mediamachina

Note: The five posts entitled “Groundwork” were originally written in 2009. See here.
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Be a platform. Join a network. For newspapers, that may mean soliciting the public’s assistance in finishing stories. It may mean recruiting and mobilizing the public to report. It may mean setting them up in business.
Jeff Jarvis
What Would Google Do? p. 126

Recapitulation

What We Gain, What We Lose

What Did We Just Read?

• That we are in a place that we can expand at will.

• That we have a level playing field to compete with all other media.

• That we have unlimited memory for:
  • Our content
  • Our users’ content
  • Our advertisers’ content
  • Our merchants’ content

• That we have unlimited memory to record exchanges between:
  • Users and our content
  • Users and media makers
  • Users and advertisers
  • Users and merchants
  • Users between themselves

• That we can give as much – or as little – space as we want to any and all of these exchanges.

• That we have total control over the environment where all these contacts, exchanges, and relationships take place.

• That we have total control over the context, the nature, and the content of these exchanges.

Is it possible
that we can’t find a way to make money with this?

No.
Way.

We have to use the system structured by the Four Observations.

Photo: TechnoCRAFT @ Yerba Buena – Vero.b – Some rights reserved

Note: The five posts entitled “Groundwork” were originally written in 2009. See here.
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We hear a lot about Moore’s Law and the doubling of processing capacity, but storage-density’s growth makes the pace of processor improvements look glacial.
Cory Doctorow
Tracking the astounding pace of digital storage

figure 23: Memory of exchanges in a traditional media

Observations on figure 23

This analysis is fairly straightforward but, as often happens, by outlining the relationships I ended with seeing more than I initially imagined.

• The three rectangles are, from top to bottom: the advertiser (the orange rectangle), the media (the black rectangle), the user (the light blue rectangle)
• The large circles stand for the exchanges between the media and the users, as shown in our analysis (figure 7): specifically, content exchanges (the big black circle), business exchanges (the big red circle).
• The two kinds of small blue circles (solid and dotted lines) represent the memory, if any exists, of these exchanges.

The users know and remember:

• What content they have used (the solid blue circle overlapping the big black circle)
• What they have paid for (purchases, subscriptions, classifieds) and what ads have interested them (the solid blue circle overlapping the big red circle).

The media knows what the users have done only through statistics (hence the dotted lines).

The media and the advertiser share this information.

That’s how a “mass” media works: all the knowledge about the readership, the readership profile, and the ad targeting and efficiency is statistical.

figure 24: Memory of exchanges with users in a Web media

Observations on figure 24

The media wants stable exchanges with the user. So it has to do all it can to create the right conditions.

We now have as much memory as we want.
We can record every real action of any kind.

We can keep track of the user as a person, with an identity on which memories can be built.

And we can track every possible contribution made by the user, from a simple vote to any kind of content (text, images, audio, video, money).

Finally, we can track how every user shares our content; please note that “our content” now covers everything that is produced within the media:

• By media professionals
• By other users
• By our advertisers and merchants

Hosting these memories has two main effects:

• Hosting the user’s memories = the media as a “home” for the user
• Hosting recorded relationships = generating trust

What does memory change?

Traditional media had documents and archives, but they were cumbersome to search and use.
We had nothing like digital memory, which can store billions of data every second, data that are easily accessible, easily searchable, and easily expandable.
Digital and interconnected memories change . . . everything!

Memory changes the space we have for content

• We were constrained by the format (paper area for print, linear time for electronic media)

Memory changes the space we sell

• Advertising prices are based on the scarcity of premium space, just as real estate is
• When space is expandable at will, its value tumbles: buying free space doesn’t make sense

Memory changes the value system

• In near infinite space, real estate has less value; data and connections have more value; so relationships (data + connections) have more value

As it happens, Memory changes the space we have for hosting memories (data, connections, relationships)

• Expandable memory allows us to transform all our exchanges with advertisers, merchant, and readers into relationships.

And obviously, Memory changes the space we are in, because, on the Web . . .

figure 25: . . .  Memory is the medium:
Users and merchants are everywhere on our platform
How do we do business with all of them?

