In the City of Fools, a last-minute, April 1 invitation for a private, drop-by with a dignitary is as predictable as cherry blossoms. Still, we appreciated this one to Washington’s frustrated, but very creative, development community:

[modevdc] New Meetup: Sit down with Steve Jobs
From: “Pete Erickson” To: [modevdc]-announce@meetup.com

What: Sit down with Steve Jobs
When: Friday, April 1, 2011 7:00 PM
Where: (A location has not been chosen yet.)

Why: Steve Jobs is in DC today on an unpublicized tour seeking to connect directly with the developer community. Don’t miss this opportunity to sit down with a technology legend.
Steve Jobs has asked MoDevDC to schedule one hour of developer focused discussions tonight. His goal is to learn as much as possible about the front lines of development and to share more about Apple’s plans. Topics discussed will be:

– The real story behind Apple and Adobe and the move away from Flash
– Mobile advertising and the future of iAds
– The iOS development environment
– iPhone 5 release
– The future of iTunes
– Developer questions


Due to security requirements, the exact location will be sent to all RSVPs at 6pm. Hope to see you tonight!

Cheers,
Pete

It’s not a ha-ha spoof, and it’s not a ha-ha issue, either. The environmental, social and human impact of our consumption gets so much less attention than the features and flaws of the latest release, the debates about business models, the righteous indignation about bandwidth and fees.

For the record, I own a MacBook and an iPhone 3GS, which I just updated to iOS4.

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.

We’re back at world headquarters outside Washington, just in time for the FCC national broadband plan. It’s a big deal in this capital city where so many good intentions are stuck in the muck of politics and the mire of control. This is the swamp where FCC touts its plan as nothing less as a way to keep the U.S. competitive. Which ought to put the plan into the same category as health-care reform now that it goes to Congress.

Fifty years ago, the memo that launched the space program and put man on the moon contained just a few, clear paragraphs. The FCC’s plan is 376 pages – and that’s just the beta. There’s a story here about how the adoption of public policy hasn’t kept pace with a global, always-on world. American cities lag far behind their counterparts in Asia, Scandanavia – even eastern Slovakia – places where broadband is faster, cheaper and more widely accessible. Many of the FCC’s recommendations will require Congressional action — and beyond politics and murky matters of jurisdiction — would likely take years to put in place, if at all.

At We Media Miami last week, FCC Managing Director Steve VanRoekel gave us a glimpse of a government that is moving toward eDemocracy and wired capitalism. Accordingly, the FCC plan acknowledges that broadband Internet is becoming the common medium for government, business and life in the U.S. The plan broadly seeks a 90 percent broadband adoption rate in the United States by 2020, up from roughly 65 percent.

One way to react to the plan: consider how the companies that control broadband in the U.S. respond. So far, big Internet providers have been receptive, but they warn (of course) that government regulation could impede their abilities to expand their networks. Many of the plans will benefit wireless carriers, including AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Sprint and T-Mobile USA. The FCC said it wants 500 MHz of spectrum to be available in 10 years with 300 MHz coming within five. Proposals will probably face resistance from other telecom giants, which over time will face new competition for customers. The broadcast television industry is already resisting efforts to auction off some of its spectrum so that it can be redirected toward mobile Internet technologies.

It’s hard to imagine that the companies that currently own spectrum would willingly give it up to stimulate competition for an asset they think they already own. Let the games begin.

The decline of local and national US news companies has led to a call for expanding public media news production. But in the UK the BBC is blamed for stifling the news market – and it’s shrinking.

Paula Kerger

Last year, The Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities recommended expanded funding for public media, and the Knight Foundation’s vice president of journalism programs, Eric Newton, brought that idea to hearings on the future of news conducted in the fall by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. [Disclosure: iFOCOS, the media think tank and futures lab I founded, receives support and collaborates regularly with Knight].

Later this year PBS, the public television network in the US, will launch a new online news hub and show, and National Public Radio is experimenting with expanded local news programming through a local network of blogger-reporters called Project Argo.

