One of the case studies I use in lectures about media ecology is how newspapers in the 1950s adapted to the emergence of television. But actually there’s an even better example — which is how newspapers adapted (or failed) to the challenge of radio. The WSJ has a lovely example of this in a piece by L. Gordon Crovitz prompted by a new biography of Barney Kilgore, the editor who transformed the Journal in the 1940s.

As the remaining city newspapers rethink themselves, editors and publishers might consult a road map for how newspapers can live alongside new media that was drawn up more than 50 years ago by Bernard Kilgore, outlined in a new biography by former Journal executive Richard Tofel, Restless Genius: Barney Kilgore, The Wall Street Journal and the Invention of Modern Journalism.

Kilgore had remarkable judgment early about the journalistic issue of our day: how readers use old media, new media and both. When Kilgore became managing editor of the Journal in 1941, he inherited a business model that technology had undermined. Founded in 1889 to provide market news and stock prices to individual investors, the Journal lost half its circulation as this basic information became widely available.

Kilgore observed that then new media such as radio meant market news was available in real time. Some cities had a dozen newspapers that had gained the Journal's once-valuable ability to report share prices.

The Journal had to change. Technology increasingly meant readers would know the basic facts of news as it happened. He announced, “It doesn’t have to have happened yesterday to be news,” and said that people were more interested in what would happen tomorrow. He crafted the front page “What’s News — ” column to summarize what had happened, but focused on explaining what the news meant.

On the morning after Pearl Harbor, other newspapers recounted the facts already known to all the day before through radio. The Journal’s page-one story instead began, “War with Japan means industrial revolution in the United States.” It outlined the implications for the economy, industry and commodity and financial markets.

If you wanted an illustration of the mindset newspapers need to cope with the challenge of the Internet, then that Pearl Harbor story is it in a nutshell.

The New York Times discovers Twitter.”Taken collectively”, it says,

“the stream of messages can turn Twitter into a surprisingly useful tool for solving problems and providing insights into the digital mood. By tapping into the world’s collective brain, researchers of all kinds have found that if they make the effort to dig through the mundane comments, the live conversations offer an early glimpse into public sentiment — and even help them shape it”.

Wow! You don’t say.

If you’re puzzled by the firestorm over Amazon’s apparent decision suddenly to block “adult” books and DVDs from searches and best-seller lists, then Rory Cellan-Jones has done a sterling job of trying to figure it out.

Fang Wu and Bernardo Huberman have done a fascinating study which seems to undermine the theory that in order to succeed in the YouTube ecosystem you need to be a prolific and persistent uploader.

The Abstract of their paper reads:

A hallmark of the attention economy is the competition for the attention of others. Thus people persistently upload content to social media sites, hoping for the highly unlikely outcome of topping the charts and reaching a wide audience. And yet, an analysis of the production histories and success dynamics of 10 million videos from \texttt{YouTube} revealed that the more frequently an individual uploads content the less likely it is that it will reach a success threshold. This paradoxical result is further compounded by the fact that the average quality of submissions does increase with the number of uploads, with the likelihood of success less than that of playing a lottery.

The researchers (who work at HP Labs in Palo Alto), studied the hit rates of 10 million videos uploaded by 600,000 users before 30 April 2008 and classified as a ‘success’ any video that came among the top 1% of those viewed.

Their finding is that “the more frequently an individual uploads content the less likely it is that it will reach a success threshold.” Why? “When a producer submits several videos over time, their novelty and hence their appeal to a wide audience tends to decrease.”

So why do people persist in the face of declining audience figures? Wu and Huberman argue that they are like gamblers, who tend to overestimate the chance of winning when the probabilities are small. (Note: professional gamblers don’t operate like that.)

I think this misinterprets the biggest driving force behind user-generated content: the fact that people like being creative, and when technology (like YouTube) provides them with an outlet for their creativity, then they use it. ‘Success’ in Wu’s and Huberman’s terms is nice; but it’s not necessarily what it’s all about.

Amazing footage showing what appears to be an outrageous, aggressive unprovoked attack by a police officer.

Ian Tomlinson, the man who died at last week’s G20 protests in London, was attacked from behind and thrown to the ground by a baton-wielding police officer in riot gear, dramatic footage obtained by the ­Guardian shows.

Even if it cannot be shown that Mr Tomlinson’s death was directly caused by this attack, it looks like GBH to me. It’ll be interesting to see how the Met/City of London Police try to avoid responsibility.

Interesting case also of citizen journalism?

LATER: Interesting blog post linking the Tomlinson case to that of Blair Peach who was killed just 30 years allegedly by a blow from one of the Yard’s ‘Special Patrol Group’.

In Peach’s day there were no hand-sized video cameras available to record the action. Today, media is much more immediate and many people carry camera phones capable of recording video. This means that any untoward action by the police during the G20 action was very likely to arrive in the public domain, just as the Guardian’s video showing the assault on Tomlinson has.

This begs the question of why the police were acting in such an aggressive and violent manner when they knew full well their actions were likely to be captured on film and beamed worldwide? The answer, to me, is simple: The police have too many bad apples in their barrels, people who are not in the job to protect people but actually prefer to bully them. They especially like to bully people who they see as ‘not one of them’. In other words, people who don’t share their often extreme views. This is a dangerous situation. It is especially so because the police force has been given many extra powers under the guise of ‘the war on terror’. Now, we are seeing them using these powers to terrorise.

I’m sorry to be a cynic but I do not believe that the policeman who was involved in Ian Tomlinson’s death will ever be brought to justice. Nor will the police aggression be reigned in as there seems to be absolutely zero political will in the leading parliamentary parties to bring their hunting dogs to heel.

Footnote: The Coroner’s verdict on Peach was “death by misadventure”.