Paul Allen’s personal spaceship hangs from the ceiling of Building 43. An organic garden supplies produce for healthy cafes across the Mountain View, Ca. campus. There are foosball tables, ping-pong tables and volleyball courts for creative play. There are massage chairs for relaxing; gyms for yoga, dancing and workouts. There are bikes and scooters for people-powered travel between buildings, and a winding path through a whimsical sculpture garden for dog-walking and contemplative jogs. The cubes, yurts and huddle rooms are filled with whiteboards, laptops, lava lamps and large, inflatable balls. Even the men’s rooms are Googlized; messages about groups working on complex problems hang above urinals as if to divert attention from the mundane business below to more Google-worthy issues at eye-level … and the organ between the ears.

I like the environment, but The Atlantic’s James Fallows so loves the the place that he believes Googlers can solve the problem that’s on so many minds these days. He writes that he’s spent a lot of time at the Googleplex over the past year talking with Google strategists and engineers about saving newspapers.

No doubt he passed the garden where
a bronze casting of a T Rex fossil,
a gift from founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, forages among the plants. Fallows has so thoroughly bought
into the cult of Google he reports the company is devising ways to save newspapers from becoming the next dinosaur in the garden.

“Most Internet and tech businesses have been either uninterested in or actively condescending toward the struggles of what they view as the pathetic-loser dinosaurs of the traditional media,” he writes.

Which is entirely wrong.

“Everyone knows that Google is killing the news business. Few people know how hard Google is trying to bring it back to life, or why the company now considers journalism’s survival crucial to its own prospects.”

Which is incredibly naive.

Fallows loses his balance assuming that Google can actually save newspapers. Or wants to. He bought what Google CEO Eric Schmidt sold to newspaper editors at their convention last month: the survival of high-quality journalism is “essential to the functioning of modern democracy.” Like newspaper editors didn’t already believe that?

Fallows acknowledges Schmidt is a family friend and an Atlantic reader. You don’t need a weatherman to know which way that wind blows. He spends many pages arguing that Google is trying to save newspapers rather than killing them.

Okay, Google is working with some newspapers planning to put their content behind paywalls. Those Google engineers are such good friends of journalism and democracy. And their “permanent beta” culture is so innovative ….

But there are a few other reasons, too.

Google knows newspapers are good for Google because they generate information people want to search for. Google gets all the revenue from all those little ads, formerly known as classifieds, that run next to search returns. You know, those ads that paid for the Googleplex just as publishers were shedding reporters. The paywall is another way to get a piece, one story at a time.

Google would like nothing better than for newspapers to stop printing and start selling online ads for as much money as print ads. That has never happened, nor is it likely to happen. Google wants the money anyway, no matter how much or how little. It covets display ads that count for most of newspapers’ remaining revenue. Google would gets its piece through its its ad-serving platform, DoubleClick, which it acquired three years ago and has now integrated in Google systems.

Fallows is right to suggest that craigslist, more than Google, undermined the classifieds money-machine. Craig Newmark’s crime was to make classifieds free and interactive, a wry play that made obsolete a highly-profitable marketplace in the back pages of the daily paper. Google is responsible for ruining the rest of it. Its algorithms blew up the newspaper bundle, exploding content into atoms. Context was vaporized. Newspapers have been unable to reassemble the pieces in a meaningful way or find a price low enough to charge for them. The Humpty Dumpty problem.

Now Google says it is willing to help. What it is unwilling to do is admit that it is culpable. Rather, its execs maintain that Google actually serves newspapers by driving traffic to their web sites from searches. Google has maintained that newspapers ought to charge a lot for the advertising on those pages, but a viable market has yet to materialize for most. So it goes like this:

First, Google unbundles content from the newspaper package and sells it off a piece at a time.

Next, it hastens the dismantling of physical operations — paper, ink, delivery trucks, production and the jobs that support them — as unnecessary, recurring costs of distribution. You get to find your news on Google without getting your hands dirty.

Then, it grabs display ads by serving them through DoubleClick and forcing online newspapers to create more expensive ads since newspapers would have to share ad revenue with Google.

