Dear friends,

We've been busy around here, and we're going to get busier. This time, I'll mostly just describe some of the things we're doing and some we have planned.

Our Associate Editor, Teresa Callies, attended the Special Libraries Association (SLA) Annual Conference in Boston recently. She's a member of the news division, along with people from newspapers and broadcast news services from throughout the country. The SLA conference is a very big affair. Several thousand information professionals showed up.

We're hard at work on our major new section, Women in the New Economy, which we're calling "WITNE" for short, and it should debut in the fall. It's ambitious, and we're excited about it. Right now, though, you can read Teresa's review of Sara Ann Friedman's new book, Work Matters: Women Talk About Their Jobs and Their Lives on our Reviews page.

Incidentally, among the books we'll be reviewing are Macia Harris and Sharon Jones, The Parent's Crash Course in Career Planning: Helping Your College Student Succeed. Roberta and I have two college students in the family, so I need to read this one myself.

Also coming up is Kristine Ryan-Zons' review of Laurence G. Boldt 's Zen and the Art of Making a Living: A Practical Guide to Creative Career Design, as well as Dr. Helen Paul's review of Career Transitions in Turbulent Times: Exploring Work, Learning, and Careers. The latter is the major new monograph from ERIC and the National Career Development Association and is edited by Professors Rich Feller and Garry Walz.

There will be additional reviews over the months ahead as well. Let us know if there are new books that you would like us to review. Also, if you have expertise or special experience in a particular area and would like to write a review for our readers, contact us about that as well.

On our Guest Commentary page right now, check out Dave Soss' article on virtual companies. Dave has had broad experience as a career counselor and business consultant. He has worked in both the private and public sectors, and, some years ago, counseled law students on their careers at the University of California.

Mark Champion presents a scenario on our Ed Watch page that educators may not like to think about, but which must be taken seriously during this period of fundamental transformation. Not only are academe's symbols undergoing reinterpretation, the higher education establishment is faced with vigorous competition from many sources, including nontraditional ones. It is not a time to drift or to be casual. I worry that academe's sometimes counterproductive and self-defeating cultural and organizational tendencies will jeopardize all that is precious about the community of scholars. Many academic organizations, as presently structured and operated, are not well-suited for survival in the new era. Without fundamental changes, many will not survive. When a ship sinks, all that is exasperating and all that is wonderful sink together.

I'm spending more of my time writing than usual. I've written NewWork News each morning since January 2 before going on to my main work for the day. Also, an article of mine will appear in the October edition of Le Temps stratigique, a general interest magazine and journal of ideas published in Geneva and distributed throughout French-speaking regions of Europe. I'm also involved in a university textbook project that will be completed by the end of the year.

Three other manuscripts are in progress. These are brief, somewhat related pieces that I refer to as my "new millennium trilogy," although I don't expect that anyone else will. They are happening at different rates, but I expect all to be completed within the next year or two. All have been brewing for years, in one case, for at least twenty-five years. They will deal with work, higher education, and political/legal issues, respectively. All are topics whose underlying assumptions require searching examination, and, as we prepare for a new millennium, this is a good time to do it.

NewWork News has been surveying press reports worldwide on life and work in the new economy now for about seven months, and has received an enthusiastic reception. We will add additional services over the months ahead, and, among other things, become a source of information and ideas for government, education, and the conventional press, with publications intended for all three communities. We're a communications organization, but, as distasteful as the pop term is, BNWW will become a private "think tank" with a variety of ongoing programs as well.

BraveNewWorkWorld & NewWork News continue to gain recognition throughout many areas of the world. Very recently, we have been recommended as a "career link" by the Washington Post, which we appreciate, and we were also selected as a Microsoft Network pick. In addition, we've been notified that BraveNewWorkWorld has been selected as one of the best 500 web sites in the world by I-Way Magazine, which will be on the newsstands in late August.

I-Way uses an elaborate system of criteria and ratings for their selections and makes assignments to 20 different categories. We will be listed in the "advocacy and politics" category along with 24 other leading web sites. Other organizations have chosen to put us in different categories, including news, business news, labor and industrial relations, economics, and, of course, career development. Some have said that there has never been anything else quite like BraveNewWorkWorld & NewWork News, and we're glad to hear others say it. Our own judgment is that we're not anywhere nearly good enough at this point, but we're not done yet.