Yet in Britain, the crown jewel of global public broadcasting, the BBC, has been attacked by commercial competitors – most notably News Corp. European and Asian chief and heir-apparent James Murdoch – for damaging the commercial market for news. The BBC, funded by a tax on every television set sold in Britain, is just too big, or too good, the argument goes, for commercial newspapers and broadcasters to compete, especially for online revenue – and relevance – as audiences shift to digital experiences and content distribution choices like iTunes downloads and video streaming.

BBC’s critics appear to have political momentum on their side. The Times of London – a Murdoch paper – reported this week that the BBC plans to shrink its web operations, including a 25 percent staff reduction, and shut down two radio stations and reduce its spending on television.

We’ll explore the differing trajectories of US and UK public media at We Media Miami, March 9-11 (register here). Paula A. Kerger, CEO of PBS, will join me for a conversation with outgoing BBC Global News head Richard Sambrook. Sambrook is leaving the BBC for a new job as vice chairman of Edelman PR.

Our program in Miami also includes a discussion on the most notable innovations and trends in public media, moderated by Jessica Clark and Tracy Van Slyke, co-authors of Beyond the Echo Chamber.

The Obama Presidency faces a unique challenge: with the explosive growth of the Internet, the pervasive use of mobile technologies and seemingly ubiquitous accessibility of people across the globe, President Obama has a historic opportunity to communicate more directly with the American public – and with the entire world. The world, in turn, has an opportunity to monitor, inform and influence the Obama Administration’s actions and policies. And traditional media, once the gatekeepers for information about our government, are now competing for attention and access while identifying a new role for themselves as both watchdogs and advocates for democracy.

Download the report (PDF)

There’s a story going around that touts the Internet as a perpetual money machine. It goes something like this: many pieces of old content on the digital-now network have aggregate residual value that, over time, exceed present value of fresh content, which spikes and subsides quickly. The story is called the Long Tail. It is part economic theory, part myth, part common sense, and one good chapter in a popular book.

Download the report (PDF)

It begins with an act of visualization. A ball 1.68 inches in diameter sits on slender stick planted in the ground about five feet from your eyes. Armed with a metal club, you visualize a swing that launches the ball straight and far toward a hole in the ground hundreds of yards away. You move from the general to the specific in a discrete series of strokes, the fewer the better. The first stroke is a leap of faith. Each successive one is a correction of the previous. You end up on the green putting the ball into a 4.25-inch cup, which is a very specific place, that you couldn’t see from the tee.

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.

Here’s a promising collaboration we’ll be watching – and a series of events that may interest our Washington friends. The University of Miami’s Knight Center for International Media is organizing a series of discussions in Washington on big global issues with the Center for Strategic & International Studies, an influential global policy think tank. The Knight Center is part of the university’s school of communication, the host and sponsor of our annual We Media Miami conference.

The first event is this Monday, Nov. 2, 2009 (details below). It focuses on development in Haiti, the poorest country in the Americas. Participants include Dr. Paul Farmer, UN Deputy Special Envoy to Haiti, Dr. Barth Green, Chairman of The Global Institute at the University of Miami, and Raymond Joseph, Haiti’s Ambassador to the United States. More about the series here.

When: Monday, Nov. 2, 2009 3 pm to 4 pm
Where: CSIS B1 Conference Center, 1800 K Street, NW
RSVP: Required, via email to: miamiseries@csis.org

The internet is a wondrous anomaly, a technical and creative achievement grander than the Tower of Babel, an infinite tangle of knowledge, ideals, data, entertainment, beauty, trivia, terror, news, noise, hubris, despair. It’s a cultural blender, a mixmaster archive crammed with visions, twits and everyday things.

I’ve been thinking about the net, and its vastness, in anticipation of OneWebDay on Sept. 22. That’s an informal, loosely organized global celebration of the World Wide Web. This year the organizers are trying to focus attention on policies that can make the web available to more people. You can find a variety of events, meetings and parties in cities around the world, or organize your own, on the OneWebDay web site.

This year I’m supporting the effort as a OneWebDay Ambassador. I hope you’ll find a local event, chime in, or simply think about whether OneWebDay makes any sense. I’d like to know what you think of it.

