Jeff Jarvis on the Future of News: Community-based, and ad driven
It was really refreshing to read Jeff Jarvis‘ cogent, detailed potential scenario on the future of news in the Huffington Post today. It’s amazing to see a courageous view of somebody’s industry, offered up with few difficult topics avoided out of taboo and a spirit of intellectual inquiry.
Bottom line of this scenario: less editing, more cultivating of communities, and ad money still pays for reporters. Much more on the specifics of funding newsrooms and the future of running a local beat, which makes it a real treat.
This piece is truly insightful, and apparently controversial to the journalistic community, which makes it a must read.
Future Trends 2025: We need better foresight from our government
The following is a response to “Future Trends 2025″ from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (http://www.dni.gov/nic/PDF_2025/2025_Global_Trends_Final_Report.pdf.)
Despite its goal of looking incisively at the next 17 years, its total inability to provide insight on the future is a danger to all of us. With our institutions failing at around one per week (!) it seems it’s time for a real discussion.
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The meltdown of the financial system; the collapse of the automotive industry; the impending bankruptcy of several American cities — these events tell even the casual observer that our institutions are weak when it comes to the ability to perceive and act on future trends. Most people might say that this is part of the human condition, the result of our natural short-term thinking in a complex, rapidly changing world. But this shortcoming of foresight is reaching a dangerous level that can no longer be considered acceptable. We must develop an institutional capability in the public and private sector to have frank, courageous discussions about the implications of strategic trends - and the actions they require - if we are to guide our society safely and prosperously into the years ahead.
A recent release by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence shows how pervasive the lack of a professional method of foresight has become, even in the places where we expect it and need it most. The ODNI just published a report entitled “Global Trends 2025,” a major effort of the nation’s sixteen intelligence agencies and several think tanks, supposedly intended to inform the new presidential administration. Given the resources committed to such an endeavor, one would expect the project to be a tour de force of professional foresight, a foil for stimulating discussion among leaders everywhere. Instead it is a cautionary tale of group think, narrowness of scope, and faulty methodology.
The content of the work offers little insight for those would guide our institutions in uncertain times. The summary of these global trends is: “By 2025, the accelerating pace of globalization and the emergence of new powers will produce a world order vastly different from the system in place for most of the post-World War II era.” In other words, the next seventeen years are unlikely to be like the last sixty years. This is not exactly “actionable intelligence.”
The individual trends detailed in the report are just as weak, combining unexamined assumptions and sclerotic analysis. Other projections in “Global Trends 2025″: include:
• “Russia’s emergence as a world power is clouded by lagging investment in its energy sector and the persistence of crime and government corruption.” Poverty, lack of investment and corruption in Russia has been going on for about 1000 years. What’s new?
• “A worldwide shift to a new technology that replaces oil will be under way or accomplished by 2025.” This is wishful thinking at best. The International Energy Agency’s recent forecast sees fossil fuels continuing to supply the vast majority of the world’s energy through 2030. This report offers vague hopes for biofuels, and assumes oil will be on the way out – a canyon-jumping leap of faith.
• “The likelihood that nuclear weapons will be used will increase with expanded access to technology and a widening range of options for limited strikes.” This forecast has been written repeatedly, on a regular basis, for the past 50 years. What should we do differently?
• “The impact of climate change will be uneven, with some Northern economies, notably Russia and Canada, profiting from longer growing seasons and improved access to resource reserves.” This is a landmark entry in the annals of positive spin, and one that ignores that the most important part of global climate change will be the actions we take in response.
The bland, inaccurate and un-provocative content, shows that while these agencies go through the motions of a foresight methodology, they have lost the spirit of the exercise entirely. It was the threat of thermonuclear holocaust that led these very organizations in the 1960s to invent futures research in the first place. The tools of forecasting and scenarios were designed not for their capacity for prophecy, but to provoke an examination of our cherished - and potentially harmful - unexamined assumptions. To become lost in groupthink in 1960 was to perhaps lead our country aimlessly into nuclear annihilation. Foresight was intended to make us think while there was still time.
The DNI’s latest report seems to show that our intelligence agencies no longer study the future with rigor and intellectual stimulation as the goal. Instead, we see a view of the future that was agreed upon by committee: unoffensive, ambigious, and of minimal utility to leaders attempting to think deeply about the challenges to come.
