Pain English

I suspect the reason business people so often resort to gobbledygook in their writings is not just laziness or habit, but that they're afraid specific language is too confining and restrictive. Ambiguity seems more inclusive. It relies on the reader to fill in the blanks of meaning. These would-be communicators fear that explicit, precise, and detailed writing might not tweak every reader's interest or encompass every possible interpretation.

Problem is, it doesn't say anything either.

You don't have to look hard for examples. As I started to write this, IBM spammed me with an email they hope will draw my attention to an article in their newsletter. They say the piece is about how that company helps "organizations make strategic decisions that enhance competitive advantages, create new sources of value, improve revenue growth and develop the change programs necessary to meet business or mission objectives."

Well, who wouldn't be interested in all—or at least some part of—that? Aren't those things that all businesses want to do? But the email doesn't give me a clue what IBM's consultants really offer, or how they deliver it, or what they've done for somebody else.

On the contrary, the message I get—loud and clear—from their spamMail is that IBM doesn't know a thing about my business or me. They think of Bob Kalsey and Bravura Films as just another organization with problems and issues no different from those faced by any other. By trying to offer everything, they offer nothing at all. That's the ROI for ambiguity: nothing.

These thoughts are inspired by a question today on LinkedIn, where I occasionally try to contribute to the conversation. Loren Hicks referred there to a help-wanted ad that includes the phrases “The role will leverage all aspects of the offer matrix” and “ … will include presenting and evangelizing xxx’s offering …”

Loren asks how people respond to such a thing and whether they'd apply for the job—whatever it is.

My response was:

I would be pleased to apply for a role that leverages all aspects of the offer matrix and proud to present and evangelize the company's offerings, especially if the aspects are of the unique, cost-effective and robust next-generation aspect type.

At the end of the day, though, the matrix would have to be flexible, scalable and optimized in terms of metrics that deliver value added outcomes, and the offerings would, hopefully, be easy to use, world-class and unique—as well as focused on high performance innovations from a leading provider of new and improved feature sets. Heck, the bottom line is, I'd give 110 percent commitment—or more—to such a win-win partnership of all stakeholders. Wouldn't you?

I have to give credit for many of the buzzwords I used to David Meerman Scott and Dow Jones, who created and provide (under Creative Commons) a list of the things. Just in case you've forgotten some of them and don't want to leave any out of your next spam.

Scott is as ferocious about blather and baloney as I am, and you might want to read his Gobbledygook Manifesto, in which he points out another reason business writers default to those words: they don't really understand their products, or how customers use them.

Shame on them.

The Business of Music

The music industry is in crisis. The fundamental cause is the unbundling of creative content from physical media: the same phenomenon that is behind the troubles of the newspaper publishing business.

At one time, music was not bound to physical media at all but was part of the oral/performance tradition. Artists supported themselves through patronage and direct payments by their listeners.

Musical notation was the first technology to change the music business. It arose not as a means of publication and distribution, but for the preservation of music and the convenience of its performers—and music became fixable, in some respects, to a physical medium. Various musicologists improved and standardized notational methods through the 16th century, concurrent with the printing press boom, and music publishing became a viable business.

Music flourished as an industry due to the entrepreneur's ability to produce and sell copies of sheet music and collections—to fasten creative content to salable, durable physical products. "Pirating," though, was a commonly accepted business practice in the United States, until Congress extended copyright protection to music in 1831.

Before the publishing revolution, music was not so much a business as an art, and musicians were independent of commercial specialists: lawyers, agents, publishers, printers and resellers. They were beholden only to the makers of instruments, their fellow artists, and the gratitude and generosity of their admirers. That changed when composers made a Faustian bargain with publishers. It seemed like a good idea at the time and, for centuries, it was.

After 1878, with the perfection of the first practical sound recording and reproduction systems, recorded music followed the same strategy as music publishing. Not just notations, but actual musical performances could be fixed to mass-reproducible physical media. The advent of the phonograph brought a crisis to the music publishing industry's reliance on sheet music sales, but publishers (and the composers they represented) adapted their revenue model to draw income in the form of royalties, on the strength of copyright protection.

Radio broadcasting was initially seen as a threat to the recording industry because it made music "free" to the consumer—first with the support of the radio set manufacturing industry and, eventually, of advertisers. The music industry demanded—and received—compensation through broadcast performance licensing, but its income from that source paled in comparison to that from record sales. Eventually it became clear that radio broadcasting was an effective music-marketing tool because of its reach and influence. Radio was not an on-demand medium, so consumers who wished to hear a particular performance at a particular time still needed to purchase it in its physical form.

