Category Archives: Media ecology

ITV makes the Grade

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Michael Grade is leaving the BBC to join ITV.

Michael Grade has resigned as BBC chairman and is to join ITV, the corporation’s main terrestrial rival.

ITV, which has been struggling with falling advertising and ratings, said the appointment was a “real coup”.

Well, it is for ITV. I’m not sure it’s the smartest career move for Grade (who I know slightly and have always liked a lot; among other things, he’s a serious cigar smoker). He’s been offered huge amounts of money — a pay package which could hit £2 million a year, compared to the £140,000 he earns now as Chairman of the Beeb. But when he took the BBC job, I had assumed that he had made enough money not to have to worry about it for the rest of his life. Maybe I was naive.

His departure is a terrible blow to the BBC, but he has done great things in a short time. He was appointed in the wake of the Hutton Inquiry, when the Corporation was bruised and demoralised by Hutton’s ludicrous whitewash of the government, and for many people his appointment signified that the BBC would survive and bounce back. And it has.

“Being the Chairman of the BBC was the most unexpected job I have ever had”, he writes in his farewell letter.

The welcome you gave me on my arrival is embedded deep within my emotional dna. At that moment I realised what was at stake for me, for the BBC.

So much has been accomplished in the last two and a half years that I feel comfortable that I have achieved what I set out to achieve – namely restore the equilibrium of the this great institution, to lead the process to appoint a new DG [director general], to secure a new ten year Charter and to reform the governance of the Corporation.

With the help of my fellow governors and the new Governance Unit, the future is secure, the independence of the BBC is safeguarded and, most important of all, our programmes across all media are maintaining the overwhelming support of the licence fee payers.

All of that’s broadly true. He claims in his letter that the real reason he’s going is that he hates not being involved in (TV) programming. (As BBC Chairman, he has to take a hands-off attitude and leave it all to the management.) I can believe that: he comes from a showbiz family. One of his uncles (Lew) was a great ITV entrepreneur; another was a theatrical agent. Grade has entertainment in his blood. As Executive Chairman of ITV, he will be able to get stuck into scheduling and commissioning and luring talent and all the stuff he loves doing.

But… The problem is that Grade is a wizard at popular broadcasting — the few-to-many stuff that was the basis of the old media-ecosystem. But that world is eroding fast. ITV’s chronic problems are partly to do with the abysmal management it has had for nearly a decade. But it’s also due to the fact that its glory days are over — because broadcast is in inexorable decline. Michael Grade was a wizard in the old system. My conjecture is that he’s about to start playing Canute in the new.

Flickr: camera stats

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Flickr has released released some interesting statistics about the most popular cameras used by uploaders. This graph shows the most popular ‘serious’ cameras. The graph below shows the most popular point-and-shoot cameras.

If these stats are accurate, Canon seems to have the business sewn up.

Flickr comments:

These graphs show the number of Flickr members who have uploaded at least one photo with a particular camera on a given day over the last year.

The graphs are “normalized”, which is a fancy way of saying that they automatically correct for the fact that more people join Flickr each day: the graph moving up or down indicates a change in the camera’s popularity relative to all other cameras used by Flickr members.

The graphs are only accurate to the extent that we can automatically detect the camera used to take the photo (about 2/3rds of the time). That is not usually possible with cameraphone photos and cameraphones are therefore under-represented.

Fleet Street’s maiden aunts

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Peter Wilby, writing in the New Statesman, has picked up on my rant about why young people don’t like newspapers — and taken the argument a useful step further. Here’s part of what he says:

Newspapers have never been good at picking up and responding positively to major social and cultural shifts

The Observer’s internet columnist John Naughton spoke the truth to the Society of Editors annual conference in Glasgow this month. Young people aren’t buying newspapers, he said, because the press portrays them as “hateful, spiteful, antisocial” criminals. To that, I would add that newspapers portray the schools, colleges and universities young people attend as incompetent and ill-disciplined. With standards plummeting, according to the press, A-levels and degrees aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. Half the courses are in joke subjects.

School leavers are illiterate and unemployable. The only decent young people, apart from soldiers, are those killed or beaten up by the savage creatures who make up most of their peer group.

Then there’s drugs and sex. You will find lots of pieces discussing the pros and cons of tobacco and alcohol, but cannabis and ecstasy are simply damned without reservation. Evidence that anybody under 18 is even thinking about sex – or being encouraged by teachers to do so – is taken as a sure sign of social disintegration. As for fellatio, news editors probably think it sends you blind.

