. A statue in bronze, which today is a target for pigeons. He’s also a target for quotes about the Internet.

My guess is that you’ve all heard most the quotes before:

‘The Internet is the biggest things since Gutenberg.’

‘The change underway will be the biggest since Gutenberg.’

‘The Internet will change things as much as Gutenberg did.’

Etcetera.

Don’t get me wrong: Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press sparked the Renaissance.

But I’m here to tell you that the change underway today is even larger than that which Gutenberg sparked.
The change now underway is bigger than mass production was for the medieval calligraphers and scribes that Gutenberg’s invention put out of work. Moreover, it’s not just a change from production of single calligraphic editions to mass production of millions of books. What is underway is an quantum and intellectual jump in how information is distributed to people and how they find information.

It’s like a jump from two dimensions to three dimensions. Unfortunately, most newspaper publishers don’t understand the new dimension.

The problem starts with Johannes Gutenberg He wasn’t originally a printer, but a metalsmith from Strasbourg. Johnnie invented a device for mass producing innumerable copies of the same thing.

He inked a reversed, metal analog of what he wanted to print, and then used a screw to press it into paper.
Gutenberg’s analog technology created the editorial practice that editors used for the next 500 years. A practice to create editions that are the same for everyone.

That’s the key to the problem: Because analog presses are capable of manufacturing only the same thing at one time for everyone, editors for 500 years have selected stories according to two criteria:

• Stories about which the editor things everyone should be informed.

• Stories that have the greatest common interest.

A common edition manufactured for the many. The same edition for all. The one to many.
The general-interest newspaper came into existence shortly after Gutenberg, due to the analog technology he invented, and it had the same production limitation due to that technology. The production limitation of printing the same things for everyone at once.

In the 400 years since the first newspaper was published, that analog technology has fundamentally changed little every since.

Yes, James Watt’s steam engine speeded up the presses. And Thomas Edison’s electricity made the presses run even faster. But the newspaper industry still manufactures its products that same old, early Industrial Era, analog way. The Mass Media editorial practice is still the same as it was during Gutenberg’s era — produce the same edition at once for everyone.

That’s a huge problem, and it’s why the newspaper industry is dying.

It’s a huge problem because I’m a soccer fan who subscribes to The New York Times.

The New York Times almost never publishes stories about soccer- except for a few weeks every four years during the World Cup. They did publish a story today about the game between Turkey and Germany in the Euro 2008 Cup, but the story was about the political implications of the game; it wasn’t a story about the game itself.
Soccer is the Number One sport in the world, but The New York Times hardly ever publishes any stories about it!

However, I know The New York Times newsroom receives soccer stories every day. Because I was the Reuters executive who — at that newspaper editors’ request — sold them the soccer wire. Their newsroom receives hundreds of soccer stories each day. The New York Times has the stories about every Premiership game. They’ve got stories about every Turkish Third Division match. They’ve got the Swiss intercantonal game results. The Korean Intercity league. They’ve got it all.

Yet The New York Times doesn’t print any soccer stories because its analog presses can print only one edition at once for everyone. That means the newspaper’s editors publish only stories about the sports with the greatest common interest in New York – which this time of year means American baseball stories and golf stories.

There probably are hundreds of thousands of soccer fans in the 17 million-person New York City metropolitan area. Probably more soccer fans there than live in some European countries’ capital cities. But those fans won’t see any soccer stories in The New York Times because of that newspaper’s analog production practice. The same is true for every other American newspaper.

At root, this is a massive distribution problem: The stories that specific people may be interested in exist, but aren’t distributed to them due to the technological limitations of analog presses.

But newspaper publishers and editors can’t fathom there being any other way. As if these analog production practices were god-given or the divine right of kings! Publishers and editors forget that their editorial practices are based upon the limitation of technologies that were invented when horses were the only form of transportation on our streets.

Even worse, most newspapers today shovel those same analog practices online — even though the digital technologies of online don’t have the limitations of analog printing presses. Go figure!

Why is this criticism of analog editorial and packaging practices – hallmarks of mass media – pertinent to this conference? Because more than 1.3 billion people on the planet have gravitate away from Mass Media and those traditional practices.

Why are more than 1.3 billion people – one of every six persons on the planet – now spending more time online than with traditional Mass Media? Moreover, why are they doing that when video is easier to view on TV, audio easier to listen to on a radio, and newspapers easier to read on paper than online? Why indeed?

I’ll tell you why. They are customizing – individualizing.

Look around this room. Or look outside.

Each of us in this room and every person outside shares precious few common interests. What topic could possible interest us all, including everyone who’s not in this room? The weather perhaps. Or whether there’s been a new 9/11-type attack. Or whether George Carlin was really god?

If you think about it, there are very, very few topics that interest everyone. All people share few common interests.
Some groups of people do share some group interests. You’re newspaper people listening to me here. There are probably a few fans of the Rockies baseball franchise. Or groups of you who are golfers.