Take that, Apple. Just like the iPad or iTunes, Google could try to impose controls on content-distribution platforms that yield revenue. Let’s take the big slice from those desperate publishers. Who’s your boy: Eric or Steve?

The survival of high-quality journalism? The functioning of modern democracy?
Let’s not leave those questions to the likes of Eric Schmidt, Steve Jobs or James Fallows. They confuse important questions with current cliches.

We don’t need lava lamps or inflatable balls to cool-out a business that no longer works.
Journalism and democracy will survive and flourish in new forms and formats that are emerging. That’s an idea worth the investment.

“>

We saw awe-inspiring work, a renewal of the creative passion that helped launch the Internet and its period of technical, entrepreneurial and societal achievement. Old-school publishers such as Popular Science, Zagat and Thomson Reuters rediscovered their game with sharp-shooting apps aimed at connected audiences. NPR and ESPN enhanced experiences that were already compelling online. There were untethered virtuosos, too, such as Electric Literature, the Ghost in the Machine (under development) collaboration, and soloist Rob Kelley’s BeatPad. We’ll revisit and follow the development of their apps in subsequent posts, examining the qualities that make them successful.

More critically, we saw, heard and felt a renewal of the creative passion that helped launch the Internet, the Web and its culture-bending technical, entrepreneurial and societal achievements. In just four weeks since the launch of Apple’s iPad, a flurry of applications has been released to expand engagement, enhance understanding and extend meaning and utility.

Design-driven innovation from a fresh, creative class of developers has delivered a whole new mind for experiencing a world gone digital — high concept, high touch connections that enable us to cope with our unrelenting craving for transcendence.

Finally, we have devices and a number of very good starts that deliver abundance with an aesthetic imperative, as well as a new and better way of organizing things: the new order or order.

Yet, initial responses to our questions were cautious and meek: It is early. We don’t really know. Where’s the money?

Where’s the money?
As a way out of ingenuity, the last response is the first one cited. “Where’s the money?” is the mantra of the unimaginative. A circular question, it is an excuse for inertia, a business plan for standing still. Again. The question is almost as pathetic as its cousin — the position that we won’t invest in an online or mobile strategy until we are certain it works. Good luck with that one.

We weren’t surprised that some who participated in Tabula Rasa, and some who covered it, could not or would not get their minds around the theme of the event: innovation in the emerging Conceptual Age. Mea culpa, we invited discussion at a where’s-the-money session called Good Apple, Bad Apple / Good Business, Bad Business. Given both the dissension over “paid models” and the noisy discourse surrounding it, the topic is a requirement on the conference circuit. Not even a fresh take could take us out of the weeds.

We thought our friend Merrill Brown, the former Editor-In-Chief of MSNBC who’s been dealing with the issue for a coupla decades and currently promotes a freemium model for publishers (some content free, some paid), summed it up rather well: “Putting up a pay wall does not solve your business problem,” said Brown. “Publishers who think they can put their magazine on an iPad and make a lot of money are making a significant mistake.”

We love surprises … almost as much as provocation. Jeff Jarvis didn’t disappoint. We showed the stunning TIME magazine app — high concept, high touch, and only $4.99 issue. The Buzzmachine turned buzz killer:

“I think the TIME Magazine app is the most sinful piece of shit ever,” said a skeptical Jarvis., “The ego of it was unabashedly awful.” On his blog he writes: “It’s worse than the web: we can’t comment; we can’t remix; we can’t click out; we can’t link in, and they think this is worth $4.99 a week. But the pictures are pretty.”

Josh Quittner, TIME’s editor-at-large and one of the creative forces behind its iPad app, gave it back to Jarvis in a blog post called “And the horse you rode in on.”

“Jarvis, a former Time Inc.-er, can be forgiven for the disgruntled, I-hate-my-ex-wife tone that creeps into his rhetoric, whenever he discusses his former employer. It’s tiresome, dude, and intellectually dishonest given that you’re still stumping for your Google book.” 

