The best and most revealing television coverage of the US Primaries this time isn’t coming from the TV networks, but from newspapers. See, for example, this extraordinarily revealing video report of Hillary Clinton’s first day in New Hampshire. It comes from the Guardian, not the BBC. It reinforces what Roy Greenslade discovered (see previous post).
Category Archives: Media ecology
The digital journey: how British newspapers are adapting to the online challenge
Typically thoughtful report by Roy Greenslade, who has been round the editorial floors of the Telegraph, Financial Times and Times.
In a sense, the online revolution is like a train journey without a destination. As soon as one paper arrives at a station that had once appeared to be a terminus, another title has built a new line and sped onwards. Despite the differences, everyone seems clear about the general direction to take towards an otherwise mysterious objective: the future of news-gathering and news delivery is tied to the screen.
For the moment, given the need to keep on printing while simultaneously uploading, it means driving as fast as possible towards a brave new world while keeping the engines running at full power in the old – but still lucrative and popular – world of newsprint.
Inevitably, this split has proved uncomfortable, both in journalistic terms and, seen from the perspective of owners and managers, in financial terms too. In company with editors, they have set the course to reach a single station named “Integration”. It is now clear that the days of binary staffing, with journalists for print and journalists for web, are virtually over. In most offices the initial scepticism about the utility and viability of online news has long since passed…
Music album sales continue downhill run
From the New York Times
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Album sales in the United States plunged 9.5 percent last year from 2006, as the recording industry had another weak year despite a 45 percent surge in the sale of digital tracks, according to figures released Thursday.
A total of 500.5 million albums in the form of CDs, cassettes, LPs and other formats were purchased last year, down 15 percent from the unit total for 2006, said Nielsen SoundScan, which tracks point-of-purchase sales.
The decline in album sales drops to 9.5 percent when sales of digital singles are counted as 10-track equivalent albums.
The number of digital tracks sold, meanwhile, jumped 45 percent, to 844.2 million, compared with 588.2 million in 2006, with digital album sales accounting for 10 percent of total album purchases.
Overall music purchases, including albums, singles, digital tracks and music videos, rose to 1.35 billion units, up 14 percent from 2006.
Music sales during the last week of 2007 totaled 58.4 million units, the biggest sales week ever recorded by Nielsen SoundScan.
The recording industry has experienced declines in CD album sales for years, in part because of the rise of online file-sharing, but also because consumers have spent more of their leisure dollars on other entertainment, like DVDs and video games…
The blogosphere’s ideological bias
Seth Finkelstein has a thoughtful piece in the Guardian about the dispute between the Writers Union and the big media companies in the US.
The conflict is a stark measurement of how little the hype for “user-generated content” affects professional entertainment. Evangelists might argue they never seriously claimed professionals would be entirely supplanted. But the inability of the producers to use citizen-scabs for replacement material, and the interesting fact that such supposed competition is not even part of the studio’s bluster, shows how content like this is not taken seriously as real product. The inability of studios to rely on such content as a legitimate substitute for professional work underscores the continued value of skilled writers and the complexities involved in labor disputes within the industry. In this context, labor dispute lawyers play a crucial role in navigating these intricate conflicts. Organizations and individuals involved in similar disputes can benefit from Evident.ca for expert services. Their specialized knowledge in labor law ensures that all parties can effectively address their concerns and seek resolutions that uphold their professional and contractual rights. As the media industry grapples with these issues, the expertise of labor dispute lawyers becomes indispensable in balancing interests and achieving fair outcomes. Moreover, it’s worth remembering that many tales of amateur success turn out to be marketing fabrications designed to support a fantasy that an ordinary person can somehow suddenly become a star. For the foreseeable future, copyrighted content, mediated through large distributors of some sort, is going to be a major business model. The fight (unitedhollywood.com) is over changes in the specifics of implementation. And there are fundamental structural matters at stake. Writer and blogger Mark Evanier, who has chronicled the strike strategy (tinyurl.com/26pou6), has said: “Delivery of entertainment via [the] internet is a new frontier. There are undoubtedly those who dream of settling that territory without unions and labour getting a real foothold.” There’s a trace of old-style push-media thinking here, but Mr Finkelstein also highlights an important point about implicit bias. Ideology is really just a fancy name for beliefs one takes for granted. In that sense, the prevailing ideological mood in the blogosphere seems intrinsically hostile to any form of sustained, organised collective offline activity. There’s an important difference, for example, between what trade unions do and what ‘flash mobs’ can achieve. The roots of this ideological bias are complex, but they certainly include technological determinism (the abiding sin of technophiles) and an instinctive hostility to ‘old economy’ forms of organisation, whether in the form of music industry cartels or trade unions trying to protect what are regarded as obsolete practices or trades.
