Increasingly I believe that we in the media business doom ourselves by our devotion to quality. Before you get out the gunpowder, let me explain myself. I love excellence. Awesomeness is, well, awesome. But the premature pursuit of excellence can kill you.

I'm going to pick on my friend Howard Owens as an example, and I hope he won't mind. Howard is a multi-talented guy, but he is no Roger Black or Mario Garcia. He runs a website called The Batavian in upstate New York.

The site's design is adequate. It's not beautiful. It's not stunning. It could easily be both beautiful and stunning, because both Roger and Mario do beautiful and sometimes stunning design work, and they can be hired.

So Howard could run to his bank, take out a big loan, hire somebody like Roger or Mario to do the design, then hire some contract programmers to convert the design into a website theme, and make his website presentationally excellent.

So why doesn't he do this? Because there's no ROI. No return on that investment. In fact, that investment would likely crush his business.

The unpleasant reality of business is that it's all about money. If you're going to try to build a new business, you'd better obsess about your pennies. And here's the thing: If you divert energy, time and money away from the things that count and into things that please you but don't count very much, you will fail.

If the typical media company sets out to do something new, the process usually follows this pattern:

1. A committee is formed.
2. The committee looks at a lot of work other people have done (benchmarking).
3. Many lists of features and functions are made.
4. Committee members attempt to draw examples.
5. Someone comes to their senses and brings in an actual designer.
6. The designer creates sample designs.
7. The committee critiques the designs.
8. The committee debates at length and demands changes in pursuit of conflicting visions of excellence.
9. If not totally fatigued, GOTO line 6.
10. Now that the design process has been halted by fatigue, the implementors are brought in.
11. It is discovered that the arbitrary design doesn't respect the realities of implementation.
12. Much time and energy disappears into the implementation work.
13. The committee continues to invent new ways to make the product better and interrupts the implementation with the new really-great ideas.
14. If not totally fatigued, GOTO line 12.
15. Key features and functions are cut because the project has taken far too long and is way over budget -- if there was a budget.
16. The new product is pushed into production.
17. The company begins to discover whether the whole idea was brilliant, disastrous or somewhere in between.
18. It's somewhere in between -- but it has no chance of covering its development costs.

The guys from Harvard Business School, which of course is devoted to excellence, will tell you this is a path to your doom. In fact, they have already told you that. And it's not exactly a new concept in the world of software development, either.

So why do we keep doing it?

Because we care, and because we want to do the right thing, and because "good enough" just seems wrong. We're motivated by what Daniel Pink calls "challenge and mastery," and mastery has to do with excellence.

The startup guy possessed by what he thinks is a Big Idea will follow a shorter path. If he has the skills, it will look like this:

1. Look at what other people have done (benchmarking).
2. Make some notes.
3. Grab cheap, free, off-the-shelf tools.
4. Put together a rough working prototype.
5. Launch.
6. Gather real-world results.
7. Modify the product.
8. If not either rich or bankrupt, GOTO line 6.

He doesn't follow this shorter path because he doesn't care about quality or excellence. He does it because he's desperate and doesn't want to starve.

If you're paying really close attention, you'll notice that lines 6 through 8 aren't in the big media company's process. That's a shame, because they're the important ones. Pre-launch business plans are always wrong. Or at least almost always. You can't argue your way to success in a committee meeting, or design your way to success on a whiteboard. You have to execute and iterate.

Quick and dirty doesn't have to mean ugly, or badly implemented, or sloppy. We have within our grasp today cheap and free tools that make it easy for a nimble developer to do work that is awesome and excellent without breaking the bank. But we have to be on guard against the seductiveness of excellence, and always keep our focus on the reality that doing the wrong thing really well won't lead us to success.

I was poking around in the Library of Congress photo database and ran across these Lewis Hine photos of children who worked at the cotton mills in Augusta, Ga.

A doffer boy in the Globe Cotton Mill, January 1909

They're a stark reminder of why we have government regulation of business practices. Corporations have no heart, no soul, no conscience and no values. Lawless capitalism leads to scenes like these.

Child workers outside the Enterprise Mill, January 1909

Eunice Hadwin earned 75 cents to $1 per day as a spinner. When photographed, she already had been working for five years.

King Mill workers lived in these conditions in Gregtown, an Augusta neighborhood

Lest we feel too complacent -- after all, haven't we abolished child labor? -- consider that globalism has simply exported the problem to countries with weak regulation. Next time you pick up a pair of $75 jeans at the mall, think about who did the cotton spinning, denim weaving, cutting and sewing. And it's not just children, of course; the Chinese worker who assembled your Apple iPhone may have committed suicide over working conditions.

There was a time when American journalism was the gold standard of the world. We created the world's first journalism school. Newspapers and, later, broadcasters all over the world looked up and tried to emulate our practices. But no longer.