Turns out the dispute was not about the money, but a little about the distribution of media bundles, a little about concerns that Apple and its partners are attempting to control the “open” web and kill the link econony (Google), and more than a little about Jarvis and Quittner.

Can we turn the page, please?

The Meaning Model
Enough cautious and meek. We need some bold. Why not look at economic issues with the same creativity and integrity as we do conceptual ones? The current “where’s the money” debate is framed by rules developed for the economies and societies, factories and mass production, of the Industrial Age. Forward-thinking enterprises adapted to the atomization and proliferation of content in the Information Age. Now we enter the Conceptual Age with a universe of creators. The new currency is meaning. Off the top, how many business plans can you conceive for a meaning model? Maybe a hundred for, say, anyone?

From Tabula Rasa, we put that first word on the blank slate: meaning. As we reconsider what it means to be human, we’re discovering new metaphors for storytelling, creating new ways to engage, connecting with a world of friends and information, and designing innovations that will guide our lives and shape our universe on almost any device.

Where’s the money?

We’ll answer the question with a better one: Where’s the love, y’all? We put that one to music (Black-Eyed Peas with Justin Timberlake) and video when we started we this crusade back in ought-three. If you don’t know the answer to “Where’s the Love?” by now, you’ll never get the one that asks “where’s the money.”

This is one of those moments – an important shift in digital culture that will be old news, obvious to everyone, a few years from now. There’s an electrifying crackle in the air as digital creatives, businesses, investors and visionaries collide in a mad dash to define the future around the next big thing. Not even the old masters of the universe can stop it. Their hands are slipping off the controls.

There go my people. I must find out where they are going so I may lead them.

Sorry. Your people are leading the way in this universe.

Journey to the Conceptual Age
It’s not just the iPad, it’s the promise of a more personal, more creative, more fulfilling, more inspiring and more beautiful digital experience. It’s the promise of something more human, more wonderful. It’s bigger than Facebook or Twitter or Apple. It’s the next PC, the next smartphone, the next printing press. It’s all of that – in a simple, mobile shiny-new-thing powered by something entirely new to media: human touch. Gigs and hard drives fade into the cloud, replaced by pictures and words and shapes and sounds we can mold like clay. That’s magic. The result isn’t merely something hard and shiny that resembles a notepad. It’s something old, deep and rare: pure joy.

Over the next weeks we’ll continue our journey to the Conceptual Age. We’ll stop at the guideposts along the way, showcasing innovative examples of work defining the creative moment. We’ll conduct activities that show where the moment is leading. And we’ll identify the qualities of design-driven innovation that will determine who flourishes and who flounders.

To get started, we have five questions ….

“>

When he got the promotion to CEO in 2006, Nike’s Mark Parker asked Apple CEO Steve Jobs if he had any advice.

“Get rid of the crappy stuff,” Parker says Jobs told him.

That sounds like potent advice for any leader – and any organization – with some assumptions:

1. There’s a leader.
2. There’s something left once the crappy stuff is removed.

via FastCompany

Smaller, we said. Formats, staff, revenue, influence, circulation, advertising. Smaller. Much smaller.

That was 2005. We were invited to conduct a session on the future of newspapers — a tired and circular topic even then — at the annual conference of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. We returned last week on a comp, rather than taking a pass as we had in recent years.

It turns out that the future for newspapers is indeed smaller. So much that I had trouble finding it. Making my way to the bottom of the bunker, I spotted feints signs of life: a registration desk and a cluster of middle-age white guys in bad suits. Eureka, ASNE 2010! But comp or not, there was no badge of admittance to be found. A nice man with very white teeth began to make one for me. “You would be Doctor…. who?” he asked. Doctor, hmmm. Honorary recognition for an accurate prognosis about the news industry five years ago? Then I saw the small sign: American Dental Association.

“I seem to be in the wrong place.”

“That’s happened a lot today,” said Dr. Brightsmile. “I think you’re looking for that newspaper meeting. Their registration desk is around the corner, but I’m not sure anyone is there.”

