When you have no choice…

I was reviewing a presentation by Dave Morgan this afternoon and I had such an odd thought cross my mind. The list of traditional brick-mortar establishments that have defined our society (at least American society) for so many years is filled with many stalwart names. Some have recently taken an economic turn that will challenge our notion of what those business mean to our lives in the future. It is a personal thing, but I’ll try to illustrate by touching upon a small portion of the list.
Circuit City shutting down. Wasn’t Circuit City the modern (but more high-end) version of Radio Shack. There wasn’t much you couldn’t get at Circuit City and there were always plenty of geeks and nerds around if you had questions (some didn’t even work there, but they seemed friendly and helpful, so why not, eh?).
Macy’s closing numerous stores. I never set foot in a Macy’s growing up, but it definitely was a name with which I was familiar. For some like my wife, it was part of holiday shopping trip traditions. Nothing stings quite like messing with traditions. I’m sure I’ll hear all about it when the time comes.
Office Depot closing over 100 stores. OD is certainly one of those places you knew you could find the office supply stuff you were lacking. Granted they were never terribly competitive with their pricing, but their stores were a part of office supply rituals and back-to-school shopping trips.
Steve & Barry’s closes 8 stores (including one here locally). My immediate reaction is who cares. I thought the place was filled with over-marketed garbage sold at near-counterfeit prices (ponder on that one). The fact that our local S&B was in a dying mall probably colors my opinion a good deal. I’m sure this closure will disappoint the dedicated bandwagon fan who will be madly searching for a Steelers/Cardinals jersey right after the game is over and they know which jersey to buy, wear and claim to have owned for years.
Finally, Sears is having issues? That hurts, because Sears was my personal Macy’s growing up and has always held a strong position with me anytime I needed quality handtools that were unconditionally backed up with a guaranteed, no-questions replacement policy.

As more stores shrink or disappear, the customers that have relied upon those stores for some period of their life will have to adjust, whether be an annual trip for school supplies or a monthly trip to knock out the office supply list. Where do you go now? I’ll bet you can find whatever you seek at http://www.__________________ (fill in the blank). I’m quite certain some would shrug and matter of factly ask, “so what?” I can live with that reaction, because that is the reaction I would expect from those who have broken free of the brick and mortar mentality. Maybe it’s a borderline boomer thing, but there are plenty of people who haven’t made the jump to an electronic shopping mindset. It’s coming. Imagine yourself immersed into a historical parallel: 1872, middle of nowhere, but you have a Montgomery Ward catalog. It has pictures, descriptions, prices and an address to which the order can sent. Talk about a business that exploded and all without the benefit of store fronts, sales clerks, annoying perfume smells, mortgages/rent, etc. Why? People didn’t have any other choice. It worked then…why not now?

Content! Read all about it!

As we continue as a company to close in on target models for information content gathering and packaged product delivery, one thing is very clear. We still have some distance to cover before a clear path is laid for gathering or packaging content. I don’t expect and don’t need anyone to concur with that statement…I’ve seen and heard enough to know it needs to be said. Steve Butty has just recently laid out an outstanding explanation of the changes taking place in his organization. It is a great read and of interest to employees, customers and others in the industry. Steve hits a key element in his post:

For all of those 126 years, our success has been tied to a packaged product, a newspaper. Even though our customers like that packaged product and many even love it, they aren’t buying it because of the package but because of the content: stories, photographs, columns, graphics, editorials, obituaries, calendars, box scores, lists of information, advertisements.

Watch and see this information content transformation take place in front of your eyes. Even at the electronic delivery end of the spectrum, there are changes and some undiscovered territory (some of which we are just blazing through alone because no other news organization has ever attempted it). We might be creating industry best practices, we might be slightly off the mark. One thing is for certain, it is not just corporate leadership that is wrestling with the changes and not just a few who are championing the “content” focus. Tom Altman provides a good case in point. Tom, one of my web developers, is spot on when talking a technical point, but notice how quickly he draws things back to the fundamental killer-trait when it comes to information:

This is very cool and it is letting the WebDev geeks get some kung-fu going, but that is not the part that has me worried.
It’s the content that worries me.

I can imagine a few raised eyebrows right, amazed slightly that those technical dweebs are yakking about content, it’s accessibility, it’s usability, etc. That’s okay…we aren’t your Dad’s newspaper IT group, so I can understand.

What is so tremendously exciting about this transformation is the disparity between where we are headed and where most people have grown used to news organizations being centered. Here’s the old way: staff journalists gather the news, the staff packages it and carriers delivery it. Here’s the new way: content comes from every available source (staff and public), it is aggregated publicly and open for real-time discussion and some of that makes it way into packaged products. Think about that for a second. Does that mean that you could actually WATCH as the applicable content is gathered, linked and semantically woven into the fabric of an actual story. Yep. Read all about it!

An update to the content cycle

With great thanks to Steve Ribble and Mary Willie for taking time to review this and provide feedback, the below revision is offered up as potentially satifactory. The feedback was speficially targeted at the mobile world, SMS, RSS feeds, widgets/gadgets, etc. I had mistakenly binned those (in my mind) into the social media box…bad mistake. Any-hoo…here’s the revision:

Revised Content Cycle

Food for thought: Activity diagram for content cycle

In the interest of attempting to completely immerse myself in understanding the current information cycle paradigm, its successes, its gaps, its shortfalls and understanding as much as possible the future of content gathering, I have been striving to put things into perspective by way of one concise picture. Don’t confuse with me a traditional top-down, step-wise analyst, but I do believe every endeavor of value is capable of being modeled at some level. The future best-of-breed content gathering paradigms will not, in my opinion, lend themselves to highly detailed modeling. If that doesn’t jive for you, I suggest you are considering the dynamics and fluidity of content gathering and, most importantly, the incredibly diverse and mobile sources available.
Now that I have ticked off most classically trained process analyst (please notice I didn’t apologize), I wanted to offer a rough initial glimpse into a first draft of a highly bastadized activity diagram for the content cycle. Again, please don’t sling any arrows at me for taking massive liberties with the traditional thought patterns for activity diagrams (process flows) – I have no interest in validating myself with the analysts of the world. This diagram attempts to convey some important characteristics, including the speed of creation, the speed of dissemination from source, the need for synthesis and the timely interaction with content consumers with new packaging paradigms.

First cut on a high-level activity diagram for the content cycle

I would appreciate comments, thoughts and general feedback. Oh yes, please rember I am not a journalist, so forgive any of my trespasses – they aren’t intentional.