I was on a panel at SXSW 2012 called “Con­tent and Code != Com­modi­ties,” which tried to explain and bridge the cul­tural gap between tech­nol­o­gists and media-ist. Below is some of the think­ing that inspired the panel and a mod­i­fied ver­sion of the deck pre­sen­ta­tion on Slideshare. (There are some reports about our panel, includ­ing this entry at IBM’s web­site)

Here’s the prob­lem: coders see con­tent as “stuff” and code as “art” (“Go find some writ­ers off of Craiglist.” Or “We’ll do user-generated con­tent! Yay.” While cre­ators (writ­ers, artists) see code as “stuff” and con­tent as “art.” (“Oh, just hire some devel­op­ers to build a website.”)

This is a haz­ardous atti­tude, because you end up see­ing the other side as a com­mod­ity, and inter­change­able. When they really are not. You can’t attract tal­ented folks if you view what they do as a commodity. The Inter­net is lit­tered with the detri­tus of projects which failed in part because of that (some of which I have wit­nessed first-hand.)

Hang­ing out in Sil­i­con Val­ley, I began to develop a deeper under­stand­ing of technology’s view of con­tent. It’s about low-touch and scale, where scale comes from quan­tity. Tech com­pa­nies love mea­sur­ing con­tent. You’ll note that YouTube’s first press stat is about hours of video uploaded every minute and Twit­ter has this met­ric of Tweets per sec­ond. Peo­ple in tech­nol­ogy love mea­sur­ing con­tent because it’s some­thing they can grasp. It’s objec­tive. It’s quantifiable.

This sign below is from a tech­nol­ogy com­pany try­ing to become more media-centric, try­ing to edu­cate the programmer-types about the impor­tance of con­tent. They do it partly through empha­siz­ing the large numbers.

Then below, the sign has an expla­na­tion as to what con­tent is: “Con­tent includes things like pub­lished arti­cles, pro­fes­sional videos and pho­tos. It doesn’t include home movies or party pics.” It’s telling that they have to point out the dif­fer­ence between pro­fes­sion­ally pro­duced cre­ative con­tent and user-generated mate­r­ial, for fear that peo­ple see it as interchangeable.

In Sil­i­con Val­ley, when you talk about a project, they always ask, “How are you going to scale that?”

On the other hand, the cre­ators’ view of con­tent (the media indus­try) is that it’s high-touch, about craft, and scale comes from qual­ity—hav­ing a hit (Hunger Games, Harry Pot­ter, Mad Men). Get­ting that hit is idio­syn­cratic. It’s about that 1 per­cent (really the 1 per­cent of the 1 percent).

Essen­tially every mean­ing­ful media ver­ti­cal is about high-touch: tele­vi­sion, report­ing, art, mag­a­zines, movies, pub­lish­ing, music. The cre­ative process is very relationship-based, trust-based, and yes, often seem­ingly inef­fi­cient, as a result. My tech­nol­ogy friends are always incred­u­lous when I explain to them the process by which books are sold and come to mar­ket. Even with the explo­sion of self-publishing, much of the book indus­try is still dri­ven by lit­er­ary agents con­nect­ing writ­ers with edi­tors, often involv­ing a lot of lunches and know­ing to an inti­mate degree what edi­tors like which projects. And no, this doesn’t scale very well. That’s why media com­pa­nies have poor val­u­a­tions com­pared to tech companies.

So it’s been really fas­ci­nat­ing watch­ing tech com­pa­nies shift to a more media (high touch) mind­set. The best exam­ple is YouTube invest­ing $100 mil­lion (or so) in pre­mium con­tent via part­ner chan­nels. Talk­ing to my Hol­ly­wood and cre­ator friends who are inter­act­ing with them, the cul­ture gap is pal­pa­ble. Another exam­ple is Quora. It has a mind­set of a tech and prod­uct com­pany, when I think it should really see itself more with a media bent (the stuff that mat­ters is the top 1 per­cent — or the top 1 per­cent of the top 1 per­cent — and moti­vat­ing them).

This gap in atti­tude between tech­nol­ogy and cre­ators really hit me when I was at a YCombi­na­tor demo day a while back. One startup told the audi­ence they aimed to be the “Demand Media of ebooks.” Sit­ting in the audi­ence as a writer, I was absolutely hor­ri­fied. The last thing in the world I would want to do, as a writer, is to work for a com­pany that saw my craft as a low-class assem­bly line process. But my VC friend, who was also in the audi­ence (inci­den­tally whom I knew from my col­lege paper), explained to me that that pitch was directed at investors. Demand Media had just gone pub­lic. So they under­stood it as an exit. It was a very direct appeal.

I remem­ber sit­ting there and think­ing, “Oh wow, these are not my people.”

To be sure, since then, the startup has changed its atti­tude towards the cre­ation of con­tent to value tal­ent more. Simul­ta­ne­ously, Google’s adjust­ment in its rank­ing algo­rithms has appro­pri­ately chas­tised Demand Media for its low-quality con­tent. Hah.)

