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The Biggest Wow in Indiana

✇Doc Searls Weblog
Par : Doc Searls
24 janvier 2024 à 16:51
No, an AI did not paint this. It’s the West Baden Springs Hotel, which I shot with a camera while gawking at it for the first time.

In the summer of ’22 we were still new to Indiana and in an exploring mood. Out of nowhere one afternoon my wife said, “Let’s go check out French Lick.” She just liked the name of the town, plus the idea of taking a half-day road trip under a sweet blue sky and big puffy clouds. I said “Sure,” because I’m a basketball fan and supposed there would be a Larry Bird museum or something like it in his hometown. (Turns out there isn’t, but never mind that.)

Southern Indiana would be part of Kentucky if the Ohio River didn’t inconvenience that option. It’s hilly, and the natives have Southern accents. They say CEment and INsurance. (You know, like Larry Bird.) About halfway down the roads from Bloomington to French Lick, Google took us off the highway onto a twisty hypotenuse through deep woods and lumpy farmland, away from the hard right angle the boring main route would take at the city of Paoli (home of Indiana’s only ski slopes). This shortcut ended where the going got flat and we turned right onto a highway called 150. Then, in a short distance, we drove under a serious-looking arch that announced WEST BADEN SPRINGS. It might also have said ALMOST FRENCH LICK, because that’s what Google Maps told us. We were less than a mile away. After the arch, the edge of a town appeared straight ahead, but that scene was totally upstaged by the one on the right.

My wife and I both gasped. I said, “What the fuck is THAT?” My wife said “Wow!”

Suddenly we were … where? Spain? France? Croatia? There, under that perfect sky sat a beautiful giant resort-like structure that was obviously old, grand, well-maintained, and set among smaller structures just as old and nearly as grand, on a wide expanse of green.

A few hundred feet farther came this entrance on the right:

The only Carlsbads we knew were the town in California and the caverns in Arizona New Mexico. And all we knew about West Baden Springs was what that arch had just told us.

Of course, we couldn’t wait to get inside this thing, whatever it was. Here’s what we saw:

“Wow” doesn’t cover it. Nor do the many views of what turns out to have been—and still is—the West Baden Springs Hotel, which I’ve put in this album here. Check ’em out.

We’ve been back a bunch of times since then. And to French Lick, home of the French Lick Springs Hotel, which was once a great competitor to the West Baden Springs Hotel, and is almost as grand, just as historic, and a short and fun train ride away. Here’s the West Baden Station.

I’ll be putting up more albums of both places soon. Meanwhile, come visit, ya’ll.

A Supply Problem

✇Doc Searls Weblog
Par : Doc Searls
31 décembre 2023 à 18:22
My last four boxes of Trader Joe’s High Fiber Cereal

A while back, my gastroenterologist insisted that I get accustomed to eating high-fiber cereal in the morning. And so I have. It does work.

He recommended Fiber One. I didn’t like it, but I put up with it until I found Trader Joe’s version, which tasted much better. Since Bloomington is more than an hour from a Trader Joe’s in Indianapolis (there are two on the north side, while we are way down to the south), I stock up when we’re up that way.

Or I used to.

In Palm Desert for Thanksgiving, I went to a Trader Joe’s there to find High Fiber Cereal missing from the shelves. When I asked a crew member (they’re called that) if they had any in the back, she came back out with the manager to tell me that High Fiber Cereal had, regrettably, been discontinued.

I did not take it well.

I then told them that I also lament earlier discontinuations of the house-brand Ancient Grains granola and its thick, labneh-like strained Greek yogurt. As I reported in the chapter about Trader Joe’s in The Intention Economy, the company takes customer requests to heart.

I also see here that Fiber One is not getting out to store shelves, thanks to what General Mills calls “supply issues.” Since most of Trader Joe’s branded goods are made by other companies (including, presumably, General Mills), perhaps High Fiber Cereal will be re-continued.

Meanwhile, here’s to a good digestive 2024.

 

 

Getting Us Wrong

✇Doc Searls Weblog
Par : Doc Searls
29 décembre 2023 à 23:56
Prompt: ” hardscrabble farms next to a suburb full of volvo station wagons”

Several thousand years ago, when I was on leave from journalism and working as a marketing dweeb, my small North Carolina firm learned about PRIZM (Potential Rating Index for Zip Markets), a techy new service that told me that my rural zip code was “Hardscrabble,” while the next one over was a suburb PRIZM called “Volvo Wagons” or something.

