The New York Times innovation problem has a name: "Consciousness Shift"

The New York Times innovation report points out the readership problem that mainstream media like the NYT, the Washington Post and the Guardian are going through and which the report identifies as an issue of "audience development" set in a wider blurred setting called "digital media."

Through this article we will demonstrate our thesis statement that identifies the New York Times innovation problem as a problem of "Consciousness Shift."

Not surprisingly, after months of investigation led by a team of eight who are among the most "forward thinking" NYT writers, they came to the conclusion that the more urgent need was "to focus on the core of the New York Times."

That conclusion sparked outrage in the NYT newsroom, as the immediate reaction even cited in the report was that "Focusing on the core is harder than starting something new because every proposal threatens tradition and turf."

Such a reaction is the kind of attitude that has been preventing our civilization from evolving for about 2000 years.

It's called "fear of Self-Empowerment" or on a deeper level "Fear of Consciousness" and it made me think of Umberto Eco's "The name of the Rose" a 1980's novel that wonderfully portrays the very reason behind the birth of religion on this planet:  Fear.

This is an abstract from the movie adaptation of the book:

The starting point of the Innovation report is that over the last year the Times "has watched readership fall significantly". I warmly invite you to read the abstract below which is the introductory paragraph of the NYT Innovation report:

"The New York Times is winning at journalism"

 Our daily report is deep, broad, smart and engaging

-- and we've got a huge lead over the competition"

"At the same time, we are falling behind in a second

critical area: the art and science of getting our

journalism to readers."

Dear New York Times Editor, trying to disguise readership with something weirdly defined as "art and science" is not very honorable coming from a historical institution like yours.

"Getting your journalism to readers" is not "a second critical area," nor it can be mystified or confused with "art and science" because it has nothing to do with witchcraft nor is it something that can be exiled to an unspecified "secondary scientific/artistic area."

Such a redundant essay reminded me of the time when physics scientists at the beginning of the Twentieth Century discovered that Consciousness was involved in the dynamics of matter creation and they were so shocked by what they found out that they had to confine such a disturbing phenomenon within a different type of physics.

The discovery was so dreadfully appalling to their fragile consciousness that they felt the compelling need to call it by a different name. That's why Quantum physics still at today is cut off from "official physics."

Just as is the case with a law of physics, Readership is a direct consequent of Consciousness:

No Consciousness, no readers. End of story.

You can try to hide behind bad faith claims like "the endless upheaval in technology"

Or nonsense like: "Digital media is getting more crowded, better funded and far more innovative"

But at the end of the day you will have to face yourself in the mirror and try to convince the person you're looking at.

Turning towards Consciousness means beginning to connect to the world's collective feelings and looking at the world without "tradition and turf," that is to say you have to start telling stories without all the filters you’ve been adopting along the course of your entire history.

That is to say that if you don't want to completely lose your audience you have to jump ahead of the Consciousness Shift and take the lead.

Obviously if you are stuck with "tradition and turf" I strongly suggest you to drop out of the competition because there is no way out here other than tuning yourself into Consciousness mode.
You can find a million excuses not to. You can call it digital upheaval or digital divide, but what you need to do is to become aware that its correct name is Consciousness Shift. Despite its roboant sound, its implications are not as exotic as you might think. Actually it just means that "you have to follow the vibe," where the vibe is yourself and yourself only.

I understand the concept might sound hostile to someone who has buried consciousness under the concept of “digital upheaval” but once you are willing to catch the shift, surprising things will follow, like solving your readership problem for example.

To be perfectly honest I am quietly optimistic regarding the New York Times situation, because among the world's major newspapers that have been mentioned in the Innovation Report the NYT distinguished itself for its cautious behavior and its attitude of sticking to a strict fact-based policy.

As a matter of fact the NYT never made a real faux pas in comparison to other media like the Guardian or the Washington Post, whose fact-checking policy can be compared to an improv show.

What's even more appalling regarding these two papers is that they almost seem to share the same newsroom because their headlines are often exactly the same.