Note: The five posts entitled “Groundwork” were originally written in 2009. See here. .

TV is unbalanced – if I own a TV station, and you own a television, I can speak to you, but you can’t speak to me. Phones, by contrast, are balanced; if you buy the means of consumption, you automatically own the means of production. Participation is inherent in the phone, and it’s the same for the computer. Clay Shirky Cognitive Surplus p. 22

figure 20: Current exchanges between media and user

Observations on figure 20 This is a simple but fairly accurate description of exchanges between a traditional mass media and its users:

• Black arrow right: Most of the content flows from the media to the user.
• Blue arrow left: The user’s mail and comments trickle back to the media.
• Red arrow left: Most of the money exchanged goes from the readers to the media, either directly (paid content, classifieds) or indirectly (advertising).
• Red arrow right: Users can make money via the media when they sell stuff through the classifieds.
• Blue circle: Memory – only the reader remembers what they have bought and read. For the media, the user is only a statistic, not a person with whom to have an exchange.

figure 21: Exchanges in an equal media, like the telephone

Observations on figure 21 Our goal is to have a stable relationship between users and media. So we have to look into what our users expect when they get involved in exchanges using an equal media. We know of several examples of equal media,where the two parts of an exchange have the same power to send and to receive: the telegraph, the fax, and the telephone. We’ll use the phone as our example, because we are all familiar with relationships that develop over the phone. Here is the million dollar question: What would happen if you had regular phone calls with a person and this person talked all the time, barely listened to you and never remembered who you were? Exactly! That’s the traditional media / user exchange. For two people to have stable and repeated exchanges on the phone, we can roughly expect that ideal conditions would involve:

• Equal exchange of content
• Equal memory of the exchange

figure 22: Exchanges that occur when Web media and user have equal media capabilities

Observations on figure 22The user has countless choices: it’s the media that “wants” a long term and stable relationship. If we want the user to “feel” that they have a “good” relationship with the media, it’s up to the media to do its best to “equalize” the exchange. Here we use the phone exchanges as a model.

What media equality changes?

Content: Since we have a lot more content to offer than a lone reader does, we have to find any way we can to make the user feel “equal.” We can request users to send as much content as possible to us:

• Content that contributes to our original content
• Content that users want to share with other users

Exchanges: Because we can’t have one-to-one exchanges with all our readers, we can make sure that other exchanges happen as frequently as possible between “equal” persons: between users, between users and merchants.

Identity: There is no other way to equalize the exchanges than to recognize participating users individually and to remember them, their contributions, and their exchanges.

I could talk to you forever objects of co-dependency 2008 keetra dean dixon

used with permission of the artist

Note: The five posts entitled “Groundwork” were originally written in 2009. See here.
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Push models treat people as passive consumers whose needs can be anticipated and shaped by centralized decision-makers.
Pull models treat people as networked creators who are uniquely positioned to transform uncertainty from a problem into an opportunity.
John Hagel and John Seely Brown
From Push to Pull (pdf)

figure 17: Sending printed media to consumers

Observations on figure 17

For a print media, the content is printed on a support (the black squares in the inner circle); these supports are distributed (the black squares in the outer circle) to reach the users wherever they are (the blue squares), either by mail or via stores, newsstands, posters.

The publisher of a printed media is the origin of the communication, which travels toward its readers.

figure 18: Sending electronic media to consumers

Observations on figure 18

For a radio or TV station, the content is sent out (broadcasted over the airwaves or through cables) to  receiving devices (the green squares) near the users (the blue squares).

Here the station is the origin of the communication, which travels toward the users.

Whether for print or electronic media, users don’t need to know the specific place where the media is created: they are in contact with paper supports or  receiving devices, not with the media makers.

figure 19: Users going to a Web media

Observations on figure 19

The black dashes stand for any media on the Web.
Media people put the content (the gray dashes) on their web sites.
They don’t send any printed object, they don’t send anything over the airwaves: the content just stays on a server.
The content of the media does not travel in space nor in time.

The users (the blue squares) decide if they want to visit the media and to give their attention (the blue dots) to its content (the gray dashes).
The origin of the communication is the user.

What origin changes?