But each and every one of us has myriad specific interests. A hobby. An author. A favorite place. An activity. A type of food. A favorite actor. A favorite band or recording. Etcetera. Among all of you in this room, there must be more than a thousand – if not thousands – of myriad, specific interests.

And each and every one of us is a unique mix of common, group, and specific interests. That’s what makes us individuals.

There are very few topics that are common and relevant to all people. Each person judges relevance according to his own unique interests. Relevance is judged by the individual, not by the publisher or an editor.

The analog editorial practices of Mass Media are wonderful at satisfying the very few common interests. They are so-so at satisfying group interests (you can read about baseball but not soccer). But the analog editorial practice of creating a common edition for all is frankly lousy at satisfying people’s specific interests.

Fifty years ago, studies showed that the average person read only 4 to 8 stories in each day’s newspaper. Today, that is still the same. There might be 50 to 100 stories in each edition, but a person will read only those few stories that satisfy the few common interests, plus maybe a story that fits one of that person’s group interests, and maybe he’ll get lucky and that say see a story that satisfies one of his very specific interests.

Mass media ably distributes only a few stories, not each and every story that a person might want.

Fifty years ago, newspaper circulation was in its heyday because people had little other access to daily changing information in text format. You read a printed newspaper to satisfy your few common interests, may find a story about one of your group interests, and in hope that that’s day’s edition might chance to have a story that satisfies one of his very specific interests. You had no other choice.

But look what has happened in the decades since:

During the 1970s came cable TV (and later satellite TV). Hundreds of topical channels. If you’re a tennis fanatic, there’s not only four purely sports channels but a 24 hour tennis channel. You no longer have to hope that there might be a tennis story in that day’s paper.

During the 1980s, computerized offset lithography replaced hot lead letterpress and made publication of ‘niche’ magazines economical. Newsstands that once sold only one or two dozen titles now sell hundreds of titles. Hundreds of titles aimed a group or specific interests.

Then in 1992 came public access to the Internet. Each of you – and 1.3 billion others – now have online access to every newspaper, news magazines, trade journal, radio stations, TV stations, and TV network on Earth. There today are more than 200 million active dot-coms, dot-orgs, and dot-nets. There are Web sites for every specific interest. And we nowadays have that at broadband multimedia speeds. Always-on access. And more and more in wireless access. Pervasive access to everything.

Within a single human generation, people have gone from relatively scarce access to information to surplus access. From having access to only a few things to access to everything. A cornucopia of information.

And what’s the result? More than 1.3 billion people are gravitating to whatever mix from that cornucopia matches their individually unique mix of interests. They’re gravitating away from Mass Media and its one-size-fits-all attempt at satisfying 1.3 billion unique mixes of interests.

I’ll say it again: billions of people are gravitating online to find much more relevant matches of their interest than the traditional practices of Mass Media can give them. They’re customizing – individualizing. Billions of them.
I’m sure you’ve all by now seen this diagram. It’s called the ‘Long Tail’ diagram. It ably charts people’s interests. Its horizontal axis lists topical interests and its vertical axis lists the popularity of each of those interests. The huge but narrow spike at the left shows the very few topics with common interest. The radial curve towards the lower left of the line shows group interests, topics that hold interest from sizable but not huge groups. Yet almost all of the chart – and indeed it goes completely off the right side of the chart – are myriad specific topics that in aggregate interest huge numbers of people, although no single one of those topics interests huge or even sizable numbers of people.

Any geometer will be able to tell you that the area in those specific interests is a whole lot larger – the demand greater, the opportunity greater – under that specific interest tail than in that common spike.

The reason why Google and Yahoo! are the most used sites online is because people are hunting and gathering to find the topics that match their myriad and individual specific interests. Look at your own behavior online. Raise your hands if you don’t use a search engine many times every day you’re online, Exactly, none of you.

Google and Yahoo! understand this. They know that billions of people are gravitating online to satisfy specific interests or even group interests, interests that traditional Mass Media can’t satisfy because of analog editorial practices. That’s why Google is working on iGoogle and Yahoo! on MyYahoo! They’re aiming to provide services so that those billions of people don’t have to hunt and gather, services that deliver to each and every individual the information that satisfies that individual’s unique mix of common, group, and specific interests. The unique mix of information that is relevant to that individual. They know the world is entering an era of mass customization of information.

Billions of people today are using their new-found cornucopia of access to information. Each person is using it to hunt and gather whatever mix of information matches his unique individual mix of interests.

And those billions of people are gravitating away from generic, analog products that deliver the same mix of news to everyone. They’re moving away from the analog newspaper.

That’s why circulation is declining. This isn’t a cyclical change. It’s permanent. The cornucopia of access to information that consumer now have isn’t going to go away. The traditional, analog newspaper is.

If you don’t believe me that it’s over, then look at this proof from Nielsen//Netratings. I know that many of you won’t want to see it. It lists the top 100 American newspaper Web sites and shows how many times each site’s average visitor visits per month; how many pages he sees all month long; and how much time he spends on the site that month.

