Technology

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Nate Silver, Data and Storytelling

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FORTUNE July 24, 2013We are steadily moving from a qualitative to a quantitative world, not just in the sciences but also in politics, sports, mass entertainment and many other creative endeavors. But the bits of life are not the guts of life. And that's what makes ESPN's hiring of Nate Silver a critical move for sports television and beyond.

At ESPN Nate Silver's presence could be transformative to sports television. At the New York Times, Silver was a prognosticator and a brand, a conjuror who with his FiveThirtyEight.com blog was scarily accurate in predicting the outcomes of elections. That was the sizzle. But the actual steak is that Silver is able to tell stories we can all dine out on using data. That's what's so exciting.

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FORTUNE ARTICLES: COMCAST & NBC SPORTS

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My piece on Comcast and NBC Sports—Comcast Bets Big on Sports—is in the new issue of Fortune Magazine. Also on Fortune's website is a second, short piece—Life After Ebersol—about how Ebersol's NBC Olympic team rallied just after he was forced out, and how influential (and inspirational) Ebersol remained in the weeks that followed his exit, as the NBC team prepared their multi-billion dollar Olympic bid presentation to the International Olympic Committee. (The Comcast and NBC Sports folks gave me tremendous access, something I'll be writing about in a bit.)

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"THE AGE OF DISRUPTION"

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Fortune Magazine published my story about Americans reinventing themselves last week. The genesis of the piece was my realizing that just about everyone I know is sitting in their office—if they even have an office—spending no small part of their day thinking: "How much longer is my job as I currently know it going to last?...And what the blank am I going to do next?" Oh, and I'm not just talking about people in the media business. I'm talking about practically everyone except for tenured professors.

We're living in the "Age of Disruption" — a time when technology has flattened the world, making it easier for new companies to be born, but more difficult for traditional companies to do anything but cut costs and cut jobs. In the Age of Disruption, change has become the only constant: business models are being torn up daily, and the skill-sets required of both workers and managers are in a constant state of redefinition.

I'm not a historian (and I don't play one on TV) but I can't recall reading about another period in history where everyone no matter their occupation, their education or their social status, seemed so uncertain and disconcerted about their job future...a time when everyone deep down was worried that they were, at most, a couple of years away from becoming obsolete.

Curious to know your thoughts. Feel free to comment here or toss me an email.

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MY FIVE YEAR COMPASS POINTS TO TMZ, DEADSPIN AND ESPN... AND THE WAR BETWEEN GREED AND ANARCHY

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Last week I was asked by a media friend in Israel if I would contribute to a paper about where media will be in five years. My answer was that five years is a long way off, and way too distant a horizon to be thinking about media. (But it's still a hellova a measuring stick to use when trying to figure out Soviet farm production goals.)  And, anyway, when thinking about where things are going, rather than trying to plot specific points along the digital highway, I tend to limit myself to just trying to figure out the right direction, to try to see what's going on and hazard a guess as to where the media world might be heading.  And to that end, I have a compass—although, unlike the normal four-pointed compass, mine only has three points:

1. First-person Communication.

2. TheCurve

3. Open-Source Media.

Let's look at them one at a time.

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THE NEW YORKER & THE WARSHAW CURVE

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In this week's New Yorker, James Surowiecki on his Financial Page has an article, "Soft In The Middle" that is entirely about theAldenCurve!!! Okay, okay, it's not actually about TheCurve — but Surowiecki's article describes exactly the same phenomenon — about how, when it comes to consumer products:

While the high and low ends are thriving, the middle of the market is in trouble.

Now, while I originally started writing about TheCurve focusing on evolution of the consumption of television content (see graphic below), I later began posting about other areas that adhere to TheCurve, along with a few of Adam Park's observations about TheCurve and consumer electronics. And although Surowiecki never graphically drawers TheCurve, he does write about how the consumption of consumer electronics has shifted from "the amorphous blob of consumers who make up the middle of the market to the high and low ends."

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OLYMPICS PROVE THE WORLD IS FLATSCREENED

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NBC's coverage of the 2008 Beijing Games clearly sits at the very far right-hand side of The Curve: it's high-end production by the best producers, directors and announcers (especially Al Trautwig) in television.

