In all the many newsrooms where I have worked content has always had priority over form. Except one. Britain’s leading tabloid newspaper, The Daily Mail, treats form and content on the same level. And that is one reason why it is successful. It understands its own intrinsic strengths and weaknesses.
In literature classes we learned that form and content were indissoluble – but only when things are going right. A Shakespeare sonnet is a fusion of meaning and metre. When Baryshnikov moved across the stage at the Kirov you couldn’t tell the dancer from the dance. But life is not all Shakespeares or Baryshnikovs.
In any business, if we knew better how to fuse form and content, how much more successful we would be. All around us is change, revolution, competition. Against such a confusion nothing is more important than clarity: clarity about what you are, what you stand for, what you offer.
I will go to the stake arguing that the media renaissance unleashed by the internet is not killing print but reinventing it. It is like the affect of electricity upon domestic lighting. The lamp changed from wick to bulb but it is still a lamp. Today, print still does something that only print can do as well.
Anyone who is in the media needs to understand more about fusing form and content and about what it is that we can do best. In the past I believe we got away with getting it 30% wrong. Those days are long gone. Today 30% wrong means walking the plank.
The Daily Mail is a properly fused product. It may not be beautiful but it is what it is. The typography, the colours, even the shape of the paper, marries with its message, with what is trying to do and what it is trying to be. The Economist is a fused product too. It is as comfortable in its skin as a horse by Stubbs. Slick, dense, clear, reflective, synthetic. So is Google, for that matter, and many others.
The importance of this should hardly surprise us. We’ve seen it in the arts. Every form has its intrinsic character. Nothing, for example, seems to match the novel in its ability to create a concrete world. (The fact that such a world is build entirely in the imagination of the reader is the novel’s final stroke of genius). Nothing seems to dominate the emotions as directly as music. The fact that music is an entirely abstract medium which works without images, makes it the form of choice for the alchemy of human feeling. (Watch any great conductor to see a human being in a full-blown trance). Nothing has the mesmerising power of a great painting. The sheer power of light to shock and overwhelm the viewer, is an effect that other art forms cannot strive for. A person can reach for a blanket, a shot of whisky or sit by a blazing fire. Each will warm them - but in a different way.
After thirty years working in media I am surprised there is so little appreciation of the power of form. We talk a lot about formats – broadsheet or tabloid, analogue or digital, video or film. However, formats are to form as haircuts are too looks. They help but they don’t really get to the heart of the matter.
Perhaps we are simply too superficial and therefore lack any interest in what lies beneath. Form is an idea that is anything but superficial. Plato’s forms were the archetypes. Everything started there. And still today the word includes the notion of the essential nature of things.
Or, more likely, we have been taught to focus only on brands. To survive today, any business must be good at what it does. We tend to forget that it is just as important for it to do what it is good at. In a consumer culture dominated at every level by marketing, only a fool would say brands are not important. But long before you can have a successful brand you must know your intrinsic strengths and weaknesses. And that knowledge is at the heart of fusing form and content.
We should have listened harder to Marshall McLuhan. Around 50 years ago he said the medium was the message; or more precisely, that a medium has its own intrinsic effects which constitute a great part of its unique message. He said: “People don’t actually read newspapers. They step into them every morning like a hot bath.”
If we were clearer about different forms and what they are intrinsically good at, then we would not only be better at using our existing media to greater effect but would see that we need to keep experimenting with form. Like any industry with a history, the media industry is essentially complacent, lazy and stuck in a rut. Now we are fighting for our future, we have to do better.
Five years ago only a tiny handful of people foresaw the forthcoming surge in social media. The massive dominance of Facebook and MySpace could not have been imagined. Yet the appetite was clearly there. It was latent. And the technology was there. It took a spark of genius to marry the appetite with the technology and come up with a product so fused that it immediately make sense to millions of people.
Do we really think about or understand what the mainstream media is for, what print and television is really good at? Maybe we understand at some level that print is the pre-eminent medium of information. We understand that it is particularly good at filtering and condensing huge amounts of knowledge; that the human mind can absorb more from a well-designed page of text and graphics than it can in any other way.