Digital technology changed everything, and that is where we are today. Music and its performance are no longer bound to salable physical media. Individual consumers are able to cheaply copy, store, and distribute music. Whether those practices are legal or not is almost irrelevant, because in practical terms the laws and patents that protect the rights of creators, performers, and their licensees are unenforceable.

The business models are broken. The industry faces the prospect of a return to its roots: the support of musicians through patronage and the gratitude and generosity of their admirers.

The good news is that digital technologies are available to musicians, as well as to their audiences. Composers, arrangers, and musicians can create, perform, distribute, and monetize their products with as much independence from the traditional middlemen and facilitators as they are willing and able to claim. If one wants to go that way, one can. But the upside potential for the independent artist is limited; the rewards are different, and of a smaller scale, than those possible for musicians who choose the traditional route to success.

The music industry has long offered the alluring potential of quick and possibly obscene profit. That is not and has never been the principal motivation for every musician or music business person, to be sure, but it has always lurked in the wings behind the dream of artistic acceptance: the hot score, the hit single, the platinum album, the world tour, the merchandise, and the star on the walk of fame. If not the goal, that elusive dream has always been the ultimate verification of one's value. But to be honest, achieving that dream was never the pay-off for talent alone, or talent and hard work. It was the product of a machine, and artists never ran that machine.

Those at its controls are struggling today with the new digital reality. They are re-jiggering the machine, changing its components, re-tooling to maximize and maintain the profitability that fuels it. Music served on a platter is no longer the product, but the music and those who make it are—once again.

In a way, the machine too is returning to music's roots—to the song, the personalities, and the performance, rather than the page, the disk, or the cassette. It returns with the benefits of the contraption it has evolved to become: its profit motive, its managerial skills, its media reach and influence, its marketing power, its packaging abilities, its synergistic properties and its business relationships. Of course, it also arrives with the burdens of its artistic timidity, its pandering to public preferences, and its reputation for greed intact. You can learn everything you need to know about the machine from "American Idol."

Musicians, since their Faustian bargain with the Mephistophelean machine, have always been only a part of the system, and they are finding that their relationships—and their place in the revenue stream—are changing. Ironically, as the performers and their performances are increasingly the salable product, their share of the revenue will decline. There is no other way to feed the beast.

Musicians have two choices, and every imaginable opportunity in between: to go it alone, or to ride with the machine. Either way, the future is uncertain. But the future always is.

That Nobel Prize

Peace is more than a state of warlessness—a state, it should be noted, the world has never known. It is, as importantly, a process and an attitude.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has conferred the Peace Prize on 97 individuals and 20 organizations. In only three instances was it awarded to individuals who were actually involved in the direct brokering of peace accords between nations.

Theodore Roosevelt won in 1906 for his successful mediation of an end to the Russo-Japanese war and other contributions. Henry Kissinger was honored in 1973 for his work on the Paris agreement that led to the final cease-fire in Vietnam and the withdrawal of American forces. And Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin shared the prize in 1978 for the Camp David Agreement, which led to a negotiated peace between Egypt and Israel. (Despite the persistence of animosity, hostility, and bloodshed between Israel and its neighbors, that country and Egypt remain—after a fashion—at peace with one another.)

Some winners have helped to reduce tensions and bloodshed within their nations. The Committee honored Nelson Mandela and Frederick Willem de Clerk in 1993 for terminating the apartheid regime in South Africa, and John Hume and David Trimble for their efforts to find a peaceful solution to the conflict in Northern Ireland.

But, mostly, the prize has historically been awarded to people and institutions who have worked toward the process of conflict resolution and aided or inspired humanitarian efforts. The International Committee of the Red Cross has won three times, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, twice.

Of all the Nobel prizes, the Peace Prize is generally the most controversial. Were there, in each year, an individual or organization conspicuously responsible for bringing peace to some corner of the world, there would likely be no controversy; the Prize would be a slam-dunk. Sadly, that has seldom happened, but happily there are always folks grinding away at the process, forcing attitudes and postures to change, making contributions. They might work for decades, on their own initiative, with little recognition. Others might just be at the right place when history comes to call. In every case, though, they are—more than anything—an inspiration to others.

Geir Lundestad, the Secretary of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, has said that President Barack Obama will receive the honor this year for his creation of a new climate in international politics. The cable tv political bloviators—and the Chairman of the Republican Party—think the prize is pretty much a joke; that Obama is undeserving, the prize diminished by his selection, and the award no more than a slap at former President Bush and evidence of an international socialist conspiracy at work.

