Category Archives: Media ecology

Looking for the mouse (contd.)

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Following my post about Tom Steinberg and 4IP (in which I quoted the story about a kid looking for a mouse behind the TV), Karl-Martin Skontorp pointed me at this essay by Clay Shirky, in which he tells a similar story:

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”

Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

The Great Experiment

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Hooray! We’re moving closer to a planned experiment that will tell us if — and how much — people are prepared to pay for online content. The Guardian report says:

The Sunday Times is set to launch a standalone website – and is considering charging readers for its content.

Plans have not been finalised, but executives at Sunday Times publisher News International are considering the charges to fall in line with the publicly stated desire of Rupert Murdoch, the chairman and chief executive of parent company News Corporation, for his newspapers around the world to follow the lead of the Wall Street Journal by charging for content.

Sunday Times content is currently published online alongside its daily sister title the Times under the umbrella Times Online website brand.

One source familiar with the situation said the new Sunday Times website could launch within three months. Another said it would be later in the year and that many crucial decisions about the site had not been finalised.

MediaGuardian.co.uk understands that a final decision on how to charge readers to look at content – whether via subscriptions or micropayments – has not been made…

Oldweek — the new, new Newsweek

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Michael Kinsley has a delicious evisceration of Newsweek‘s frantic attempt to re-invent itself. Sample:

What, for example, is this graphic on the letters page? Why, for that matter, is there still a letters page? It’s the first page of content you come to. Five one-paragraph comments on the issue published two weeks ago–room for little more than a thumbs up or down. On the Internet, thousands of people have their say immediately and at length. And, then, a self-parody: “Your thoughts on swine flu”–the cover story two weeks ago–“in six words.” Hali McGrath of Berkeley, California, submitted, “Blah, blah, swine flu, blah blah.” And Newsweek published it.

But back to the graphic. It lists what I guess are five articles from the issue two weeks ago, each attached to a percentage. A thin line heads east from the second item (“16% ‘The Path of a Pandemic'”), turns south, and ends up at a pie chart (38 percent neutral, 21 percent positive, 41 percent critical). A tiny footnote says, “Does not add up to 100 due to letters received on other topics.” Oh, I get it, I think. This is a breakdown by topic of letters–letters!–received about the issue two weeks ago, plus a breakdown of one topic (possibly the cover?) by approval. So now you know that twice as many people who wish to comment on “The Path of a Pandemic” than those who wish to comment on “Tom Daschle and Mitt Romney on Health Care” know where to find a stamp. Fascinating…

Actually, the ‘new’ Newsweek“ is so feeble that one almost feels sorry for its staff. What it illustrates, I think, is how difficult it is for journalists trained in the print tradition to make the transition from the old, privileged, we-know-best, ecosystem to one in which you’re only as good as the value you add to what we already know. The only print magazines I read that are still succeeding to add value are: the Economist, the New Yorker, the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books.

Quote of the day

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Jon Gisby, Channel 4’s director of new media and technology, received a useful insight into the mindset of the digital natives from his six-year-old son, Josh, who he recently observed digging around behind the family TV.

“What are you looking for?” asked Dad.

“The mouse,” said Josh.

[Source]

Publish on Scribd and name your price

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From this week, Scribd is allowing authors to charge for content. According to the NYTimes,

The Scribd Web site is the most popular of several document-sharing sites that take a YouTube-like approach to text, letting people upload sample chapters of books, research reports, homework, recipes and the like. Users can read documents on the site, embed them in other sites and share links over social networks and e-mail.

In the new Scribd store, authors or publishers will be able to set their own price for their work and keep 80 percent of the revenue. They can also decide whether to encode their documents with security software that will prevent their texts from being downloaded or freely copied.

Authors can choose to publish their documents in unprotected PDFs, which would make them readable on the Amazon Kindle and most other mobile devices. Scribd also says it is readying an application for the iPhone from Apple and will introduce it next month…

Mainstream media and bloggers — remind me: which are the parasites?