Actually, there were: about 150 by a quick count. Some were speakers or comps like me. A few editors were still sulking about a pre-conference survey by Pew that found the brethren depressed, distressed, and worried about losing their papers and their jobs. I recognized many of the usual suspects who frowned when we put down an unpopular vision five years ago.

Then came a few surprises, fresh faces like HuffPo’s Arianna Huffington, NPR’s Matt Thompson, Google’s Eric Schmidt, FanFeedr’s Ty Ahmed-Taylor and Paid Content’s Staci Kramer. There was even a Twitter feed.

This year the digital future finally arrived at ASNE. And this year we left with a smile that made editors and dentists alike proud.

I am excited to announce the launch of a new project that we are calling WeThink.

What is it? WeThink is a conversation about innovation and the future — an effort to explore new ideas and promote solutions to the challenges that our society is facing.

What’s the big deal? If you follow our work here at all, you’ll know that We Media is a movement – a concept – that helps explain how we know what we know, who we trust, and how we learn. It’s about power of the community. We Media is part of the infinite quest to harness the power of media, communication and human ingenuity for common good. And, well, We Media changes everything.  We Media changes the way we innovate.  We Media changes how we create, sustain, and grow successful ventures. We Media enhances the structures, models and economies that support human communication, interaction and achievement.  And through that, We Media challenges us to review our existing ways of operating, break apart our established structures, and re-build our approach to the future.  These changes impact all of us, and they are forcing each of us to find new ways of thinking about… well, everything.

What are you talking about? I have this crazy idea that we need to re-think the way we create, support, and sustain ventures.  We need to re-think how we innovate.  What we are doing isn’t working anymore – not as well as it should – and we need to try something different.  That means re-considering what kinds of companies and organizations are needed today, in response to the massive changes we are seeing in our society as a result of the influence that technology and the internet are having on our culture.  That means re-structuring how ventures, both for-profit and social in nature, are funded and managed.  That means re-assessing what success looks like for new companies and organizations, as well as re-considering how we measure progress of existing organizations against our needs in society.  And that means re-building the whole infrastructure of innovation… from how we teach it, promote it, cover it in the media, what skills we value, who gets to serve as gatekeepers, and more.

How will it work? Over the next year we will collect and share new ideas, highlight different approaches, ask tough questions, and propose solutions. We will lead a new and different kind of discussion about innovation. Everywhere we go we will be looking for new issues to discuss and new ideas to consider.  Everyone we talk to or encounter is invited to contribute their experience or perspective to help power this effort.  And all those ideas and suggestions, approaches and solutions will be shared.  They’ll be posted online.  They’ll be open to feedback.  They’ll be mashed up with other thoughts.  At the end of a year, our plan is to pull together a ‘solutions book’ that helps to support, and sustain, a vibrant and game-changing discussion going forward.  The rest we will figure out as we go.

The first few ideas and questions will be posted in the next several days.  So, stay tuned — the fun is just beginning.

Alberto Ibargüen

The Knight Foundation promotes informed, engaged communities in the digital age.

Ibargüen is the former publisher of The Miami Herald and of El Nuevo Herald . During his tenure, The Miami Herald won three Pulitzer Prizes and El Nuevo Herald won Spain’s Ortega y Gasset Prize for excellence in journalism.

He studied at Wesleyan University and the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Between college and law school, he served in the Peace Corps in Venezuela’s Amazon Territory and in Colombia. He practiced law in Hartford, Connecticut until he joined The Hartford Courant, then Newsday in New York before moving to Miami.

Ibargüen is chairman of the board of the Newseum in Washington, D.C., a museum dedicated to free speech and free press. He also chairs the World Wide Web Foundation, founded by the inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. He is a member of the board of PepsiCo, AMR Corp. (American Airlines), ProPublica and of the Council on Foreign Relations. Over the years he has served on the boards of arts, education and civic organizations including The Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Wesleyan University, Smith College and the Trustees’ Council of the National Gallery of Art and was chairman of the board of PBS.

For his work to protect journalists in Latin America as part of the Inter American Press Association, Ibargüen received a Maria Moors Cabot citation from Columbia University and George Washington University awarded him an honorary Doctor of Letters.