To save time, let’s look only at The New York Times, the premier among those 100 American dailies. The average visitor to its Web site visited only 4.05 times per month. Think of that: that a visit only once per week. He saw only 29 of that sites pages all month (which means less than 29 stories because the Times spreads most stories over many multiple pages to maximize banner ad exposures). And he spent less time on the site all month than the average reader of the Times‘ newsprint editions spends in a day. The figures for most other American dailies are even worse. And I have these figures going back ten years, and those results are just the same.

New Media isn’t simply putting analog edition content put online. It isn’t ‘shovelware.’ It’s not about transplanting traditional Mass Media’s analog editorial practices online. Mass Media analog practices shoveled online just create versions that used less frequently and less thoroughly than even the traditional Mass Media that billions of consumer are leaving.

And why not? Do each of you wear exactly the same style of clothes? Do each of you drive the same make, model, and color car? Do each of you like exactly the same food? Imagine walking into a supermarket and every customer being handed the same bag of groceries.

You are each different. You each want choice. You each have different needs and interests.

Am I talking about total customization here? A newspaper in which there are only Britney Spears stories? No, I’m talking about shared control. Shared customization between the editors and the readers.

Give me the consumer the bulletins and urgents plus all the stories about which editors truly think everyone should be informed. But let the consumer pick which sports, teams, and topics fill the rest of the paper. Better that the childless bachelor gets stories about a car he desires than school lunch menus. Better a fashionable young woman gets the stories about the latest couture from Paris and Milan than sports or that AP story on page 7 about record wheat harvests in the Sudan.

Billions of consumers want information that unique matches each of their uniquely individual mixes of interests. Services that deliver whichever contents are uniquely relevant and interesting to each different individual.

Customization makes the daily newspaper more relevant to each person’s interest and needs. It will make the daily newspaper much, much more valuable.

Billions of people are leaving analog newspapers and going out to hunt and gather information that fits each of their own individually unique mixes of interests. Why should they hunt and gather?

There’s a huge business opportunity there. People talk about the missing business model for online publishing. Well this is it and always has been. And it’s possible online and now in print.

And, ideally, give consumers the choice of all brands, like in a supermarket. I don’t know who operates the cable system here in Denver. In my city, Time Warner does. Imagine if Time Warner’s cable system only offered PBS plus the channels that time Warner owns: CNN and HBO. Would anyone subscribe to that cable system? No, they want to choose from among all brands. All this is possible with XML and today Internet-based technologies. All the elements now exist and are practical.

We now live in a time when that can be done; an era when the digital technologies now exist to do that. Thanks to content management systems and extensive markup language, we have the capability to deliver each pieces of relevant content to each person for whom it is relevant and interesting. No more distribution problems. (I get my soccer stories.)

Individually customized delivery of content can be easily done today online. Yet hardly any publishers do it. They don’t understand that is possible. They are still stuck in the old way of thinking, stuck delivering exactly the same package of content to everyone.

Moreover, individually customized newspapers are now possible. The press manufactures are now manufacturing digital – not analog – presses. Digital ink-jet presses fed by rolls of newsprint and controlled by computers programmed with each and every user’s unique mix of interests.

All this is what this seminal conference is about.

It’s obvious that during the 21st century, news and information will be delivered broadband, wirelessly, and in multimedia format. This will be pervasive worldwide. News and information likewise will be delivered that way, as well as on-demand and available in archives.

But more importantly, what will be produced and delivered with be individualized to match each and every user’s truly unique mix of common, group, and specific interests.

By the way, am I pronouncing the end of Mass Media?

No, there will always be a need for media that satisfies the most common interests. That will always exist in some form. Just as radio wasn’t totally replaced by Television, so too won’t New Media replace Mass Media.

However, the era of Mass Media’s primacy is certainly over. Though radio still exists, it is no longer people’s primary source of news, entertainment, drama, comedy, etc. We’ll always have Mass Media, but it will no longer be people’s primary source of news, entertainment, drama, comedy, etc. Or even people’s primary source of daily changing text, audio, and video.

However, publishers must stop using only analog editorial practices and immediately begin adopting the technologies of mass customization. All of those technologies now exist. The pieces of technology are there, the publishers merely need to adopt and assemble them.

Moreover, publishers will need to work together – to be not just competitors but cooperators. The reason for that is that the change must be industry-wide. The industry can make the change most quickly only if it works together.
The opportunities here are tremendous, but you cannot be cavalier about the what you must do to meet these changes underway.

In fact, you cannot be cavalier at all. Because horses are no longer in use!

Thank you.

[Postscript: I've read some criticism of the conference's use of the term Individuated. I think it's an excellent term. No one intends or is attempting to sell that term to the public. It's an accurate industrial and academic term for what the conference was about.]

My opening keynote speech at the 2008 EPublishing Innovations Forum, London, May 7th

Thanks, David! Two linguistic notes before I begin.