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Lovely Salon.com piece by Glenn Greenwald, prompted by the ruckus over Maureen Dowd’s lifting of a para from a well-known blog.

Typically, the uncredited use of online commentary doesn’t rise to the level of blatant copying — plagiarism — that Maureen Dowd engaged in. It’s often not even an ethical breach at all. Instead, traditional media outlets simply take stories, ideas and research they find online and pass it off as their own. In other words — to use their phraseology — they act parasitically on blogs by taking content and exploiting it for their benefit.

Since I read many blogs, I notice this happening quite frequently — ideas and stories that begin on blogs end up being featured by establishment media outlets with no credit. Here’s just one recent and relatively benign example of how it often works: at the end of March, I wrote a post that ended up being featured in many places concerning the unique political courage displayed by Jim Webb in taking on the issue of criminal justice reform and the destruction wreaked by our drug laws. The following week, I was traveling and picked up a copy of The Economist in an aiport, which featured an article hailing Jim Webb’s political courage in taking on the issue of criminal justice reform and the destruction wreaked by our drug laws.

Several of the passages from the Economist article were quite familar to me, since they seemed extremely similar to what I had written — without attribution or credit…

Meetings 2.0

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I must be getting old: I find myself agreeing with Steve Ballmer. There’s a terrific interview with him in today’s NYT. I particularly like this bit:

Q. What’s it like to be in a meeting run by Steve Ballmer?

A. I’ve changed that, really in the last couple years. The mode of Microsoft meetings used to be: You come with something we haven’t seen in a slide deck or presentation. You deliver the presentation. You probably take what I will call “the long and winding road.” You take the listener through your path of discovery and exploration, and you arrive at a conclusion.

That’s kind of the way I used to like to do it, and the way Bill [Gates] used to kind of like to do it. And it seemed like the best way to do it, because if you went to the conclusion first, you’d get: “What about this? Have you thought about this?” So people naturally tried to tell you all the things that supported the decision, and then tell you the decision.

I decided that’s not what I want to do anymore. I don’t think it’s productive. I don’t think it’s efficient. I get impatient. So most meetings nowadays, you send me the materials and I read them in advance. And I can come in and say: “I’ve got the following four questions. Please don’t present the deck.” That lets us go, whether they’ve organized it that way or not, to the recommendation. And if I have questions about the long and winding road and the data and the supporting evidence, I can ask them. But it gives us greater focus.

I’d go further. When I’m Supreme Leader all the chairs will be removed from committee meeting rooms.

The serious point behind Ballmer’s Meetings 2.0 is not so much that it’s efficient (which it is) but that it means that each meeting adds value or moves things on. And, in a way, that’s the whole point of our networked information ecosystem. One can often assume nowadays that anyone who’s prepared to put in a little effort can be as well informed as you are. So the question then becomes: how can s/he or we add value and move us on?

I tried to make this point in my seminar last week at the Reuters Institute in Oxford. I said I was sick and tired of seeing an expensive TV journalist being filmed outside the door of 10 Downing Street telling me stuff that I already know. I want him or her to move the story on, not waste airtime and bandwidth in useless summary or colourful waffle.

The other really interesting point to emerge from the Ballmer interview is that his favourite ‘management’ book is Bill Collins ‘Built to Last’.

Networked news

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This morning’s Observer column.

As newspapers fold, the hunt is on for a workable business model for online news. Lots of things are being tried, but none of them provides the revenue growth needed to offset the income siphoned off by changes in media consumption patterns and the diversion of advertising revenues to the web.

Things have got so bad that Rupert Murdoch has tasked a team with finding a way of charging for News Corp content. This is the “make the bastards pay” school of thought. Another group of fantasists speculate about ways of extorting money from Google, which they portray as a parasitic feeder on their hallowed produce. And recently a few desperadoes have made the pilgrimage to Capitol Hill seeking legislative assistance and/or federal bailouts for newspapers.