On the Web, since we don’t have to send our content out in a tight package over space and time, we don’t have to create and present our content as a tight package anymore.

A media is not a product anymore, it’s a place.

Since people are coming to our place we are probably better to have a mindset, an infrastructure, and features to welcome them.

Note: The five posts entitled “Groundwork” were originally written in 2009. See here.
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The Internet is a place. It is a weird place in which proximity is determined by interest, rather than a space in which interests are kept apart by distances. It is a place in which nearness defeats distance.
David Weinberger
The Net is a place

Let’s begin with a process we know very well: Advertising.

The orange balls represent the product we want to promote, followed by what the ad must do.

figure 10: The advertising process

Observations on figure 10

As a communication specialist, I admire the work of the ad agencies’ creative minds.
They have to pack a lot of information into a very small area, like a printed page or a 30-second TV or radio commercial.
Given a product (the circles), they have to make an ad (the triangle) that accomplishes numerous tasks:

• First it must be noticed among the clutter of thousands of ads that we see every day.
• Then it must keep our attention to make sure that we read or view the whole message.
• It must summon an emotion, because emotions are the only paths to memory.
• This emotion must be positive enough to engage us.
• This positive emotion must be attached to the product.
• This product-emotion must be anchored in the viewer’s memory.
• And then, tightly packaged with all this, there must be some kind of spring that will unwind at just the right moment: a delayed push to action.

But the smallness of the display area is not the only reason ads have to be engineered this way.

figure 11: Traditional marketing

Observations on figure 11

Recap: (1) An advertiser orders an ad from an agency; (2) the agency buys a place for the ad in the media; (3) the media is sent out to the consumer.

(4) The ad is viewed where the media reaches the consumer, which is generally at work, at home, or in transport. The consumer comes in contact with the ad and then, hopefully, the ad leaves behind an imprint (the dotted triangle) on the consumer’s memory.

(5) For the ad to succeed,  the consumer must, later, go to a store in person to buy the product.

“later”: The time between the placement of an ad and the act of buying a product can be as brief as one hour. But generally  it takes days, weeks, even months, and sometimes years.

“store”: The distance between the place where the consumer views the media and the store can be as near as 100 m and as far as 10 km or more.

A good ad is first an imprint device and then
it’s a vehicle to make a buying decision travel through space and time.

Note: figure 12 will appear in a future edition. Here we jump directly to figure 13.

figure 13: The traditional content process

Observations on figure 13

For users of a traditional mass media only they themselves (the blue squares) and the media products (the black squares) are in physical contact – the black squares represent either a paper object (print) or a receiving device (radio or TV).

The media makers (the gray dots) and the making of the product (the gray square) are far away from users in space and in time.

figure 14: The Web media content process

Observations on figure 14

For users (the blue squares) of a Web media, their attention (the blue dots) is inside the media site (the black-dashed rectangle).

Here, they feel as though they are in immediate proximity of other users and of the media makers.

The media makers (the gray dots) are hiding behind their content (small black dashes): they imagine that they can maintain their distance from the users as in a traditional media. But users know now from countless other sites that this distance doesn’t really exist. In every news media on the Web where readers can’t interact with journalists, readers know that it is only so because journalists (or editors or publishers) don’t want them to.

figure 15: Proximity is only in the hands of the users

Observations on figure 15

On the Web, proximity is only available to a person, never to a media.

Media makers, as individuals, can reach any Web page a click away, but the media website itself can’t be sent away on a decision from the media.

A media website doesn’t move, can’t move, and can’t be sent to consumers: it sits on a server.

We have to learn immobility.

It is the decision of the users to take their attention to the media (the blue solid horizontal arrow).
For any content that can interest the users (news alerts, new comments, images, offers, activities, etc.) the media can (and should) offer to the users as many ways as possible to be alerted (the black-dashed arrows):

• RSS
• email,
• Twitter, etc.

The small hollow ovals are there to represent the users’ decisions to receive these alerts.
It is important to understand that thesealerts are not a return to the traditional media process of sending content. The only function of these alerts is to bring the users back to our place where we can use all the advantages of proximity.

figure 16: What proximity changes

Observations on figure 16

The black dashes represent the news media on the Web.
Users (the blue squares) are inside the website.
The triangles represent the ads that send our users to the merchants (the orange line circles).

