Media, Communications and the Fog of War

I’ve just finished reading Conquering Tide: War in the Pacific 1942-44 by Ian Toll. It’s a magisterial overview of the strategy, plans and the ultimate outcomes of the conflict in that theatre of operations—the kind of book that could only be written after the war.

According to the overview, the book is a “masterful history” that “encompasses the heart of the great Pacific war, when a ‘conquering tide’ of Allied air and sea power supported the U.S. Marines in reclaiming the thousands of Japanese-held islands on the road to Tokyo.” 

Sitting where we do today, we know how those battles, and the war itself, turned out. During the war, however, things were never that clear.

For participants, it was often about what is called the fog of war.

The phrase the “fog of war” was coined by Prussian military leader and theorist German Carl von Clausewitz who said: "War is the realm of uncertainty; three quarters of the factors on which action in war is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty.” 

This was one of the points of The Face of Battle, by eminent British historian John Keegan.

In the book, Keegan notes that for the average soldier a battle takes place in a space of not more than 50 meters wide—and for much of history, that 50 meters of battlefield was shrouded in impenetrable smoke.

Only later could historians impose order on what was, at the time, a chaotic and confusing scene made up of thousands or hundreds of thousands of individuals making individual decisions and blindly, hopefully, doggedly pressing forward towards some far away and hoped-for goal.

Rick Atkinson, the author of The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe 1944-45, another magisterial overview of World War II, expanded on this theme.

In the book, he notes that people today look back at the war and see, from the time of the D-Day landings until the surrender of the Nazis, an inexorable march to a successful conclusion.

It was, in fact, not like that at all. For much of the time, victory was anything but assured or foregone.

“War is never linear," he wrote, "but rather a chaotic, desultory enterprise of reversal and advance, blunder and élan, despair and elation."

Why write about war in a blog about non-profit communications?

As communicators, we are not in a war. But we are on the “front lines” of a communications revolution.

Today it feels like we are lost in smoke and fog, taking one step forward then two steps back, maybe making progress, trying this, giving up on that, sometimes gaining or losing ground.

Sometimes we are even unsure what the grand plan is, or if there even is one.

For Internet guru Clay Shirky, this is “what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.”

Fifty or a hundred years from now, someone will write a book and make sense of all the things we are going through in communications and media today—just as has been done about the Gutenberg revolution.

In the meantime, it’s all foggy. And that’s perfectly normal.

The Winnipeg Free Press: Not a Newspaper—It's a "News Engine"

The Winnipeg Free Press is not a newspaper.

It used to be, editor Paul Samyn said at Going Barefoot 5, the bi-annual communications and marketing conference at Canadian Mennonite University.

But not today. 

“We are a news engine that produces a newspaper—and a website, a Facebook page, video, livestreaming, and a salon at the News Café,” he stated.

Today, he went on to say, the Free Press is “trying to shake off the print legacy. That legacy doesn’t work any more.”

“We are not a newspaper, but we publish one.”

This change is being forced on them, he went on to say.

“The biggest change is the pace . . . we used to make people wait 24 hours to get the news from us. People don’t want to wait that long any more.”

One thing they no longer think of are “print deadlines,” he stated. “If something is ready, we post it.”

This is different than in the past, when a newspaper would wait until it had all the information before publishing.

“Now, we know we can do more digging later,” he said.

Samyn’s comments reminded me of what Barth Hague, Chair of the Board of The Mennonite, the official publication of Mennonite Church USA, said a couple of years ago about changes at that publication.

Writing about the resignation of then-editor Everett Thomas, he observed that under his tenure the magazine had moved from being “a print magazine to a content distribution system.”

Like at the Free Press, The Mennonite was no longer just a magazine, he told me.

"We're transitioning from being a magazine to a content distribution system," he said of how The Mennonite now offers a traditional print magazine, website, blogs, podcasts, video and a weekly information e-mail.

"The traditional methods of sharing content are waning—it’s rapidly becoming digital now," he said. "The media are being transformed."

What does this mean for non-profits?

Just like the way the media is being transformed, non-profits are changing, too, or should be.

Like with the traditional media, non-profits also need to stop thinking about deadlines and publications. 

Today, our supporters are like subscribers to a newspaper. They are no longer willing to wait until when we are ready to share information—until the fall issue of a newsletter, or the spring issue of our magazine. 

Today we live in a web-first (or, as ESPN has said, a mobile first) world. 

If something is ready to be shared, it should go up immediately on a website, ready for sharing via social media.