President Obama richly deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. Even before taking office, he revived the world’s long-dormant sense of hope for peace and positive change. People around the globe see him as a transformative figure and are inspired by his message of optimism, his call for mutual respect, and his promise of progress. They wear Obama t-shirts in Udaipur these days, and gave this American visitor high-fives in Delhi last December as they grinned and shouted, “Obama! Obama!”

As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama convinced the majority of American voters to choose peace and to reject the previous administration’s policies of hostility and confrontation; to vote for rationality and against rigidity and blind ideology; to support a foreign policy based on respect, rather than arrogance; and to believe, once again, that it’s okay to look after one another--here at home and around the world.

None of the above, none of the genuine feelings of so many citizens of the world, is welcome news to those who reflexively oppose the President no matter what he does or tries to do or what honors or endorsements he receives. Nothing in the revitalized aspirations of many millions around the world will reverse the hostility of those who hope and pray for our President to fail (as though his failures would not be our own), who are irreversibly angry about his election victory, and who still can’t believe that most American voters don’t agree with them.

Those Americans should get over it, and get with the program—or get out of the way.

Rachel Maddow concluded an excellent MSNBC broadcast on the matter saying, “The American president just won the Nobel Peace Prize—by any reasonable measure, all Americans should be proud.”

Indeed.

Social Networking

Names are kind of funny. We like to name things, because it gives us the illusion of understanding them and the hope we will ultimately control them. When we name a disease, for example, we begin to think that one cure – if we're lucky or smart enough to find it – will remedy all instances of the malady. Unfortunately we often mistake symptoms for diseases and forget that a symptom may have many causes. Cancer comes to mind. Or the common cold. We forget, too, that the disease might be entirely imaginary – caused by mass hallucination or hysteria.

"Social networking" has a lot in common with diseases in those respects. It isn't a single thing, nor is there a single way to deal with its many instances. Giving it a serious-sounding and techno-babbly kind of name may make us feel as though it's one thing and that we understand it, but those impressions are false. It might even be imaginary, brought on by exposure to the radiation of computer monitors and Blackberry LCD screens.

We like to categorize things, too: also so we can understand and control them. Ever since Linnaeus we've tried to categorize the flora and fauna of the Earth, for instance. But we've embarrassed ourselves many times because the categories we've invented have sometimes turned out to be meaningless and those in which we've chosen to place a thing have not always been the most appropriate.

"Social networking" is a whole jungle of creatures and they don't all belong in the same part of the zoo. Facebook and Flickr, YouTube and Twitter may be cousins, branches on the Internet family tree, but should they be in the same cage and fed the same diet? Maybe they're all in the kingdom "Digital," the phylum "Internet," and the class "Social," but are they all in the order "Advertising Medium?"

Marketers are some of the most dedicated namers of things. One of them came up with a condition known as "halitosis" in order to sell an elixir for bad breath. Many folks who sell advertising and technology consulting services have latched onto "social networking" as a way to foment a profitable combination of greed and fear, dread and avarice in the marketplace for their wares. It helps that nobody really knows what "social networking" is (it can mean anything you want it to mean), but everybody wants to turn it to his own advantage or save himself from its potential ravages.

We sure do like to try to turn everything we encounter to our advantage, and that can bring good results or otherwise. Thankfully some guy long ago saw a spiny lobster crawling around and said "I don't care what it looks like, I'm gonna eat the thing." But it's not a good idea to leave infants unattended around cans of paint thinner.

Many thirsty folks these days are thinking seriously about swallowing the social networking Kool-Aid. I guess we'll find out how that turns out.

Senator Kennedy

Shakespeare observed remorsefully, "The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones" Tragic but true, it speaks of our pettiness that we are so often blinded and imprisoned by our hostility.

Certainly Edward Kennedy was merely a man and had his faults as all men do. Many disagreed with his politics and with his beliefs about what makes for a civil society. But we needn't foam at the mouth at the mere mention of his name. To do so is unseemly, unfair, unhealthy, and makes us unworthy.

I, for one, will remember him as he remembered his brother Robert – as "a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it." And as a man who both respected and served humankind with a sincerity, grace and eloquence rarely seen these days.

Adam Clymer, former Washington correspondent for The New York Times and author of "Edward M. Kennedy: A Biography," is answering questions about Senator Kennedy today on The Times' Politics and Government blog. He writes, in part:

"If you voted at 18 or were served Meals on Wheels or took advantage of a Medicare drug benefit, he helped get you there. Cheap college loans, children’s health insurance, aid to the disabled and a variety of civil rights measures are also to his credit. I don’t adore him, but I respect that record. He achieved it by working across party lines, remarkable in a day when bitter partisanship seems to trump most issues in Washington."

