corporate marriages only rarely end in bliss—many studies have found that most mergers and acquisitions do little for the acquiring company’s bottom line. A KPMG study of seven hundred mergers found that only seventeen per cent created real value, and that more than half destroyed it. And a McKinsey study of mergers that took place in the nineteen-nineties found that less than a quarter generated excess returns on investment.

Why then does the Wall Street Journal introduce many mergers with details leaked by people close to the deal who violate their legal duties of confidentiality? And when the Journal gets a so-called scoop of this sort does it thank the leaker by soft-pedaling criticism? Or is there some other explanation for fawning coverage of deals that so often go bust?

In a variation on Surowieki’s theme, I once wrote about how publicity helped create a frenzy for initial public offerings (IPOs). I quoted Yale University economist Richard Shiller, who dedicated a chapter of his book, “Irrational Exuberance,” to how the press invented financial euphorias. The article quotes him as saying:

I don’t think there were any bubbles until there were newspapers,” said Shiller, whose research went back to the Dutch tulip bulb craze of the 1630s.

Imagine that. Extra, extra, read all about it! Newspapers invent hype! Hollywood lives for hype. Economists understand that “the (film) distributor earns most of its revenue over the first two or three weeks of the movie’s screen life.” The publicity blitz in advance of a new movie is intended to get viewers into this three-week window. Of course Hollywood thanks the media with generous advertising.

Surowiecki is known for his observation that public — or rather niches within the public — often have greater collective expertise than the so-called experts, which concept is captured in the book title, “Wisdom of the Crowds.” The crowds will need all the wisdom they can muster because mass media often seems intent on selling its audience a bill of goods.

Lethem initiated a project through his website called Promiscuous Materials that offers up his stories and lyrics at no cost for other artists to use and rework. He also recently announced that he will option the film rights to (his new novel) You Don’t Love Me Yet to a filmmaker of his choice in exchange for just 2 percent of the budget. By doing so, Lethem claims, he hopes to spark a re-examination of the typical ways in which art is commodified.

I first read about Lethem in a Poets & Writers (May/June 07) article titled “Creative Copywriting.” The article said Lethem will announce a winner to the film option idea on May 15. Visit Lethem’s web site to read about the movie deal.

Lethem argues for a kindler, gentler copyright in an essay in Harpers titled “The ecstasy of influence.” Artists, he says, have always imitated each other’s works, been influenced by one another overtly and subliminally. “Literature “has been in a plundered, fragmentary state for a long time,” he writes. And now we’ll see if that thought will be coming to a theater near you soon.

Journalism that Matters: That’s the name of a conference scheduled for August 7 and 8 in Washington, D.C. (conference details here). It is the second such gathering of new media innovators and educators. Scan the post-conference wrapup of a similiar event held in Memphis in January 2006. The conference is being organized through the Media Giraffe project. Spend a minute to find out more about the project and make sure to visit its excellent web site.

Software reduces art to science and turns judgments into point-and-click routines. Desktop publishing and tax preparation are examples of professional skills that have been boiled down and percolated into general practice.

But professionals still have tricks-of the trade that set them apart from amateurs. Author Robert W. Harris shares the secrets of typography and graphic design in a forthcoming book, “The Elements of Visual Style.” I read a preprint issued by Houghton Mifflin which has scheduled publication for May.

The title of this book harken’s back to Strunk & White’s classic, the “Elements of Style.” Whether “Visual Style” will have the shelf life of its namesake remains to be seen. But desktop publishers who read this slim volume will get a good grounding in the essentials of graphic design. I know the subject first hand. In 1980s I ran a small typography and publishing firm that was ultimately clobbered by desktop publishing.

“Visual Design” is not a program guide. It is not “documentation” or a tutorial for this, that or the other DTP package. The book presumes readers have some grasp of how to use their software; what the author supplies is the foundation to use DTP tools to best effect. Harris writes that “Visual Style”:

– catches the eye
– directs attention
– organizes information
– is easy to comprehend
– is void of distractions

Neatly and adroitly, Harris explains the fundamentals of choosing type; how to mix styles and toward what end; how to use photos, designs and emptiness (called “white space”) to evoke feelings or aid in comprehension. Although this is a book for the layperson it is meant to create an awareness and appreciation of the professional ethic that good design never calls attention to itself. It is, instead, self-effacing. Harris writes:

 “The main purpose of type is to convey ideas.  Any inventiveness in using type needs to serve that purpose and not interfere with it . . .  Designing a page is essentially a matter of dividing it into text, space and art . . . you want the appearance of a page (or an entire document) to make sense based on its purpose . . .”

I look back on my graphic design days with some nostalgia. Desktop publishing first emerged when I had about five years experience as a typographer. Five years later we had decided to get out of typography. It was hardly a choice. Virtually every one of our prime accounts had taken the work we used to do in-house, buying a desktop publishing system and designating some staffer to produce the newsletters, brochures and other printed materials that had been our stock in trade.

