Clearly, Steve Jobs is pissed. I would be, too. You pour thousands of hours collectively into a project like this and you want people to just use the damned thing, enjoy it, and have it change their lives on some level. That the media has churned up such a storm over this issue has got to be not-a-little-bit frustrating.

Apple’s media materials are always top notch, and what they produced highlighting the antenna design process at Apple, the tour of the inner sanctum of antenna design on campus, meet the standard. They included videos on apple.com and in the conference demonstrating the exact same signal loss on previous generation iPhones, along with phones from Nokia, Blackberry, HTC, and Samsung. Hold the phone in just the right way, signal drops. In fact, as Josh pointed out in the linked piece over at Apple Insider,

In June, Nokia’s official blog poked fun at the iPhone 4 “death grip” issue. The post included a variety of pictures showing a range of grips, encouraging consumers to feel free to hold their Nokia device any way they like without suffering any signal loss.

Users of the site then posted links to videos showing signal loss on several of Nokia’s handsets, as well as instructions from a Nokia manual warning users “to avoid touching the antenna area” and that “contact with antennas affects the communication quality.”

I waxed sarcastically on Twitter that Verizon’s cheeky attitude toward this antenna thing would bite them in the ass. I’m bummed the prediction isn’t wholly accurate in that I didn’t use Nokia as my case point. That would have made me far more prescient. At least someone looks foolish here. It’s never really smart to publish material dragging your competitors through the mud on untested, unconfirmed reports.

Which is why I’m on the fence about Apple doing just that in this case, dragging these other manufacturers into the ring with them on this issue.

As uncharacteristic as it is, I’m not sure they had another choice. This is a PR disaster. It’s a disaster specifically because it’s a nominally interesting story that has been spun out of Apple’s tight control, not because there is any more or less scandal to it. Their response strategy of choice is clearly to soften by deflection — get us all thinking about these other guys so we’re not so focused on the iPhone 4 soft spot.

Apple’s biggest issue in this mess is completely self-created, and it’s not that they created a phone that has a major antenna flaw (we know there’s a flaw, I’m just saying that’s not the biggest problem here). It’s that Steve Jobs stood on stage for the iPhone announcement and choose to point out that the antenna design is legendary, revolutionary, incredible, and then showed the world exactly where the antenna is. The fact that the world media has been so focused on the antenna is a problem of Apple’s own making. Given the tone and timbre of the press conference, it’s clear that Apple knows this. Their own duct tape solution is to give out the bumpers for free. It’s payola for those who bought the phone, love the phone, and want to keep the phone in spite of their problems with connectivity.

The other manufacturers have come out pissed. Rightfully so, but it sure is hard to defend indignation in the face of video evidence. Apple knows this. So does Nokia, RIM, Samsung. Best case result of Antennagate is that we all get the phone of our dreams because of a renewed focus on better, smarter, clearer antennas from all these manufacturers. At least we know from their responses so far that the intent may be there to do it, if only because Apple just made the target in Cupertino that much bigger.

In TechCrunch’s follow up, Arrington makes an ironically apt comparison. Job’s coming on stage to give all this data of the reality of the ecosystem, that 30-day returns at AT&T is about 1.7% — down from 6% for the iPhone 3GS, is akin to Facebook execs coming out to talk about how people really aren’t jumping off the service as a result of Facebook Privacygate 2009-10. But for all those affected — punditry, gadget hounds, privacy advocates, the works — those affected are not likely to change their opinions based on reported data from the company. People who feel betrayed by Facebook will not come back to the service as a result of a press conference. And folks like Arrington will continue to be as venomous as ever of the iPhone.

Anandtech has been leading the charge with data-driven coverage of this whole mess. After the iPhone iOS 4.0.1 update which mixed up all the bar data display across iPhones, they posted some terrific graphs which compare the dBm mapping to bars displayed to cover just what has changed on the phone and how it will help to convey more clearly what level of coverage you might be able to expect in a certain area.

So then, as long as Apple is trotting out the dog and pony show about their antenna labs, where was this data from them? If Anandtech is able to produce such terrific analysis as an external party, it seems only natural to have even greater expectations of Apple. Just because the Blackberry or Nokia drops two bars has no effective comparison to the iPhone dropping two bars without those dBm comparables — they’re just bars, tiny pixels that (as far as I understand it) have little relation to actual connectivity at all. On TWiT 255, Jerry Pournelle and Spencer Webb remind us that on digital phones, bars mean little; that a more effective indicator would be a lightbulb. If it’s on, you have signal. If it’s off, you don’t.