Marketing:

Proximity kills the distance in space and time between media and merchant: the orange circles become orange-dashed circles.
Proximity can fuse advertiser and merchant (the ads are a part of the dashed circles) inside the media.
Proximity can bring users and merchants in contact inside the media.
For users and merchants who are inside the media (member users and member merchants) once an ad has been clicked on, marketing may end: the media can become a place for sales.

Content:

Proximity kills the distance in space and time between the media makers and the readers.
Readers are among us, right there, we can touch them.
Everybody is a click away: everything can be personal whenever the “personal” is more efficient or more productive than  generic content or an automatic process.

Note: The five posts entitled “Groundwork” were originally written in 2009. See here.
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The relationship of the customer to the business will likely be redefined, not by social media but by a broader set of tools and new contexts for relationship. Jon Lebkowsky Thinking about the future of online marketing

Take a truck made of 10 tons of metal and plastic. Make it plunge into the sea from the end of a pier. It will sink. Launch it in the air from the top of a cliff. It will crash. That doesn’t mean that you can’t make 10 tons of metal and plastic ride the waves or fly through the air. It just means that we build our vehicles according to the characteristics of each medium. When we stop trying to drive our trucks into the ocean, we can observe the Web as a different medium.

Four observations on the Web as a communication medium:

• Proximity
• Origin
• Equality
• Memory

I call them “observations” because that’s what they are: points that appear again and again with the same effects everywhere. One way of reading McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” is to take into account all the perceptions implied by the medium and around it.  These observations are perceptions implied by the medium. Perception is reality: everything happens as-if. The observations are listed in no particular order: they all exist at the same time. The consequences of each one are explored in detail in later posts. I’ll just begin by defining briefly what each word means in this context. So here they are: three of them define a physical property of communication in this medium; the fourth one took me more time to grasp.

• Proximity: For a user of  the Web, every page is a click away.

• Origin: On the Web, communication starts from the user.

• Equality: On the Web, the user has exactly the same means of communication as the media.

• Memory: On the Web, we have as much memory space as we want.

None of the traditional media has any memory of what consumers do with it. Suddenly we can remember all our content, all the content of our users, all the content of our advertisers and all interactions.

On the Web, every content from the media and from the users can be recorded. There is a lot to say about memory. I will add more later. For now, we only need to note that memory is a new fundamental factor in the relationship between media and users.

Proximity changes the nature of the exchanges: What happens when you are very close vs very far away. Origin changes the dynamic of the exchanges: What happens when the media doesn’t move and the user does. Equality changes the balance of the exchanges: What happens when every exchange is one to one. Memorychanges the nature of the medium, the space where the exchanges takes place, the space available to the media, the context in which all media and all users exist.

The four observations in just four lines: Proximity: For a user, everything is a second away Origin: Communication starts from the user Equality: Any user is equal to whatever is on the screen Memory: We have it, we are in it

For the few next weeks, I am taking a break from trying to launch a local Web news media created according to the observations that are the topic of this work.

I was asked so many times, “Is there a media that already does this?”, that I first wanted to launch a proof of concept. But I have not managed to convince a publisher. Yet.

When I stopped publishing here more than a year ago, I had several chapters that I believed were ready. But advance readers told me that my descriptions were complicated and not clear enough. This stalled me because so many authors have also observed these structures. I could see them everywhere on the Web. The last remaining step is to launch a news media built along these observations.

I am a journalist. I had to find ways to show publishers how these observations stand out in all kinds of businesses on the Web and can be used for news media. I thank the people who have had the patience to listen to this story. And I thank my readers for their precious feedback.

I also thank all the media, advertising, and marketing executives whom I have tried to convince to initiate real projects based on these observations. Each conversation has helped me further refine my understanding of the realities of the media industry.

If anything, I think I wanted too much to fit these observations with existing businesses in media and marketing.

The great leap I recently made was to respect the validity of these observations and not try to adapt them anymore.