First, please forgive my Yank accent. My great-grandfather Crosbie, who was born in London, would wince at it.

Second, doe anyone here speak Chinese? I ask because, after people who read English, the second largest linguistic group online today is people who read Chinese. To make sure they benefit from my speech, I took the title that the conference organizers suggested – Thriving in the digital age: threats and opportunities for digital publishers – and put that into Google’s English-to-Chinese translation engine. Then, just to make sure that I got the Chinese version right, I took that result and put it into Yahoo’s Chinese-to-English translation engine. The resulting title is Watts that you say? Screw Gutenberg, the Change Underway is Even Larger. So that’s what I’m going to talk about.

Gutenberg. The Screw. Watt. And why the changes today underway are even larger than during Gutenberg. (Don’t worry, I’ll explain the screw.)

Here is a slide of Gutenberg in Strasbourg. His statue in bronze and a target today for pigeons. He’s also a target for quotes about the Internet. My guess is that you’ve all heard most the quotes before:

‘The Internet is the biggest things since Gutenberg.’
‘The change underway will be the biggest since Gutenberg.’
‘The Internet will change things as much as Gutenberg did.’

Well, don’t get me wrong: Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press probably sparked the Renaissance. Yet it’s time we understand something: The change today underway is even larger!

The change now underway is bigger than mass production was for the medieval calligraphers and scribes who Gutenberg’s invention put out of work. Moreover, it’s not just a change from production of single calligraphic editions to mass production of millions of books. What is underway is an intellectual jump. It’s a quantum jump in how information is distributed to people and how they find information.

I’ve lately become an academic, and in academia we have a technical term for the magnitude of the change today underway. It is an academic term that combines Norman French and Anglo-Saxon. We call it a Mindf*ck.

It’s like a jump from two to three dimensions. And from this new dimension arises phenomenal new opportunities for publishers. Opportunities we’ll talk about.

Unfortunately, most publishers today still think only in the old two dimensions – and therein lay the only threat to their livelihoods. Their failure to understand the new dimension underway in publishing is the threat. Understand me: The only threat is not to understand the change underway.

Let’s go back in time for a moment. The U.K. Statistics Office says there are more than 10,000 Britons who are more than 100 years old. In 1908, the streets outside this hotel, and all the streets of London, were full of horse carriages and horse carts. Though the 20th Century was new then, people nevertheless knew that the 21st Century would be a mechanized age despite the abundance of horses.

The early automobiles showed promise. Telephones were beginning to become common in offices and homes. Tesla and Marconi were each experimenting with something that would eventually be called radio. Yet nobody knew how quickly all those things would affect London’s seven million people, one million horses, 25 daily newspapers. Also, more esoteric and far-reaching things were also being developed in 1908. Things like quantum mechanics, which would later give us devices such as television, the transistor, the computer, the laser, and the CD, DVD, etc.

Today in 2008, people still get information distributed on paper pulp or from analog broadcast transmitters that fundamentally have changed little since Marconi’s time. Nevertheless, we know that our new century will be an all- digital age. An age of pervasive information. If the personal computer and mobile phone were our equivalents of the newfangled telephones and automobiles for people 100 years ago, so too can we now foresee things that are only recently being and invented, things we’re starting to have a clue that will shape the 21st century.

The one million horses were gone from London’s streets by 1920, only a dozen years’ after 1908. Likewise, the changes between now and 2020 will be phenomenal. If you think that you’ve seen change during the past dozen years, you ain’t seen nothing yet!

I’ve a bold agenda this morning. My job is to tell you how much things will change and explain the general themes and opportunities in those changes for publishers in the 21st century.

• I will explain why 1.3 billion people have gravitate online despite their already having access to mass media in much more convenient formats than online.
• I will explain why the fragmentation of audiences is an illusion.
• I will explain why traditional newspapers’ and news magazines’ circulations, and news broadcasts’ viewerships, must ineluctably evaporate. And the reason is not because people don’t want news.
• I will explain why most newspapers’ and news magazines’ and news broadcasters’ Web sites won’t save their companies. (In other words, why what you here in British publishing circles are calling the Rusbridger Cross won’t occur.)
• And I’ll explain why people will be even better served by New Media than by Mass Media. In other words, why the change today is even greater than that during Gutenberg’s era.

That’s an ambitious agenda, so let’s begin.

We’ll start with Johannes Gutenberg, who wasn’t originally a printer but a metalsmith from Strasbourg.

Although the Chinese had been using it for centuries in their part of the world, ‘Johnnie Goodmountain’ invented a device for mass producing innumerable copies of the same thing.

He inked a reversed, metal analog of what he wanted to print. Then he used a screw to press that metal analog into some paper. Analog. Screw. Press.

Gutenberg’s analog technology created the editorial practice that editors used for the next 500 years. An editorial practice that creates editions that at once are the same for everyone. Let’s be clear about that: Because the technology of analog presses is capable of manufacturing only the same thing at one time for everyone, editors for 500 years have had to produce the same edition for everyone.