Maybe we understand at some level that television is the pre-eminent medium of entertainment. We understand that to bring a vivid replica of the world, of thousands of worlds, into the living rooms of millions of families is an incredibly powerful means of distracting people. However I believe we waste a lot of our energy too – trying to achieve things in each medium that are never going to work as well as they would in another. To anyone who knows better, how often we must resemble a man who is using a hammer as a golf club and a golf club as a hammer.
Against this backcloth, I believe there is at least one gap in the market worth mentioning. I think there’s both an unsatisfied appetite and the means to meet it. Yes, it would always be a niche but it would make up in influence for what it lacks in scale.
The gap I see is for ideas. Why? One reason might be education levels. We are introduced to life-changing ideas at school and then the river dries up. Our minds are kept busy but remain stubbornly un-appeased. Another reason might be information overload. The demand for meaning is strong. We are deluged with data. Information springs at us from every angle at every moment of every day. Some of it sticks. We learn a little. But meaning is elusive. Without ideas it is very difficult to translate information into meaning. And without meaning, life is pretty unbearable
A leading publisher explained not long ago the current formula for a best selling book. He said you had to have a proposal (not necessarily a new one) that explained a condition that affected a large number of people (being overweight, for example). Then you had to explain your idea in an easy but convincing way so that once people had read your book they would feel they understood. “Everyone wants to feel wiser”.
Of course ideas are everywhere – in newspapers, magazines, books and on TV. However I do not think any of the above are best way to communicate ideas. People are hungry for more.
What is the right form for a medium of ideas? Firstly, ideas happen best when people are together. The spark of an idea is almost always in a conversation or a meeting. Secondly, ideas connect best when people can experience them being unpacked step by step before their eyes. To bring an idea alive you must participate in making it. All teachers know this. Therefore, what I am essentially suggesting is the relaunch of the dialogue – live, fluid, unpredictable – and surely one of the most effective forms of idea-making available to us in the world.
I see this as the complete antithesis of the ubiquitous business conference, with its keynote speakers and its endless Power Point slides. These are usually dead (and deadly) events in which self-important people from a particular sector get to stand on stage for 20 minutes and give everyone else the benefit of their experience.
The point about dialogues is that they are living discussion. They can not be prepared in advance because you can never tell what paths the discussion might take. There are already signs of a nascent revival in dialoguing today. In the United States the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation has around 800 members and exists to promote the spread of ideas through dialoguing. In Britain there is Intelligence Squared, which claims to be “the only institution in town - aside from Parliament - to provide a forum for debate on the crucial issues of the day” and which attracts considerable numbers even at £20 a ticket.
Ever since Socrates and his friends, newly-scarred from fighting in the Peloponnesian War, sat near the forum in ancient Athens 2,300 years ago, picking apart life, mankind and the universe, we have had evidence that the dialogue is the essential ideas medium. The adversarial debate, with proposer and opposer and votes from the floor in the British style, is just another form of dialogue. (It is a common fallacy that dialogue can only involve two people – from confusing the root di- “two” with dia- “though”).
What if our great institutions and universities were to launch travelling road shows in which leading thinkers were brought together in different cities to grapple with the world’s great problems? Is it impossibly romantic to think that there might be a few thousand people in each city who would pay for a ticket for the chance either to be actively involved in the discussion or to witness it at first hand?
I don’t think so. When you consider the numbers that will turn out to see a favourite author such as Margaret Atwood, giving her stump speech and answering questions, or to hear Gore Vidal talking to Melvyn Bragg in a big auditorium, I don’t think it is merely a romantic thought. Couldn’t we have the intellectual equivalent of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra or the London Philharmonic turning up in cities such as Paris and Pittsburgh to stage a dialogue on climate change or citizenship?
As it happens I do know of one great American college that is doing just this. The Art Center of Pasadena, one of the top design schools in the USA, is launching a rolling programme of dialogues around the world, starting in Spain next month. (To declare an interest: I am helping - which is one reason why I have become a dialogue fan).