A View of Mt. Twitter

Doc Searls is a most interesting fellow and he has a wonderful sense of metaphor. The other day he wrote that tweets have "the impact of snow on water" while "blogging is geology."

Tweets, as you know unless you've been comatose for a while, are those usually trivial and often incomprehensible mini-messages that some folks like to send out into cyberspace from their phones or computers in hopes of relieving their feelings of inadequacy and/or irrelevance.

Some folks in Iran did a lot of tweeting after the recent elections there, you may recall, and there were important social and political reasons to demonstrate their relevance. Their tweeting served the common good, to be sure, which shows that twittering offers real and potential benefits. Still, so much drivel, so much snow on water.

Not that there's anything wrong with drivel. It serves a purpose. It's part of the glue that holds people together, and there's value in that.

Twittering is sort of like the "Active SETI" project that attempts to send messages to intelligent aliens (should there be any) elsewhere in the universe. Both twitterers and the Active SETI people assume somebody may be out there listening for signs of intelligent life, though tweet-makers sometimes seem to be less concerned about the intelligent part. In the case of SETI, the subtext behind the messages is "You are not alone," while for tweeters it's often "I am here."

Doc's point, if I may be so bold to hazard an interpretation, is that tweets are ephemeral – part of the babble of the human brook flowing by. Blogs, on the other hand, become part of the record of human experience, just as sediments become a record of biological and geophysical events.

No doubt part of the appeal of Twitter is that it's so darned hip. But another part is that it IS ephemeral, which makes it a low-risk form of communication. Tweets aren't as likely as blog or Facebook postings to come back and haunt us someday. They go away pretty quickly, almost as fast as the remarks we make in conversation, so we can be spontaneous and frivolous and not fear that others may use our words to our detriment in the future – to make us seem supercilious or trivial or careless or worse.

I think Twitter may be changing blogging, making its recording function more significant and its reporting function less so. People use Twitter now to point others to things they find interesting or provocative and to publish trifles – things they might have formerly done with weblogs. Blogs are, I think and hope, becoming a medium for more carefully considered and painstakingly prepared messages. Blogs may become more worthy of the preservation that is part of their nature. They may become more interesting. They may even remain interesting to the cultural archaeologists who will dig around in them in the future to find out what people were like back in the early part of the 21st century.

It's a commonplace that each new medium adopts some of the characteristics of those that preceded it. Television, before it found itself, was a lot like radio – but with pictures. It's also true, though, that new media change those that are already in use. Radio became something different when TV came along. Twitter is a new medium that has taken to itself some of what was once the purview of the blogosphere, and I expect that blogging will change, now that the "frivolous" stuff we can't stop ourselves from producing finally has another place to go.

Of course, all this presumes that Twitter will persist long enough to make an impact beyond the few million digitally devout souls who use it now. Or that something else will take over its niche. It seems important enough to survive, but I wonder if its importance might be an illusion.

Seems like Twitter may seem important mostly because people talk about it. When people talk a lot about something, marketers perk their ears up, wonder if they can use it to sell stuff, and start sniffing around like dogs around a sandwich bush. When people with money in their pockets start sniffing like that, the cadre of consultants sees an opportunity to transfer some of that cash into their own pockets. Those consultants join the crowd of talkers. And pretty soon you've got a phenomenon on your hands, and pretty soon after that it becomes a mania.

There is a marketing principle that says the best way to success is to stake a claim on top of some mountain, where the mountain is an idea or a proposition or a gizmo or what marketers call a "category." Stake a claim at the top where you can be most visible. Many companies and would-be gurus are battling for control of and visibility atop Mt. Twitter – which seems to be about the highest peak on the horizon these days. I wonder, though, if Mt. Twitter is a real mountain or just another hill piled so high with curious marketers and hungry consultants that it has the look of an actual mountain without the granitic core to hold its own against the forces of erosion.

Time will tell. It always does.

The Future of the Newspaper

Certainly technology will bring profound changes to newspapers and to the ways in which people experience news and information. But whether newspapers survive in their present physical form or some other, I expect them to evolve in significant ways if current trends continue. Their evolution, I believe, will take inspiration from the media with which they compete.