A rigorous, courageous approach to foresight is no longer a luxury, reserved to times of plenty or relegated to philosophers. Leaders of all organizations - everywhere - must commit themselves to developing an organizational capacity to understand future trends, examine their impact completely, and to motivate others to action. To fail in this challenge is to continue to suffer the fate we see in our critical institutions today.
Demise of the mall, parte deux
Furthermore, what designer thought that the zeitgeist of 2008, with all of its systemic change, would be 
best served by a giant mall with a 287-foot ferris wheel?
I’m not an urban design expert. I suppose there’s no accounting for taste.
The demise of the mall?
Factoid of the day: Last year was the first year in half a century that a new indoor mall didn’t open somewhere in the United States - a precipitous decline since the mid-1990s when they rose at a rate of 140 a year.”
Hat tip: Fark Business
We were building 140 malls a year? Really? Does that not seem insane to anybody else?
Prediction: the next bubble to burst will be the glut of retail in the United States.
The g-space operating system
Approximately forty trillion times cooler than Microsoft Windows.
g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.
Monty Python: a new business model, with a smile
This clip of Monty Python’s official YouTube site seems to me to be the ideal way to communicate when you’re faced with a game-changing industry trend.
Humor: imagine the power.
Burlington, Vermont, the healthiest city in the United States
My birthplace and former residence, Burlington, Vermont has been named the healthiest city in the United 
States.
Two thoughts come to mind. First, shoveling snow and enduring weeks of -20 degree weather must be good for you.
Second, it must be incredibly good for you because this city is home to Nectar’s gravy fries, two pound sandwiches, and enough awesome cheddar cheese to kill a moose.
Bailouts make us ask: what is the future of the corporation?
Next up on the bailout list: car companies, cities, healthcare, schools. I guess nobody’s business model is 
working very well, and now everybody needs money from the U.S. federal government, which of course is half a trillion in the red this year. Companies losing billions want loans from a government that’s losing billions.
I think that a lot of things are going to need a redesign in the next few years, to put it mildly.
Regardless, yesterday’s stars were the automotive CEOs who flew into to Washington DC to plead for the U.S. government to provide aid to its most important companies.
But wait, are they American companies? Chris Kelly at the Huffington Post provides an excellent bit of polemic, reminding us that Chrysler is actually owned by a $60 billion hedge fund called Cerberus Capital which owns, in addition to Chrysler:
A Japanese bank called Aozora
A Japanese real estate company called Showa Jisho
A Japanese golf course company called Kokusai Kogyo
An Israeli bank called Bank Leumi
A German bank called Handel und Kredit Bankhaus
A reinsurance company called Scottish Re, with headquarters in Bermuda
A British TV rental chain called Boxclever…etc.
This is a great point - we’ve spent decades making global capital so fungible, so fluid that it readily cros
s borders, ignores nationality, changes hands without making news. So can a corporation possibly be a national entity for which a certain government (and its taxpayers!) might claim responsibility?
If Chrysler isn’t a potent enough example, how about Citibank, which is getting “trouble asset relief” from the U.S. Treasury but is now is owned to an even greater extent by Saudi princes?
This begs HUGE questions. What is a corporation? To whom does it belong? What is the relationship between a corporation and the nation-states of the world?
If you’re in business today, and plan on staying in business through 2009 and beyond, these aren’t just philosophical discussions. This is your future. Give it some thought.
City economies now collapsing: OK, let’s take a breath
You know, we spend our time on the long-term future here, but it seems like everybody needs to pay attention to the next few weeks.
Today, several American mayors went on record saying their finances are in shambles, and now THEY need a bailout too.
Did the bailout plan really take none of these repercussions into account? Can we maybe stop and do a little scenario planning about what the next two months could look like before acting with $700 billion in our pockets?
Note to the Treasury Dept: we’re only one block away.
“Nobody could see it coming,” schadenfreude edition
One of the most outrageous things I heard about this current financial crisis was that “Nobody could see it coming.” Early warning was written all over this systemic collapse - and people actively made fun of this view.
Watch this video of economist Peter Schiff and the ridicule he must endure for accurately predicting the systemic weaknesses in the economy.
Think about this kind of dynamic the next time you need to spread news of a systemic disruption in your organization.
Be social