My current zip, in Bloomington, Indiana, features five out of PRIZM’s 68 numbered types:

  • 48 Generation Web—Low Income Younger Family Mix
  • 47 Striving Selfies—Lower Midscale Middle Age Mostly w/o Kids
  • 15 New Homesteaders—Wealthy Middle Age Mostly w/ Kids
  • 51 Campers & Camo—Lower Midscale Middle Age Family Mix
  • 66 New Beginnings—Low Income Younger Family Mix

None of which describes me or my wife.

Sort of close is 05 – Country Squires: “Members of this segment fled the city life for the charms of small-town living. Many have executive jobs and live in recently built homes.” Except we didn’t flee and our home was built in  1899 or 1915. (Sources differ.) But we are building a house, so maybe that counts.

A bit closer is 20 – Empty Nests: “Most residents are over 65 years old, but they show no interest in a rest-home retirement. With their grown-up children out of the house they pursue active, and activist, lifestyles.”

But all of that stuff is just name-calling against typified populations—a form of -ism not much different than racism, sexism, or ageism. That’s why, on the receiving end, we tend not to like it, even if it brings us ‘relevant’ messages from sellers. (This happens far less than sellers think, and typically at the cost of privacy lost to surveillance.)

All of us are as different as our faces and voices. Being different than everybody—even ourselves five minutes ago—is among our most human qualities. We all grow and change constantly, whether we want to or not.

Marketing didn’t get that when PRIZM was invented in 1980, and it doesn’t get it today, for the simple reason that marketing was not built for talking to people. It was built for typifying people.

Chris Locke, David Weinberger, Rick Levine, and I all thought there was hope for marketing when we wrote The Cluetrain Manifesto in 1999, because we saw the Internet as a radically new way to connect the demand and supply sides of markets directly, and personally.

But marketing instead saw the Internet as a great way to spy on people and to typify them more than ever.  PRIZM persists, entrenched as ever. And conversations among customers and marketers happen in two very different and disconnected echo chambers, mostly using giant corporate platforms.

For a sense of how thoroughly disconnected those chambers are, see any of Tom Fishburne’s Marketoons. They’re brilliant and spot-on.

They also make clear—at least to me—that Cluetrain won’t prove right until marketing gets out of the way.

Which it won’t on its own. Our side—the customers’ side—needs to obsolesce it.

The image above was generated by the prompt in the caption under it, using what currently calls itself Microsoft Bing Image Creator from Designer, which persists Microsoft’s long tradition of aversive and unmemorable names for products.

We Need Wide News

✇Doc Searls Weblog
Par : Doc Searls
1 septembre 2023 à 06:10

Bloomington, Indiana, my new hometown

How do people get news where you live? How do they remember it?

For most of the industrial age, which is still with us, newspapers answered both those questions—and did so better than any other medium or civic institution. Newspapers were required reading, delivered daily to doorsteps, and sold from places all around town. Old copies also accumulated in libraries and other archives, either as bound volumes or in microfilm reels and microfiche cards. News also came from radio and TV stations, though both did far less archiving, and none were as broad and deep in what they covered and how. Newspapers alone produced deep news.

And wide news as well. Local and regional papers covered politics, government, crises, disasters, sports, fashion, travel, business, religion, births, deaths, schools, and happenings of all kinds. They had reporters assigned across all their sections. No other medium could go as wide.

After the Internet showed up in the mid-’90s, however, people also began getting news from each other, through email, blogs, texting, online-only publications, and social media. To keep up and participate, newspapers, magazines, and other legacy print media built websites and began to publish online. Broadcast media began to stream online too. But the encompassing trend was the digitization of everything and everyone. Consumers became producers. Every person with a computer or a phone was equipped to become a reporter, a photographer, a videographer, or a podcaster. (In the 24 September 2004 issue of IT Garage, I reported that a Google search for podcasts got 24 results. Today it gets 3,84 billion.)

In the midst of all this, the local and regional newspaper business collapsed. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post found ways to survive and continue to thrive. Many other major papers are getting along but none are what they were. Nor can they be. Today most local papers are gone or shrunk to tiny fractions of their former selves.  Countless local commercial radio stations are now owned by national chains, fed “content” from elsewhere, and maintain minimized or absent local staff. Public radio has survived mostly because it learned long ago how to thrive on listener contributions, bequests, and institutional support. TV news is still alive, but also competing with millions of other sources of video content. None of its coverage is as wide as newspapers were in their long prime.

Another reason for the decline of local news media is economic. Craigslist and its imitaters killed newspapers’ classified sections, which had been a big source of income. Advertisers abandoned the practice of targeting whole populations interested in sports, business, fashion, entertainment, and other subjects. With digital media, advertisers can target tracked individuals. As I put it in Separating Advertising’s Wheat and Chaff, “Madison Avenue fell asleep, direct response marketing ate its brain, and it woke up as an alien replica of itself.” That replica cares not a whit for supporting journalism of any kind.

