All Things Digital

I usually don’t have a lot of time to get through big, long thumbsuckers in magazines anymore–what can I say? I can hardly keep up with my Twitter feed–but here are two worth a look.

First, a Fast Company piece on the disaster at AOL (this is, for anyone who follows the company, nothing new), called “Dead Man Walking” by David Case.

The phrase, the origins of which is not mentioned in the piece, was applied by pundits to AOL in the early 1990s, when it looked like the Internet was going to make closed online services like AOL obsolete.

It did not turn out that way, of course, as AOL became–for a time, at least–the most powerful player in the digital arena, before imploding right after its disastrous merger with Time Warner (TWX).

After a bit of resurgence under Jon Miller (who was fired for his efforts), AOL is on the ropes again, this article contends–and which BoomTown has been saying for a while now. There are copious examples of this sorry trend in the piece, one more painful than the next.

If you don’t want to slog through it, here’s the money quote:

Eight years removed from the Time Warner merger and more than four years after AOL was expunged from the public company’s official name–an eternity in our evolving Internet age–AOL has been unable to find a way to innovate out of its troubled past. Yes, AOL has been plagued by internecine battles with its corporate parent and by a dial-up subscription-revenue model that could not possibly survive in the modern era. But it has also failed to exploit a wealth of formidable assets, including a ubiquitous brand, millions of regular users, the Web’s dominant instant-messaging service, the iconic MapQuest and Moviefone, the most popular finance site, a top celebrity-gossip site in TMZ, an innovative video search engine in Truveo, and deep television and music offerings… what emerges is a tale of failure on multiple fronts: short-term thinking, bad technology, bungled product development, a dramatic miscalculation of what drives page views on its own site, and a risk-averse culture more prone to imitation than innovation. ‘Pretty much everything we worked on,’ says a former AOL manager, ‘executives pointed to someone else’s product and said, “We want that.” ‘

Second, a piece in the New Yorker by Eric Alterman about the death of newspapers–or, as BoomTown likes to say of this much-trotted out concept: Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead!

Most interesting, though, is its look at the growth of Arianna Huffington’s online phenom, the Huffington Post (which we wrote about last week here, in fact), as part of the problem for newspapers. (We borrowed this very funny illustration from the article, which kind of says it all.)

And that is basically: They are dull and Arianna is not.

Here’s the money quote:

Though [the] Huffington [Post] has a news staff (it is tiny, but the hope is to expand in the future), the vast majority of the stories that it features originate elsewhere, whether in print, on television, or on someone’s video camera or cellphone. The editors link to whatever they believe to be the best story on a given topic. Then they repurpose it with a catchy, often liberal-leaning headline and provide a comment section beneath it, where readers can chime in. Surrounding the news articles are the highly opinionated posts of an apparently endless army of both celebrity (Nora Ephron, Larry David) and non-celebrity bloggers–more than eighteen hundred so far. The bloggers are not paid. The overall effect may appear chaotic and confusing, but, [HuffPo Co-Founder Kenny] Lerer argues, ‘this new way of thinking about, and presenting, the news, is transforming news as much as CNN did 30 years ago.’ Arianna Huffington and her partners believe that their model points to where the news business is heading. ‘People love to talk about the death of newspapers, as if it’s a foregone conclusion. I think that’s ridiculous,’ she says. ‘Traditional media just need to realize that the online world isn’t the enemy. In fact, it’s the thing that will save them, if they fully embrace it.’

Since we have been hugging online for a while now, Arianna just made us feel all warm and fuzzy.

And can they ever get along?

At the SIIA Information Summit yesterday, New Yorker writer Ken Auletta, who recently did a piece on Google, noted:

We’re in an engineering culture. You couldn’t put a [Rupert] Murdoch or a [Michael] Eisner in charge of a company like that. It’s been tried. Terry Semel led Yahoo. I just spent some time with Google engineers. I couldn’t understand a thing they were saying. I don’t think [Semel] understood the engineers’ language, so he couldn’t challenge them. I suspect that’s one reason he didn’t last.”

Auletta is right, and it is an increasingly interesting issue as we move forward with the hyper-digitization of content.

While, for example, the use of online video increases exponentially, how big an audience can be created for any one property without the kind of intense programming and marketing that the entertainment industry is famous for?

On the other hand, is an increasingly massive reliance on e-metrics–the ability to minutely tell and even predict what an online audience wants by their clicking and being perfected by engineers at widget companies like Slide–the right direction?

I have no idea, but the delta is one that needs bridging.

It would be remiss of me not to mention the long piece on Walt Mossberg, my partner in AllThingsD.com and the D conference, that appeared today online and in print in the New Yorker magazine. Written by well-known media chronicler Ken Auletta, the piece, called “Critical Mass,” had the subhead: “Everyone Listens to Walter Mossberg.”

Here at AllThingsD.com, we not only listen, but encourage Walt (we don’t ever call him Walter, unless we are really cross) even more to write, blog and make videos, along with publishing his many columns on tech products and issues, which also appear in The Wall Street Journal.

The piece got a lot of play around the Web, and that was no surprise given Walt’s large following both on the Internet and, more importantly, off it, where all the regular folks live most of their lives. Walt’s true constituency are the masses of people who are not the tech elite, but who have an interest and a need to understand the digital tidal wave that has overwhelmed our whole world. What has always been interesting and instructive to me is that while Walt focuses on the proverbial little guy, the digerati follow along quickly, too. (Here’s a picture of us at our conference last year interviewing Microsoft’s Bill Gates.)

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