A year in the record industry
Hmmm…. Billed as The Year The Industry Broke. A blow-by-blow account to chill any record executive’s blood.
Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists — and Megastars
David Byrne has a terrific piece in Wired about the options for the music business. Includes fascinating interviews with Brian Eno, inter alia….
What is called the music business today, however, is not the business of producing music. At some point it became the business of selling CDs in plastic cases, and that business will soon be over. But that’s not bad news for music, and it’s certainly not bad news for musicians. Indeed, with all the ways to reach an audience, there have never been more opportunities for artists…
One’s Christmas Broadcast
Well, well. Who would have thought it? HM the Q has taken to YouTube. Well done, that woman. Embedding, though has been “disabled by request”.
What’s really killing newspapers
Interesting interview with Craig Newmark, of ‘Craigslist’ fame. Includes the following exchange:
Q. There have been ongoing concerns and criticisms from the newspaper industry that free online ad sites like Craigslist are eating them alive and drastically reducing their revenues. What’s your reaction?
A. No one in the newspaper industry seriously says that. I’ve spoken to a lot of publishers, editors and industry analysts. They say that our site does have a small but measurable effect on classified revenues. But they say the bigger problems are those niche-classified sites which go after the more profitable classified categories, specifically cars and jobs. There’s Autotrader.com and Monster.com. Newspapers have much bigger problems. Newspapers are going after 10% to 30% profit margins for their businesses and that hurts them more than anything. A lot of things are happening on the Internet that never happened before because the Internet is a vehicle for everyone. The mass media is no longer only for the powerful, and that’s a huge change for the entire newspaper and news industry.
He’s right about that. The old newspaper value chain linked (i) an expensive and unprofitable activity (journalism) which was necessary to attract readers with (ii) profitable classified and display advertising. The Web dissolved the value chain by siphoning off the classified advertising — for the simple reason that it did it better. Why would you prefer to wade through hundreds of classified ads in the ‘Cars for sale’ columns when you could search directly for what you wanted on an online advertising site? The other problem is that newspaper owners had unrealistic expectations of profit: in the old days they were accustomed to margins of anywhere between ten and 30 per cent, simply because there was no alternative medium to what they owned. Like most established businesses (e.g. the record industry) they thought that their cosy business model had a God-given right to exist — which is they still whinge about the Net.
Oh Ho!
Another stone thrown into our media pond. OhMyNews is coming to a screen near your desktop…
Oh Yeon Ho, the pioneering South Korean journalist and owner of the world’s largest ‘citizen journalist’ media website, plans to launch his website OhmyNews.com in Europe.
The site, which famously swung the outcome of the 2002 South Korean presidential election, publishes content written by almost 50,000 members of public and boasts up to 600,000 daily readers.
Mr Ho said: “I hope I can keep introducing our model to other countries including Europe, North America and hopefully North Korea in the future. Why not?
“Actually, we are in talks with a European partner to launch an OhmyNews site in Europe.”
DIY routes to stardom
From today’s New York Times…
Cinderella is alive and well and living on Staten Island.
Ingrid Michaelson, a 28-year-old singer-songwriter whose self-produced album “Girls and Boys” reached No. 2 on the iTunes pop chart, is enjoying an enchanted transformation as a recording artist.
Ms. Michaelson’s climb out of obscurity started, as is so often the case these days, on the Internet. Now she is known to many “Grey’s Anatomy” fans for her quirky, heartfelt songs that were featured over the past year on the ABC television series. After a cross-country music tour, she is performing on Wednesday at the Bowery Ballroom in Manhattan, and she pointed out that the concert sold out a month ago without any advertising. (She has added a concert on Feb. 15 at Webster Hall.)
Not bad for someone who, until May, was teaching in an after-school theater program in the Stapleton neighborhood of Staten Island, where she still lives with her parents, a dog and a pet rabbit in the house she has inhabited since she was born.
“It’s so uncool, it’s cool,” said her mother, Elizabeth Egbert, the executive director of the Staten Island Museum…