Monday, April 08, 2024

After the Seagulls

 (This is from April 2021.)

"There’s an old joke that consultants are like seagulls - they fly in, make lots of noise, mess everything up and then fly out. That’s pretty much what tech has done to media industries - it changes everything and then it leaves..." -- Benedict Evans.

Not to gang up on consultants or the tech industry, but that quote pretty much sums it up. Of course there's the odd seagull who contributes something useful, but the sight of them approaching means either trouble or the 7th inning at the ballpark where the San Francisco Giants play baseball.

For undetermined reasons, the seagulls all show up in McCovey Cove during the 7th inning stretch, eager to scoop up all the half-eaten hot dogs and garlic fries before the crowd leaves and human clean-up crews arrive.

In recent years in media, consultants invariably brought variations of the Agile development process, with post-its, power points and recommendations related to expensive hardware/software schemes.

Once the consultants had had their way with us, most of the media companies I worked for went back to what we were doing before they showed up.

Of course there are two sides to every equation, and I served as a consultant myself for a number of years. One company hired me to use my journalistic interviewing skills. My assignment was to interview authors who had perfected the self-publishing process to become best-selling authors.

I carefully interviewed each one, inducing them to spill their secrets, and soon a fairly substantial body of knowledge existed on the company's website.

Apparently I was too good at my assignment, however. Because the company suddenly stopped assigning me any more interviews, just as I was getting to enjoy the work immensely. No one ever called or explained what had happened but when I checked the website, it turned out that the company had automated my interviewing techniques. So I'd been replaced by an algorithm.

A more straight-forward experience happened when a billionaire recruited me to leave Stanford to join his online media aggregation firm. "I want to study your brain as part of my company’s business plan.” 

I consented as the financial terms were substantially more lucrative than my salary as a visiting professor.

Long story short, maybe it was my brain or the software duplicate, but neither could prevent that guy’s company from filing for Chapter 11.

Thus it went, chapter by chapter of my supposedly illustrious career, for which just last year I was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the main professional association for journalists. It was quite an honor and I was grateful for the recognition.

The only problem was the arrival of a novel coronavirus (remember that?), which came along so they had to cancel the awards ceremony before I could give my speech, which might have been either a tearjerker or a stinker, who can say.

"Oh well," I told my grandchildren, "At least the plaque should be nice." They excitedly checked the mailbox for days in anticipation.

Only problem? The plaque never arrived. Eventually I heard one of the grandkids say to another, "You know what Mom says. Grandpa is full of stories that may or may not be true."

***

P.S. A couple years later, the plaque did arrive. By then the kids had forgotten all about it.

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