Category Archives: Media ecology

End of the peer show

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ITV, a TV company in terminal decline, is dropping its only remaining approximation to a high-brow show. Germaine Greer has a nice piece about it in the Guardian, in which she says:

The South Bank Show archive will be essential viewing for anyone aiming to give an account of the cultural cross-currents of the late 20th century — essential if hardly sufficient. Its successors are the current generation of arts magazine shows, grabs at important subjects, presented by celebrities, shot upsoide down and backwards, with competing soundtracks, arts journalism as art itself, processed for a public with a three-minute attention span.

The miracle, I suppose, is not that the SBS has finally been axed, but that it survived for so long in the cultural desert of contemporary British commercial television.

How Google does it

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If you came on US Patent #7508978 you might stifle a yawn. Certainly you’d never suspect that it might be a design for radically changing our communications environment. Here’s what the Abstract says:

Detection of grooves in scanned images

A system and method locate a central groove in a document such as a book, magazine, or catalog. In one implementation, scores are generated for points in a three-dimensional image that defines a surface of the document. The scores quantify a likelihood that a particular point is in the groove. The groove is then detected based on the scores. For example, lines may be fitted through the points and a value calculated for the lines based on the scores. The line corresponding to the highest calculated value may be selected as the line that defines the groove.

Eh? And yet it turns out that this is the basis for Google’s amazingly efficient book-scanning technology.
In a lovely blog post, Maureen Clements explains how:

Turns out, Google created some seriously nifty infrared camera technology that detects the three-dimensional shape and angle of book pages when the book is placed in the scanner. This information is transmitted to the OCR software, which adjusts for the distortions and allows the OCR software to read text more accurately. No more broken bindings, no more inefficient glass plates. Google has finally figured out a way to digitize books en masse. For all those who’ve pondered “How’d They Do That?” you finally have an answer.

LATER: How the Internet Archive scans books. As you can see from the movie, it’s pretty labour-intensive, despite the robotics.

The Two Cultures: fifty years on

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This morning’s Observer column.

…Over the years, Snow’s meme has been subjected to criticism and abuse, but the idea of mutually uncomprehending cultures still seems relevant to understanding why important segments of our society are struggling to come to terms with a networked world. In our case, the gap is not between the humanities and the sciences but those who are obsessed with lock-down and control, on the one hand, and those who celebrate openness and unfettered creativity on the other. The odd thing is that one finds arts and scientific types on both sides of this divide….

America’s newest profession?

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Hmmm… There’s an interesting article in the WSJ which makes some intriguing but implausible claims:

In America today, there are almost as many people making their living as bloggers as there are lawyers. Already more Americans are making their primary income from posting their opinions than Americans working as computer programmers or firefighters.

Paid bloggers fit just about every definition of a microtrend: Their ranks have grown dramatically over the years, blogging is an important social and cultural movement that people care passionately about, and the number of people doing it for at least some income is approaching 1% of American adults.

The best studies we can find say we are a nation of over 20 million bloggers, with 1.7 million profiting from the work, and 452,000 of those using blogging as their primary source of income. That’s almost 2 million Americans getting paid by the word, the post, or the click — whether on their site or someone else’s. And that’s nearly half a million of whom it can be said, as Bob Dylan did of Hurricane Carter: “It’s my work he’d say, I do it for pay.”

I’m afraid I don’t believe the numbers in the article. The main problem, I think, is the inferences made about the number of bloggers who actually earn a living from their work. I’m sure that lots of them earn pin-money or better from Google AdSense etc. But if ‘earning a living’ means pulling in, say, $50k or more a year, then I haven’t seen many of them in my corner of the blogosphere. See here for another sceptical response which criticises, among other things, the WSJ’s credulity about Technorati surveys.

The WSJ (to its credit) later appended a note at the end of the piece, saying in part:

People have raised questions about the calculations on the numbers of bloggers for hire. First, I was surprised at how few studies there are on this and I believe there definitely should be more. So perhaps in the future I will do some original research, but for this piece we took the best we could find and referenced every number so people would know where they came from.

There is no question that the blogosphere, fast-growing as it is, has yet to nail down one way to measure itself or gauge its activity. But the most comprehensive sources we could find, conducted by reputable professionals, say there are over 22 million bloggers out there; and that 2% of bloggers are making their living blogging. Do the math, and you get roughly 450,000. It’s a fast-growing group and we ignore their needs, and influence, at our peril.