It could still be published in a printed publication for those who prefer to get their information that way. But that should never be the first use.

Why? Because just like the Free Press isn’t a newspaper, non-profits are no longer in the publishing (print and deadline) business when it comes to sharing their information.

We are a news and information engine.  

Memento Mori: Closure of Canadian Hunger Foundation a Reminder to Non-Profits That They, Too, Can Die

Last summer, the Canadian relief and development community got a shock when the Canadian Hunger Foundation suddenly closed down.

CHF, as it was known, was no fly-by-night organization.

Founded in 1961, it was well-respected by other NGOs and the Canadian government, which provided generous funding for its programs in the developing world.

But it all came to an end on July 31, 2015, when it shut down.

What was the reason for the closure? Lack of investment in fundraising.

“While we were reaching more people [with international programs] than ever over the last couple of years, we weren’t investing what some other organizations were on marketing to donors, and ultimately that meant we couldn’t keep pace with our fundraising needs,” said former President and CEO Stewart Hardacre.

At the root of the problem was too much success: CHF was able to win a number of matching grants from the federal government for its overseas programs.

While the grants helped the organization help many more people, CHF was required to come up with $1 for each $3 or $4 provided by the government.

Unfortunately, CHF couldn’t come up with the matching funds.

"The fundamental problem was they were too successful in getting projects, and not successful in raising in a very significant manner the donations to CHF," said management consultant Garry Comber, who also served as interim executive director.

Adding to their woes was the loss of a major foundation donor, which provided $1 million a year—a loss that was impossible to make up.

The fundraising challenges came together “into sort of a perfect storm” that ultimately meant CHF had to cease active operations, said former Director of Communications Mike Jones.

So: What can other non-profits take away from CHF’s demise?

The number one lesson is the importance of investing in donor relations, marketing, communications and fundraising.

It’s all very well to have great programs; every NGO and non-profit should. But if you don’t have the money to support them, it ultimately won’t matter in the end.

In my experience, this is something many NGOs are loathe to do. Fundraising is overheard, after all—and we want to keep that as low as possible.

Plus, most NGO executive directors and presidents I know rose to their positions through the program side of things. They're great people, but their primary interest is in the delivery of assistance overseas—not marketing and fundraising. 

The result is that many NGOs routinely underspend when it comes to resource gathering. 

The result? Overworked and under-resourced staff do their best, but there’s only so much a few people can do to raise funds.

In the end, it's sort of like the children of Israel in the land of Egypt in the Old Testament who were told by their Egyptian overlords to make more bricks with less straw.

You can do that for a while. But one day the weakened bricks will give away and the whole edifice can crumble—as it did with CHF.

In that respect, CHF has become a memento mori for other Canadian NGOs:

Memento mori is Latin for “Remember, you too will die.”

In the middle ages, it was common for paintings to feature memento mori in the form of skulls and other death motifs. (As in the picture above.)

It was a reminder of how precious life is, and how quickly it can be over.

Instead of a skull (too macabre), maybe every NGO leader should keep the CHF logo on his or her desk or desktop screen.

It will be a reminder that every NGO, like CHF, can die if they don’t invest in fundraising and communications.

So, farewell CHF. And for the rest of us: Memento mori.

Mobile is Everything for ESPN, and Soon Will be for Everyone Else

ESPN revolutionized TV. Almost single-handedly, it made cable TV a must-have service for tens of millions of people.

But now ESPN's future is in doubt as more people cut the cable cord. And where are those people going? 

To their phones.

To help it succeed on that platform, ESPN is developing "a smartphone-first content effort that combines personalization, journalism, video and personality,” as the internal memo announcing the change described it.

According to Chad Millman, ESPN's new vice president and editorial director for domestic digital content, the broadcaster is going in this direction because "mobile is everything. We always have to be thinking about mobile first. If we’re thinking about anything else, we’re failing the audience."

And what does it mean to do mobile first?

"You need to keep re-imagining how things look," Millman said in an article in Nieman Lab.

Among other things, this means how it looks on a phone and how long the headline is. 

"What is it (the headline) going to look like and where is it going to cut off on a mobile device," he said. 

What makes all of this challenging, he added, is that pages destined for mobile are designed on a desktop.

"There’s no magic formula to simulate what it looks like on a phone," he said. "So you’re decreasing your browser before you publish it, you’re checking it on your phone as soon as you publish it to fix something right away."

Creating for mobile also means not trying to make it look like ESPN on TV.

