Category Archives: Media ecology

The Great Paywall of Wapping

Posted on by

I also wrote a Comment piece for this morning’s Observer about the now-operational Murdoch paywall. Excerpt:

When the web took off, most newspapers were bewildered by it. Fearful of falling behind, they began to put their content online – for free. Insofar as there was a business model behind this, it was the belief that: "If we build it they will come." And if the readers came there would surely be a way of "monetising" all those resulting eyeballs.

For the most part, however, the monetisation lagged way behind the costs of online publication and newspapers began to think that, while the web might indeed turn out to be the future, most of them would be insolvent long before the online bonanza materialised.

One unintended consequence of this triumph of hope over experience was that several generations of internet users came to believe that online content comes free. As every economist knows, in a competitive market, the price tends to converge on the marginal cost of production, which, in the case of online news, appeared to be zero.

But it only appeared to be zero because newspapers weren't charging a price that corresponded to the costs of production. In fact, they weren't charging anything at all. As a result, we have no idea whether people would be prepared to pay for online content published on the web and, if so, what a realistic price might be. The great thing about Murdoch's experiment is that it may provide some answers to these questions…

Open data and the live tube map

Posted on by

This morning’s Observer column.

For me, the most arresting image of the week was not the photograph of General Stanley McChrystal, looking drawn and ascetic in combat fatigues, en route to his dismissal by his commander-in-chief, but a map of central London showing the underground system. On each line can be seen little yellow blobs. Blink and you discover that each blob has moved a fraction. You can see it for yourself at traintimes.org.uk:81/map/tube/.

The yellow blobs are, of course, tube trains. The fact that they're moving across the map indicates that this is, as near as dammit, real-time information about their positions on the network. And it's public data: you can sit at your computer in San Francisco or Accra and know how the trains on the Central line are doing just now.

How you react to this provides a litmus test for determining where you are on the technology spectrum…

On becoming a news buyer

Posted on by

Benedict Evans is thinking of buying a daily newspaper. Here he explains the thinking behind this revolutionary act.

So how do I know what news to read? Google News (a bogeymen of newspaper proprietors even though hardly anyone actually uses it) indexes 4500 ‘English language news sources’ and tells me what they’re writing about. But Google’s algorithm thinks that ‘Wales Online’ is my first source for news on the UK budget – it knows what the stories are, but not where I should read them. I don’t need someone to tell me what stories are important, but rather where they are being written about with insight and judgment. For that Google is even counter-productive – the effect of SEO on editorial sites is to make them hard to read and harder to understand. This is why iPad apps, which can dispense with SEO, are easier to use than their associated websites, and it is why Apple launched ‘Reader’ in the new version of Safari.

What I want is something curated. After 15 years of gorging on news online, I would rather like to step back, slow down and outsource my news. I would like a sophisticated and intelligent person to choose what stories I ought to read today. I’d like coverage of major UK and international news by people who understand it and aren’t just rewriting wire content and press releases. In other words, I want a newspaper, not news.

I might even pay.

I have heard a great deal about how news is a commodity, and about how a newspaper that goes ‘pay’ is doomed because all the content is available for free elsewhere. I’m not sure that I agree. Google does indeed have 4,500 English language ‘news sources’, but how many of them will say anything worth reading about George Osborne’s emergency budget later this week? How may will cover the mayoral race in London? The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel might (or might not) be a fine paper with admirable SEO, but it leads today on lobbying shenanigans in Wisconsin. On the news that matters to me there are surprisingly few good news sources…

Actually, his point about curation is spot on. It’s why people like me pay quite a lot for subscriptions to the Economist, the New Yorker, the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books. And why I buy the Guardian (disclosure: I write for the Observer, which is owned by it). It’s because I’m busy and value the editorial sieve that these publications have.

Getting stuff done

Posted on by

Or why the mass media’s attention-deficit syndrome is so pathetic — and so damaging. Great post by Andrew Sullivan.

What are the odds that Obama's huge success yesterday in getting BP to pledge a cool $20 billion to recompense the "small people" in the Gulf will get the same attention as his allegedly dismal speech on Tuesday night? If you take Memeorandum as an indicator, it really is no contest. The speech is still being dissected by language experts, but the $20 billion that is the front page news in the NYT today? Barely anywhere on the blogs.