Me?

OneWebDay, if it matters, can raise awareness of important policy issues – like Net Neutrality and the Digital Divide – that aren’t on most people’s minds every day. If the only people who care about OneWebDay are the ones who already care about those issues, then the day is pointless.

The name of the day itself has me thinking about the paradox of the networked culture. The web is hardly unified, the people who use it certainly aren’t, and as much as our assorted digital networks may connect us, they also divide us. I’m not sure I’d want it any other way.

I love the web and the idea that we may use it to carve a path toward a better future for more people. I also love the competitive market that has encouraged entrepreneurs to imagine new uses for the web, some of which may be part of the formula for a better future.

But I don’t know that the web will get us there – or, really, that the web, one for all and all for one, is as worthy a cause as earth, or Earth Day. Some days I need to turn off the web, tune out, drop out. I never feel that way about the planet – and don’t need a special day to think about it.

OneWebDay is a paradox. The web seems boundless, endless, limitless, but really it’s just vast, overwhelming and confusing. It doesn’t know everything, or everyone. It doesn’t go everywhere. Some people don’t use it, billions can’t, and while that’s a tasty social and business challenge for policy- and market-makers, it pales against life-or-death challenges like lack of clean water, hunger and infectious diseases – all of which are symptoms of what economist Jeffrey Sachs calls extreme poverty – the deepest, most desperate kind of poverty. I’d like to see amazing wireless broadband networks everywhere – but not before there’s a decent water supply, shelter, food, vaccines, education and peace on the ground. I don’t want the web to be used for better war reporting. I want it to be used to stop wars.

Maybe a better, faster, cheaper, vaster web will help us achieve these things – I’m encouraged by projects like Charity:Water and Twestival; by code-saavy activists like those from the Sunlight Foundation, which uses technology to shed more light on how government works; and by daring, on-the-ground digital media makers like those from Witness, who use video and photography on the web to document and oppose human rights abuses.

Yet the web, so vast already, deep in insight, full of promise, also churns in a great race for dominance and control. So, today, Google dominates online search and advertising built around it; Paypal dominates online commerce and transactions; Facebook dominates social networking and photo sharing; Twitter dominates microblogging; and governments vie for control of the Internet itself – and access to whatever anyone may say or do with it. Key telecom companies and governments dominate the unseen wires and fibres that pump all our data from one place to another, and devices that can monitor and filter what we say, what we see.

The net is at once open and vast as well as closed and constrained by physical limits, economic inequities and unseen forces.

This paradox of the net is at the heart of a movement of policy and tech activists who have been talking about the Digital Divide since the early days of the web. The divide, rarely mentioned in business settings, is about haves and have-nots, and in the digital culture access to the network is a bright line of political and economic division, much like access to clean water, education or a safe, secure home. In the U.S. and other developed countries, access of some sort is now widespread – at least 63% of adult Americans had some sort of broadband at home in 2009 – and that’s far less than the 95 percent who have access in South Korea.

Where ever you live, the quality of your web access – in terms of speed, convenience, freedom and the sophistication of users – remains unequal. China has the world’s biggest online audience, but the Chinese Internet, like other forms of media, is monitored and controlled by government censors. Twitter may have helped us keep up with riots in Tehran this summer – but we’re hearing less now about the trials and punishments of arrested protesters. I’m thinking about them as OneWebDay approaches.

The genius of the web has always been the hyperlink – the way we point from one idea to the next. That simple notion, coded 20 years ago into a language that both computers and people can understand, spawned a torrent of technical and social innovation – truly a creative explosion that not only redefined business and culture but gave rise to a new canvas for creativity itself. The slogan of the blogging platform WordPress captures that spirit: Code is Poetry.

I’m thinking of OneWebDay in those terms, as a vast experiment in collaborative art. Artists help us understand the world, challenge perceptions and shine light on our inner lives, on the most personal and subjective perspectives of the human experience. A few are celebrated. Most toil in obscurity. In some ways it feels like the web has turned us all into performance artists. Some of us know it, some don’t.

