Form vs function in journalism

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Just watched, despairingly, Newsnight on BBC2 grappling with the “death of the newspaper”. The peg for this feeble item was the arrival of the Digger at Luton airport.  He has, it seems, flown the Atlantic in order to reassure his serfs and placemen at the Sun (a newspaper) that he is not going to close it down.** The Newsnight item followed the usual recipe: a short film report followed by a studio ‘discussion’ with three guests: a former tabloid editor, a doughty female hack (Joan Smith) and a young gel in impossibly high heels who is the UK head of the Huffington Post, a parasitic online creation that feeds on proper journalism.

The really annoying thing about the discussion was the way it failed to distinguish between format and function. The thing we need to preserve is not the newspaper (a form which was the product of a technological accident and a particular set of historical circumstances) but the function (provision of free, independent and responsible journalism). Once upon a time, publishing in print was the only way to ensure that the product of the function reached a public audience. But those days may be ending. The organisations traditionally known as “newspapers” need to transform themselves into journalistic outfits that produce a range of outputs, one of which — but only one of which — may be a printed paper.

The other thing that those who run newspapers need to realise is that digital technology implies businesses that earn much lower margins than analogue businesses did. In the old days, newspapers were often licences to print money. (The Digger’s Sun still is.) But in every industry where digital technology has taken hold, margins have shrunk. Could you support a newsroom of 120 journalists — plus all the material and distribution expenses that go with producing a print product — on the revenues that a newspaper website currently earns? Answer: no. But could you support a newsroom with 80 journalists and a purely online offering with the same revenues? Answer: possibly — provided you were prepared to settle for a modest return (say 5%) on investment.

**Later: Murdoch announced that he would be setting up a Sunday Sun — a continuation of the Screws of the World by other means. This was hailed by the mainstream media as a bold, defiant and possibly inspired tactic. I’m not so sure: it’s just possible that the Murdoch brand is now so toxic that the new gamble won’t wash. An alternative reading is that the old guy is finally losing his marbles. If the US laws against corrupt payments are triggered by the most recent developments (the arrest of Sun journalists on suspicion of making such payments to public officials) then the supine directors and shareholders of News International may finally be moved to, er, move.

iMicroscope

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The product ecosystem that surrounds Apple iDevices reminds me of the Peace of God as described in the Bible — in that “it passeth all understanding”. This is an add-on for the iPhone4 (and 4S) that turns it into a microscope.

Well, sort-of.

The only thing I could find to test it when it arrived was a penny. This is how it came out.

Somehow, I don’t think it’ll make me into a latter-day Leeuwenhoek. But it’s fun.

Telling it like it is

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 Just came on this in Aaron Sloman’s wonderful home page:

What should I write if asked to act as an academic referee, and the invitation requests me to assess the impact of the candidate’s work?

“I am not interested in impact, only quality of research, which does not always correlate with impact, since the latter is often subject to fashion and transient funding policies, etc. If you want a study of impact you would do better to consult a social scientist. Moreover high impact as measured by citations is often a consequence of making mistakes that many other people comment on.***

Many great research achievements could not possibly be assessed for their impact until many years later, in some cases long after the death of the researcher (e.g. Gregor Mendel).I’ll tell you what I think about the research quality: things like the depth, difficulty, and importance of the questions addressed, the originality, clarity, precision and explanatory power of the theories developed, and how well they fit known facts, as far as I can tell. If there are engineering products I may have some comments on their contribution to research. I shall not be able to evaluate their contribution to wealth or happiness.”

Thanks to Seb Schmoller for the link.

***Footnote: Really acute observation this. One of the most cited research papers in recent history is the infamous MMR paper published by the Lancet.

MIT launches free online courses — and gives credentials

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This from BBC News:

MIT, along with many other leading universities, makes its course material available online, but the MITx scheme takes this a step further by creating an accredited course specifically for online students.

Study materials and the awarding of grades are all provided online.

Before Christmas, the Boston-based university announced its intention to create MITx.

On Monday it set out how this will be put into practice, with the creation of the course 6.002x: Circuits and Electronics, based on the campus-based course of the same name.

This is not a “watered down” version of the campus course or “any less intense”, says a university spokesman.

The main difference is that the MITx version has been designed for online students, with a virtual laboratory, e-textbooks, online discussions and videos that are the equivalent of a lecture. It is expected to take 10 hours per week and will run until June.

Er, great news and all that. But regular readers will have seen it somewhere before.

Untethering the presenter

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I’m not a fan of PowerPoint etc. (for serious reasons and frivolous ones) but because of my book I’ve been doing quite a few talks and using Keynote as a way of providing some structure. I eventually realised that one of the reasons I hate using presentation software is that I felt tethered to my Mac — which is ridiculous given that (a) I hate tethered devices in other contexts and (b) simple wireless solutions are available — like this Kensington Wireless pointer. It communicates using 802.11 (so no line of sight or range problems), runs on 2 AAA batteries, plugs-and-plays with my Mac, has an inbuilt laser pointer (complete with H&S warnings) and — neatest of all — has a slot into which the USB dongle fits when not in use.