[UPDATE: Dammit. Gruber and Aaron Swartz beat me to this little bit of wisdom. I hate being late to the party.]

I got my iPhone 4 the day before it launched. I’ve dropped one call. I was talking to my dad, and driving through an area at the top of Sylvan Hill on highway 26 in Portland. With my iPhone 3Gs, I’d drop calls there every single day. With the iPhone 4, I’ve dropped only one, in spite of regular use in that area. Other than that, the phone has absolutely out-performed all my previous iPhones. I have a bumper, but I rarely use it. Yes, I’ll likely go get the refund Apple is offering for it, just cause, you know, 30 bucks.

Still, my impression here is not that Apple has perpetrated some kind of crime on consumers. I really do believe that Apple is learning as they go along based on data they’re collecting in real time. This is a monster of their own creation and is more a result of the death grip they have on their own communications, testing, and public relations policies than anything else. It’s a trade-off, and if you’re going to build policy around secrecy, this is the no-win scenario you have to be willing to confront. Kobayashi Maru, indeed.

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/09/the_singapore_grand_prix.html

Of particular note, make sure to look at 11 and 23, both taken with a tilt-shift lens to great affect.

Content is still king. Talk all you want about new media, but someone has to write the content, and someone has to like the content so that advertisers will spend money to cozy up to the content. Yes, I know there’s plenty of content online. Does it serve the community and world? Or does it serve the ego of the writer?

True and true. We are in an ad-subsidized world. It would be royally great if subscription content services could compete in news distribution, but they simply do not scale.

That said, current research indicates that the burgeoning online ad sales game is taking off in spades. JupiterResearch (via CNET) recently reported that 2008 will boast 20% growth in the online advertising space while offline advertising does the Shrinky-Dink. Of course, when you look at raw numbers, there is still room to grow. Online ads represent only about 9% of total ad spending in the US, forecasted to hit 14.3% by 2013. Lots of headroom there — one could say, so much headroom that the downside is the very, very large, gaping maw of a gap between that 14.3% and the other 86% that’s in the air out there to be claimed.

And that really is the story here, more than anything else…

Granted, the Internet has given some very talented people their 15 minutes of fame. They may write well, and have enormous talent with video and audio. But do they have a compass? Can they be bought with a freebie, a pat on the back or the neighbors’ praise?

The Internet is in the process of giving rise to a new breed of journalist thanks to all these layoffs in mainstream media. This is an important shift, because it centers on the people who report the news, not the ego-bloggers and serial editorialists.

For example, take a look at Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo. Josh started the site as a personal platform for his political views. The site has turned into a news portal for political journalism supplied by a network of journalists. He’s still got the leftist blog, but the site is a destination for millions each year to keep up with left-bent political action.

Even more robust: The Huffington Post. As strange as I think Arianna Huffington is, she is openly working to create a network of solid reportage that rivals mainstream media. She’s built a network of citizen reporters around the world who are able to cover breaking news with speed and accuracy that rivals all but the biggest networks — and on that point, not for long.

If America’s great experiment in democracy is to survive, a free press (broadcast, etc), one that doggedly tracks the actions of government and the powerful, is the only protection we have from those who could evenutally undermine freedom as we have known it.

Outlets will continue to close, to re-org, to downsize. That’s the fundamental nature of change. But journalists will always be journalists, whether they are working for CNN or Arianna Huffington. They report the news. This will not change.

What will change is our base habit around news consumption, for a while. See, convergence is happening on more fronts that will impact media than just changing business models that throw a wrench in mainstream media dominance. Luckily, the end result may be more transparent than we think.

The first is technology. Right now, we can look at what is happening with media delivery systems like YouTube, Vimeo, BitTorrent and the like and build a personal broadcast system where consumption takes place more on your computer than your TV. And once it’s on your computer, it’s on your iPhone, your Blackberry, wherever. The pendulum will swing back as more and more cable and telecom operators penetrate the suburbs with their high-speed data, pulling coax in favor of fiber to the home and making those computer media streams ubiquitous across screens. The changing media hegemony is not about the decline of one TV screen in the living room. It’s about the virulent increase in the number of screens all around us, all the time.

And with more screens, comes more content. I should say, the need for more content. This should sound familiar to anyone who switched from rabbit ears to cable in the 90′s. As our technical capacity to shove signal into our homes increased exponentially, so did our need for more content to fill that signal. And so was born about 1,000 channels of nonsense to supplement the 3 channels of value on our cable bills. Those being Comedy Central, Sci-Fi, and Porn, of course, in no particular order.