I wrote some of these unpublished chapters in 2009. They are in my past: they form the foundations of this work. So I am publishing them as reference under the title “Groundwork”.  I am just adding a quote and a photo to these posts. This blog is a draft after all and I’ll rewrite them when the time comes.

Meanwhile, you can jump directly to [link to come shortly], which summarizes the state of my understanding of opportunities for news media on the Web. In the following posts, I will develop my pitch for a news media business based on this model.

Some things haven’t changed, though: these observations are just that, observations. They stand on their own merits, not mine.

So if they are still obscured by my shortcomings, I apologize and I need your help to clear them out.

Thank you.

Photo: US NAVY – USS Ronald Reagan Sailors wash flight deck – All Rights Reserved

The Web is a little like water: in the same way that you have to be in the water to learn to swim, everything on the Web has to be experienced to be understood.

So I can’t stress enough that I have been able to observe and describe the Welcome Model because I have first personally experienced the consequences of being welcomed, especially by the two persons I am introducing here.

I had been observing the Web since the early 90s and, as a business journalist covering media and marketing, I was mainly interested in mass media. Around the year 2000, I realized that I should have a better look at the whole variety of native lifeforms that were blooming on the Web. I felt like a gardener who can’t see anything growing in his patch of dirt, turns around and is surprised to find in the nearby wilderness an abundance of new fruits and vegetables. One of the first marvels of the Web is that anybody doing anything on it was only an email away. So I wrote emails asking questions about business models.

After a few back and forth exchanges, Avi Muchnick told me that I had better experience his website from the inside and asked me to register. He was creating at the time Worth1000.com, a website hosting daily contests of image manipulation. I didn’t know anything about “photoshopping” as we said at the time, but Avi told me to poke around. I had the privilege, at the advanced age of 53, of becoming a newbie.

I began to participate in comments and forums. I made all the the basic mistakes, I was bullied, I bullied back and was almost banned by an upset admin. But I survived. I learned. I was fascinated. As soon as I realized how this “community” machine worked, I knew that I had reached the promised land: I had been an editor in chief of magazines, and I saw that “mods” and “admins”, the people operating communities, were the editors in chief of this world. That’s why I called my blog modadmin, for the editors in chief of Web media.

Avi Muchnick – photo by Joi Ito

I became a juror (Worth1000 jurors had then editing powers), and once again I made all the basic mistakes, like editing an ongoing thread and being accused by angry members to try to change the past. This was an exhilarating time: the site was running and changing all the time. There were new contests in photography, text, illustration, animation. Admins were as much creative in governance solutions as members were with their artworks. We were all trying new things, exchanging, experimenting. It was as thrilling as what I had experienced when launching magazines or a daily newspaper, only faster, more intense – and with less pay :-). Avi was 23 years old, studying law, making a living designing web sites, marrying, having a kid, while spending nights coding the site with Israel Derdik. Nowadays, they are developing Aviary.

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I was an old hand stumbling on every molehill while surrounded by whiz kids, talented artists, young geniuses having other jobs but all knowledgeable about programming. I still didn’t know anything about manipulating images nor about coding but Avi and the admins welcomed me in their midst. I will eternally be grateful for their warm welcome: they left me wander among them with access to every possible button governing the system. Avi gave me the keys of the house. And the whole time, I was taking notes and developing the observations that became ComCom and media machina.

Professionally, those years at Worth1000 gave me the confidence to tell to media people that it is not that difficult to interact directly with registered members; there is a logic to it, steps to implement, guidelines to write, tools to install, but community building works. More importantly, I was at Worth1000 in daily contact with real people: I saw tempers flare, emotions rise and ebb, dramas, hilarity, recklessness, compassion, fun and hate, laugh and tears. I was touched by individuals and I was touching them. This is also an important professional lesson for media people: Web communities are not mass media, they are places where only real people can interact, one by one.

While I was in contact through Worth1000 with people all over the world, back in Montreal I was not very successful when trying to convince my colleagues in media and marketing that we should build communities for their users and consumers. I had no more luck with local programmers until I met with Sylvain Carle, now CTO of Praized Media and needium. As A Frog in the Valley, he had been one of the first bloggers and he became the first person in my own city who knew at once how media and communities could come together.