Being a design school, these dialogues will have a design focus, naturally, but not a narrow one. In fact, one of the fascinating results of planning the dialogues has been to realise how design awareness is now almost as much a part of science or business as it is a part of architecture or town planning. Art Center is taking 24 brilliant minds and putting them together for a day of intellectual fireworks on the stage of the Palau de la Musica in the heart of Barcelona on Friday March 7th. Tickets are on sale – and are selling.
I believe they are tapping into a idea that, five years hence, will be ubiquitous and as much part of a civilised life as concert going, theatre going or queuing up for the latest exhibitions.
February 19th, 2008
Barak Obama claims that he is raising a $1m a day, mostly online and mostly in the form of relatively small donations from private individuals. This sort of political “micro-philanthropy” is a thoroughly modern affair (see Peter Deitz’ amazing slideshow on the phenomenon–one interesting point: in Apr ‘07 distributed fundraising sites more than $3m; see also ChipIn for a widget version). Or, at least, that is what I had always thought. Then this morning, I heard a piece on the Statue of Liberty on Radio 4 that revealed the true father of “micro-philanthropy” - Joseph Pulitzer.
In post Civil War America (postbellum?), newspapers were a genuinely powerful force. The invention of more efficient and cheaper printing presses and an increasingly urban demographic allowed newspapers to become a populist medium for the first time. As a result, papers had enormous influence on the issues of the day. One of the world’s great campaigning newspapers, Joseph Pulitzer’s The World (see page on left) is from this era and is at least partially responsible for bringing the France’s greatest gift (besides all that help with the pesky red coats), the Statue of Liberty, to New York. (There is also one in Tokyo - see photo above courtesy of Stefan on flickr and also one in Paris)
France generously offered the huge, 151 ft statue as a gift, leaving the United States to pay only for the plinth on which it would stand. Alas, most of the fat cats in the country thought of the statue as a New York momument that had nothing to do with the rest of the country and refused to stump for the plinth. But, then Pulitzer got on the case, haranguing both the rich for not caring about their country and poor for expecting the rich to do all the work. The result? Money literally poured in, a great deal of it from school children sending in pennys to see their name in print and to give to what was suddenly seen as a worthy cause. Today, of course, this sort of social movement would start and end on Facebook of Bebo.
This is a crucial lesson for today’s far less powerful newspapers. They need to go retro and engage, even uncover, issues people really care about. They need to become rallying points again.
February 14th, 2008
Steeped as I am in the journalistic lore of balance and finding myself musing ever more often how valuable it would be if you could read news these days that just told you what was actually going on, I was all the more forcibly struck yesterday by a quiet but passionate plea for more bias.
It came from a Kenyan journalist, one of the leaders of the media scene in East Africa. I shan’t mention his name for God knows what a blaze saying the ‘wrong thing’ could start in that tinder box of a nation. But his general point was this.
We in the media are neurotically obsessed with balance. There is a case for balance. However there is a case for bias. It is called making a judgement. In any political system and especially a system in crisis, the media, like it or not, leads public opinion. Journalism that bends over backwards not to make a judgement is a lie. Yes, it may be factually true but without moral or value judgement it is a much a lie as a black and white photograph of a Matisse. Far better that the media should take a position and provide intellectual leadership in a democracy than neuter itself with neutrality. That position at best will be wise and thoughtful. At worst it could be wildly wrong. However the wildly wrong doesn’t stick. The wise and thoughtful does.
He made the point only in passing over a plate of mezze so I may have put words into his mouth. But this is what I took away with me.
Compelling.
February 12th, 2008
While the rest of us were enjoying the weirdly summer-ish sun this weekend, The Guardian web people were inside, no doubt monitor-tanning while perfecting the latest phase of their (slowly but surely) redesign of guardian.co.uk. Not any huge changes (if you don’t count the marketing decision to drop Guardian Unlimited in favor of the more sanguine and comprehensible guardian.co.uk–a good choice I say), mostly just extending the redesign introduced last year to new sections. Some areas are more successful than others (I am not sure about the new colorful section menu, its much harder to read) but it generally still looks good. I love the simplicity of it - it isn’t plagued with any of the clutter that web designers are often tempted by (see The Times).