A handful of columnists, such as the Independent’s Johann Hari and Catherine Townsend and the London Evening Standard’s Laura Topham, give an authentic hint of young people’s attitudes and daily lives. But they are lone voices among what resembles a chorus of maiden aunts, circa 1953…

Great stuff. Thanks to Roy Greenslade for the link.

The end of water-cooler TV

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Peter Preston has a very observant piece about the state of broadcast TV. He starts from the fact that Peter Paterson, TV Critic of the Daily Mail has retired.

After Paterson, who? Actually, after Paterson, nobody. The Daily Mail has ceased to review television programmes: an unannounced, but significant, decision. The Mail, though, does nothing without careful forethought. And the thought here has a steely logic to it.

Once upon a time, television was full of national moments: mass audiences of 10 million or more tuning in and wanting to follow through the next day. But now that audience – fragmented across hundreds of channels – has virtually ceased to exist. Most of the time, any review of any show can only be valuable to a relatively small percentage of readers. Soaps? An exception, perhaps: you can catch up with them in the Saturday supplements. But through-the-week reviews have lost their relevance, just like television’s dominance of mass entertainment. (Goodnight ITV!) Use the space for more listings and previews, then, if you must. But recognise that the world has moved on….

It has. This stuff has a personal resonance for me because I was a TV critic for 13 years — the last nine on the Observer — and it was a wonderful occupation, because there was usually something interesting to watch — evenin the depths of the summer. It was also fascinating because in those days there were still huge audiences for individual programmes and series, and every viewer is a TV critic. So I had a wonderful postbag. It was like participating in a huge national conversation. I’ll never forget the letters I got during the first run of The Boys from the Blackstuff, or of anything by Dennis Potter.

I stopped in 1995, just as ITV was starting to disintegrate (and the BBC started to follow it downmarket) and the Web began to take hold. With hindsight, it looks as though I got out just in time.

For years, I’ve been arguing that the decline in broadcast TV is significant because it was the dominant organism in our media ecosystem. It shaped our society, poisoned our politics and fostered the delusion that most people are passive couch potatoes. So it’s really interesting to see the Mail spot the way the wind is blowing.

That YouTube deal

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From Techdirt…

Remember the rumor, kicked off by Mark Cuban, that Google was holding back $500 million from YouTube in escrow to deal with potential copyright infringement lawsuits? Yes, the same claim that Google CEO Eric Schmidt clearly denied was true last week. Well, it seems that when he called it false, it appears he only meant the number, not the concept. Today it came out that Google has actually put aside a little over $200 million in an escrow account, almost exactly as the original email Mark Cuban posted described. It’s to handle potential legal costs associated with copyright lawsuits. While it’s not nearly as much of the deal as originally suggested, it still is a significant chunk. There’s a second interesting tidbit in the article as well. While some had suggested that YouTube actually has been profitable, apparently, the company was so hard up for money, it needed to borrow $15 million between the time the deal was announced just over a month ago and its closing of the deal yesterday.

MySpace: the story continues

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From this morning’s New York Times…

The Universal Music Group, the world’s largest music company, filed a copyright infringement lawsuit yesterday against MySpace, the popular social networking Web site, for allowing users to upload and download songs and music videos.

The suit, which also names MySpace’s corporate parent, the News Corporation, comes as the recording industry contends with how to exploit its copyrighted material online. The issue has taken on more importance as services built around user-generated content become popular and generate advertising revenue.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Los Angeles, is seen as part of a strategy by Universal to test provisions of a federal law that provides a “safe harbor” to Internet companies that follow certain procedures to filter out copyrighted works. The law requires sites to remove such content after being notified by the copyright holder…

Fakesters

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Thoughtful critical piece by Wade Roush about the ‘monetization’ of MySpace…

While MySpace’s bad rap as a haven for sexual predators is probably undeserved, there’s good reason to be disturbed by the site: it is devolving from a friends’ network into a marketing madhouse.

If any social-­networking company has found a way to rake in cash, it is MySpace; for example, Google recently agreed to pay $900 million for the exclusive right to provide Web searching and keyword-based text ads on the site. Of course, targeted advertisements distributed by Google and other companies provide the revenue that keeps many Web-based businesses afloat. But MySpace’s venture into consumer marketing has gone far beyond traditional advertising. The site has given members the technological tools to “express themselves” by turning their own profiles into multi­media billboards for bands, movies, celebrities, and products. Think MTV plus user photos, bulletin boards, and instant messaging.