Faced with that technological limitations, editors selected stories according to two criteria:

• Stories that have the greatest common interest.
• Stories about which the editor things everyone should be informed.

One common edition manufactured for the many. The thing same for all. The one-to-many.

The general-interest newspaper came into existence shortly after Gutenberg and was certainly due to the analog technology he invented and the production limitation of printing the same things for everyone at once.

That analog technology has fundamentally changed little every since. James Watt’s steam engine merely increased those presses speeds. Gutenberg’s screw couldn’t keep up with steam power, so analog presses became rotary: a rotating cylinder that inks a common edition. Thomas Edison’s electricity made those cylinders print even faster. Nevertheless, the newspaper industry – what used to be on Fleet Street and is now largely at Canary Wharf – still manufactures its products the same old analog way. The Mass Media editorial practice is still the same as it was during Gutenberg’s era: production of the same edition at once for everyone. All because of the technological limitation of Gutenberg’s metal type.

That’s a huge problem, and it’s why the newspaper industry today is dying.

It’s a problem because I’m a football fan. No, not American football, but football football. The real thing. The Number One sport in the world. What Americans call soccer.

In America where I live, I subscribe to The New York Times. Yet The New York Times hardly ever publishes stories about the world’s most popular sport. The Number One sport in the world, but The New York Times never publishes any stories about it, except maybe every four years when there’s a World Cup championship.

However, I know The New York Times has soccer stories. I know because I was the Reuters executive who, at that newspaper’s request, sold it the football wire. Their newsroom receives hundreds of soccer stories each day. The New York Times has the stories about every Premiership game. They’ve got stories about every Turkish Third Division match. They’ve got the Swiss intercantonal game results. The Korean Intercity league. They’ve got it all!

But The New York Times doesn’t print football stories because its analog presses can print only one edition at once for everyone. That means the newspaper’s editors publish only stories about the sports with the greatest common interest in New York, which this time of year means American baseball stories and golf stories.

There are hundreds of thousands of soccer fans in the 17 million-person New York City metropolitan area. There probably are more fans there than live in some European countries’ capital cities. But those New York fans won’t see any soccer stories in The New York Times because of that newspaper’s analog production limitations and the limitations that makes on its editorial practices. The same is true for every other American newspaper. Or newspapers here (God forbid if you’re a baseball fan in London!)

At root, this is a distribution problem. A massive distribution problem. The stories that specific people may be interested in exist, but aren’t getting to them via traditional, analog media.

Mass media ably distributes some stories — the common stories, but not each and every story that a person might want.

Radio and TV have the same problem, and use the same analog production and packaging practices. Analog transmitters — technologies that were invented before the automobile — send the same program at once to everyone. Everyone hears or sees the same thing at the same time, on the same schedule.

Analog. Most newspaper publishers and editors and broadcasters can’t fathom there being any other way – as if these analog production practices were god-given or the divine right of kings!

Publishers, editors, and broadcasters forget that their editorial practices are based upon — and have been limited by — the limitation of technologies that were invented when horses were the only form of transportation on the streets.

Worse, most newspapers and broadcasters today shovel those same analog practices online — even though the digital technologies of online don’t have the limitations of analog printing presses or analog radio or television transmitters. Go figure!

So, why is criticism of analog editorial and packaging practices – hallmarks of mass media – pertinent to this conference?

Because more than 1.3 billion people have gravitate away from Mass Media and those traditional practices.

Why have more than 1.3 billion people – one of every six people on the planet – gone online when they already had access to traditional Mass Media? After all, video is easier to view on TV, audio easier to listen to on a radio, and newspapers are easier to read on paper than online.

Why are more than 1.3 billion people now spending more time online than with traditional Mass Media?

I’ll tell you why. They are customizing – individualizing.

Look around this room. Or look outside. Each of us in this room and every person outside shares precious few common interests. What topic could possible interest every one of us, including everyone who’s not in this room? The weather perhaps. Or whether or not a bomb has gone off in London today. Whether Victoria Beckham is really a man? If you think about it, there are very, very few topics that interest everyone. All people share few common interests. There are very few things that are common and relevant to all people. Relevance is judged by the individual, not by the publisher or broadcaster.

Some groups of people do share some group interests. You’re here listening to me. There’s probably a few fans of Manchester United or Arsenal here. Or fans of Top Gear or Torchwood.

But each and every one of us has myriad specific interests. A hobby. An author. A favorite place. An activity. A type of food. A favorite actor. A favorite band or recording. Etcetera. Among the 200 of you in this room, there must be more than a thousand – if not thousands – of specific interests.

And each and every one of us is a unique mix of common, group, and specific interests. That’s what makes us individuals.

The analog editorial practices of Mass Media are wonderful at satisfying the very few common interests. Those practices are so-so at satisfying group interests (you can read the Premiership soccer results in your newspapers but I can’t in mine). But they are frankly lousy at satisfying very specific interests. So analog editorial practices satisfy only a fraction of interests.