Amra Tareen, the savvy and ebullient founder of AllVoices, has
just closed a $3 million funding round for the innovative, citizen journalism site. That brings funding to $9 million for the two-year-old start-up. Not bad. TechCrunch has a good take on the AllVoices funding.

How does she do it? Amra returns to We Media Miami this year
for Amra’s Great Adventure, a workshop on how a Harvard MBA, electrical engineer, and Muslim mother of two rose to partner at an investment fund to capture opportunities in communications, managed info-tech and telecom businesses, set up micro-credit programs for women and orphans of the Pakistan earthquake to rebuild their lives, and raised millions to start a global news company with local context provided by anyone. Is there funding to extend the AllVoices model into the future of news?”

You can meet the amazing Ms. Tareen and discover great insights on the successes, struggles and experiences of launching a good idea at We Media on March 9-11. Register here.

Our enthusiasm for the tablet comes from both sides of the brain, the creative as well as the practical (we’re talking about business). The Creative Class sees the possibilities: read Nick Carr, Pentagram, Joe Zeff and my post yesterday on experiential news design.

Our take is that smart publishers can reap rewards by investing in new channels for storytelling, advertising and, dare we say, content you can charge for. But few have expressed either understanding, leadership or the required commitment to fill the blank slate of content that the expanding flood of tablets and other mobile devices afford. The creative class is apt to beat them to the future.

Anyone can post photos of a missing person or loved one, tag and sort images for matches in a database, and deploy facial recognition software (coming) to make a match.

Can’t we all just get along? Ah, no. Not as long there is control, copyright and lots of money at stake. Paid Content’s Rafat Ali reacts and shares perspectives from the warlords. Fredic Filloux, the Paris-based editor who writes the Monday Note blog, attempts a diplomatic solution. Does anyone believe this will end well?

The key is keeping your eye on the ball. You can’t hit what you don’t see. A lack of focus, the slight movement of the head, or a distraction from flow alters the physics of the swing. In a blink, the slightest error of execution will send the ball flying to a place of unintended circumstance.

In the third week of coverage about Tiger Woods came a story from the White House: the Obama Administration directed all federal agencies to break down barriers to transparency, participation, and collaboration between the federal government and its citizens. The Open Government Initiative opens doors and data to the public. The policy serves the public’s right to know, promotes accountability, fosters participatory governance, encourages citizen involvement in the affairs of their government. The promise of open government is a big deal.

For reasons that are obvious, you’d think newspapers, broadcasters and news sites would be all over the story. I picked up a few – the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal – and didn’t find a word. I checked their web sites as well as those of dozens of other news sites. Nada.

But I did find a few stories about a golf icon and product shill who ruined his privileged existence through serial adultery and bad behavior. There were more than 56 million of them indexed on Google today.

It’s not as if nothing else was going on between the holidays. Congress wrestled with health care legislation. World leaders gathered in Copenhagen to address climate change. The president extended the economic stimulus package and introduced new programs to create jobs. The U.S. sent 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan to ensure security at home. But when the Tiger Woods scandal broke, it was if the world stood down from multiple crises that threatened civilization. Perhaps we needed a juicy story about the fall of an American folk hero to distract us. Or to drive revenue.

“God bless Tiger,” Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz told audiences at this week’s UBS Media Conference. When asked if the coverage would help the Internet company make the quarter, she said, “Oh, absolutely,” and added that he’s fueling more visits than Michael Jackson’s death.

You can almost hear mainstream publishers and broadcasters harrumpf in indignation: That damn Internet. That is until you consider the endless cover stories and page one teasers in print, the continuous broadcast streams on network and cable television, and the news sites overwhelmed by coverage of Mr. Woods’ woes – all of which fed the Net. The story that broke on the Net became excessive in the mainstream, entirely at the expense of stories of importance and meaning during a fragile and turbulent time.

If mainstream media want to argue that a sex scandal involving a popular pro golfer warrants more attention than stories that lead us out of crises, they need to discover the true values of journalism and storytelling in the digital age.