I realize that in criticizing a pop-culture mecca frequented by millions of people, I risk sounding just as out of touch as DOPA’s supporters. But after spending the last few years chronicling the emergence of social networking and other forms of social computing for this magazine, I had higher hopes for the technology. To me, the popularity of MySpace and other social-networking sites signals a demand for new, more democratic ways to communicate–a demand that’s likely to remake business, politics, and the arts as today’s young Web users enter the adult world and bring their new communications preferences with them. The problem is that MySpace’s choice of business strategy threatens to divert this populist energy and trap its users in the old, familiar world of big-media commercialism…

Digg faster than Google News

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Less than 10 minutes after the news of Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation hit the wires last week, the information was visible to hundreds of thousands of people via the homepage of Digg.com, a social news aggregation site that relies on readers to submit and promote interesting news stories.

According to Digg founder Kevin Rose, the Rumsfeld news was submitted to Digg three minutes after the Associated Press released it; four minutes later, the story had acquired enough “diggs” to jump to the front page of the site. The speed at which the Rumsfeld news–a quick read at only two sentences–was promoted to the front page of Digg “broke a record,” said Rose last week at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

But the incident is more than a milestone for the social news site: it underscores the power that legions of citizen editors have to determine the importance and timeliness of news. By comparison, Rose said, Google News, a site that uses algorithms to find and establish the importance of news (based on the reputation of news sources), took about 25 minutes to pick up the story.

How did so many people find the Rumsfeld news amid the thousands of other headlines submitted to Digg that day? According to Rose, 33 percent of the diggs that helped propel the story to the front page came from the data visualization tools called Stack and Swarm, which graphically represent stories and their popularity. The effect was particularly striking in Swarm, an application in which stories appear as small floating circles that grow in size as users digg the story. At one point, said Rose, the circle that represented the Rumsfeld news swelled so large that it encompassed most of the screen.

Data visualization tools such as Swarm are crucial to sifting through the hordes of detritus on Digg. Because of these tools, Digg was able to harness the collective intelligence of its users and serve up speedy results that, in this case, bested Google’s specialized algorithm. The incident illustrates that when social sites can meaningfully tap into the brainpower and enthusiasm of their communities, they are not just a novelty or a Web 2.0 fad. They may well be essential.

[Source]

The inexplicable success of the Daily Mail

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As I noted earlier, Andrew Neil gave the Keynote Address to the Society of Editors conference in Glasgow, in the course of which he argued that newspapers that don’t embrace online media are doomed.

During the Q&A at the end, a smart journalist named Donna Leigh asked a simple question. If he was right about the urgency of going online, how did he explain the continuing success of the Daily Mail which, to date, has rather avoided Cyberspace?

It was interesting to see that Brillo Pad was unable to deal with the question — and indeed reverted to type by suggesting that he and the questioner (an attractive woman) might discuss it further, er, later. (I’m sure that was entirely innocent, but it brought to mind the famous observation of one of his subordinates at the Sunday Times that “if you couldn’t f*** it or plug it in then he [Neil] wasn’t interested”.)

Anyway, Roy Greenslade has returned to the issue raised by Ms Leigh. Here’s part of what he has to say:

The undeniable truth is that the Mail, as the questioning Leigh correctly said, has been defying the overall downward trend that’s affected the rest of the market, and that does deserve some explanation. Neil pointed out its professionalism and its attention to editorial detail. I could have added that it has positioned itself perfectly in that bit of the market which has grown in the past 20 years, the working class who have aspired to be middle class (and largely achieved it). It also purveys the values of the middle class, a commonsensical conservatism allied to a pervasive sense that those values are under attack. Unlike the red-tops below it, it has maintained a sense of dignity. Unlike the serious papers, it has embraced populism without appearing to find it somehow distasteful. It has also – and Neil also noted this – benefited from the collapse of its middle-market competition in the shape of the Daily Express.

In other words, the Mail (and its successful Mail on Sunday stablemate) is living on the laurels of long-run demographic change and its clever identification with the people who have lived through it. That change may have reached its zenith or, just possibly, may yet have a little way to go. But the Mail’s success, having inured it to the circulation problems suffered by other papers, meant that it didn’t see the point of investing some much time and energy (and money) in digital platforms. Now, belatedly, it is doing so.

I may be wrong, but I don’t think the delay will necessarily have a negative effect on the Mail’s future. It will surely have learned from the lessons of those papers that have pioneered online journalism. But the really interesting factor is the conservatism of the current Daily Mail audience and the likelihood that fewer young people will be drawn to its values and its agenda.