Category Archives: Media ecology

Tweetie pie

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This morning’s Observer column.

Twitter’s been around for ages, but it’s now gone ‘mainstream’ – ie, been taken up by the brain-dead media, possibly because they’ve discovered that celebs have Twitter accounts. Jonathan Ross (@wossy in Twitterspeak) used it to send dispatches to his admirers during his banishment from the airwaves. I’ve just checked and he has 156,092 followers. But this horde is dwarfed by Stephen Fry’s (@stephenfry) 321,578.

This gives Mr Fry a certain amount of clout. A few months ago he pronounced on the BlackBerry Storm, a new phone being touted by Vodafone. “Shockingly bad,” he tweeted. “I mean embarrassingly awful. Such a disappointment. Rushed out unfinished. What a pity.” Given that many Twitterers are, like Mr Fry, gadget freaks, his tweets effectively shut down that corner of the market.

Suddenly companies are beginning to think that having a lot of Twitter followers might be a good idea…

LATER: Jason Calcanis’s stunt generated an inspired spoof about Twitter “premium accounts”.

The future of news (and of lots more besides)

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Three interesting pieces have appeared recently, each of which sheds light on the seismic changes underway in our media environment.

First of all, Emily Bell had a perceptive column on the TMA (“too much stuff”) syndrome, and the $64 billion question:

How does an industry that has force-fed all manner of output to an audience that can’t digest it draw back? The economic downturn will make this confrontation easier to resolve. The way out is for a narrowing at one end of the distribution pipe – the creation end. Production companies in the UK are now bigger and more powerful than broadcasters, not least because of the over-commissioning spree.

There is as much good television now as there has been for a long time – Iran and the West, The Devil’s Whore, Mad Men, Red Riding – yet it barely has space to breathe. We are moving, probably for all manner of creative content, toward the “iPlayer model”. The number of shop windows and the level of output will drop dramatically with closure and consolidation, but the opportunity to consume will exponentially expand through technology.

Rationally this is something every media business knows, but moving towards it is incredibly painful and often extremely expensive. Not to mention slow. The light at the end of the tunnel is the possibility that, when all of the current attrition is over, there will still be enough revenue from advertising to support the very best of the content. Shrinkage is the new black, even the stylish Lygo can see that. The war against too much stuff has officially begun. The challenge is to make sure we are left, when the gloom lifts, with the right stuff.

Then there was Clay Shirky’s essay (about which I’ve already blogged) in which he highlighted the blind-spot that disables most media discussion about the future of news, namely the failure to distinguish between form and function. What matters is news and journalism, not the survival of one particular form (the newspaper) which — for historical and technological reasons — happened to become the dominant way of fulfilling that function until recently. Journalists are obsessed with the importance of preserving the newspaper, rather than the thing that newspapers existed to produce. This, it seems to me, is a pretty widespread misconception, and it applies to many fields other thn journalism. Libraries, for example. Travel agents. And maybe universities.

Finally, there was Steven Johnson’s speech to the South by Southwest Interactive Conference in Austin. This is another example of trying to take the long view of what’s happening, rather than constantly engaging in panic-stricken extrapolation from short-term trends. One thing I especially liked is that he shares my view that ecological metaphors are the best tools for discussing what’s happening.

The metaphors we use to think about changes in media have a lot to tell us about the particular moment we’re in. McLuhan talked about media as an extension of our central nervous system, and we spent forty years trying to figure out how media was re-wiring our brains. The metaphor you hear now is different, more E.O. Wilson than McLuhan: the ecosystem. I happen to think that this is a useful way of thinking about what’s happening to us now: today’s media is in fact much closer to a real-world ecosystem in the way it circulates information than it is like the old industrial, top-down models of mass media. It’s a much more diverse and interconnected world, a system of flows and feeds – completely different from an assembly line. That complexity is what makes it so interesting, of course, but also what makes it so hard to predict what it’s going to look like in five or ten years. So instead of starting with the future, I propose that we look to the past.

To use that ecosystem metaphor: the state of Mac news in 1987 was a barren desert. Today, it is a thriving rain forest. By almost every important standard, the state of Mac news has vastly improved since 1987: there is more volume, diversity, timeliness, and depth.

I think that steady transformation from desert to jungle may be the single most important trend we should be looking at when we talk about the future of news. Not the future of the news industry, or the print newspaper business: the future of news itself. Because there are really two worst case scenarios that we’re concerned about right now, and it’s important to distinguish between them. There is panic that newspapers are going to disappear as businesses. And then there’s panic that crucial information is going to disappear with them, that we’re going to suffer as culture because newspapers will no long be able to afford to generate the information we’ve relied on for so many years.

