I wanted to call it "The End of the 'End of Print' "

In my column , just up at PBS/Mediashift.org, I try to directly take on the blablabla about the End of Print. Given the blabla when this position is publicly asserted, it could get interesting.

The short story is the "End of Print" meme is very similar to the "Don't Trust Anyone over Thirty" meme that I was guilty of propagating back in the 60's. It's less about Print than it is about a new generation coming of age.

Whenever a new generation comes of age, all that went before is "dumb." "Everything will change." "Dinosaurs will be replaced with mammals." This generation will lead us all to the new Jerusalem. It's just a normal part of growing up. I did it in the sixties. The generation of the 1920's did it. The generation of the 1840's did it. And the founding generation in America in the 1770's did it.

Children and young adults, who think they are going to live forever, make the error of clarity in a world of complexity. Young adults, unlike children, also commit the sin of Pride. They are starting to feel their power and are eager to flex it and define the world. That's all to the very, very good.

But as they age, they will discover that what will be done, has been done and that there really is nothing new under the sun. There are only new tools to do the same things that humans have always done. They will also remember that media is not a zero sum game. The rule for media is the more, the more.

At it's base it's always a signal v noise problem. That's why the Tower of Babel story still resonates and blablabla is good, but if you want to manage the risks of the future, science is better.

The formula for educating the customer . . . and everyone else, including yourself

Data points + thinking points = growth of a better responsive mechanism for filtering out the signal from the blablabla.

The problem is that people think blablabla works. It doesn't. Usually it's just more noise.

So . . . keep getting data points and thinking points on their (your) radar. Then as you get closer to the deadline, you'll be able to more quickly separate the signals from the blablabla. Quickly separating signal from noise is what is meant by "smart." The thing that is cool about selling "smart" is that the marginal cost of production is pretty close to zero.

The remaining problems are
1. Create the understanding in the right customer's mind that you can be depended on to do "smart" in the future. Customer's only put a value the future.
2. Be ready to answer the call in real time. Customer real-time is now.
3. Stay on the radar of your customer. Since customers (and everyone else) will do the easiest thing to do, make the easiest thing to do to get a response from you.

Hint:
1. Number 3 is the really important one. No one's really that much smarter than anyone else. It's all common sense anyways. But some people are a little less busy being busy.

2. Educating bottom of the pyramid high school kids works the same way.

The Value of Print. It's about space/time.

Learning is defined as the emergence of new behavior. Learning increases when just the right content in just the right form is inserted into just the right space/time. The right space/time for learning is defined by the yellow circles in the second illustration.

Print is the best artifact for learning, and thus the right from, for a specific space/time.

Thanks to ed4wb the illustrations.

Learning in a value chain economy


Learning in a facilitated user network economy

The Pardox of Consultative Print Sales

The better you are, the less they need you.

If you focus on being an unpaid consultant to your customer and plan on being rewarded by the purchase of X, you are in a paradoxical situation.

I did a longer post over at Tough Love resolving this paradox. But the short story is that your customer has to see you as a source of quick fixes the next time they need a quick fix. The issue is not to be a consultant, it's to be a handyman. Every one needs a handy man plus they are so hard to find. It's a bit like a good baby sitter or cleaning person.

It doesn't feel as cool to think of yourself as cleaning person or baby sitter or handyman, but consider how much money a really good plumber makes.

Important Reading to see where Newspapers are heading

Newspapers are afraid they will go out of business if they don't find a new revenue source. Everybody, including printers and newspaper people, are blind to the value of print to earn money going forward.

They say people make decisions because of fear or greed. The reality is that big decisions are made by going businesses on the base of fear. But they call it "risk management" because nobody wants to admit they are afraid.

Read these conversations at Harvard. Don't forget the comments. If it's too much of a pain to read it on the screen, print it out and use a highlighter to remember the important parts.

Major-news-outlets-to-sell-multipart-investigations-as-digital-newsbooks
and
Print-is-still-king-only-3-percent-of-newspaper-reading-actually-happens-online
and
Google-as-middleman-for-news
and most important of all for the Big Picture
Managing-the-content-cascade