In fact I was almost flabbergasted when I read in the Innovation Report that competition in the news-industry has become more aggressive and the NYT Innovation analyst affirmed the Guardian and the Wash Post adopted "aggressive strategy."

Strategy?

This is the Washington Post on April 8, 2014:

From this headline you can judge yourself the level of "strategy" put in place by what used to be one of the most respected media worldwide.

The headline reads: "Want people to think you're smarter?"

This is not a joke, this is the Washington Post. 
Remember Woodward and Bernstein? The Watergate scandal? It's the same paper.

Let's analyze this headline deeper: the statement expressed in the headline starts from the assumption that "you got to look smarter" even before "being smart".

Actually the very concept of "being" here is completely trampled on, because according to the Washington Post what really matters is "to make people think" you are smart.

Hence, it doesn't matter if you are a mentally disabled individual. What really matters is other unspecified people's thoughts over your "smart appearance."

Not only "being smart" is absolutely out of discussion here, but the article jumps to a further disturbing level because it aims at leading the reader to assume that what really matters is what an undisclosed number of unidentified people, somewhere in the space-time tissue, might, one day, THINK OF YOURSELF. Without even knowing you but only looking at yourself and at your abilities "to look so intelligent."

Let's see:  Do I want other people (who are not me), to see me as a smarter person?

Ok, let's put it for a second that me, Mr. Nobody, I follow the Washington Post's Cro-Magnon's advice and I start to look smarter than what I think I actually am. What then?

I mean once "my smart look curtain" dramatically falls down what then?

How do I keep looking smart once the people I want to impress go beyond that veil of appearance and realize I am a total idiot?

Does the Washington Post provide a solution for that kind of "Consciousness death" like some after-life pill or something that goes beyond how to look or to impress others?

Do you realize the Washington Post is promoting external appearance disguised by Self-Empowerment?

In the era of Consciousness and Self-Awareness the Washington Post Editorial Policy on Self-Empowerment is to focus yourself on "how you look,” which in terms of self-awareness means absolutely nothing but killing your own Consciousness by hiding it under "what other unknown people might think of me one day."

Is this the Washington Post’s audience development strategy?

Rather this appears to be a totally pathetic attempt to deny the very existence of human Consciousness, which is the default equipment of every living human being. Even if it has to be considered pathetic in its form, this is nonetheless but a lame attempt to completely annihilate the reader's consciousness.

And the New York Times is afraid by the strategic audience development put in place by the Washington Post.

I wonder why.

Audience development is an advertising concept. Most of the time, people who have no advertising background and absolutely no knowledge of audience development (as in the case of the Washington Post) they have a sort of makeshift attitude towards something that actually requires a professional background and years of study and dedication.

Below you see a basic audience-development diagram that shows you how a concept has to be modeled upon the audience segment you want to target.

Usually our client tend to prefer advertising campaigns that fall within the ME/PRODUCT area, while in today's market it's the southeast area designated as BENEFITS/AUDIENCE that makes the difference in terms of audience.

In today's market the targeted audience segment has to immediately perceive:

(1) The product was shaped just for them

(2) The immediate benefit they would receive from buying it.

Diagram Courtesy:  GLD Marketing    www.gldmktg.com

This is just a very basic standard you have to stick to when you work with Audience Development Professionals in a professional environment.

If you go back to the Washington Post headline, it is absolutely and immediately clear that the message they want to sell to the audience is not only off target, because it doesn’t provide a single benefit, but it is actually a self-destroying message, hence it won't ever sell. 
Not in a million years.

Here's another pearl:

This is the Guardian's audience development strategy; we can define it as "the denial of human consciousness, of free will and of quantum physics in one shot".

"Does smoking weed make you a better parent?"

We should start here from the Quantum physics, whose basic assumption is that "it is the observer who creates reality". 
Indeed the famous double-slit experiment demonstrates that "when the observer doesn't watch matter behaves like a wave." Quantum physics was discovered 200 years ago and the double slit experiment is a sneak peek into the power of Consciousness but still at today news media struggle to familiarize with it. Or better they simply don't care because they think it's something that only relates to nerdy scientists and not to our everyday's life and certainly not to the scientific-art of audience development.