When you hear people sound alarms about the future of news, they often gravitate to two key endangered species: war reporters and investigative journalists. Will the bloggers get out of their pajamas and head up the Baghdad bureau? Will they do the kind of relentless shoe-leather detective work that made Woodward and Bernstein household names? These are genuinely important questions, and I think we have good reason to be optimistic about their answers. But you can’t see the reasons for that optimism by looking at the current state of investigative journalism in the blogosphere, because the new ecosystem of investigative journalism is in its infancy. There are dozens of interesting projects being spearheaded by very smart people, some of them nonprofits, some for-profit. But they are seedlings.

So here are some principles for thinking intelligently about our emerging media environment:

  • Think ecologically
  • Think long-term. What’s happening might be as profound as what happened after the emergence of print — and look how long it took for those effects to work their way through society.
  • Don’t confuse existing forms with the functions that they enable. It’s the functions that matter. Forms may be transient, the product of historical or technological circumstances.

    • Er, that’s it

    LATER: Andrew Keen isn’t entirely impressed by the Shirky essay.

    But for all the invigorating qualities of Shirky’s prose and ideas, I found the piece to be just a tad depressing. The weakness of his skeptical argument is also its great strength. Since we don’t know the ending to the news business saga, we can’t know for sure if this will have a happy ending. Shirky acknowledges that “many of these models will fail” and that “over time” some of these experiments might “give us the reporting we need”. I’ve bolded and itallicized that “might” because I suspect that Shirky isn’t himself completely convinced that a real solution will emerge. And that’s a depressing thought because a society without journalism isn’t a good society.

    And the question that I’d throw back at the laissez-faire Shirky is this: how absolutely should we stand back and trust the free market to come up with a solution to the crisis of the news business? We certainly aren’t trusting this unfettered market to solve Wall Street’s financial crisis. Nor are most Americans happy with a free market in healthcare that has left millions of people without insurance. So if we can agree that the news business, like healthcare and the financial sector, is too important to fail, then shouldn’t the government be taking a more active gardening/watering role in ensuring that at least one or two of today’s digital flowers fully bloom in the future?

    Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable

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    If you’re interested in journalism and its future in a digital age, then read this essay by Clay Shirky. It’s the most eloquent, succinct and compelling statement of the problem that we’ve had to date. Snippets:

    Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’t been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply pointing out that the real world was looking increasingly like the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.

    When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of its most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away.

    […]

    That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given novelty isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.

    And so it is today. When someone demands to be told how we can replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

    […]

    Print media does much of society’s heavy journalistic lifting, from flooding the zone — covering every angle of a huge story — to the daily grind of attending the City Council meeting, just in case. This coverage creates benefits even for people who aren’t newspaper readers, because the work of print journalists is used by everyone from politicians to talk radio hosts to bloggers. The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?

    I don’t know. Nobody knows. We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it. The internet turns 40 this fall. Access by the general public is less than half that age. Web use, as a normal part of life for a majority of the developed world, is less than half that age. We just got here. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.

    Thanks to Jeff Jarvis for the link.

    What the broadcasters tried next

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    From BBC NEWS.

    Project Canvas will bring together content from some of the UK’s biggest channels, including the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Five. Viewers will be able to watch on-demand content through their television via a special set top box, expected to cost between £100-£200.

    It is being described as Freeview Mark 2. The BBC’s director general Mark Thompson called it “potentially the holy grail of future public service broadcasting provision in the UK”.

    The service will run in addition to existing on-demand efforts such as BBC iPlayer and 4oD, and content on Canvas will require no extra subscription – just an existing broadband connection.

    The Last Two Journalists in America

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    Lovely WashPost column by John Kelly.

    The last two journalists in America sat at a card table in the middle of their empty newsroom. They faced each other, about to flip a coin.

    The coin was to decide which one would be the second-to-last journalist in America and which one would be the last journalist in America.

    The last two journalists in America were dressed oddly; not poorly, as journalists usually dressed, but in what appeared to be costumes. The woman looked as if she’d stepped out of a black-and-white movie. She wore a tight-waisted woolen [sic] dress with angular shoulders. There was a seam up the back of her stockings. Two pencils stuck out of a bun of tightly-gathered hair at the back of her head. The man had on flared pants, a loud, collared shirt and a necktie as wide as a dinner napkin.

    She was from "His Girl Friday." He was from ‘All the President’s Men.’

    “Call it,” the man said, flipping the coin in the air.

    They’d known this day was coming — had spent the past 10 years watching it get closer — but even so it was a bit of a shock to see it arrive. The newsroom that had thrummed for so long was vacant. The computers and phones were gone. The desks had been sold for scrap. Their contents — spiral-bound notebooks, computer printouts, government documents, letters from inmates, soy sauce packets, Freedom of Information Act requests, paper-clip chains, journalism awards, eraserless pencils — had been push-broomed into huge drifts that dotted the cavernous room like termite mounds on the savanna.

    “Heads,” the woman said…

    Young listeners deaf to iPod’s limitations

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    Fascinating piece in The Times about the impact that MP3 compression has had on music fans.