Of course, any “clean” look is largely influenced by the number of ads on the page and, in The Guardian’s case that number is 0. This adlessness might simply be a product of the new look going through (though I don’t recall the site having many ads on a normal day) but even so, its a strange piece of strategy. The site is getting something on the order of 17 million users a month, not to monetize them just seems crazy. As a designer, though, its a dream come true. Ads are something you can’t control and, on a webpage, they are inevitably more colorful, dynamic and motionful than the necessarily staid news-design they sit next to.
Its an exciting time for newspaper websites (especially now they have recovered from their festive slump) what with The Indepedent relaunch and now rumors surrounding a new look The Telegraph site, allegedly based on the New York Post (!)…say it ain’t so Shane, say it ain’t so.
Also, a special word for guardian.co.uk editor-in-chief Emily Bell who admirably (and honestly) answered all comers to her blogpost on the changes. Very impressive.
February 11th, 2008
For the past two mornings in my rather cold but lovingly quaint flat (its those windows there above the dairy - shannylea at flickr) I have been struck with premonitions, small, dusty thoughts that emerge from nowhere. I am not ashamed to admit that they are the most important thoughts the world has ever seen. Today, for instance, I was struck with this doozie: WordPress is going to take over the world (yesterday’s portent, by the way, was far less important - John McCain is the next president of the United States. I am hoping it is more unconscious prediction/fear than unconscious desire).
My ghost thoughts are very demanding and declarative, aren’t they? But rightly so, I suppose, I do think, even now in the bright light of day, that WordPress, a blogging platform created by Automattic (who just got some investment from the New York Times), might actually be a world conquerer. What has swung me from dispassionate user (this blog is on WordPress) to faithful follower is the revelation that the platform is powerful and extensible enough to allow people like you and me (or even my little nephew) to create viable, modern and beautiful newspaper or magazine websites. From scratch. For free. And this isn’t just pie in the sky, its already being used by the Express and Star in Wolverhampton.
I admit that I am a tad late to this but I promise to make up for my tardiness with some good old-fasionhed zealotry. And I have a feeling both of the readers of this blog will have my back. Just look at the various themes that I discovered today. With a tweak here and there these could be just as good as The Guardian, The New York Times or the Telegraph. Amazing. And game changing. I just hope my little premonitions are always so right on.
February 5th, 2008
I urge people to read We are under attack in Uganda’s leading national paper, The Daily Monitor.
It tells the shocking tale of the interrogation and charging of five excellent journalists over a story reporting details of a Ugandan Ministry of Finance investigation into a government corruption scandal.
Far from being based on gossip, the original story published back in August is extremely detailed, carefully balanced, quotes from the investigation and merely reports what one government agency is saying about another.
As a result the Monitor five are facing trial in a few days and have been interrogated by the anti-terrorism squad and the department of serious crime - hardly the right use of Uganda’s most powerful law enforcers.
The salary sandal concerns one of the most powerful women in Uganda - Faith Mwondha, the Inspector General of Government. She has apparently been paying herself 50% more than she should, a breach of the Ugandan constitution, and (you would have thought) precisely the sort of thing a free press is there to report.
The charged journalists are: Joachim Buwembo, managing editor; Bernard Tabaire, managing editor (weekend); Robert Mukasa, news editor; Emmanuel Gyezaho, political reporter and Angelo Izama, special projects writer.
I know the two managing editors. They are fine journalists. And The Monitor is a credit to Uganda - a strong, independent voice. (Interest declared: we are helping to relaunch it).
The immediate need is to support the journalists. The longer term tragedy is that events like this will only lose Uganda the respect of the rest of world - which was at an all-time high last year in November when Commonwealth leaders gathered in the capital Kampala.
February 4th, 2008