"We’re creating for the platform or device that we most expect people to see it on, and not thinking that we have to create something that looks like it belongs on television. 

"Can you understand the story with the sound off? How long should it be? When are people dropping out of videos? 

"All of that stuff makes us rethink how we might have produced something even two or three years ago."

One example of ESPN's mobile-first strategy is its 60-second preview of the week in the NFL. The minute-long segment is designed, produced, and edited with mobile in mind. 

"It is quick cuts, it is tightly written, and it gives you information, but it does it quickly and in a sort of whimsical way. That is something that we wouldn’t have done a year ago," he said.

How quickly things change—in  the mid-2000s, when the web began to take off as a main vehicle of communication, media and others started to move from thinking print-first to web-first. 

There was a lot of agonizing back then over the need for shorter articles, and the end of an edition or issue-based mindset (see Life and Communications Unbundled, on this blog.)  

Now here we are, about a decade later, and we're beginning to hear talk about doing everything mobile-first. Which isn’t surprising, considering the growth of mobile around the world.

Today, mobile is first for ESPN. Soon it will be that way for everyone else.

Study Shows Attention Spans Today Shorter Than Goldfish or, I'm Sorry—We're You Talking to Me?

Intuitively, we know it to be true. But now research from Microsoft confirms that people today have shorter attention spans than goldfish.

According to the study, which surveyed 2,000 Canadians last year, a goldfish has an attention span of nine seconds. 

But people today generally can only stay focused on one thing for eight seconds.

“Heavy multi-screeners find it difficult to filter out irrelevant stimuli,” said the report. “They’re more easily distracted by multiple streams of media.”

Added Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella: “We are moving from a world where computing power was scarce to a place where it now is almost limitless, and where the true scarce commodity is increasingly human attention.”

The study also found that 19% of people leave a website within the first ten seconds—if they don’t immediately see what they are looking for, they’re gone.

On the positive side, the report says that our use of multiple screens and devices is training our brains to be better at multitasking.

What this means for marketers

For those of us trying to catch the attention of people online, this inability to pay attention means a) it is hard to catch attention and, b) it is hard to keep it.

Says the report: “With today’s digital lifestyle, marketers need to make an almost immediate impact before consumers switch off/move on.”

It goes on to say that people are “suckers for novelty. It's more exciting to jump from subject to subject or device to device than to concentrate on a single thing at any one time.”

Get to the point—quickly. “Hook consumers right off the bat with clear and concise messaging that’s communicated as early as possible,” says the report.

And since many people won’t read much on a web page, “craft headlines that can say it all.”

Be personal and relevant. Make sure your brand is “personal and communicate clear consumer value. How will paying attention make their life be better?”

Today’s marketing, it goes on to say, “is about instant gratification and appealing to consumers’ needs and desires to ensure your message is relevant.”

Be short and clear. “What consumers can see in one glance has everything to do with what they’ll do next,” the report says.

“If overwhelmed by input . . . their brain will stop taking it in. Exclude unnecessary information. Stick to the main message. If something doesn’t play a significant role, it’s not needed.”

(Those who know how to write journalistically, using the inverted pyramid style of writing,  will have an advantage here.)

Use rich media and movement.”Human survival has been based on the ability to focus on what’s most important (generally what’s moving),” the report says. “Harness the power of peripheral motion.”

“Rich media ads help capture attention and dramatically improve engagement.”

Include calls to action. What do you want people to do once they have read your content? Is it easy to find a donate button? A link for more information?

It’s a big challenge, especially for small non-profits with limited resources. But there’s no way around it.

Fortunately, there’s a bit of good news. According to the report, our increasingly digital lifestyles is also making us more efficient at processing information.

We are, apparently, able to do and recall more—even with less ability to pay attention.

And it you made it to the bottom of this article, congratulations on your great attention span!

When it comes to being focused, you are much better than a goldfish.

Unfortunately, there's no direct link to the PDF of this report. For more information, Google Microsoft attention span study.

New Media vs. Old Media, or Welcome to the Digital (Middle) Age(s)

Old media is dying today. Newspapers are closing. TV news stations fear they are next. Journalists everywhere are losing their jobs.

In its place we have new media—digital. Facebook, Instagram, Vine, etc.

Out with the old, in with the new! Sorry for all those lost jobs, but there’s no stopping progress.

We are going boldly forward into the future.

Or are we?

Maybe what we are actually doing is going backward to a much older time. Instead of the digital age, what we might be experiencing, when it comes to communications and media, is the middle ages.

That’s the idea suggested by British historian Andrew Pettegree in his book, The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself.