Sylvain Carle – photo by Simon Law

Sylvain is a coding genius and the social hub of every kind of geek camp or conference about programming, about the Web, about identity, about social media, about local marketing, about open everything and mobile anything. We spent long hours pushing the ComCom observations first into a business model and then into an architecture for prospective clients. I’ll tell later in these pages how it went and why it went that way.

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At the same time Sylvain introduced me to the Web community of Montreal, where I was mainly known as a magazine guy. He led me to the Yulblog and Yulbiz events, made me a blogger of the first Webcom conference and an admin of the Webcamp events ever since. He also helped me play with Drupal and WordPress, insisted that I try facebook and he even registered my first account on Twitter. We live in incredible times and I am incredibly lucky to have met such a great and generous friend.

If you think that the linked images above are ads, you are wrong: ads are anonymous and have barely any content. These links lead you to two real people who have welcomed me, with whom I have created memories, and the stories I have just told about them convey trust.

And trust is the supreme currency on the Internet.

This is how “welcoming” sums up the real difference between traditional media and communities on the Web, between mass communication and personal relationships.

The Internet allowed a new flow of communication springing from the consumer toward the media.
It was a key turning point in the media-consumer relationship: with the personal computer and the Internet, suddenly we are all connected.

And each of our users (readers, viewers, consumers) is connected to our media, to our ad, to our company, to us.

We don’t send our content in the world at large anymore.

We are sending it to people who are connected to us.

Ever since the beginning of the Web, each time we are sending content, people can send us something back.

And since they are our clients (consumers, readers, viewers), we have to provide them with a mean to talk back to us.

I played with the idea of calling this simple observation “Ping Pong” (“Every Ping should be ready for a Pong”), but for clarity and mnemonic purposes, I called this new phenomena and its consequences “ComCom”.

The ComCom Principle:

• From now on, every communication has to take into account its feedback.
• For every communication output (« Com »)
  there is a communication feedback (« Com »).
• Meaning: Every time we publish any ad, news, or content in any media we must provide, at the same time, the means for our readers-consumers to reply.
• Moreover, if we want to thrive in this new context, we have to seize every opportunity to provoke this feedback.

In hindsight, it looks today as if ComCom contains hidden in its folds most ideas anyone needs to use the Web at its best for fun or for profit. But it took some twists and turns to go from there to a business model.

But at the time, the biggest influence of ComCom was to validate for me this line of inquiry: after a few months of observation, I had been able to describe a characteristic of the Web that could be useful to any kind of media. Once again, McLuhan was right: this is a machine that can be observed and described. Everything else could eventually be observed and described.

Note: I have registered “Com Com” as a trademark in Canada in 1999 and have used it ever since for business and conferences.

In presentations at the time, I had the audacity of predicting that “In 5 years, 50% of the content of any media on the Web will be made by readers”.

Hahaha! That was in 1999 and I couldn’t have been more wrong. Eleven years later readers are still an afterthought in most news media.

On the other hand, with millions of blogs, communities, forums and social networks like facebook, flickr, Twitter and so many others, I guess that the overall content created by “readers” overwhelms easily the content of all mass media combined. It’s just that it’s happening outside of traditional media instead of within them as I thought at the time.

I know now that Com Com is vastly more widespread than the relationships between media and readers on the Web: it has probably always existed in any context of any relationship. What has changed, as McLuhan pointed out, is the speed of communication, and the speed of the feedback: the speed of electricity.

He even predicted that the acceleration of change won’t stop until every human being is linked to the others at this very speed. (We are not done yet).

In 1999, the domain name com.com was already taken, but I found a way to use it in this domain name: boutotcom.com.

I am media centric and user driven.

Media centric?  By now, we have all observed, learned or at least heard that the Internet is user centric: we have user-centric identity, user-centric design, user-centric media, user-centric Web architecture and user-centric databases management. And of course, when we’ll come to hosting communities, we’ll look closely at what “user centric” implies for architecture and content.

But let’s be media centric for a while. The notion of “user centric” might be dizzying, so let’s go back to the media as the center of our world. Nothing wrong with it: that’s where we are. The users are out there, somewhere.