Of course, jour­nal­ismy folks are guilty too of see­ing the pro­gram­ming pri­mar­ily as a technician’s job. One of the more inter­est­ing exam­ples was this post­ing from Ezra Klein on Wonk Blog look­ing for politics-obsessed programmers.

It sounds really excit­ing, but then you click through and you get this dry job descrip­tion. The respon­si­bil­i­ties include par­tic­i­pat­ing “in sys­tem test­ing efforts to ensure proper oper­a­tion of sys­tems and free­dom from defects” and col­lab­o­rat­ing “with IT staff and clients to estab­lish Ser­vice Level and Oper­at­ing Level Agree­ments that set mea­sur­able IT serve and sys­tem per­for­mance expec­ta­tions.” Not ter­ri­bly motivating.

But recently, with my work with Hacks/Hackers, a world­wide group that tries to bring tech­nol­o­gists and jour­nal­ists together, I came to real­ize cre­ators and devel­op­ers are more alike than they real­ize. In fact, they have the same over­ar­ch­ing motivation.

Both groups want to work with smart peo­ple on inter­est­ing prob­lems that have impact.

In other words, both sides are moti­vated by their craft and a desire to feel that an audi­ence is expe­ri­enc­ing their work, whether though prose or programming. This is my tiny con­tent ver­sion of uni­fied field the­ory. Of course, you have to wran­gle with what the def­i­n­i­tions of what an “inter­est­ing prob­lem” is (crowd-sourced inves­tiga­tive report­ing? real-time dis­tri­b­u­tion of mil­lions of units of con­tent? inno­v­a­tive user expe­ri­ences?) and what “hav­ing impact” is (Con­gres­sional hear­ings! Hun­dreds of mil­lions of users! Hav­ing a huge audi­ence). This obser­va­tion is a ver­sion of Paul Graham’s lovely essay about hack­ers have more in com­mon with painters than they do with com­puter sci­ence academics.

And both sides want to work with peo­ple they respect.

So that is the chal­lenge you have to pose to the other side to moti­vate them and get them to join you in what­ever project you want. So here are some thoughts we had on our panel on how to do that:

• Where you sit in the orga­ni­za­tion — geo­graph­i­cally and on the org chart — says a lot. If you respect con­tent or tech­nol­ogy, it should be reflected in the geog­ra­phy of the news­room (or what­ever) and who reports to whom.

• State things in terms of prob­lems that need to be solved, rather than solu­tions that you are order­ing the other side to do. (I was recently chas­tised for this when I wanted a Word­Press instal­la­tion and the tech folks forced me to dis­till down what prob­lem I was try­ing to solve).

Speak in a lan­guage that the other side understands.

• In talk­ing to developers/engineers/programmers/coders/hackers (what­ever you want to call them), appre­ci­ate the art in coding/programming Some­one once told me that San­jay Ghe­mawat, Google Fel­low behind many things that make Google great, wrote “code that was like poetry.” I thought that was a beau­ti­ful expres­sion. His code was ele­gant, min­i­mal­ist, but got the point across and really pushed boundaries.

• When speak­ing to cre­ative types, the part of scale to empha­size is about audi­ence, not about the process of cre­at­ing con­tent. We don’t go into media because our pri­mary moti­va­tion is to get rich. Seri­ously, there are much more reli­able ways to make money in this world. We go into writ­ing (or music or movie-making) because we have some­thing we want to say to the world. And as much as tech­nol­ogy can help us say what we want to say to the world, that’s awe­some. (YouTube, Twit­ter, Tumblr). I am always sus­pi­cious of tech­nol­ogy types who sud­denly decide they want to go into con­tent (I get asked to have cof­fee all the time to talk about busi­ness mod­els, ideas). I always push to ask them what their moti­va­tion is, to see if they “get” us. If they don’t love con­tent, they are going to have trou­ble down the line — whether in recruit­ing or audience.

• “Con­tent” is a ter­ri­ble word. In addi­tion, one of the worst terms to emerge in the last decade or so is “con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem” (CMS). As the Wash­ing­ton Post ombuds­man wrote: “It reduces the heart and soul of jour­nal­ism — sto­ries, pho­tos, graph­ics, the news — into generic ‘con­tent,’ some­thing akin to the uniden­ti­fi­able fill­ing in a Twinkie. Ick.” Word­Press, you’ll notice, does not call itself a CMS. It calls itself a seman­tic per­sonal pub­lish­ing plat­form with a focus on aes­thet­ics, web stan­dards, and usabil­ity. At the startup I work with, Upwor­thy, the “con­tent folks” are called “Edi­to­r­ial,” which is much more dignified.

• Acknowl­edge con­tri­bu­tion through bylines and cred­its. Really, the only high qual­ity place that can get away with not giv­ing bylines these days is The Econ­o­mist.

And the last point, a gen­eral piece of advice for both sides, is to ask “What prob­lem am I solv­ing for the user?”

Any­way, here is a dis­tilled and mod­i­fied ver­sion of the slide deck (if it loads. I’ve had prob­lems get­ting it to load as an embed). If it doesn’t load, click through to here: Con­tent and Cod­ing are Not Com­modi­ties. SXSW 2012 Presentation