[Guest post by James Erik Abels, cross-posted from TMMBusiness.com]
There’s no grace in tech talk.
Most of the people who chat and chew digital communiqués have all the originality of Einstein without any of the eloquence of Tolstoy. One of their favorite words is also one of the ugliest – “disintermediate.” It’s vague, awkward, and obscure.
Generally, it means “to cut out the middle man.” Specifically, it means turning a profit by putting someone’s business out-of-business. No wonder start-up types prefer “disintermediate.” Sounds safer.
Still, truth is truth. Many want to upstage media so as to earn a cut of its billions in ad revenues. Michael Wolff – the rabble rousing media expert who’s breathing new fire into Adweek – wrote about the quest on Monday. He described lunch with two new media titans who want to slice off a piece of the media pie:
These entrepreneurs wanted to know, of course, about opportunities, about where and how they might ‘intermediate’ between traditional content producers and digital distributors.
That’s new. Wolff is saying these two either want to come between “content producers” and their digital publishers, or between publishers and their digital distributors. People usually just want to undermine “old media,” not the newer digital businesses that have evolved out of it. Still, that’s exactly what’s coming.
Call it PubOS. Call it a new type of publishing system. Call it whatever. The tools that are available to most professional publishers today are very limiting. To develop new businesses – and retrofit old ones – they need a new category of technology platform.
Forbes – a storied media empire in the midst of transition – made the point last week. Chief Product Officer Lewis Dvorkin wrote a piece about an up-and-coming digital publisher named SBNation that’s purportedly building its own set of tools.
He writes:
What’s so important about a great platform?…You need great technology and tools to enable smart people to do their best work, whether they are writing, editing, producing, programming, or tracking how they’re doing.
Sure do. I learned that building the first stage of Three Minute Media with my own two hands. I had plans, ideas, and thoughts that made a lot of sense. Problem was, I couldn’t do most of them with today’s publishing systems. So I built one.
Maybe it’s disintermediative, maybe it’s not. I didn’t design it to to sop up someone’s cash flow. I just needed something that let me do what I needed to do – say something and sell it. It’s a non-technical art that requires an outsized mantra:
“I can create something no one else can. I can see – and say – what crowds can’t.”
Great journos, playwrights, and artists aren’t just deft with a pen, they also have thoughts that identify the raw truths people love but won’t see unaided. What those ideas are worth depends on the message’s medium, the consistency of its quality, the gracefulness of its presentation, and, naturally, the way it’s packaged and distributed.
To his surprise, Adweek’s Wolff said his tech-focused entrepreneurs got it. Osama Bin Laden was the reason. Last week’s din of Tweets about his death drove the point home:
My entrepreneurs seemed full of awe about the eager audience looking for…something.
Absolutely: Grace.
James Erik Abels is the founder of Three Minute Media, a Web video news company. A former media reporter for Forbes, he has also written for Slate: The Big Money, Corporate Counsel, and Pearson’s Mergermarket news wire. He anchors stories about media/digital at TMMnews.com.