As far as the $75,000, the Technorati report says that of those bloggers who had 100,000 or more unique visitors, the average income is $75,000. True, it’s not the median, but it is the average. We can quibble about how easy it is to make this kind of money — but the point is, the huge potential is there.

So where’s the value-added?

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I’m getting bored with reporters who do very little real reporting complaining about how the Internet is destroying journalism. So is Jeff Jarvis, who’s been on the road for two and a half weeks and I guess is fed up watching CNN. Here’s a terrific blast from him:

Every day, with everything they do, the key question for journalists and news organizations in these tight – that is, more efficient – times must be: Are you adding value? And if you’re not, why are you doing whatever you’re doing?

Sitting in a hotel room, cruising by CNN the other day, I caught a behind-the-scenes segment that wanted to show us just how cool it is to be a reporter dashing from story to story. It did the opposite for me. I was disturbed at the waste.

The correspondent – I won’t pick on him; it was just his turn to play show monkey – stood in front of the new Mets’ stadium to tell us that there’s controversy about naming it after a sponsor. It was just a stand-up. There was no evidence of reporting as he was standing alone in a parking lot. The knowledge was a commodity. Anybody could have read it. But they wanted to scene and invested a correspondent and crew to get it. Then he dashed to the UN because there was a vote happening. But he didn’t run to report. He ran to the bureau to do another stand-up with another background. Again, what happened in the vote was commodity knowledge. Anybody could have read it.

So there is a reporter not reporting. But, of course, that is hardly unique to CNN. How much of the dwindling, precious journalism resource we have – on national and local TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines – goes to original reporting, to real journalism? How much goes to repetition and production?

Spot on.

The future of online news: where are the business models?

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Good, robust common sense from Jeff Jarvis.

At the end of the day, what we’re trying to do is make hard, unemotional business judgments. The question is not whether content should be free or whether readers should pay; “should” is an irrelevant verb. The question, very simply, is how more money can be made. What will the market support?

The other question, then, is how much journalism the market will pay for? What kind of journalism will it support? This doesn’t necessarily start with the current spending on current newsrooms. Part of the equation, especially in the other models, will be new efficiencies (e.g., do what you do best, link to the rest) and new opportunities to work in collaboration and in networks.

This is a good, hard-headed essay. And I couldn’t agree more about the need to ban the ‘should’ word from these conversations. Too many print journalists — and even some journalism professors — are locked into normative dead-ends. We need to move on. The question is: what will work in the new ecosystem?

Hashmobs

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Nicholas Carr was, predictably, not impressed by the #amazonfail business:

Flashmobs were okay, but they had a couple of big downsides. First, they required you to go outside. Second, you had to, well, be in a flashmob.

Hashmobs solve both problems by transferring the flashmob concept into a purely realtime environment. A hashmob is a virtual mob that exists entirely within the Twitter realtime stream. It derives its name not from any kind of illicit pipeweed but from the “hashtags” that are commonly used to categorize tweets. Hashtags take the form of a hash sign, ie, #, in front of a word or word-portmanteau, eg, #obama or #obamadog. The members of a hashmob gather, virtually, around a particular hashtag by labeling each of their tweets with said hashtag and then following the resulting hashtag tweet stream. Hashmobbers don’t have to subject themselves to the weather, and they don’t actually have to be in proximity to any other physical being. A hashmob is a purely avatarian mob, though it is every bit as prone to the rapid cultivation of mass hysteria as a nonavatarian mob….

Life After Newspapers — and spelling

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Just browsing this WashPost piece by Michael Kinsley when I came on this para.

It is tempting, but too easy, to say the problems of newspapers are their own fault. True enough, the industry missed a whole armada of boats. If newspapers had been smarter, or moved faster, they might have kept the classified ads. They might have invented social networking. But that’s all hindsight. I didn’t think of these things, nor did you. Judging from Tribune Co., for which I once worked, the typical newspaper executive is a bear of little brain. Until recently, little brain was needed. Even now, to say the newspaper industry has no problems that a busload of geniuses couldn’t solve is essentially saying that the industry’s problems are insoluable. Or at least insoluable without help.

Hmmm… Insoluable indeed. Maybe someone should donate a spell-checker to the poor impoverished Washington Post. But that reference to “a bear of little brain” comes from Winnie the Pooh, whose spelling — you will recall — was “good spelling but it wobbles”.

That aside, it’s a nice piece.