Fifty years ago, general-interest newspaper circulation was in its heyday because people had little other access to daily changing information in text format. Broadcast news listenership and viewership was high for that same reason.

I didn’t grow up in the U.K., so let me tell you about the U.S. a generation ago. Thirty years ago, people in the average U.S. town or city (which doesn’t mean New York City) had access to only two daily newspapers and three television channels.

Everyone read the morning newspaper and the afternoon newspaper because those were people’s only daily changing sources of information in text. The newspapers satisfied their few common interests, such as the weather. An edition might have had a story or two that satisfied some group’s interests, such as a story about a team in a sport. But an edition probably didn’t have many, or any, stories about each individual readers’ specific interests. However, each individual read that edition hopes that a story about a specific interest might appear that day.

Fifty years ago, the average newspaper reader read only 4 to 8 stories in each edition despite there being scores of stories in each edition. That ratio hasn’t changed. It hasn’t changed because the ratio of stories that satisfy an individual’s unique mix of common, group, and specific interests hasn’t changed because the analog editorial practice and its limits are the same.

Likewise for radio or television. We’d watch the three television channels for those same reasons. If you were a tennis fan, then maybe – just maybe – there’d be a tennis match broadcast once per week (even if only as a ten minute segment on ABC’s Wide World of Sports).

Mass Media circulations, listenerships, and viewerships were high were high because people had no other choices.

But look what has happened in the decades since.

During the 1970s came cable TV (and later satellite TV). My town has a 250-channel cable TV system. If you’re a tennis fan, there’s not only four purely sports channels but a 24 hour tennis channel. There’s even a 24-hour channel of nothing but the Premiership soccer! If you like to cook, you no longer watch the Sunday afternoon cooking show, you now have access not only to cooking networks but individual channels about Italian cooking or Chinese cooking or barbeque. Group and specific interests.

During the 1980s, computerized offset lithography replaced hot lead letterpress and made publication of ‘niche’ magazines economical. Newsstands that once sold only one or two dozen titles now sell hundreds of titles. Hundreds of titles aimed a group or specific interests.

Then in 1992 came public access to the Internet. Each of you – and 1.3 billion others – now have online access to every newspaper, news magazines, trade journal, radio stations, TV stations, and TV network on Earth. There today are more than 200 million active dot-coms, dot-orgs, and dot-nets. There are Web sites for every specific interest. And we nowadays have that at broadband multimedia speeds. Always-on access. And more and more in wireless access. Pervasive access to everything.

Within a single human generation, people have gone from relatively scarce access to information to surplus access. From having access to only a few things to access to everything. A cornucopia of information.

And what’s the result? More than 1.3 billion people are gravitating to whatever mix from that cornucopia matches their individually unique mix of interests. They’re gravitating away from Mass Media and its one-size-fits-all attempt at satisfying 1.3 billion unique mixes of interests.

I’ll say it again: billions of people are gravitating online to find much more relevant matches of their interest than the traditional practices of Mass Media can give them. They’re customizing – individualizing. Billions of them.

I’m sure you’ve all by now seen this diagram. It’s called the ‘Long Tail’ diagram. It ably charts people’s interests. Its horizontal axis lists topical interests and its vertical axis lists the popularity of each of those interests. The huge but narrow spike at the left shows the very few topics with common interest. The radial curve towards the lower left of the line shows group interests, topics that hold interest from sizable but not huge groups. Yet almost all of the chart – and indeed it goes completely off the right side of the chart – are myriad specific topics that in aggregate interest huge numbers of people, although no single one of those topics interests huge or even sizable numbers of people.

Any geometer will be able to tell you that the area in those specific interests is a whole lot larger – the demand greater, the opportunity greater – under that specific interest tail than in that common spike.

The reason why Google and Yahoo! are the most used sites online is because people are hunting and gathering to find the specitic topics that match their myriad and individual specific interests.

Look at your own behavior online. Raise your hands if you don’t use a search engine many times every day you’re online. Right! None of you.

Google and Yahoo! understand this. They know that billions of people are gravitating online to satisfy specific interests or even group interests, interests that traditional Mass Media can’t satisfy because of analog editorial practices.

That’s why Google is working on iGoogle and Yahoo! on MyYahoo! They’re aiming to provide services so that those billions of people don’t have to hunt and gather, services that deliver to each and every individual the information that satisfies that individual’s unique mix of common, group, and specific interests. The unique mix of information that is relevant to that individual. They know the world is entering an era of mass customization of information.

That is the extra dimension.

For half a millennium until 1992, anyone who wanted to convey or publish information had to make a choice:
He could produce something that reached everyone at once, but he couldn’t be customized to each and every recipient’s unique mix of interests. Or he could customize something, but you could only do it for one person at a time. Mass production at once or customization one at a time. Mass reach or single individualization. Two dimensions.