Today I’m a newspaper reporter, another profession being challenged by citizen amateurs. Once again my professional skills are being distilled and disseminated through software. Oh, well. It’s nothing personal. The whole drift of technology is to make tools  more capable and democratize skills. Some technologists ultimately hope to create machines that can surpass human intelligence. Humankind is in for a comeuppance if and when artificial intelligence gurus get their way.

Meanwhile, the best thing professionals can do nowadays is to reckon themselves to the inevitable surrender of their specialty and do whatever they can to help the amateurs behave responsibly. In that light “The Elements of Visual Style” makes a graceful attempt to raise the professionalism of printed communication.

I agree with the bloggers but fuming at the dunderheads of dead-tree media is not going to change their minds. Instead let me use a metaphor to argue that old and new media may be headed toward a symbiosis that will lead to something better. Let me borrow the concept of the mind-meld from the original Star Trek, the television parable that hinged on the interplay between the bombastic James T. Kirk and his uber-logical Vulcan sidekick, Spock.

Fans of that show will recall that time and again the differing talents of these two characters enabled the starship Enterprise to escape the various perils of Gene Roddenberry’s science fiction universe. Kirk would have the gumption to go where none had gone before and knock out the bad guys. Spock’s reason complemented Kirk’s passion because, even in real life, it is often critical to understand precisely how many zeroes to the right of the decimal point it takes to express a contamination rate of six parts-per-billion.

To extend this metaphor to media, the more even-tempered and fact-based mass media plays Spock, while the blogosphere, hard-wiresd to throw a punch or preach a sermon as Kirk-like tendencies.

I see us headed toward a melded media in which the mass outlets, craving information to feed their varied and voracious audiences, fly over the blogosphere with AWACS -look-down radar, lifting the best bits into the larger knowledge cloud. In return the mass media bestow some attention on the originating blogs — and attention is the new currency of media.

Steve ( MicroPersuasion) Rubel recently said much the same thing:

“Blogs aren’t about big breaking news stories. They’re about news in thousands of niches that are too small for the big boys to cover. When will people get it? Surveys like this are just silly. Big media and micro media are complementary, not competitive. Gee Willikers.”

This symbiosis will not be equal. They never are. Mass media will rule because it has the cash and the audiences and the clout. But who benefits more is irrelevant. Because the crew of Planet Earth will never achieve its continuing mission — to explore new worlds of ideas and build a better civilization — guided by its media as currently constituted.

* It would be helpful if, in the future, MediaPost reported details of the study: number of persons interviewed, margin of error, etc. I also looked for but could not find a copy of the study or at least a Lexis-Nexis press release. That would also have been useful.

I need not belabor the point. Anyone who reads a newspaper or listens to the TV news can recite the boilerplate. “In a stunning development” … “sources speaking on the condition of anonymity:” … said something so inconsequential “about the simmering controversy” that it is a miracle we do not all wake up sweating and shrieking at night.

Pardon me if this is not an original complaint. Many, many moons ago, when I was in the Navy, I recall reading former TV anchorman Edwin Newman’s book titled “Strictly Speaking” in which he warns that the re-transmission of business and political jargon was polluting Engling with “banalities, cliches, pomposities, redundancies and catchphrases.”

“Strictly Speaking” was published in 1974. If there are even two Americans who think mass media prose has improved in the intervening 3.2 decades, let them step into nearby phone booth and equivocate each other to death with cruel and unusual euphemisms.

But I see hope. In blogging. In the short, snarky phrases that card-carrying journalists are beginning to hoist online and — assuming they don’t get sued or fired for this effrontery — may gradually seep into the solemn gray columns in which we — who work in what critics call “corporate media” — dispense all the news that’s fit to print. Or whatever it is we do do on a daily basis.

Yes, there is hope, and I see it by analogy. We recently got a kitten to add to the menagerie that is our family. I’ve watched it go sniffing around, gradually maturing from a scaredy cat into a bold hunter, ready to pounce on any defiant dust ball or bottle cap. Blogging journalists are like kittens. Mayhaps one day we’ll start to take bigger leaps, hiss at danger, even stretch out our claws and bare our fangs.

(Note: This is a slighlty amended version of an earlier posting, Tardy Boy. I removed some chatter in the first paragraph and changed the time reference but otherwise left it alone. I must get to work early this morning and have no time for an original posting and rather liked this piece — but thought the title and the excised material weakened it The graphic is also new.)