Now, I've been reading a lot of interesting articles about NBC's ratings success with these Olympic Games (including this terrific piece in MediaWeek) ... and, well, here's a quick thought about a yet unmentioned factor that I think may be helping to drive Olympic viewership:

Combined with all the usual suspects for what's driving the ratings, such as great stories (Michael Phelps and Dara Torres, et al), the early success of the American athletes, America's curiosity (and fear) about China's rise as a super power, NBC's use of the web (finally!) to help drive interest, and the network's outstanding production/coverage — I would add one more possible factor: Flat-screen TVs.

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APPLE STUMBLES ON THE CURVE (cont.)

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As I wrote earlier, it will be interesting to see how Apple publicly responds to its disastrous rollout of MobileMe.

Remarkably, most of the MSM still hasn't reported on it — actually, given the extent of the problems, it's more astounding than remarkable — but it is a story, and David Pogue of the NY Times has posted an extensive write-up (or as Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon would say, "a good beat-down") regarding what he's dubbed, "Apple's MobileMess." Pogue's post includes some very nasty details — about individuals losing ALL the emails that they had EVER written, even those stored on their hard-drives(!) because of MobileMe — and he mentions small business owners who've incurred loses.

Given all the speculation about Steve Job's health — yesterday, Joe Nocera of the Times wrote about the rumors and their implications for Apple's share holders, about whether or not Job's health is a "private matter" and even about an "off-the-record" (and out of the blue) phone call that Nocera just received on Thursday from the secretive Jobs, himself — given all of that, one can't help but wonder if there's a connection between Job's health and Apple's lack of response to the MobileMess...and their stumble on The Curve.

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FINAL NOTE: APPLE'S STUMBLE (cont.)

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This will (probably) be my last post about what David Pogue has labeled their "MobileMess,"

i.e.

Apple's disastrous rollout of MobileMe. Since I'm not a techie, rather than focus on the product side of the company's recent stumble, I've been focusing on aspects of Apple's marketing that I think have been previously overlooked. (See

Apple Stumbles on the Curve

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I wrote earlier that "it will be interesting to see how Apple publicly responds to its disastrous rollout of MobileMe," and it has been interesting, indeed. Apple's remarkably belated response is a "MobileMe" status blog. written by an Apple employee named "David G.," assigned directly by Steve Jobs:

"Steve Jobs has asked me to write a posting every other day... to ensure that we keep you really up to date... it’s been a rocky road and we know the pain some people have been suffering."

Apple's MoblileMess blog clearly holds true to the company's core message, which has always been that Apple feels the pain experienced by Microsoft Windows and Vista consumers. Only this time — for the first time since Steve Jobs returned to Apple — Apple's messaging is addressing not Microsoft pain but Apple pain inflicted by Apple on its own consumers.

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APPLE STUMBLES ON THE CURVE

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As mentioned in previous posts ("Other Sectors Following The Curve?"), a few contributors have used The Curve to look at the the consumer electronics market. That makes sense if you think of the various low-end vs. high-end, cheap vs. premium, electronic products that you can choose between when making purchase decisions: inexpensive digital cameras (vs. high-end Nikon and Canon consumer SLR's), earbuds (vs. Bose headphones), generic laptops (vs. MacBooks) and, as already mentioned, cheap cell phones (vs. iPhones, BlackBerry's and other PDA's).

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BIG MEDIA & THE "NEW PARTICIPATORY JOURNALISM" (with Apologies to Dick Schaap & George Plimpton)

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In the 1960s, a small number of absurdly gifted writers began to change the definition of journalism.  Using literary techniques found more frequently in novels than the New York Times. Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, Dick Schaap, Jimmy Breslin, Hunter Thompson and George Plimpton were at the forefront of what quickly became called "New Journalism."

"Participatory Journalism" was a key element of New Journalism, and it developed in two forms out of the minds and typewriters of Plimpton and Schaap:  Plimpton was the author turned participant, who wrote about his often humbling experiences in magazine articles and books like "Paper Lion" and "Out of My League," while Schaap turned participants into authors, in books like "Instant Replay," which he co-wrote with the Green Bay Packers Jerry Kramer. 

Both Plimpton and Schaap brought readers inside the locker room, the huddle and, at their best, into the mind of the athlete.  The result was "Up Close and Personal" in print, before Roone brought it to television.

Today, in the era of DIY media, where everyone has a camera and iMovie, and is publicly living their lives online, media companies can leverage their scale and resources to enable large numbers of participants at events to participate in their event coverage.

