May 12th, 2009
The Obama lesson to Rupert Murdoch
The Obama Administration’s renaming of its public relations office as the “Office of Public Engagement” has deep lessons for press barons like Rupert Murdoch.
While Murdoch thinks people should be made to pay for what his people say, the Obama people understand that interaction is the future.
A liaison sits on a stage and tells you, just like a news anchor or newspaper editor. A liaison controls the horizontal, the vertical, where stories will fit on the page, what page they’re on, and whether there is time for them.
Engagement is different. It’s more than a blog. It’s not one-way traffic. It’s two-way traffic between people and government, discussions that are moderated so everyone is heard and everyone feels safe.
That’s the value of open source community. It’s not how many people contribute code. It’s interaction that creates market loyalty to code, users who feel invested in the code.
Transparent, participatory, collaborative. These are the key terms in the President’s order changing the office’s mission.
They should also be at the heart of any sucessful media effort.
Since the Web was spun many companies have sought to raise the drawbridge and charge people more for less. Even those that succeeded financially failed in other ways, as their reach declined and they were cut off from Web links. This was a common experience throughout the industry.
On my personal blog I offered another way recently, a way forward that understands your role has nothing to do with readers or advertisers, but everything to do with aggregating and enabling the creation of markets.
Depth is achieved through loyalty, through the back-and-forth of readers that adds real value to what writers provide. Publishers who fail to organize as well as advocate a place, an industry or a lifestyle deserve to fail, because they’re not even doing what made them work on paper.
The lesson has been reinforced for me here, on this blog, by you. We have a much deeper engagement here than what I enjoyed as a newspaper or magazine writer. Every one of you is my editor, every one has a role to play.
Even my critics. Especially my critics. I don’t learn anything from attaboys. I learn from criticism, from questioning, from probing my arguments, from proofs of when I am wrong. Even from trolls.
As you play those roles, here and at other ZDNet blogs, your loyalty to the site increases, your value to ZDNet increases, and thus the value of the site increases. All in proportion, as it has been since the days of Ben Franklin, when citizens stopped one another to quote Poor Richard. Only the tools have changed.
Similarly I hope the folks in the new Obama office, like Kal Penn (above), understand that this change is just the start of a journey. To truly engage even a fraction of American voters will require scaled systems, a range of tools, and an underlying structure that can take new tools on as they emerge.
And in that last sentence I just described what Murdoch needs as well.
The success of any Internet endeavor, whether it’s political or a business, does not lie in how many people read a piece of copy. It lies in the reach readers themselves give that content, through Talkbacks, through links, even through uncredited mentions on social networks.
It’s the depth of loyalty a site achieves that defines its success, not the breadth of its readership. This delivers political capital in the public sphere, and market potential in the private sphere.
At some point in the future every publisher and every politician will understand this. The playing field will level, and change will slow. Now is the time of greatest opportunity, when you either open doors or shut them.
Short News Corp.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 05/12/09
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