An analogy is the choice of travel media for millennia until 1903. You could travel either by land or by water. Each had complementary advantages and disadvantages. Each had its own vehicles. Moreover, each of those forms of travel – land or water – was natural because we can naturally walk or swim. Then in 1903, two mechanics from Ohio invented a totally new transportation medium – one entire dependent upon advanced technology. A new medium that overcomes the earlier transportation media’s complementary disadvantages. A new medium entirely dependent upon technology (after all, we can’t naturally fly).

So too have we now invented a new medium for communications, one entirely dependent upon advanced technology. One that rises above the two mutually complementary dimensions of mass reach or single individualization. One that overcomes the mutual disadvantages of previous media.

Am I pronouncing the end of Mass Media?

No, there will always be a need for media that satisfies the most common interests. That will always exist in some form. Just as radio wasn’t totally replaced by Television, so too won’t New Media replace Mass Media.

However, the era of Mass Media’s primacy is certainly over. Though radio still exists, it is no longer people’s primary source of news, entertainment, drama, comedy, etc. We’ll always have Mass Media, but it will no longer be people’s primary source of news, entertainment, drama, comedy, etc. Or even people’s primary source of daily changing text, audio, and video.

But New Media isn’t simply putting Mass Media content put online. It isn’t ‘shovelware.’ It isn’t because transplanting traditional Mass Media’s analog editorial practices online. That’s not why consumers go online. It isn’t what consumers want online.

Shoveled online, Mass Media analog practices just create versions that used less frequently and less thoroughly than even the traditional Mass Media that billions of consumer are leaving.

What billions of consumers want is information that unique matches each of their uniquely individual mixes of interests, services that deliver whichever contents are uniquely relevant and interesting to each different individual.

Fortunately, we now live in a time when that can be done; an era when the digital technologies now exist to do that. Thanks to content management systems and extensive markup language, we have the capability to deliver each pieces of relevant content to each person for whom it is relevant and interesting. No more distribution problems. (I get my soccer stories.)

Individually customized delivery of content can be easily done today online. Yet hardly any publishers do it. They don’t understand that is possible. They are still stuck in the old way of thinking, stuck delivering exactly the same package of content to everyone.

Moreover, individually customized newspapers are now possible. The press manufactures are now manufacturing digital – not analog – presses. Huge digital ink-jet presses fed by rolls of newsprint and controlled by computers programmed with each and every user’s unique mix of interests. Indeed, there is a newspaper conference in June about this.

What tremendous opportunities for publishers — provided that they format their content so that machines can deliver it! I could go on about all this. In fact, I teach a 15-week graduate level course in Syracuse University. But in the interest of time this morning, let me summarize the main points:

It’s obvious that during the 21st century, news and information will be delivered broadband, wirelessly, and in multimedia format. This will be pervasive worldwide. News and information likewise will be delivered that way, as well as on-demand and available in archives.

But more importantly, what will be produced and delivered with be individualized to match each and every user’s truly unique mix of common, group, and specific interests.

Publishers (and broadcasters) must stop using only analog editorial practices and immediately begin adopting the technologies of mass customization. All of those technologies now exist. The pieces of technology are there, the
publishers merely need to adopt and assemble them.

Moreover, publishers will need to work together – to be not just competitors but cooperators. The reason for that is that the change must be industry-wide. The industry can make the change most quickly only if it works together.

The opportunities here are tremendous, but you cannot be cavalier about the what you must do to meet these changes underway. In fact, you cannot be cavalier at all. Because horses in use!

Thank you.

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Ole Werring, TV manager of Dabladet of Oslo, Norway, described to Ifra‘s annual Beyond the Printed Word online publishing conference how his newspaper has integrated video into its traditionally text news site.

Dagbladet initially began offering video on its site in 1999 but found its unpopular because not many Norwegians had broadband connections then, but it relaunched its about video efforts in 2006. Dagbladet employs four peole full-time to produce about 60 videos per week for Dagbladet. That number includes videos they create plus editing videos received from Reuters and the Associated Press. Each video is integrated into the text news page about that story. Each video includes a commercial that rolls before the video plays.

Each video is also offered to Dagbladet’s mobile phone service users.

Promotional trailers for cinema features are also offered (Werring was formerly with the Norwegian Film Institute).

Dagbladet has begun using user-generated videos to illustrate secondary stories. Werring mentioned that it’s often impossible to illustrate these with video except by using videos shot by users on the scene.

Dagbladet has also launched a YouTube-type site on which users can upload their own videos. He said the newspaper realizes that they will still upload videos onto YouTube.com, but believes that Dagbladet.no has enough usership and obviously enough Norwegian focus to attract users’ videos. Dagbladet.no and its associated websites currently receive about 3.9 million unique users per month, which isn’t too bad in a country of only 4 million people. (Nonetheless, Dagbladet has two even larger competitors.)

Dagbladet’s abilities to create video news reports has allowed it to begin working with Norwegian television organizations to produce news stories about crime, politics, recipes, and other topics.