This is just a glimpse into the distortion inherent in our current political and media culture. It's way easier to comment on a speech – his hands were moving too much! – than to note the truly substantive victory, apparently personally nailed down by Obama, in the White House yesterday. If leftwing populism in America were anything like as potent as right-wing populism – Matt Bai has a superb analysis of this in the NYT today – there would be cheering in the streets. But there's nada, but more leftist utopianism and outrage on MSNBC. And since there's no end to this spill without relief wells, this is about as much as Obama can do, short of monitoring clean-up efforts, or rather ongoing management of the ecological nightmare of an unstopped and unstoppable wound in the ocean floor.

I sure understand why people feel powerless and angry about the vast forces that control our lives and over which we seem to have only fitful control – big government and big business. But it seems to me vital to keep our heads and remain focused on what substantively can be done to address real problems, and judge Obama on those terms. When you do, you realize that the left's "disgruntleist" faction needs to take a chill pill…

The Wired parenting problem

Posted on by

Interesting (and sobering) piece by Julie Scelfo in today’s NYT.

Much of the concern about cellphones and instant messaging and Twitter has been focused on how children who incessantly use the technology are affected by it. But parents’ use of such technology — and its effect on their offspring — is now becoming an equal source of concern to some child-development researchers.

Sherry Turkle, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Initiative on Technology and Self, has been studying how parental use of technology affects children and young adults. After five years and 300 interviews, she has found that feelings of hurt, jealousy and competition are widespread. Her findings will be published in “Alone Together” early next year by Basic Books.

In her studies, Dr. Turkle said, “Over and over, kids raised the same three examples of feeling hurt and not wanting to show it when their mom or dad would be on their devices instead of paying attention to them: at meals, during pickup after either school or an extracurricular activity, and during sports events.”

Dr. Turkle said that she recognizes the pressure adults feel to make themselves constantly available for work, but added that she believes there is a greater force compelling them to keep checking the screen.

“There’s something that’s so engrossing about the kind of interactions people do with screens that they wall out the world,” she said. “I’ve talked to children who try to get their parents to stop texting while driving and they get resistance, ‘Oh, just one, just one more quick one, honey.’ It’s like ‘one more drink.’ ”

New Yorker Editor: “I opted for clueless”

Posted on by

New Yorker editor, David Remnick, on the vexed question of paywalls.

“I was going to be damned if I was going to train 18-year-olds, 20-year-olds, 25-year-olds, that this is like water that comes out of the sink,” he said, about The New Yorker.

Mr. Remnick was speaking at a breakfast for advertisers and some reporters in the Condé Nast Executive Dining Rooml last Tuesday morning. He said that if you want expensive reporting, then you’ll have to pay for it. Let’s just say that Mr. Remnick probably isn’t going to get a lunch with Jeff Jarvis or Arianna Huffington anytime soon and talk Web religion.

“There have been many stages of Web evangelical thinking. You must do this! You have to do that! Or you are clueless,” clucked Mr. Remnick.

“Remember the days of information wants to be free?” he continued. “So therefore the only thing that anyone with any brains could do with a magazine like The New Yorker is to put the whole thing online and give it away. Give it away! And if you were against that in some way or you said, ‘Wait a minute,’ you were–wait for it–clueless.

“I opted for clueless,” he said.

Mr. Remnick spoke about the magazine's digital edition (which is its own animal, accessible for a $39.95 fee for people who don’t subscribe to the print edition) and how some content is still free on the web. He's figuring it out, just like everyone else. He’s not in a rush. But when he does figure it out, you will be paying. Two weeks ago, Mr. Remnick told the London-based Arabic paper Asharq Al-Awsat that there are “millions” of people who will willingly pay for the news.

Well, I’d be willing to pay for the New Yorker . In fact, I already do — through the nose for the print edition. But it’s surprising that his magazine’s legendary fact-checkers didn’t pick him up on one point — tapwater isn’t free. We pay water rates or water charges for it.

Next stage in the battle for corporate control of the Net

Posted on by

Interesting story in today’s NYT.

After a towing company hauled Justin Kurtz’s car from his apartment complex parking lot, despite his permit to park there, Mr. Kurtz, 21, a college student in Kalamazoo, Mich., went to the Internet for revenge.

Outraged at having to pay $118 to get his car back, Mr. Kurtz created a Facebook page called “Kalamazoo Residents against T&J Towing.” Within two days, 800 people had joined the group, some posting comments about their own maddening experiences with the company.

T&J filed a defamation suit against Mr. Kurtz, claiming the site was hurting business and seeking $750,000 in damages.

Web sites like Facebook, Twitter and Yelp have given individuals a global platform on which to air their grievances with companies. But legal experts say the soaring popularity of such sites has also given rise to more cases like Mr. Kurtz’s, in which a business sues an individual for posting critical comments online.

