Last night I listened to the NPR reporter interview the director
from the service organization that just got dropped after a foster child
was murdered here in LA. They guy took his time and explained patiently
how his organization, which had been consistently rated in the top 10%
of such providers to the government offices whose business is foster
children and adoption got puked on for no good reasons.
It struck
me that this was a no-win situation, especially as he mentioned that
there is an ongoing investigation. An ongoing investigation means that
somebody knows, its just that a bigger somebody with authority doesn't
know yet and so officially nothing can be said. But that's somebody
still knows. The problem is getting to that somebody is what makes for
sensationalism. It is journalism and communications in a nutshell.
The
NPR journalist took calls after the director of the service
organization finished his statements. A woman from Orange County wanted
to know the demographics of foster children and how it was that a family
that keeps pit bulls can be approved as foster parents and potential
adoptive parents. She wants blood. The LATimes journalist breaking the
story is up next. I got out of my car and turned of the radio in
disgust.
What's going on here is that the radio station and the
newspaper, as part of their business model, need to highlight what's
potentially wrong, which is by definition sensational. There's nothing
wrong with that, it's important. What's wrong is that the newspaper
cannot own that audience because the real audience for this story is
longitudinal. The kind of outrage and blood the caller expressed is like
an online flamewar with a newb. She obviously knows nothing about the
subcontracting details and the authority delegated between the full-time
bureacrats in the child welfare department, the care-giving
subcontractors and the board of supervisors. None of us do. All we know
is a two year old kid was murdered and the system didn't protect her.
The
director mentioned the scorecarding system that the County uses to rate
its subcontractors as well as the three government officials who would
have to be involved in the approval of transfer from foster parentage to
adoptive parentage. What we don't know is how well the system works so
much of the time that we pay no attention to it. And if we are genuinely
interested, where would we look? Most importantly how could we use a
different form of communication to translate the energy of outrage which
is currently owned by the radio station and the print media journalists
into the energy of responsibility owned by the director's care-giving
organization?
You see? The length of the attention span of the
media in its current instantiation does a disservice to every
organization that gets scandalized because the energy of the
anti-scandal owned by the media outweighs the energy of reform.
Part
of this imbalance is inevitable and cannot be fixed. Consumers cannot
be producers. Anybody can enjoy listening to music, but only a few can
play it, and only fewer still can compose it. We have a faux system of
journalism that promises to enable democracy in conflict with this
fundamental human fact. Everybody can be outraged at the death of a two
year old, but only a very few of us can prevent it. The Director did
not, and maybe he could not. However consumers can become prosumers if
they are informed in the right ways. And so voters can become reformers
if they are given the proper background. But this is not a job for
journalism as it is currently constructed - it is more a job for the
communications directors of such agency's as the one now under fire.
If
this story generated 50,000 hits at the LATimes, how long with those
same eyeballs stay glued? How long can the investigating journalist on
the story write about it and follow up? How can those eyeballs be moved
to a longer attention span with a prosumer / reformer / watchdog
capacity that is credible even in the eyes of the Board of Supervisors,
the child welfare agency and the subcontractors kiretsu? This is the
problem to be solved in all of journalism and in all of communications.
Journalism has to itself move from pique to education or the burden
needs to be gracefully transitioned to the communications abilities of
the first parties. When the care-giver's agency can take those 50,000
hits and disseminate on a long term basis, then we have a win.
Until
then it will be outrage as usual and frustration with the system. This
is what the current media generates.
--
Here's the technical view:
The way I see it, the iPad is a consumption tool and the PC is a production tool. I already can see in certain corporate cultures where an iPad would be acceptable to take to a meeting, where a laptop would not be. The iPad gives phones an opportunity to dumb down, which is exactly the kind of move I went through about 14 months ago when I was Treo + iTouch. So the way I see it, a phone becomes more important as a networking brick. I'd pay Verizon or AT&T a premium for a mesh phone with great coverage tethered to my laptop and iPad, but nothing about multitasking Droidage appeals to me.
With the iPad as a nice consumption device and new, new media platform, I see corporate communications reaching a new level. Sitting in a room consuming a powerpoint with a human presenter is so 1990s. There is no reason a good sized company could not generate next gen presentations (a la TED video + embedded Business Intellegence) and distribute them. HTML5 + XBRL is what I think.
I cannot imagine that Cisco would not jump up and down on Jobs' head to get a front-facing camera on the nextgen iPad. There's a killer app just waiting to be born.
What I don't understand is why there isn't a global standard for secure RSS. It seems to me a no-brainer that such a protocol would destroy Microsoft's lock on the Sharepoint market (poor blighters). Maybe it's already done in Webdav or something Mac-y that I do not yet know (me being new to OS X), but that's the step that publish and subscribe has to take at enterprise scale, now that CMS is commodity.
Those are three pieces that would aid in the disintermediation all the confusing middle-tier of enterprise software - which we know are all glued to transaction DB technology of yesteryear. Why smart players haven't jumped into that market is not a technical question.
The iPad is a new kind of peripheral, just like a game console. As soon as some smart people see the enterprise space as a scaled-down MMORPG with a much smaller sandbox of transaction types, the sooner we leverage these cool technologies.