At the opposite end is Fark.com, which the piece calls “a collection of reader-submitted links to amusing videos, jokes, and curiosities from all over the Web.” It is described as “incredibly cost-efficient” because readers post links to amusing stuff; because that material is hosted elsewhere, which means lower traffic-hosting costs; and because its payroll consists only of founder, Drew Curtis, and two contract (as in no benefits?) staffers. Curtis told the magazine he expects Fark, with 40 million page views a month, to “soon log monthly ad sales of $600,000 to $800,000″ and Battelle is paraphrased as predicting that Fark will become “the first indie blog to earn a million dollars a year in profit.” I’m left scratching my head. Given the foregoing stats, why is Fark not already there. Are there only two months in the year? Are those two contracts raping poor Curtis? Or are the bandwidth costs astronomical? The math doesn’t seem to jibe with the optimism.

Easier for me to grasp is the anecdote about “journalist Mark Frauenfelder (who) founded Boing Boing, then a paper-based cyberpunk zine, in 1988 and took it online in 1995.” Today it has 325,000 daily visitors. Awesome! Hard work, over many years. That is news we all can use.

Some other points to note. At one point the piece cites “Web ad agency Organic (which) puts ad spending on blogs at $40 million this year.” Elsewhere it says “blogs, they’ve exploded: There are 50 million of them, and two new ones are launched every second.” That all falls under the heading of “don’t quit the day job.”

And that’s of course good advice for the average blogger who is neither connected nor posessed of whatever mad genius propels a handful of those 50 million to sudden fame. But don’t let me discourage you. My words may be tinted green. Because in this “Attention Economy.,” when getting noticed has become the coin of the realm, surely envy is poised to gain market share among the seven cardinal sins.

“There is something ceremonial and tactile about taking out the albumn and handling it,” I was told. Playing CDs doesn’t offer the same aesthetic pleasure, the music lover said. They’re cheap plastic. Handling them is an insult. What do they cost to produce? A dime! CDs are nothing but a to capture copyright royalties on the flimsiest of formats. And besides there was a better sound reproduction in the analog format. “

I wish I’d taken notes, there was so much passion in the reply, but it was a party and my music-loving source started backpeddling as soon as I identified myself as a professional scribe. Something about subtly dissing digital music when that was their day job.Suddenly I started getting, “I love music in any form.”

I understand. Many professionals despair of the gap between what they envision as their mission and what they can actually sell. All too often it’s a watered down version of what they would prefer to deliver. I wonder why? It’s not a trivial question in an era when self-publishing is becoming common. Will we see a revival of passion-driven media or will more “prosumers” be driven to the same compromises that typify mass media?

Make mine live! As chance would have it not long after my encounter with the album-lover, a friend took me to a live concert at UC Berkeley’s Greek Theater to hear a band called Manu Chao. It was a perfect night, just enough breeze to be comfortable, incredible acoustics and a crowd that reflected the performers’ incredible energy. I knew nothing about the group beforehand; for me it was a chance to connect with a friend. And the songs were for the most part sung in Spanish and so I only picked up a few words here and there.

But as I danced to the rhythm in the sway of the crowd’s excitement I thought this was the essence of music — the tribal, hive-mind experience that strikes some private chord. Yes, we can now digitize it and carry it with us in devices slimmer than cigarette lighters and pipe this stuff into our ears when we’re riding the train or jogging. But the further we get from the raw and primitive experience of live music the less powerful it becomes. Funny, when I was looking up Manu Chao, the search engine offered ads on the side: Manu Chao ringtones, read the first advertisement. In the first place it was probably a come-on. I somehow suspect that this anti-establishment band has not yet distilled its music into that particular format. But even if it were true, why bother? What am I going to get from a Manu Chao ring tone that wouldn’t be an insult to the music’s intent?

There is a professional thrill to such an assignment, as the clock ticks while the pieces of a puzzle begin to fall into place. After 14 years in the biz, I have to say the pieces tend to fall together late and all at the same time, as the calls and emails that you put out earlier take time to tield results.

So there I am at one of these critical junctures yesterday — I’ve got one critical source on my desk line when a must-take call come in on my cell. What to do? Well, as quickly and politely as possible I shift caller one to my colleague on the story and get ready to schmooze caller number two. In the course of apologizing to caller number one I invent what is, at least for me, a new term. I’m sorry, I say, for this necessary rudeness.

But wait. There’s more.

My editors are patient as I blow past deadline because I got the story late and they’re reading over my shoulder and realize that while I ain’t done, I’m on the path to what they had wanted. Then the phone rings again and caller ID says it’s my wife. A family emergency. One of the kids. All right now but in trouble and heading home to arrive much later. The clock is ticking. Nothing I can do and no time to break my concentration. So I thank her for calling and tell her I have to run, and the click I hear tells me I’ve perpetrated another necessary rudeness, although experience tells me she’d put an “un” in front of my new pet phrase.

Oh, well. The paper lands in the morning and there’s the story. The personal saga goes on.