What this increase in signal has done for news junkies is massive. Think about it this way…

The first Gulf War ushered in the era of 24-hour, round-the-clock cable news and catapulted the news channels from kitschy obscurity to mainstream competitor in about 48 hours. The viewing habits of your average news junky were pretty predictable: turn it on, keep it on, glue yourself to it.

New media journalism offers the same benefit to news junkies on a virtually unlimited content spectrum. Streaming news video from multiple sites, multiple freelance journalists, multiple war zones, all delivered in high def wherever your screens may be.

But the new media business model is even more interesting. A smart outlet with a good network of stringers can start subsidizing news production with direct ad contracts much more efficiently than the current model.

Things will change. Things will likely get worse before they get better. But there is a model in the offing that will at once upset the current system and offer something even better for consumers with every bit of the investigative and research talent that the best houses support today.

As it happens, as I’m writing this I’m catching up on This Week in Tech since I’ve been on vacation for the last few weeks. In TWiT 150, Leo Laporte and guests Jason Calacanis, Tom Merritt and Dwight Silverman have a fantastic discussion on just this issue — old media embracing and extending the new in reportage — it’s worth a good listen.

This is more of a cardinal law of organic self-promotion, and less of a journalistic technique. But it flies in the face of Lacy’s interview strategy: put herself in the middle of every story, the sun around which all her subjects orbit. On this last note, it’s certainly time to stop talking about her, even as an object lesson.

In this personal interview with a YouTuber Omar Gallaga, I think she says it all — and highlights through what she doesn’t say just how backward it is to call her a “journalist.”

http://www.viddler.com/explore/allfacebook/videos/13/

For more Sarah Lacy goodness, head here: Facebook is All Grown Up. In it, she takes her low-brow sorority chiq to turn an ‘interview’ between her and a grown-up into a name-drop-a-thon in which she completely destroys the thread of the discussion by turning herself into a pundit.

This is not a discussion of Sarah Lacy as an accomplished media personality. It’s a sad reality check on the level of acceptable behavior that comes with finding yourself both a reporter of news and a celebrity yourself.

With Zuckerberg, the audience was not amused. Enough so that many began to yell out questions themselves, rather than listen to Lacy’s self-aggrandizing inner-circle-speak. Her public response in the interview? “You guys try doing what I do for a living. It’s not as easy as it looks, OK?”

Where Sarah went sideways.

1. She shunned any healthy respect for her audience. From the interview questions, and the direction she took the discussion early on, it was clear she had her own agenda for the Facebook founder and showed little interest in the caliber of both social and technical expertise in the room. To be fair, Zuckerberg likely had put some constraints on the kinds of questions Lacy could ask — it’s a reasonable PR expectation. But her dismissal of the audience heckling showed a rampant disrespect for her listeners and her role in addressing their needs.
2. She is not a humble person. I had never followed Sarah Lacy. I’d heard of her and read her blog from time to time when linked. In catching up on her work, it is clear that she is a media personality first, and a journalist a very distant… let’s say… fifth. She’ll be a great addition to “Inside Edition” one day. Once the audience revolts, concede and rebuild the relationship. Simply spitting in the fire will not put it out.
3. She pretended it never happened. On her Twitter feed: “seriously screw all you guys. I did my best to ask a range of things.” That, for Lacy, appears to be where the story ends. In the post-keynote interview between Zuckerberg and Lacy, the interview falls soundly back into PR speak, her nodding acceptance of his every word punctuated with a resounding “Uh-huh” precisely ever three seconds. Her questions completely ignorant of the events preceding this interview, which had occurred minutes prior on the keynote stage.

Becoming a savvy interviewer takes a great deal of media training and experience in front of a camera. If her ego can handle it, this experience is a ripe learning opportunity on how to handle yourself professionally, maturely, clearly, and confidently online, in the media, on camera, and in life.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism compared stories on user-news sites with content from traditional news sources. A key finding: The news agenda of the user-sites — Reddit, Digg and Del.icio.us — was markedly different from that of the mainstream press. Many of the stories users selected didn’t appear anywhere among the top stories in the mainstream media coverage studied.

Shock and awe indeed. This is covered in full at journalism.org. The cognitive dissonance here stems from news organizations’ need to keep the lights on, while the populace is, in most cases, interested in being informed. The challenge: a cursory glance across any of the social sites bears little in terms of news I need to know. Let’s see… top “World & Business” headlines right now on digg.com…

OK, so I’m interested in Ron Paul and Castro. But 7 Underwater Wonders of the World? You build me an underwater city as a weekend getaway at the foot of the Mariana Trench, and we can talk.