It’s difficult to keep one's head when all about one people are losing theirs, but let us have a go…

Coincidentally, there have been (at least) two other pieces on this general theme this week — an uncharacteristically Daily Mail-type rant by Bryan Appleyard in the Sunday Times, and an excellent, balanced article in the Economist.

And I’ve been Slashdotted! In the old days, that would mean that the Observer’s servers would fall over.

Later: This is probably all due to Cory blogging the column in BoingBoing. And the biggest irony is that the piece didn’t appear in today’s paper edition of the Observer. No idea why, but I suspect a glitch in the paper’s content management system.

WSJ’s new code of conduct for journalists

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Partial list reads:

* Consult your editor before ‘connecting’ to or ‘friending’ any reporting contacts who may need to be treated as confidential sources. Openly ‘friending’ sources is akin to publicly publishing your Rolodex.

* Let our coverage speak for itself, and don’t detail how an article was reported, written or edited.

* Don’t discuss articles that haven’t been published, meetings you’ve attended or plan to attend with staff or sources, or interviews that you’ve conducted.

* Don’t disparage the work of colleagues or competitors or aggressively promote your coverage.

* Don’t engage in any impolite dialogue with those who may challenge your work — no matter how rude or provocative they may seem.

* Avoid giving highly-tailored, specific advice to any individual on Dow Jones sites. Phrases such as “Travel agents are saying the best deals are X and Y…” are acceptable while counseling a reader “You should choose X…” is not. Giving generalized advice is the best approach.

* All postings on Dow Jones sites that may be controversial or that deal with sensitive subjects need to be cleared with your editor before posting.

* Business and pleasure should not be mixed on services like Twitter. Common sense should prevail, but if you are in doubt about the appropriateness of a Tweet or posting, discuss it with your editor before sending.

So that’s the end of networked journalism, then.

[Source]

The New New Deal

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You’d need to be a psychiatrist to understand what’s going on in the heads of US Republican politicians at the moment. At the moment, for example, many of them are rewriting history to ‘prove’ that FDR’s New Deal was a ‘failure’. Russ Daggatt has a nice rant about this on Mark Anderson’s blog.

Former New York Senator and UN Ambassador, Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”

Increasingly, it seems, Republicans are trying to create not only their own facts but their own reality. This is particularly problematic when the mainstream media treats every issue as some kind of polarized “Crossfire” debate, with “balanced” treatment of “both sides.” Hence, we can end up with mainstream media “debates” over things like evolution, global warming and even torture.

A few years back Paul Krugman commented on the media desire for “balance” over objectivity. As an example he said that if Bush proclaimed the world was flat, the headline in the New York Times the next day would be “Shape of The World, Views Differ.” Indeed, that would be a “balanced” portrayal of the “debate” over the shape of the Earth. But objectively, the world is spherical. Stating that fact is not “bias” (except to the extent reality is a bias). Even if a large group of people – like the entire remaining rump of the Republican Party – disputed that fact, the New York Times would be doing its readers a disservice to give the impression that there was any credible, objective basis for the dissenting view.

At the Future in Review Conference in San Diego last year, Harvard professor James McCarthy, former co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was asked how many of the world’s top 1000 climate experts would disagree with the basic scientific consensus that the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations over the last 50 years to levels not seen in 650,000 years is primarily anthropogenic. He replied, “Five.” (He also told an amusing anecdote about a colleague being asked the same question at a conference and answering, “Ten.” McCarthy went up to him later and asked how he got to ten. The guy replied that he could only think of five – the same five as McCarthy – but doubled the number to provide a margin of error.) That is about as solid a scientific consensus as you are ever likely to get for such a complex set of phenomena. Yet it is almost an article of faith in Republican circles these days that the threat from global warming is at best greatly exaggerated and at worst a “hoax.”

I’m not even going to waste time with evolution. If you think there is a legitimate debate over evolution, don’t even bother to read further…

Russ’s piece has two interesting graphs. One shows that GDP rose steadily through FDR’s time in office. The other graph is of US national debt as a percentage of GDP.

Rather puts Obama’s measures in context, doesn’t it?