We intend to become involved in other media. There have been various broadcast possibilities over the past three years, but I have chosen not to pursue them for a variety of reasons. However, we expect that broadcasting will be in our future as it has been in my past.

We've also been asked about personal appearances. I've been lecturing in various contexts for a long time, and there is nothing I like better than meeting people face-to-face. In fact, talking to groups of various sizes is what I've been doing longer than anything else, beginning many years ago when I made no attempt to inform, but simply to amuse or entertain.

Surely, we will want to get out on the speaking and seminar circuits again, but, for me personally, anyway, this will have to wait for a while, perhaps at least until early 1997. For the moment, I must minimize anything that requires travel, particularly international travel. We do have some things in planning, however, and, when we're ready, you'll be the first to know. We expect that an agent will handle our bookings eventually, but we haven't had time to think about things like this yet.


On media and the Internet

As suggested above, I worry about colleges and universities, because I love colleges and universities. I also worry about newspapers, because I love newspapers. Despite the many early years in the electronic media, I have to say that there is nothing else in this world quite like a genuinely good newspaper. According to the latest counts, there are more than 1,300 newspapers on the web now, up from about 100 in January 1995 and about 700 in January 1996.

The web is something that most papers don't believe they can sit out, but it's also making the future of newspapers as we've known them highly uncertain. For one thing, the web makes geography mostly irrelevant for online publications. We can access a newspaper web site from the other side of the world about as readily as one from our home town. This means that papers are suddenly faced with an enormous amount of competition.

A paper surely can't continue to give most of its information away on the web, but no really clear way of charging for it is emerging just yet either. When there are so many options, readers have no strong incentive for paying a subscription fee in order to access a site, and, so far, the web is a highly unproven advertising medium. We just don't know yet how well those little ad banners on web pages are going to work. If you were to put a similarly sized banner in a newspaper, saying "poke here if you would like to read our entire ad," I doubt that there would be much reader enthusiasm.

In our own case, we will not ask you to pay for any of the content that appears on BraveNewWorkWorld & NewWork News. The only condition under which we might solicit subscription fees, require the use of passwords, and so on, would be for institutional audiences, such as universities or corporations, and this would be for specialized information such as databases. Major newspapers, such as the Los Angeles Times, are experimenting with this approach. The daily news is free, but their extensive and, for some, greatly valuable archives reaching back many years, are not. Even if we do something like this at some point in the future, it will be an extra service represented on our regular pages only as an additional link of some sort. It will not replace any of our present content.

Will we sell advertising as a means of supporting BNWW & NWN? That's a future possibility, because, ultimately, there must be some means of support, and we are not a tax-exempt, nonprofit organization that can solicit foundation support. However, we're not ready for advertising at this point, and, should it occur later, we will do our best to integrate ad banners into our pages in the least obtrusive ways possible. The basic character of our pages and the fundamental nature of our mission will not change.

Incidentally, there is a strong urge to transform the Internet into the information superhighway that Vice President Gore and others have envisioned. Ultimately, I think the Internet's successor, even if it evolves from the Internet itself, will be wholly multimedial in nature, integrating virtually all that we have come to know as television, telephone, print, and more.

However, it's far too early at this point. Web pages will be a sorry substitute for full-motion television if we simply clutter them up with cute little animated thingies. Whether computing overall will continue as we've come to expect with our applications residing mostly in our own systems, or whether it will become a highly distributed system with applications or pieces of applications downloading whenever we need them is a different issue, although certainly a hot one at the moment. Microsoft's continued dominance of computing will depend on our preferring the traditional model, unless Microsoft becomes a very different company.

We are choosing to minimize the use of graphics on our site. BraveNewWorkWorld is not an alternative to a television program. Instead, we're basically a print publication distributed by nontraditional means. Our site now comprises about 1.5 megabytes, virtually all of it text, and we're growing rapidly. You may be aware that an ordinary book is a fraction of a megabyte.