The towing company’s lawyer said that it was justified in removing Mr. Kurtz’s car because the permit was not visible, and that the Facebook page was costing it business and had unfairly damaged its reputation.

Some First Amendment lawyers see the case differently. They consider the lawsuit an example of the latest incarnation of a decades-old legal maneuver known as a strategic lawsuit against public participation, or Slapp.

The label has traditionally referred to meritless defamation suits filed by businesses or government officials against citizens who speak out against them. The plaintiffs are not necessarily expecting to succeed — most do not — but rather to intimidate critics who are inclined to back down when faced with the prospect of a long, expensive court battle.

I was wondering how long it would take before this kind of thing started to happen. What it highlights is the need for pro bono lawyers who are willing to provide the initial cover that will prevent legal intimidation from having the desired effect.

It’s television, Eric, but not as we know it

Posted on by

This morning’s Observer column.

And now for something completely different: Google TV. Yes, you read that correctly: Google TV. Now I know what you’re thinking. You already have enough TV channels, most of them running Friends, Desperate Housewives or reruns of Top Gear. Why on earth would you want to watch a channel in which a T-shirted nerd with an IQ in the low thousands explains how to code an algorithm for complex linear programming in seven lines of Perl while behind him one of his more subversive colleagues is gleefully demonstrating on a whiteboard how it can be done in four?

Relax. Google TV is not a channel, it’s a platform, ie a base on which things can be built. In ordinary life, platforms are physical objects, such as the drilling rig that is causing BP such grief, but the Google guys don’t do physical. They’re geeks, so their idea of a platform is a large piece of software called an operating system. A while back, they created such a platform for mobile phones…

Behind the Digger’s Paywall

Posted on by

The FT has an interesting peek behind the impending Murdoch paywall.

“It looks a lot like a newspaper, which I don’t think we’re apologising for,” said Tom Whitwell, assistant editor of the Times. “The article pages we think are simple and clean, and easy to read.”

He talks of a “news hierarchy”, with fewer stories thrown at the reader than most newspaper websites. “We are not going to show you all the news,” he says, comparing that favourably with “Google News showing you 4,000 versions of the same thing. We are giving you our take on the news.”

The Times’ stories will not be among those 4,000, with not even a headline visible in the Google index (or indeed that of any other search engine). Peculiarly, the existing TimesOnline site will live on after the paywall goes up for an indeterminate time, although it won’t be updated – an admission, perhaps, of how baked into the web its links already are.

The funniest thing in the piece is the burbling of Danny Finkelstein, the engaging Times Comment Editor:

“We can project the Times with all its tradition and iconography, but on the web,” he enthused.

Few of the Times employees presenting their plans used the word ‘paywall’ unprompted. But Mr Finkelstein insisted this barrier would not prevent him from sharing links to his articles on Twitter or cut the newspaper out of a wider online conversation. Rivals without the protection of a paywall “won’t go viral, they will go out of business”, he said.

Although there were hints that extracts might occasionally be visible to non-subscribers in the future, the Times’ content will remain tightly locked up with not even a first paragraph to tease in new customers. This apparently aids the “clarity” of the offering, in contrast to the less binary model offered by the Wall Street Journal and the FT.

“We are unashamed about this,” said Mr Finkelstein. “We are trying to make people pay for the journalism…. I want my employer to be paid for the intellectual property they are paying me for.”

Aw, shucks. It was nice knowing these guys. But I guess they’ll find jobs outside the paywall.

I liked what Steve Hewlett said about it on the Today programme this morning. To paraphrase him, everyone in the newspaper business is cheering them on and hoping it will work — but thinking that it won’t.

So what is Google TV, exactly?

Posted on by

Engadget’s answer.

Google TV isn't a single product — it's a platform that will eventually run on many products, from TVs to Blu-ray players to set-top boxes. The platform is based on Android, but instead of the Android browser it runs Google's Chrome browser as well as a full version of Flash Player 10.1. That means Google TV devices can browse to almost any site on the web and play video — Hulu included, provided it doesn't get blocked. It also means that Google TV devices can run almost all Android apps that don't require phone hardware. You'll still need to keep your existing cable or satellite box, however — most Google TV devices won't actually have any facility for tuning TV at launch, instead relying on your existing gear plugged in over HDMI to do the job. There's a lot of potential for clunkiness with that kind of setup, so we'll have to see how it works in person.

Yep. Judging from my experience with the (deeply flawed) T-mobile Pulse Android phone, we certainly will. Here’s my prediction: common platform, lots of different hardware, nobody taking responsibility for ensuring that the thing works as a whole, millions of pissed-off customers.