Eyeballs and eardrums were also pulled toward direct response marketing by algorithms rigged to increase engagement. A collateral effect was pulling individual interests into affinity groups that grew tribal as they became echo chambers favoring the voices that excelled at eliciting emotional responses. Naturally, media specialized for feeding tribal interests emerged, obsolescing media that worked to cross partisan divides—such as old-fashioned newspapers. (In the old days, papers with a bend to the left or the right isolated partisanship to their opinion pages.) Talk radio and cable news became entirely partisan operations.

So, by the time Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) said “Facts don’t matter. What matters is how much we hate the person talking” (March 13, 2022), what Yeats poetized in The Second Coming seemed fulfilled:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

And yet, as James Fallows told Joyce and me a couple of months ago, if you talk to people in small towns about anything but politics, they’re just fine. Moreover, they still work together and get things done. (Jim and Deb gained this wisdom while researching their book and movie, both titled Our Towns.)

Towns do have their fault lines, but people everywhere are held together by their natural need for the conveniences that arise out of shared necessity—for markets, medical help, education, public spaces, and each other. They also need good information about what’s going on where they live. By good I mean the kind of information they used to get before newspapers—and the daily ceremony of innocence newspapers provided—were obsolesced by the Internet.

Back in the mid-’00s, the idea of “citizen journalism” (which went by other labels) first showed up in the writings of Dan Gillmor, J.D. Lasica, Dave Winer, Jeff Jarvis, Jay Rosen, myself, and others. All of us were also concerned about the decline of newspapers. So, in January 2007, after The New York Times sold the Santa Barbara News-Press to a billionaire who fired the staff and made the paper a vehicle for her personal interests, the Center for Information Technology and Society (CITS) at UC Santa Barbara convened a charrette to discuss the future of local newspapers. The title was “Newspaper 2.0.” It was led by yours truly, then (and still) a fellow of the Center. Some of the people mentioned earlier in this paragraph were there, along with exiled News-Press staffers, educators, and other local media, including “place blogs” that were also daily newsletters. Here is a photo series from the event, and the wiki we put together as well. I don’t know to what extent that gathering helped enlarge the degree to which other media made up for the failure of the News-Press (which finally filed for bankruptcy this summer, after a decade and a half of irrelevance). I do know that Santa Barbara now rich with news sources.

Meanwhile, my full attention is here in Bloomington, Indiana. Our local newspaper, the Herald-Times, is still alive and kicking, but not what it was when giant rolls of paper were delivered by train car weekly to the back of the paper’s building at 1900 South Walnut Street, and it was the source of wide news for the town and the region.

Now it’s e pluribus unum time. There are many other media in town, covering many topics, and I’m not yet clear on how much they comprise a news commons. But, as a visiting scholar (along with Joyce) at Indiana University’s Ostrom Workshop, which is all about studying commons, I want to see if our collection of local news media can become an example of wide news at work, whether we call it a commons or not. From my current notes, here is a quick, partial, and linky list of local media—

Periodicals (including newsletters and websites):

Radio:

  • WFHB (has local news and podcasts)
  • WFIU (has local news and podcasts)
  • WIUX (IU student station, has local stuff)
  • WGCL (legacy local radio, AM & FM)
  • WBWB (B97) (pop music, has local news, sister of WHCC)
  • WTTS (legacy Tarzian FM music station, broadcasting from Trafalgar, on the south side of Indianapolis, with a popular local translator of its HD2 channel called Rock96 The Quarry)
  • WHCC (local country station, has some local news, sister of WBWB)
  • WCLS (local album rock station, has a calendar)

TV:

Podcasts

Indiana University

Civic Institutions:

So my idea is to hold a charrette like the one we had in Santa Barbara, to see how those interested in making wide news better can get along. No rush. I just want to put the idea out there and see what happens.

I think one thing that will help is that nobody is trying to do it all anymore. But everybody brings something to the table. Metaphorically speaking, I’d like to put the table there.

Thoughts and ideas are invited. So are corrections and improvements to the above. I see this post, like pretty much everything I write online, as a public draft.

My email is doc at searls dot com.

I shot the photo above on a flight from Indianapolis to Houston after giving this lecture at IU. Here is a whole series on Bloomington from that flight. And here is the rest of the flight as well. All the photos in both are Creative Commons licensed to encourage use and reuse, by anybody. I have about 60,000 photos such as these published online here, and another 5,000 here, all ready for anyone to put in a news story. I bring this up because public photography is one of my small contributions to wide news everywhere. You can see results in countless news stories and at Wikimedia Commons, where photos in Wikipedia come from. I put none of those where they are. Others found them and put them to use.

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