Besides, I still believe that traditional medias can thrive on the Web. They just don’t have much time to make the right moves.

We have just seen when observing figure 9 in Ecosystem that to fight erosion, a media on the Web can strengthen its exchanges with its sources, its advertisers and its users. Among those, our two sources of revenue are the advertisers and the users. And obviously advertisers buy ad space only because of the users. So our first priority is to strengthen our exchanges with our users, right?

This isn’t really new, nor is it special to the Web. In 1984, more than 25 years ago, I was exploring ways of launching a weekly newspaper in Montreal. I went to see Jean Paré, then publisher and editor-in-chief of L’actualité, Canada news magazine in French, to ask for his advice. He listened patiently to my story; then he asked me: “What do you need first to launch a weekly newspaper?” That was an easy one and I answered right away: “Money”.

“No”, he said, “The first thing you need is readers. If you have readers, you’ll find all the money you want.”

This is certainly one of the most important lessons I have ever learned about media and the publishing business.

So we may be media centric if we like but what do we find at the core of any media? Readers, viewers, listeners: users. On the Web, there is a grand unification of users: we all have to read, if only to choose a video or a song, so all users are readers. Readers are at the core of any Web media.

That seems simple and clear to the point of looking banal: yes, of course, our readers are important. Of course they are our best asset. Of course we take care of them. On the Web?

If this is so obvious, please get in the shoes of a real reader for a while and ask yourself why this kind of thing happens so often when readers want to participate in a traditional-media website:

• You are warned about everything you can’t do, topics you can’t touch, words you can’t use. Upon arrival, you are treated as a potential danger.
• You have to agree that everything you write, every photo or video you post on the site will become forever the property of the media and you abandon any claim to it. Upon arrival, you are told that everything you contribute will be stolen.
• You have to give a name, any name, but the media doesn’t give you a personal page with your identity and the memory of your contributions. You can comment one or 100 times, you can write important information or rubbish, you can help drive a conversation, but nobody will remember it, nobody will be able to find it again. You have no real identity, you can’t build a reputation. Nobody cares about who you are or what you can bring to the media.
• You have a name and you may have a personal page with the memory of your contributions but you have no place to open a conversation, to contribute information, to propose a topic, to ask a question. The only thing you can do is to comment at the end of the golden words of real journalists. You can vent in your comments but you are not part of us and please keep your distance.
• You are warned that there are moderators around and they will check your comments and maybe delete them but you are not told who these moderators are, you can’t talk to them: they don’t participate, they don’t comment, they just exercise their power. You are asked to contribute in a media where the police is anonymous and where moderators are not members of the community.
• You are allowed to contribute in some places but not at others. Your input is accepted only when and where the “people who know” agree that you are allowed to leave something.  Otherwise, whether you have an important question to ask or a key information to add, you are obviously not qualified to add it in some place, as if you were unclean or totally uninteresting.
• The rules of contribution are the same everywhere in the media because the owners don’t even know that topics and areas can be more interesting, more lively and become a more important part of the media when they have specific rules. So you have to suffer inane conversations because authors are not creating a tone and, worse, they don’t know that they could.
• Journalists think that “Community” is the place where readers are corralled.

I don’t especially want to name names, take your pick, but you can pass through that filter the otherwise great nytimes.com or guardian.co.uk .

I know that most people who are reading media machina are waiting for me to answer the question: where is the business model?

Business models are the easy part.

Getting that readers are real people and not cattle is the tough part.

I believe that’s part of what Jay Rosen means when he says in Rebooting The News System In The Age Of Social Media: “You gotta grok it before you can rock it”.

I learned to grok it like everybody else: on the Web and in communities, mainly Worth1000 and MetaFilter but also slashdot, Something Awful and dozens of others. All these communities have grown organically around their founder. All these founders are passionate from the start about their members. Founders, admins and mods are not above the community, they are the best part of it. You don’t “manage” a community. You serve it. Yes, it’s messy: there are laughs and tears and yawns and tantrums and trolling and spamming and yes, banning.

That’s life. Readers are real people.

Readers are life. They are even the only lifeline that news media have.

Readers are the business model.

See notes.