If mainstream media want to get paid for their content online, they should weigh the value of 56 million stories as bad as theirs.

If mainstream media want to ignore a national policy directive that gives citizens more access to the way government works, then they deserve to be replaced by something that’s better.

I learned about the Open Government directive in an email alert from the White House. I assume that millions of others got the email, which was anticipated for months, including mainstream media and the White House press corps.

Only one news outlet, the online Huffington Post, ran with the story. A blog post by edemocracy expert Peter Shane lead the home page of the site for a few hours yesterday. “This is exciting stuff, but it only heightens the need for what communication scholars call “trusted intermediaries” to help everyday citizens make the maximum use of new information resource,” he wrote.

I take the point, as should all journalists. Mr. Shane gets it right (corrected, per comments below). Citizens are now better prepared than traditional intermediaries to truly affect policy, mobilize public interest, contribute and share ideas, and contextualize the meaning of transparent governance. Networks and movements such as the Personal Democracy Network, Tech President and NextGov are already way ahead of mainstream media.

Visualize this: What if we could redirect the energy and resources behind 56 million stories to some clarity about health care, jobs, the economy, Afghanistan or climate change? What if we as citizens could mobilize around intelligence that is now available to everyone? What if we could work as partners with experts and those who govern?

We could move from the general to the specific is just a few moves. It’s all about keeping our eye on he ball.

We’re so fortunate that we can entrust you with the future of the news business in the U.S. Such a shrewd business leader, too. Can you help a confused citizen understand your plan to save the news?

1. You’re going to charge people to read a story online that they won’t read, and won’t buy, in print.

2. You’re going to remove the coding that enables Google to index and distribute the story to those who might want to find it through the Google search engine.

3. You’re going forfeit an estimated $15 million in advertising based on the traffic Google sends you.

4. You’re going to get Microsoft to pay you for exclusive rights to search your stories through Bing, which captures less than 10 percent of the search market, even though most people will be able to find them them by other means if they want.

5. You’re going to force the really motivated to go to other sources and accounts of the same story.

6. You’re going to force those who are directed to your version of the story to navigate a pay wall, pay to access a link to your site, then click through.

7. You’re going take the rest of the newspaper industry with you.

Did I get all that right? For a while you had me thinking that you just wanted to extract more money from Google.

Others are busy getting things done.

Between those two extremes you can ask yourself whether you’re stuck in an endless conversation, or if you and your business are focused on creation, innovation and achievement.

Here’s some of the latter. The winners of this year’s We Media investment challenge, SeeClickFix and The Extraordinaries, have been on the move and attracting lots of attention with their new businesses. Both have won further awards, sponsors and partners – and both have launched iPhone apps to crowdsource civic knowledge and action.

That’s not bad for six months of hard work. They were our most recent picks from an endless stream of new companies seeking to fill voids in what we know – and how we know it. They’re inventing entirely new pathways to knowledge and insight, and they’re part of a global story – ideas, inventions, investments, applications and aspirations for a better future are coming from every corner of the planet.

Arianna Huffington, the founder and chief face of U.S. news and opinion hub The Huffington Post, has also been busy. Her digital business is smart – run with a small staff, fueled by free content contributed by a legion of people who want to be seen and heard, filled with headlines plucked from the web and reader comments delivered by the truckload. The site aggregates news and people, and this week rolled out a scheme to bring many more people into the HuffPo universe – through the social network Facebook. Now, the HuffPo community will be entwined with the Facebook universe (200 million users and growing). If you read and use Huffpo your Facebook friends can follow along – and maybe follow you back to HuffPo. For a media brand seeking ever larger audiences, that’s a huge viral marketing play – aimed at what’s known as “audience acquisition” – all masked as social networking. HuffPo, perhaps owing to the instincts of its well-connected founder, is innately social.

Insight: News is social. Bloggers figured this out long ago. So did a variety of big media companies – like The BBC, which has long championed conversation on the airwaves and online, and The Guardian, which launched its blog/conversation space Comment is Free in 2006. Many others are struggling – unsure if there’s value in reader comments, confused about how to manage it. In other words – stuck in an endless conversation. If you’re stuck in that conversation – get out. Get something done.