I've traveled the world quite a lot in the last 10-15 years. I've read local newspapers and watched TV news in places where journalism once was illegal -- Moscow, St. Petersburg, Prague, the former East Germany. Around the world I've seen the influence of the American tradition, and it is a powerful force for good.

Then came Rupert Murdoch.

We live in an open society. Usually what immigrants contribute to American culture enriches us all. But Rupert Murdoch, immigrant from Australia, has injected into American journalism a vile corruption, a willingness to abandon the truth and embrace falsehood when it's convenient and profitable.

Murdoch is a smart and ruthless businessman, and he's used his skills to create a highly successful national TV network. He's taken over newspaper after newspaper, culminating in wresting control of the Wall Street Journal from the Bancroft family. And he's put together a 24-hour cable news channel that could have been an awesome force for good ... but instead has become a source of poison pumped right into the heart of journalism and American democracy.

My disgust with Fox News is not political. I'm not offended that opinion is being mingled with facts. I'm offended that opinion is being constructed on top of fabrications, inventions, falsehoods, lies.

The most recent and most egregious example, the libelous attack on Shirley Sherrod of Athens, Georgia, is just part of a series from a pseudo-news organization that has become part of an assembly line producing mind poison.

Let me be perfectly clear. This is not about left and right. It's about right and wrong.

Here's how the assembly line works. Someone invents a lie. The lie gets passed around among liars, growing and getting momentum. Fox News then gives it a big ride into orbit. Talking points are distributed to TV hosts, TV guests, politicians and bloggers. The chorus gets louder and louder. Soon it makes no difference whether it's true or false, because the poison is so thoroughly injected into the civic conversation that permanent damage has been done -- to individuals, to organizations and institutions, and ultimately to America.

It's like Henry Ford's factory. No one person actually builds the car. Everybody just adds a bolt here, a nut there. And there are plenty of nuts.

Andrew Breitbart, the blog network operator who posted the deception in the Sherrod case, can feign innocence. Somebody else edited the video. He never saw the whole speech. Fox News can feign innocence. It just reported on the controversy. Somebody else is always at fault.

There are legitimate journalists working at Fox, trying to practice actual journalism in a corrupt vessel, but that only makes this more tragic. People, get out. Find an honorable job.

One wall of my office is covered with notes and diagrams trying to divine the future. Nobody can get it right, so I'm actually not worried about that. What's important is to generate views that are useful and helpful in planning. In that spirit, I thought I should share a few "predictions" and see what you all think. I'm thinking of the period 2015-2018. It's close enough to be real, but far enough to give the imagination some running room.

1. Tablet-like experiences will achieve parity with computer-like experiences. I'm counting future "smartphones" as tablet-like, not just the note/slate size, and referring to usage on the network, not simply having one in your pocket or bag. Computers with keyboards are not going away, certainly not anytime in the near future, but designing for the tactile experience of tablets and touchscreens will be at least as important as any other form of information presentation design.
2. Voice interfaces -- recognition and synthesis -- won't dominate but they will become a serious part of the mainstream. Piping that data through realtime translators will begin to make the Star Trek Universal Translator real. And it'll keep the gang down at the NSA amused.
3. Computer chips won't get much faster in clock speed. Instead, the multicore processors that emerged over the last decade will sprout more cores, shrink in size and power consumption, and push their way from the desktop down into tiny devices.
4. Networking costs will drop and mobile usage will soar. If you thought we had an information surplus and a lack of scarcity in 2010, you ain't seen nothin' yet. Everything really will be everywhere. McLuhan would recognize the network as an extension of the mind. Old fogeys will continue to complain about a loss of quality, how the world has gone to hell, and how you kids should get off the lawn.
5. Apple, Google and Amazon will be big winners. Microsoft, Yahoo and any company that behaves like a newspaper will be big losers.
6. Your media experience won't be tied to a device -- it'll be tied to your identity. Current state will live in the cloud and you won't know or care where the data is stored. Quit reading or listening on one device, switch to another, and pick up where you left off. Your pocket screen, tablet, 28-inch desktop display and 55-inch wall "television" are all portals into a single experience.
7. Radio, television and print won't go away, but they'll be pushed to the margins. Real-time "channels" will still exist and be significant as discovery venues, but they'll be in the minority in terms of usage.
8. All your devices will be location-aware. All your devices will recognize and network with each other without configuration hassles. All your experiences will become personalizable based on your preferences, your behaviors, your location and your current activities.
9. Having lost their role as discovery media, any print or print-like "newspapers" that survive will have adapted to focus on other roles, such as explanation, briefing, and entertainment.
10. "News" will no longer be a good label for the work done by any surviving "newsrooms," as networked word-of-mouth will have stolen nearly all of the "breaking news" function from professional journalism. Smart "editors" will focus on understanding, which they will support through facilitating and providing context, analysis, explanation and debate, and perhaps re-embrace civic action.