In the book, Pettegree makes the point that what we see today as old media (newspapers) is relatively new in human history—newspapers, and journalism itself as we know it today, only goes back about 200 years.

Before that, few people would have had access to news from far away. Almost all news was local—you would know what was going on in your town, and maybe in towns one or two over.

And how did they get information? It was delivered personally, by friends and neighbours.

Reviewing Pettegree’s book in The New Statesman magazine, veteran newspaper editor Peter Wilby wrote: 

“In the medieval world, news was usually exchanged amid the babble of the marketplace or the tavern, where truth competed with rumour, mishearing and misunderstanding.

“In some respects, it is to that world that we seem to be returning.”

I think Wilby is on to something.

These days, fewer and fewer people are reading newspapers or watching TV news. It’s not that they don’t want information. They just want to get it from other sources.

And what is one of the fastest-growing sources of information? Facebook, or other social media.

And who provides that information? Friends.

Or, to put it another way, Facebook today is the equivalent of that old middle ages tavern or marketplace.

It’s the place where people gather with their friends to exchange information about what’s happening in their “town.”

It's a place of conversation, where information is deemed more trustworthy because you know the people who are sharing it.

The difference today is that these new "towns" are not defined by physical geography, but by relationships or shared interests.

Facebook as the new local tavern. It sounds like back to the future, to me.

The Future of Newspapers, or Asking the Right Question

The future of newspaper dominated the discussion in Canada this past week, after Postmedia—the country’s largest newspaper chain—merged newsrooms in Vancouver, Ottawa, Edmonton and Calgary, laying off 90 journalists in the process.

The cutbacks prompted a number of reporters and columnists to write about the death of journalism. One went so far as to say journalism wasn’t dying—it was being murdered by uncaring readers, advertisers who no longer buy ads, and craven governments.

The future isn’t any better for broadcasters, by-the-way; TV stations say they lost $73 million providing local news across the country in the fiscal year 2013-14, and another $41 million in the six months ending in February, 2015.

Adds the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting in a report to the CRTC,Canada’s media regulator: Nearly half of the country’s local TV stations could be off the air by 2020 without a boost in revenues to pay for local programming.

It’s not like we don’t have access to news anymore; as Winnipeg Free Press publisher Bob Cox noted, “we are all drowning in media; so much information everywhere, shared by our friends, aggregated in news feeds and always at our fingertips.”

While it’s easy “to find out about Prince Harry’s latest love,” it’s getting harder, he said, “to find anything about local school trustees or the latest local theatre production”—something newspapers “still do a pretty good job” at.

For now, at least.

As anyone who is slightly observant, the future for newspapers and TV news is bleak.

As the CRTC observed: "Canadians sense that there is a weakening of the ecosystem for local news gathering, production and dissemination across all Canadian media."

So: What’s the future of newspapers?

That’s a big question. An important question. The question many are asking.

But it might be the wrong question.

And why is that?

Asking about the future of newspapers is akin to somebody in the 1960s seeing the decline of train travel and asking: “What’s the future of passenger trains?”

That was the wrong question back then. The better question would have been: “What is the future of transportation?”

Why was that a better question?

It was a better question because the thing that needed to be asked about wasn’t one form of transportation—passenger trains—but about transportation itself.

As we know, by the late 1960s the passenger train was mostly dead in North America, replaced by airplanes and highways.

But while passenger trains ceased to be the main way people went from one place to another in Canada and the U.S., they still needed to travel between places—that need did not disappear, even though passenger trains as a form of travel faded away.  

It’s a similar situation for newspapers today, and maybe for TV news, too.

Instead of asking what is the future of newspapers, the better question might be: What’s the future of sharing information?

Why is this a better question?

It’s a better question because the need for information will always exist, but the need for physical newspapers—like passenger trains—may not.

People will still want information, in other words. They will just want it differently. Probably online, on tablets or phones.  

And they may even want different information than what newspapers and other forms of journalism are currently providing, as I noted in an earlier post.  

Figuring out how people will get information—and if they will pay for it—is another question altogether. 

So far, nobody has that answer.

Don’t get me wrong; I will miss physical, printed newspapers when they are gone. (Something predicted to occur by 2025.)

But pointing fingers at readers, advertisers and governments won’t get us anywhere.

What we need to do is ask the right question.

Update: The same week of the Postmedia cutbacks, the Nanaimo Daily News announced it would close after 141 years. A week later, the Guelph Mercury announced it was ending its print edition after 149 years.