People often decry the bias of news sources, yet the most biased commentators are often the most popular. What we publicly decry may be exactly what we privately crave. We are naturally predisposed to accept and agree with interpretations of facts that support our preconceptions and, similarly, to distrust and differ with those that conflict with them. A trend in information media, facilitated by a greatly expanding number of media outlets, is toward increasing segmentation along socio-political lines.

It's a disturbing development, rooted in the profit motive that is essential to the current model of commercial information providers. Communication was once called "the glue that holds society together." It has become, instead, an adhesive that more tightly bonds individuals of particular socio-political leanings to one another, rather than a unifier of human society as a whole. Success in mass media once required providers to appeal to a broad audience but now it is possible to thrive in a niche.

I expect that xenophobia will spread from talk radio and cable punditry to newspapers. A 2004 study of young adult readers by Readership Institute found, not surprisingly, that "people want to read about people like themselves in their local daily newspaper," and "There is less interest (in) coverage of groups to which one does not belong." Perhaps newspapers will become more overtly opinionated in their coverage, cater more to the xenophobic tendencies of their readers, and position themselves more as the voices of specific identity groups. Already we are seeing more opinion, gossip, and biased analysis creeping from the op-ed pages into formerly hard news sections; more column inches throughout local papers topped with the photos and by-lines of their own celebrity pundits.

Another trend, although it has always been prevalent, is information as entertainment. By far the most popular newspaper features are the comics and sports pages. In advertising and news content, readers under 35 prefer information about "things to do," such as recreation and local activities, and "ways to get more out of one's life," such as health and fitness features. Reports of events from around the world are instantly available on the Internet, through Twitter, and on radio and television. Newspapers are unable to compete with the immediacy and pungency of these other media, so we can expect their focus to shift away from event reporting in favor of lifestyle features, amusement, and the narcissistic concerns of their audience.

A third trend I will call "informer-as-celebrity." I think that in a strange way Walter Cronkite is to blame – not personally, but because of the value he brought as an individual to the CBS television network. The other networks competed against Cronkite's highly successful "that's the way it is" reporting not by doing a better job of authoritative, credible coverage, but by emphasizing the personalities of their own anchors. They fought substance with style, and it proved to be a successful strategy.

NBC created "The Huntley-Brinkley Report" to succeed its "Camel News Caravan," tellingly replacing the name of the program sponsor with the names of its anchors. Chet Huntley and David Brinkley were superb newsmen, but their network traded on their personalities rather than their journalistic acumen. National and local news outlets followed suit and polyester-haired anchormen (and later, women), along with clownish weather and sports reporters filled the airwaves with happy-talk news programs. The spokespersons became the medium and largely the message of broadcast information.

The spawn of the ménage à trois of these trends – socio-political segmentation, information-as-entertainment, and informer-as-celebrity – is hostility-as-entertainment. What appeals to a large audience about cable television's motley crew of bloviators is the anger and rage they express and the gleeful pleasure they take in bitterness, insult, derision, and obstinacy. "Yellow" journalism – sensationalism, scandal-mongering, and unprofessional practices – has a long tradition; it's nothing new, and it's always masqueraded as "real" news. In the past, it has been part of a newspaper's overall brand and only occasionally identified with a specific reporter or columnist. We may well see more – and more outrageous – sensationalism as newspapers experiment with ways to emulate the appeal of their broadcast competitors. And I expect that a breed of bullying celebrity journalist "stars" will become more important to each newspaper's brand.

One can expect other trends as newspapers cater to their perceptions of audience demands.

Young people think newspapers are too big; they prefer concise, bite-size news. According to the 2004 Readership Institute survey, this group tends to agree that: “I wish this newspaper had fewer pages,” “It has too many special sections,” “It tries to cover too much,” “Too many of the articles are too long.” The same organization's study of a broader reader group similarly concludes that people who feel overwhelmed by news, tend to read newspapers less.

Motivated to expand – or maintain – their readership, newspapers seem to believe that their regular, devoted readers can be counted on to continue their newspaper habit, so they are catering more to "lighter readers" – ironically by providing less: fewer pages, shorter articles, and more limited coverage.

Younger readers also say that they highly value "dynamic visual treatment," and newspapers are certainly trying to cater to this with their colorful eye-candy designs – just as cable news relies heavily on high-tech graphics and the endless repetition of dramatic imagery.

Whatever physical form the newspaper takes in the future, we can expect news delivery media to: target segmented audiences; appeal to narcissism, xenophobia, and the thrill of sensationalism; rely on celebrity pundits; deliver less news more concisely; and do it all with dazzling graphics.

Sorry, news fans, but "that's the way it is."