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A PRACTICAL SUGGESTION

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As I mentioned at the end of the post before last ("Content is No Longer King"):

Being able to create high-quality content is a big advantage, but it's not the endgame. On the web it's less and less about creating and more and more about Aggregating ... Curating ... Annotating ... and Facilitating.  That's a big reason why the little guys are now jumping over the big guys like Jack Russell Terriers on a hunt, and in heat.

That said, the Big Guys do have a bunch of advantages.

Before we get to the advantages Big Media enjoys — and how they can create new editorial products that can be monetized, based on those advantages — let's review the current state of their affairs . . .

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CONTENT IS NO LONGER KING (continued)

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Once again, let me say right off the top: I'm not bashing content.

Heck, I've devoted the last 25 years of my life to it — back when it was just called "writing" and "programming," and stuff like that. 

Content is still key.

But too many media companies are failing to make the most of their content, ironically because they've put it on a thrown and value it too highly, as I wrote below.  And at the same time, they continue to undervalue the importance of utilities.  The latter is now the most important factor for the success of media properties on the web: features and functionalities that get people to your content, get your content out to people, and let people do things with it.

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CONTENT IS NO LONGER KING

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And I'm not just content is no longer king because I'm about a decade sick of the old cliché.

Content is still key, but the king's crown now belongs to Utilities (features and functionalities).

To help prove the point, here are two interesting items that were put together by one of the fastest minds I know (Mr. Russell-Foltz Smith).  They're eye-openers for anyone trying to reach that rather elusive male 18-34 demo:

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"AN EARLY CLUE TO THE NEW DIRECTION?"

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When thinking about trends my mind always wanders to one of my favorite scenes from the Beatles' first feature film, "A Hard Days Night" (1964).

Here's the set-up for this brief, absolute gem of a scene that's all about trends and the people who spot and market them:

Just hours before the Beatles are to perform live on British television, Ringo is nowhere to be found.  John, Paul and George split up to look for him, and along the way each Beatle has his own brief encounter of a strange kind.  George's fate is to become an accidental one-man focus group for a trend-master . . .

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* WHAT IS "THE CURVE"?

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(If you've already read this post, just skip to the UPDATE at the BOTTOM.)

What is the Alden Curve?  (Or, perhaps more to the point: Why?)

Well, the modestly named Alden Curve is two things:

First, it's a pattern of content consumption.  More specifically, it's the contrast between two different patterns of video content consumption: a contrast between how all of us used to consume video content in the fading world of scheduled "traditional media," and how more and more of us now enjoy video in the ever-growing, on-demand and interactive world.

It's a concept I started noodling around with a couple of months ago, and recently started showing to a few friends who work in various corners of the media industry.

(Usually I'd tentatively bring it up at the end of a conversation about something else entirely, I would draw the curves on the back of a piece of paper or napkin, sketchily put forth the idea and ask my companions for their thoughts.  During one particularly fruitful conversation, Andrew Heyward, the former president of CBS News, dubbed it, "The Alden Curve."  And, honestly, who am I to argue with Mr. Heyward?)

Below is the curve for TV News and Entertainment.

              (Click on the images to enlarge them.)

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Warshaw_curve_2_1

So, what's the significance of the Curve?

I'm still noodling with that — but almost all the folks I've showed it to agree that, unlike Gertrude Stein's opinion of the city of Oakland, there's at least some there, there.  Or, more to the point, in the words of Stephen Stills: "There's something happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear."

But the pattern is real, and I do think it tells us something about the direction in which content consumption is heading — and that has a good deal of significance for content producers, programmers and distributors.

(I'll posit some of the details in future posts.)

Which finally brings us to the second thing that is "The Alden Curve"; i.e. this blog:

More than just a place to post my musings on the curve, this blog is a place where I hope others will post their responses, thoughts and challenges. A place to think collaboratively along some of the tangents of the curve.  It's also a place where I'll be posting some examples of other trends that I've been encountering, and even some interviews with folks who work and play on various slopes along the curve.

So, here goes nothing.

Or, just maybe, something...............?

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UPDATE: "Disruptive Selection"

In May of 2009, I peaked over the shoulder of my 15 year-old biology (and "House") obsessed daughter as she was studying evolution, and I discovered the below:

EVOLUTION

(Click on the images to enlarge them.)

The curve on the bottom-right looks pretty familiar, doesn't it?

Makes sense that The Warshaw Curve, which is about the effect of disruptive technologies — like video on demand, YouTube, et al — would match up with what biologists refer to as the curve for "Disruptive Selection."