Seen in that light, OneWebDay seems well worth a toast. Its promise remains limitless. I can’t wait to see what’s next. The Digital Renaissance has only just begun.

Back in the September, I wrote that “one of the fundamental tasks of design and business is to stand between revolutions and life, to help people deal with change.” That was the premise of The Right Brain Rules, a strategic vision and a portfolio of assets for creating value into the future.

Allison Arieff goes beyond  by proposing a national design policy. “Design touches all sectors of our daily life, and increasing awareness of that reality can result in tremendous benefit for all,”  Arieff writes in her New York Times blog.  “Our entire economic system could do with a redesign. which would help bolster American competitiveness at a time when we can use all the help we can get and enable the government to properly promote and measure the (only) remaining competitive advantage of American goods and services: their design.”

DC designers have taken the lead in  a DC Magazine competition organized by Richard Smith. The entries, shown below, should get you excited about currency again.

We haven’t recorded a podcast in a while — life gets in the way, you know — but we are back on track, effective immediately.

WeMedia conducts regular regular podcasts that feature in-depth interviews with prominent media, technology, and social change figures, as well as distinguished experts on current affairs and news. Our goal is to help the WeMedia community understand the roots of the changes taking place in our society, hear from the thinkers and doers who are on the front lines, really understand the difficulties facing the media, consumers, and others — all while being somewhat entertaining.

Today’s podcast features a conversation with Melinda Wittstock, the Bureau Chief, Founder and Executive Director of Capitol News Connection – a news organization that covers political issues with a focus on how they play locally (CNC has more correspondents covering Capitol Hill each day than any other national news organization, and produces most of its content for distribution through public radio stations nationwide). She is also the creator of AskYourLawmaker.org, a project/site that allows citizens to post conversations directly to their lawmakers, and have CNC journalists help track down responses. Melinda is a life-long journalist and has some strong views about what the media is doing well, and where improvements are needed. We agreed, for example, that good, timely, relevant content is critical to the success of the news media – and also missing from much of the newspaper and similar coverage today. We also talked about what responsibility the media might has when it comes to facilitating action or enabling citizens to get more involved and the benefits of hyper-local news content and focus.

Click below to listen.

We are hoping to get back on track with weekly/regular podcast discussions shortly. Let us know if you have suggestions for people we should talk with or topics we should cover. And if you want to participate in one of our podcasts or discussions, just let us know.

On Monday, the Cambridge, MA City Council adopted a policy order recognizing that a climate emergency exists and directing the City Manager to “direct the appropriate city departments to increase the City’s responses to a scale proportionate to the emergency and consistent with the city’s own Climate Protection goals for 2010 and beyond.”  (The full text of the measure is available here.)  Yesterday, I participated in a planning meeting to help chart a course for what kinds of immediate attention and action should be considered.  A long list of possible actions was developed — everything from hiring more staff to establishing a special department to lead an emergency climate response effort to orchestrating a large-scale public education and engagement effort were discussed.  While the discussion was interesting, I left the meeting thinking (knowing?) that very little progress would actually be made.

Cambridge is one of the first cities in Massachusetts, and the nation, to take up the climate change issue as an “emergency declaration” requiring immediate attention and action.  And yet, for all its research, commitment, and chest thumping on the issue, the prospects of a major response being organized and pursued are slim.

What is keeping us from solving the climate crisis?  We are.

The challenge is this: Mounting a significant – in this case city-wide – response to the climate crisis would require a sizable effort.  Time is running short.  There is still plenty of debate about what the appropriate response should be.  And any kind of sizable effort would need to be funded in a major way to have any kind of measurable impact.  The reality is this: There is no room for additional spending in the current budget and neither the City Council nor the Mayor are permitted to authorize new funds on their own.  Placing limits on building construction or restricting where/when residents can drive or park could have a measurable impact on emissions output, but those policy decisions require weeks of hearings and deliberation before they can be considered (and there is no certainty that the best policies will emerge from that process).  Even the idea of posing a question directly to voters asking for authorization to direct the government to act (and providing funds to support such an effort), in the form of a ballot initiative, would require substantial effort and money just to begin.