“People live locally,” Ian Davies, director fo business development of the British regional newspaper publishing company Archant Ltd., this afternoon reminded attendees of Ifra‘s annual Beyond the Printed Word online pubishing conference. He said a recent survey by the (UK) Newspaper Society indicated that the average distance of local interest is 8 miles, and that is not necessarily ‘local’ as newspaper publishers understand that term.

Davis emphasized that people online are interested in both topical and local communities, and that any newspapers must provide its readers with information about their street, town, region, nation, and the world. He said this shouldn’t be new to publishers, but the need to geocode stories is.

He gave examples of good use by Lawrence.com, Bakersfield.com, Sacramento Bee, Budstikka, ChicagoCrime.org, Los Angeles Times, Reuters, the Sydney Morning Herald, and SkyNews.

At Ifra‘s Beyond the Printed Word conference this afternoon, Rowan Barnett described how his monthly newspaper has a circulation of 100,000 without publishing a website or in print.

He is editor-in-chief of The Avastar, a virtual newspaper that circulates in the virtual world Second Life. Its owned and operated by Bild.T-Online AG, a joint venture between Deutsche Telecom and the publishing company Bild (Bild, Stern, Spiegel Online).

Second Life has 10.5 million registered users, although only some 560,000 are active. It is an avatar world, in which users create a graphical version of themselves and navigate through a three-dimensional graphic world, much like in a video game.

Barnett said that 95-percent of the site’s content is generated by its users. He emphasized that major advertisers such as Toyota, Mercedes, Reebok, Lacoste, and Armani has setup virtual stores in Second Life and that news organizations such as CNN, Reuters, and SkyNews has setup virtual news bureaus in it. Celebrities such as Bruce Willis, JZ, and 50 Cent have created their own avatar inhabitants there and given interviews.

The Avastar began publishing in English during December 2006, now also publishes a German-language edition, and generates up to 136,000 downloads per month. It currently downloads a PDF edition but plans to switch to a HTML site in the near future. Downloads are available a virtual kiosks and vendors in Second Life.

This virtual newspaper has a full-time staff of seven, supplemented by user-generated content from users, whose work is edited by the staff.

Barnett explained Second Life’s low usage rate as due mainly to technical problems involving its graphics. He said that 23 percent of users’ sessions end in browser crashes and another 8 percent end in server crashes.

(Though Barnett termed Second Life part of Web 3.0, I think that definition could create quite a dispute among those who favor Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s ‘semantic web’ definition.)

How what are the challenges in a popular tabloid creating user-generated content? Danny Dagan described some this morning at Ifra’s Beyond the Printed Word conference in Dublin.

Dagan is head of online communities at News Group Digital, which puts online London’s The Sun and News of the World, the two largest selling (3.2 million daily in the case of The Sun) tabloids in the English-language. Those newspapers’ websites attract 10.6 million unique users each month. The average user looks at 23 pages during the time.

The sites have begun to offer the beginnings of customized content. The sites provide each user with a widget that travels with them through each page of the site. The widget currently factors only the user’s gender and favorite football team, but really only football team. It colors itself in that team’s color, displays the team’s logo, and hyperlinks to the discussion area about the team. If the user is female, it just colors itself pink.

The challenges a popular tabloid faces when using user-generated content are:

• How to balance freedom of speech versus England’s strong laws against libel and contempt?
• How to protect children against offensive content?
• How to deal with an online public that is nowadays less amenable to editorization by the host newspaper and also to waiting for content to be pubished>
• How to achieve high quality content?
• How to remove objectable content quickly and effectively?

News Group Digital employees seven people full-time as user-generated site moderators. They don’t directly explain to a user why his objectional comment was removed, because such conversations tend to be endless, but the site does have a section entitled ‘Why Your Posting Was Removed.’

At Ifra‘s Beyond the Printed Word conference in Dublin, Matthew Buckland, general manager of the Mail & Guardian Online of South Africa, has given a presentation about ‘Integrating Web 2.0 tools into news sites.’ He previously in his own blog described his presentation and offered the presentation itself available for download.

Since you can download and see his slide presentation, I’ll mention a few points from how he narrated it:

‘Web 2.0′ tools have let the Mail & Guardian Online build user-generated content sites quickly and in collaboration with consumers. The tools harness the newspaper professional content and user-generated content. And have allowed the newspaper to get closer to its community.

The Mail & Guardian has chosen a ‘multi-brand’ approach. It has created Amatomu.com, an aggregator of regional South African blogs.; Thoughtleader.co.za; a site that combines the newspaper own content and the best content from South African bloggers; Newsinphotos.com, a title that describe the site; and also applications that consumers can use on Facebook.com. All of these were created using WordPress software (in case you were wondering which ‘Web 2.0′ tools). Buckland mentioned that consumers tend to write better if they know someone will be editing their work.

In three months time, these sites have generated 700,000 words from 100 contributors and also 3,000 reader comments, content that costs the Mail & Guardian nothing to generate.