Instead, here we have a headline that is just as self-destructive as the Washington Post's article on "looking smarter." It basically starts from the assumption that the reader's consciousness and her/his free will simply do not exist.

This is the Benefit-oriented/Self-Empowerment strategy of the Guardian in terms of Audience Development.

What the New York Times must be aware of, is that a major Consciousness Shift is occurring on this planet and if you pretend this is not happening, you are not only going to completely lose your audience but you are taking the risk that you might end up in a no-time zone like the Bermuda Triangle, where time doesn't flow and everything is stuck, including your own Consciousness.

Consciousness Shift means that a major change is occurring within every single human being on this time-string.

You have to be aware that Consciousness is not an inclusive club like Religion; some people will be left out of this shift. The final result is that the people on the planet will be split in two separate dimensions. On one side you will have those people who were awake enough to "catch the wave." On the other side you will have those who defend "tradition and turf" and who believe that an external reality does exist outside of your own Consciousness. 

The immediate consequence of such event would be that you should stop using stone-age words like "supernatural" or "paranormal" or "truth" and you have to accept the power of your own Consciousness which is by default eternal.

You should open your weltanschauung and shift your point of view not on a global scale but on a Multiversal scale. 
Such a shift involves accepting concepts like "Multidimensional Consciousness", "Life in the Multiverse" and the presence of different time dimensions, which for some reason, despite the fact that their existence was scientifically demonstrated by Albert Einstein almost hundred years ago, it is still a struggle for news media to take it into account.

When you affirm that "Flight 370 likely went down," you are not adopting a cautious attitude towards the facts because to this day there is still no conclusive evidence that the plane actually "went" somewhere. 

Despite mainstream science showed the existence of other time dimensions, according to which planet earth is not just three-dimensional but it has at least 12 different dimensions, this hypothesis has not even been considered by the New York Times. 

My question is Why?

Entering the Consciousness shift means implying that such an event might actually have happened.

Obviously you can pretend that such a shift doesn't exist or that Consciousness is just an empty word and you can keep up being stuck by fear and terror of your own Consciousness but you have to consider the chance that not accepting such a change is actually occurring, might involve the possibility for you to end like those poor people that two thousand years ago were so frightened by the power of Consciousness and so weakened by their inferiority complex that they disguised their own abilities with the work of the devil or the supernatural.

In practice they were so frightened to discover the power of consciousness that their inferiority complex let terror and fear taking over themselves. They needed a safe haven to try to control their unstoppable self-empowering instinct which scared the hell out of them and led them to feel the need to build a safe recovery called religion and buried their consciousness within.

Those monks suffered of very low self-esteem and they could not conceive power as something related to their own self, hence they started to think that an external reality existed outside of themselves. They were convinced the power they felt inside of their consciousness did not come from within but was to be attributed to an external superior entity called god. And that those self-empowering feelings had to be attributed to the Evil One: the Devil.

Strange to say but this human attitude is still alive and well in the present day. The same mistake was made by those scientists who two hundred years ago discovered how consciousness affects matter and were so scared by it that they created a brand new branch of physics to distance themselves from that nightmarish reality.

You have to realize that fear (which has no correspondent feeling in the rest of the Multiverse, hence is earth's most typical product) characterized the whole history of our civilization and it is the very reason for our civilization's major setbacks in all fields that involve knowledge.

The entire human history has to be seen as a continuous struggle between Consciousness and Fear, fear that has resulted in the inability to accept Consciousness as the very fundamental ground upon which the whole Multiverse is based.

Starting to accept what Middle Ages philosophies defined as supernatural as natural could be the first step towards Consciousness Shift and the right direction in terms of audience development.

On the contrary, holding up "Tradition and Turf" in the New York Times it would be like keeping the Holy Inquisition's flag waving over New York city and the whole world.

If you want to survive in the era of Consciousness you have to get rid of such dead weight policy . Especially if you are the New York Times and you are supposed to be the guide of our Civilization through the new era we have just entered.

E Pluribus Unum




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