Forecast: Look for more media companies – new and old – to use the Facebook Connect API, Google’e OpenID and other social connectors to mash up people and content. At the same time, media companies will roll out their own APIs – like those offered by NPR and The New York Times in the U.S., or the newly announced Open Platform from The Guardian in the UK. These are, in essence, keys that allow independent developers to build new products around news databases.

Aside: Hey Arianna, where’s the love? Or even a simple tweet @wemedia? We learned last week that HuffPo is compiling a list of media game changers. Hmm, that sounds familiar. Here’s Dale’s shout-out to the would-be blogul. We hope we’ll see her at next year’s We Media Miami conference. It’s March 9-11. Registration opens this fall, along with nominations and voting for the 2010 We Media Game Changers Awards and the 2010 We Media PitchIt! investment challenge.

About 2000 years ago the philosopher Seneca said that “the best ideas are common property,” which is an old thought rediscovered as the fresh ethos of the Internet.

To be fair, the current state of being on the Web allows me to bring to the same sentence a Roman stoic with the Greek word addressing moral character. Fun, but too easy. Much like The Huffington Post’s recent offense of idea hacking.

Earlier this year my organization launched a new idea at the We Media conference in Miami to recognize the people, projects, ideas and organizations leading change and inspiring a better world through media. It is called We Media Game Changers.

Last week you announced the HuffPo Game Changers: 100 people who are using new media to change the world. That sounded more than a little familiar.

Both of us are trying to make the world better through media. Our We Media conference showcases the work of the leaders and visionaries who are shaping the future. This year’s Game Changers included Obama campaign manager David Plouffe, Twitter, Social Vibe, Ushahidi, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Humana’s Freehweelin’ site, and Innocentive. Ze Frank, also one of this year’s winners, best describes the We Media Game Changers awards in this You Tube video.

Before poaching the idea, you and your editors could have conducted simple research to avoid stepping on the ideas of others. Internet searches would have revealed Ze’s video, A.G. Laffley’s best-selling book on driving profit through innovation, Shell’s early stage investment fund for efficient energy systems, and a suite of productivity products to stir business innovation.

If you applied the word “media” to their searches, you would have received 7.8 million returns for We Media Game Changers, including the entire first page of Google returns.

We didn’t invent the term “game changers.” Nor are we the first to apply the phrase to awards or programs. But at least we’re respectful in our application of the idea. And we think it is only fair to avoid confusion among the leaders, visionaries and agents of change. So all of us would like to invite you to make things right:

Please join us at the next We Media Game Changers conference. It’s March 9-11 in Miami. We’ll have a good, open conversation about game changing. Bring the HuffPo 100, too. We’d be pleased to share their stories about using new media to change the world. I hope The Huffington Post will do its part, too, in promoting the idea you anticipated with such clarity.

I’m sure you’ll want to make plans quickly. Email or call soon.

Best,

Dale
dale@wemedia.com
703-474-5563

Today’s podcast features a conversation with Chris McChesney, one of the lead researchers at the Franklin Covey company and the author of The 4 Disciplines of Execution: The Secret to Getting Things Done, On Time, With Excellence. Chris and I connected after I issued by ‘Business Book Challenge‘ — suggesting that I was having trouble finding business books that offered value, or insight, to really help people and organizations to succeed. Chris’ expertise is in helping organizations develop effective strategies and execute them properly — and his research, and now the book, are focused on teaching the principles that guide those successful efforts. He thinks his book passes the test — but I am not so sure that a book, no matter what it talks about, can fully change the way people think and act.  I put that question directly to Chris — you’ll be surprised by his answer (about 35 minutes into the podcast).  Beyond the book, we talked about some of the challenges that plague organizations today and what role technology and the internet are playing in making those easier, or more difficult, to handle.  We also discussed how people learn and how to measure success across organizations.  Really interesting stuff.

Click below to listen.

Please post your comments, suggestions, or ideas for future conversations and podcasts. We’re listening!