Our democratic system, for all its benefits, is standing in the way of real progress in the face of an emergency.

Cambridge is not the first community to find itself hamstrung by our democratic process.  Just this morning, The New York Times featured an article about California’s budget crisis and the setback voters dealt the Governor and other legislators this week when they voted down a budget compromise (which called for some deep cuts and tough choices) in a special election.  The result, as the article begins, is that “Direct democracy has once again upended California — enough so that the state may finally consider another way by overhauling its Constitution for the first time in 130 years.”  That’s right, left without any other options, lawmakers may try to change the state’s constitution to allow for immediate action, bypassing the direct participation of the voters.

So here is my question: Does our democratic system(s), which is designed to ensure discussion, moderation in our thinking, and to help keep the government from acting independently – without the best interests of the public in mind – have limits?  When the need arises, should we permit our elected officials to bypass some of the steps that keep real progress from happening in a short amount of time?  If we do, how can we ensure that the power won’t be abused (what defines an emergency, really)?  Given our technology-enabled, highly informed, and uber-connected society, are there other ways that we can mobilize to address these emergency situations, without running afoul of our founding principles?  In short, is it reasonable in an emergency situation for us to do whatever it takes so that the problem can actually be addressed — and what does “whatever it takes’ really mean?

There’s a media and technology feeding frenzy in Washington. Failing U.S. newspapers are looking for a bailout from the government; nonprofits, telecoms and policy wonks are scrambling to have their say and get their piece of the economic stimulus action – a few billion dollars – to expand broadband networks AND create more content and services to justify it. Talk about sharks and chum. Meanwhile, in case you missed it, Bizjournals reported on the poorest and wealthiest cities in the U.S.. It takes seven families in Camden, New Jersey, to match the median household income of one family in McLean, Virginia. A 25-year-old war in Sri Lanka is said to be winding down – but the government there won’t let journalists into war zones to see for themselves. So we observed, quietly, fleetingly, remotely, another World Press Freedom Day this week. One day of freedom and remembrance for the dead seemed somehow – sad? prophetic? – against years of decline, layoffs, bankruptcies. Who’s on the local freedom beat in your community? Simple question, no? Makes you wonder why the world’s press doesn’t champion freedom every day. Ah, right, because some days there’s other business to attend to.

The Senate Commerce Committee announced announced the lineup for their hearing about the future of journalism.  The list of speakers includes:

• Senator Ben Cardin
• Marissa Mayer – Vice President, Search Products and User Experience, Google
• Alberto Ibarguen – President and Chief Executive Officer, The Knight Foundation
• David Simon – Author, TV Producer and Former Newspaperman
• Steve Coll – Former Managing Editor, The Washington Post
• James Moroney – Publisher/CEO, The Dallas Morning News
• Arianna Huffington – Co-Founder and Editor in Chief, The Huffington Post

There is, of course, one notable person missing from the list of speakers: ME.

I’m not suggesting that I should be invited to speak to the Committee (though that would be cool) — but I think the voice of the customer is missing. I read newspapers and magazines, watch network and cable news, listen to the radio, and more.  Sometimes I get my media fix online, other times its in print (or other offline formats).  For the stuff that I find really valuable, I have no problem paying.  For other stuff, I think the price point of nothing is just about right.

As I see it, the biggest challenge for the news industry today is that they are producing content that their audience isn’t willing to pay for anymore.  Most of the content is generalized, re-purposed, bland, or worse. The format for delivery, whether its online or offline, doesn’t matter.   If the customer doesn’t find the news worth paying for, the news industry is doomed. No business model, ad format, or government bailout will change that.

The Commerce Committee has assembled a good group of people to testify — including some friends of WeMedia.  But the voice of the customer is missing.  And you simply won’t hear the message that the quality of the content and focus of the media isn’t good enough from anyone who has one foot inside the industry’s door.

So, Senator Kerry and others on the Committee — pick me, choose me, ask me what the news industry needs to survive.  I will tell you.