    Research has shown, however, that today’s iPod generation prefers the tinnier and flatter sound of digital music, just as previous generations preferred the grainier sounds of vinyl. Computers have made music so easy to obtain that the young no longer appreciate high fidelity, it seems.

    The theory has been developed by Jonathan Berger, Professor of Music at Stanford University, California. For the past eight years his students have taken part in an experiment in which they listen to songs in a variety of different forms, including MP3s, a standard format for digital music. “I found not only that MP3s were not thought of as low quality, but over time there was a rise in preference for MP3s,” Professor Berger said.

    He suggests that iPods may have changed our perception of music, and that as young people become increasingly familiar with the sound of digital tracks the more they grow to like it.

    He compared the phenomenon to the continued preference of some people for music from vinyl records heard through a gramophone. “Some people prefer that needle noise — the noise of little dust particles that create noise in the grooves,” he said. “I think there’s a sense of warmth and comfort in that.”

    Music producers complain that the “compression” of some digital music means that the sound quality is poorer than with CDs and other types of recording. Professor Berger says that the digitising process leaves music with a “sizzle” or a metallic sound…

    Worth reading in full.

    Why TV Lost

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    To nobody’s surprise except its own, ITV is in deep, deep trouble. Paul Graham has been musing about how broadcast TV lost the war. “About twenty years ago”, he writes, “people noticed computers and TV were on a collision course and started to speculate about what they’d produce when they converged. We now know the answer: computers. It’s clear now that even by using the word ‘convergence’ we were giving TV too much credit. This won’t be convergence so much as replacement. People may still watch things they call “TV shows”, but they’ll watch them mostly on computers.”

    Graham identifies four factors which cooked broadcast’s goose.

    1. The Internet as an open platform. “Anyone can build whatever they want on it, and the market picks the winners. So innovation happens at hacker speeds instead of big company speeds.”

    2. Moore’s Law, “which has worked its usual magic on Internet bandwidth”.

    3. Piracy. “Users prefer it not just because it’s free, but because it’s more convenient. Bittorrent and YouTube have already trained a new generation of viewers that the place to watch shows is on a computer screen.”

    4. Social applications. “The average teenage kid has a pretty much infinite capacity for talking to their friends. But they can’t physically be with them all the time. When I was in high school the solution was the telephone. Now it’s social networks, multiplayer games, and various messaging applications. The way you reach them all is through a computer. Which means every teenage kid (a) wants a computer with an Internet connection, (b) has an incentive to figure out how to use it, and (c) spends countless hours in front of it.”

    This last, Graham argues, “was the most powerful force of all. This was what made everyone want computers. Nerds got computers because they liked them. Then gamers got them to play games on. But it was connecting to other people that got everyone else: that’s what made even grandmas and 14 year old girls want computers.”

    “After decades of running an IV drip right into their audience”, TV people thought they’d be able to dictate the way shows reached audiences. But they underestimated the force of their desire to connect with one another.

    So, in a nutshell, “Facebook killed TV. That is wildly oversimplified, of course, but probably as close to the truth as you can get in three words.”

    What do you get when you take ‘news’ out of Newsweek?

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    My guess: a pale imitation of the Economist.

    According to today’s Observer,

    Newsweek’s owner, the Washington Post, unveiled a raft of job cuts recently, following a previous round of redundancies that led to more than 100 departures, as it slims its editorial operation. It will no longer cover news, its editor Jon Meacham has said, choosing instead to focus on explaining events and providing readers with commentary and analysis.

    A smaller staff working for a smaller Newsweek will deliver intelligent insight to a more discerning, affluent readership. If that sounds familiar, it is because the Economist, one of the most successful current affairs titles for many years, already offers readers a similar service.

    Newsweek will position itself as a slightly more upmarket equivalent, printed on heavier, more luxuriant paper, with a new design placing a premium on white space. There will also be a shift in editorial emphasis, with more culture coverage and a bluffer’s guide to the week’s events, an innovation borrowed from the Week – Dennis Publishing’s news digest which now sells more than 500,000 copies in the US, following a 2001 launch. The hope is it will attract new advertisers, including luxury goods groups, weaning the title off its current dependence on financial services giants, car manufacturers and the pharmaceutical industry.

    The Media commentator and Vanity Fair writer Michael Wolff isn’t impressed. He told an audience of industry executives in New York last week: “If Newsweek is around in five years, I’ll buy you dinner.”

    Gud 4 da kids

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    Phew! Just seen this BBC NEWS report.

    Text speak, rather than harming literacy, could have a positive effect on the way children interact with language, says a study.

    Researchers from Coventry University studied 88 children aged between 10 and 12 to understand the impact of text messaging on their language skills.

    They found that the use of so-called “textisms” could be having a positive impact on reading development.

    The study is published in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology.

    “Children’s use of textisms is not only positively associated with word reading ability, but it may be contributing to reading development”, the authors wrote in the report.