For one thing, we feel that there is a serious cybercitizenship issue here. Bandwidth is precious. The scholarly community, which invented the Internet in the first place, is already having difficulty moving data around in support of research cooperation because of the heavy traffic and increasingly frequent "brownouts." Eventually, a fully developed "infobahn" will have sufficient bandwidth to handle full-motion video and anything else we will want to move through it. Now, though, the Internet is rapidly becoming overloaded, and the gratuitous use of graphics and other large files can only burden it further to the detriment of all. On the other hand, even quite wordy text files tend to be small and will transmit rapidly.

Incidentally, it's worth noting that not all successful media product is highly produced. Two of the most fabulously successful and influential offerings, the Wall Street Journal and CBS-TV's "60 Minutes" don't make use of contemporary production techniques at all. The Wall Street Journal doesn't even use photographs, and it retains a basically 19th century layout. "60 Minutes" has exactly one graphic and one sound effect, the ticking clock, and no music. Everything else is "talking heads." Both are content-driven media products, and both are wonderful, as well as amazingly successful. No glitz; just great reporting, writing, and talking.

We're also a publication for readers, not for persons with short attention spans conditioned by years of slick, over-produced television, even though I've been responsible for my share of over-produced broadcast product myself. While our pages sometimes have had a bit too much of the "ransom note" appearance to them, our effort will be to simplify and remain content-driven. We're aware that many other sites are a lot prettier and will remain so.

We spend quite a lot of time thinking about the Internet and the media revolution generally. We expect that, while the explosion of the web will continue for sometime, there should also be a general web site shakeout before too long. Already, even though there are at least hundreds of thousands of web sites, probably millions, maybe tens of millions, hits are distributed in a highly uneven fashion. A relatively small proportion of the sites get most of the traffic. Some have enormous audiences; others virtually none. I saw one site recently whose counter indicated that it had been hit exactly three times since February 7! Apparently, even the people who developed it aren't looking at it.

Many large corporations have spent a great deal of money on web sites and have been disappointed with the modest response. In part, I think this is because many organizations really haven't thought through what the web is and what it isn't, and also what their own objectives are. Many corporate sites are basically just brochures. Most conventional "junk mail" is thrown away unopened even when companies pay to have it delivered, so we should not be surprised if few people will want to come and get it if we simply "stack it out on the curb," in a sense.

The web is simply a distribution and navigational system, and that's all it is. It's a wonder, it's historic, it's amazing, and so on, but that's all it is. This means that all of the factors that ordinarily determine communication or business success remain to be dealt with, and that's nearly all of them. Most of the communication fundamentals are the same for the Internet as for conventional media.

Former Stanford computer science professor Jim Clark was on television recently. He said that when people ask how one can make money on the Internet, they're really asking the wrong question. That's like asking how you can make money on the telephone or the interstate highway system.

He's right, of course. The Internet is not a business opportunity, although many will use it for business. Instead, it is part of our infrastructure, and it will become an increasingly important part. People use the telephone and the highway system for all manner of purposes. Similarly with the Internet.

Incidentally, Jim is not best known as a former Stanford professor. You're more likely to have heard of him as a founder of both Silicon Graphics and Netscape Communications.


Tech Watch

Our major unkept promise remains our Tech Watch page, and we're very much aware of this remaining gap at BraveNewWorkWorld. We've put this on the back burner in order to concentrate on other things, but we haven't forgotten about it. While technology is playing a major role in reshaping the new world economy, there's also a tremendous amount of information about technological trends available on the Internet as well as in conventional publications. We intend to do something a little different, but it will be awhile yet. BraveNewWorkWorld will continue to develop for sometime, and we have other things planned as well.

Some of our early readers may recall that Dr. Jerry Willenbring was to have been our Tech Watch page editor, but, as I explained in my first Letter from Minnesota, a series of events made it necessary for Jerry to focus his attentions on Careers Online, Inc., a San Diego-based company that he heads. Incidentally, we're still partners in The New Work Corporation, but I'm sole owner of BraveNewWorkWorld & NewWork News.

Thanks for your time and attention, and thanks for your generous patronage of BraveNewWorkWorld & NewWork News.

Gary G. Johnson
July 27, 1996

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Copyright © 1995-2007 Gary Johnson Communications. All rights reserved. BraveNewWorkWorld, NewWork, NewWork News, Careers in the NewWork World, WITNE, and WITNE: Women in the New Economy are trademarks of Gary Johnson Communications.