Such is, ironically, the situation with David Westin, current president of ABC News. Now, my experience with corporate lawyers on one hand, and my experience in the newsroom on the other, and there’s just no way to make this math work.

Yet, somehow, by all current measures and standards for broadcast news, it does. A decade ago, Westin stepped into the presidency and has maintained healthy development of news programming over the years. As a newsman, he’s learned the business from some of the best; Peter Jennings, Charlie Gibson, Barbara Walters to name a few.

What struck me most about his talk today was his overall tone of contrition. On Iraq: “We blew it.” On build-up to war and WMD’s: “We blew it.” On election projections in 2000: “We blew it. Twice.” In general, when there is a perceived failure in reporting: “We blew it.”

And that’s where he wraps up all critical failures in the field. “Whith all the changes we see in the media, there’s a temptation to be distracted from reporting,” said Westin.

In many respects, this connects directly to Harwood’s discussion yesterday on the role of newspaper reporting in the media sphere. Where TV fails, newspapers pick up some of the slack. Unfortunately, distration from reporting is perceived to happen more and more often in network television.

“The real difference between doing right and doing wrong in journalism lies in how closely we are to covering the news,” he said.

And that, according to Westin, is the thrust of his leadership in the ABC newsroom.

Take the Virginia Tech shooting, for example. The news head says that Charlie Gibson was widely lauded with critical acclaim in the media for level-headed and balanced coverage, not catering to the sensational, to the maudlin, to coverage designed to pull heartstrings. Instead, he said, they stuck to facts, driving toward who the assailant was, how he was afflicted psychologically, and how the University was equipped to deal with such situations.

Westin is on the Internet bandwagon. “The Internet offers the possibility of greatly expanding our newsgathering capability,” he said.

Take the Tom Foley/Page story, for example. As it originally hit ABC, the story was not ready for prime time. They posted the brief on the Internet and within hour were flooded with tips from other pages saying that they were insulted ABC would post that Foley was simply “overly friendly.” The story built itself before their eyes thanks to those following on the net.

Westin’s position is that the Internet becomes a bellweather, an audition stage for stories to make it to the big screen. At the same time, he laments the in depth reporting that is afforded print journalists. To me, there’s a contradiction — and opportunity — in there somewhere.

Imagine an ABC that leveraged its considerable breadth of reach around the globe and used the website as less of a test-bed and more of a place of reportage. This morning’s lead stories on ABCNews.com? Killer rains, Iraq, and John Edwards and his wife in a street fight with Ann Coulter.

ABCNews.com stories demonstrate what all three major network websites offer: TV reporters writing snack stories not fit for broadcast. Let’s see what happens when these sites become true journalistic assets. Oh, and don’t forget the iPhone.

Two more points stuck out for me. The first was the more obvious ethical issue: when is the reportage coming out of Iraq no longer worth the personal sacrifice we’re asking our journalists to make there? His take: when the value of the reporting is no longer worth the risk involved, they’ll pull out of Iraq. Note, according to Westin: “We’re not there yet.”

The second point I found interesting has nothing to do with the war, the news, or reporting at all. During the Q&A, an audience member asked if being in the Disney stable posed ethical questions for Westin in leading a news organization.

The advantages, he says, are significant.

When 9/11 happened, we went on the air obviously commercial-free, but we went on the air for about four-and-a-half days straight, 24 hours a day, and we preempted everything on the network. We commissioned millions of dollars in expenses immediately without ever calling anybody, and the only thing I ever heard from Disney was, “How can we help you?”

So, there’s the issue of resources. Clearly, had they been a stand-alone news organization without the rich uncle, things would have been different. But what about editorial sanctity?

People think I get calls all the time from our corporate headquarters saying, “Cover that story;”"Don’t cover the story.” That never happens. Now that’s because they’re really good people or maybe it’s because they know that, if that ever did happen, it would be an explosion. There’d be a huge scandal. But I can tell you, that doesn’t happen.

OK, so Disney pays the bills, and they don’t question or influence your editorial process. It’s a match made in heaven, right?

The problem is a different problem. We are about a $600 million business, in terms of our costs every year. Compared to the Walt Disney Company, that’s almost miniscule. And as a reult, this is not like the Sulzbergers owning a newspaper, or the Grahams owning a newspaper, where the news organization is at the center, the core of what drives the company and what they care about. This good news is they leave us alone. The bad news is the CEO of the compnay has a lot more important things to do…”

I’ll be damned if I can find just how many people visit Disney parks each month. But here’s a loose point of comparison. Since opening in 1967, approximately 500 million people have seen the Pirates of the Carribbean exhibit. How many people does the ABC News organization reach each month? 200 million.