I got one recently and it does what it says on the tin. Then fell to wishing I was quicker on the uptake: I should have got one of these ages ago.

Consent of the Networked

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I’ve just got Rebecca MacKinnon’s new book and am looking forward to reading it. But at the same time as it arrived I also got notification of her talk at the Boston launch of the book. It’s vintage MacKinnon: intelligent, informed, perceptive. I particularly like her concept of the “Sovereigns of Cyberspace” — Zuckerberg, Bezos, Page, Brin, Apple, Microsoft. I also like her use of the “information ecology” metaphor: we’ve moved from an ecosystem characterised by scarcity (a desert) to one characterised by abundance (a rain-forest) and the challenge is to devise a system of governance for that.

John Kampfner’s review is here.

Quotes of the day

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“What this whole business goes to show is that Stone is no scholar and Trevor-Roper is no gentleman”.

V.H. Galbraith, Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, commenting on Hugh Trevor-Roper’s demolition job on Lawrence Stone in the Journal of Economic History.

“I find it difficult to decide whether T-R is a fundamentally nice person in the grip of a prose style in which it is impossible to be polite, or a fundamentally unpleasant person using rudeness as a disguise for nastiness.”

John Habakkuk, Joint Editor of the Journal of Economic History, in a letter to his fellow-editor, Michael Postan.

Sources: Adam Sisman’s biography of Trevor-Roper, pages 194 & 204.

Trevor-Roper: the reading list

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During the War, Hugh Trevor-Roper worked in British Intelligence, mostly on code-breaking and interpretation of intercepted messages. He also recorded in his diary what books he read. According to his biographer, the tallies for the four years 1940-1943 are:

1940: 65
1941: 72
1942: 84
1943: 119

Now I know that there weren’t all that many distractions available to an Intelligence Officer in wartime London, and that there were periods when he was hospitalised with chronic sinusitis, but still…

How to write — by the original MAD-man

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From the wonderful Brain Pickings newsletter.

On September 7th, 1982, [David] Ogilvy sent the following internal memo to all agency employees, titled “How to Write”:

The better you write, the higher you go in Ogilvy & Mather. People who think well, write well. Woolly minded people write woolly memos, woolly letters and woolly speeches. Good writing is not a natural gift. You have to learn to write well. Here are 10 hints: 1. Read the Roman-Raphaelson book on writing. Read it three times. 2. Write the way you talk. Naturally. 3. Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs. 4. Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass. 5. Never write more than two pages on any subject. 6. Check your quotations. 7. Never send a letter or a memo on the day you write it. Read it aloud the next morning – and then edit it. 8. If it is something important, get a colleague to improve it. 9. Before you send your letter or your memo, make sure it is crystal clear what you want the recipient to do. 10. If you want ACTION, don’t write. Go and tell the guy what you want. David

‘S obvious, really. So why don’t more people do it?

The End of Wall Street As They Knew It

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Trying to escape from media consensus and groupthink about the economy, I came on this thoughtful piece by Gabriel Sherman arguing that the legislative changes in the US are beginning to bite on Wall Street.

Banks have always had occasional bad years, but the sense on Wall Street is that this bad year is different. Over the past several weeks, I have had wide-ranging conversations with more than two dozen senior Wall Street executives, traders, bankers, hedge-fund managers, and private-equity investors. And what emerged is a picture of an industry afflicted by a crisis it would not be flip to call existential.

The crash four years ago was shocking enough to the financial class. But what is happening on Wall Street now is even more terrifying. No doubt the economy itself—the crisis in Europe, the effects of the tsunami in Japan, America’s sputtering recovery—has played a large part in the financial industry’s struggles. But even the most stubborn economies improve eventually. The bigger issues are structural. The Dodd-Frank financial-­reform act, much maligned, has already begun to change the shape of the financial system—even before a number of its major provisions are proposed to go into full effect this coming July. Banks are working hard to interpret Dodd-Frank’s provisions in a way most favorable to them—and repealing Dodd-Frank is a key piece of Mitt Romney’s campaign platform.

To comply with the looming regulations, banks have begun stripping themselves of the pistons that powered their profits: leverage and proprietary trading. In the wake of the crash, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs converted to bank holding companies to tap the “discount window,” the Fed’s pipeline of cheap funds that gave the banks an emergency source of liquidity. That move seemed smart then, but the stricter standards required of banks have now left them boxed in.

With all the major banks unable to wager their own funds on big bets, there’s a growing sense that the money that was being made during the Bush boom won’t be back. “The government has strangled the financial system,” banking analyst Dick Bove told me recently. “We’ve basically castrated these companies. They can’t borrow as much as they used to borrow.”

If true, this is good news. Worth reading in full.