Thoughtful reflections by Mark Lawson on news coverage of the death of Michael Jackson. Ends on this note:
Journalism was once grandly said to be the first draft of history. We’ve now moved to a world in which gossip is the first draft of journalism. When the rumour proves true, it’s great luck for viewers. But there will be nights, you fear, when this amazing pace will lead to retractions and embarrassment.
From today’s Guardian.
The owner of the O2 arena could face an insurance liability of up to £300m after the death of Michael Jackson, who had been scheduled to play a series of sell-out gigs starting in the summer.
AEG Live, which persuaded Jackson to stage the 50-date run at the former Millenium Dome, admitted earlier this year that it was finding it difficult to insure the This Is It performances after the initial schedule of 10 concerts grew.
Doubts over whether Jackson would be fit enough both mentally and physically to complete the extended run of gigs increased the potential insurance bill to £300m, according to a report by Reinsurance magazine in March.
Insurers were reluctant to take on such a liability and instead, the AEG chief executive Randy Phillips was reported at the time as saying that the company would be willing to “self-insure” to get the shows to go ahead.
“It’s a risk we’re willing to take to bring the King of Pop to his fans,” he said.
Admirable sentiment. But bad business decision, if true.
And how about this from ArsTechnica on the wider impact on the Net?
The news of pop icon Michael Jackson’s collapse and subsequent death sent ripples across the Web on Thursday afternoon, affecting numerous services and sparking yet another spam campaign. Twitter, Google, Facebook, various news sites, and even iTunes were practically crushed under the weight of the sudden spike in Internet traffic. The phenomenon may not be new on an individual level, but combined across services, it was truly one of the most significant in recent memory.
When news first broke that the Jackson had collapsed in his home, Twitter was immediately abuzz. There were several points when the Ars staff observed between 6,000 and 13,000 new tweets per minute mentioning Michael Jackson before Twitter began to melt down—all before anyone other than TMZ.com was reporting his death. Of course, most of us are intimately familiar with the famed Fail Whale at this point, though Twitter’s meltdown was mostly reflected in a major slowing of the service and the inability to send new tweets.
In fact, Twitter cofounder Biz Stone told the L.A. Times that the news of Jackson’s passing caused the biggest spike in tweets per second since the US Presidential Election. (Similarly, Facebook—also known as Wannabe Twitter—saw a spike in status updates that was apparently three times more than average for the site, though a spokesperson said the site remained free of performance issues.)
Google, on the other hand, began receiving so many searches for news about Jackson that it caused the search engine to believe it was under attack. The site went into self-protection mode, throwing up CAPTCHAs and malware alerts to users trying to find news. A Google spokesperson described the incident as “volcanic” compared to other major news events, confirming that there was a service slowdown for some time.
On the other hand, Rory Cellan-Jones has this:
But did the internet actually buckle? Well, there was some strain – but it seems to have come through well.
In the United States, a company called Keynote, which monitors internet performance, says popular news sites showed marked slowdowns for three hours from about 2230 BST: “The average speed for downloading news items doubled from less than four seconds to almost nine seconds,” said Shawn White from Keynote. “During the same period, the average availability of sites dropped from almost 100% to 86%.”
But guess what: in Europe overnight, there was no spike in internet traffic. Interoute, which operates Europe’s largest fibre optic voice and data network, sent me graphs (see below) showing traffic through the three key internet exchanges in Amsterdam, Frankfurt and London. At all three exchanges, traffic was either around the same as normal overnight, or, in London’s case, actually a little lower.
… in 1963, JFK visited West Berlin and made his famous declaration: “Ich bin ein Berliner”.
It’s hard to keep a bad idea down. Now it’s James Fallows’s turn to fantasise still that micropayments are the solution to online journalism’s revenue deficit.
In principle, some form of ‘micropayments’–tiny royalties for each online item – will be part of the eventual solution for financing online news. The problem is that most existing systems are too big a nuisance. In a world where people willingly pay several dollars per day for cable or satellite TV programming, you’d think that a newspaper article would be worth at least a few cents. But in practice, anything that complicates or delays the act of reading a Web page or clicking a link probably sends an online reader someplace else. It’s not the five cents that stops you; it’s having to decide over and over again to spend the next five cents. It might be the same with TV if you had to authorize a payment each time you switched to The Daily Show.
A sustainable payment system for online news has to make the process as effortless – but still as controllable – as the EZ-pass system for highway tollbooths. Or, for a more modern reference, as the SkypeOut payment system on Skype. With EZ-pass, you decide ahead of time that you’re willing to pay for tolls, so you’re spared the hassle at the booth. With SkypeOut, you decide ahead of time to spend $25 or $50 on Skype’s pennies-per-minute calls to landline phones, and you don’t have to worry about the details for each call.
It’s pure fantasy, this, as Clay Shirky pointed out ages ago:
Because small payment systems are always discussed in conversations by and for publishers, readers are assigned no independent role. In every micropayments fantasy, there is a sentence or section asserting that what the publishers want will be just fine with us, and, critically, that we will be possessed of no desires of our own that would interfere with that fantasy.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, the media business is being turned upside down by our new freedoms and our new roles. We’re not just readers anymore, or listeners or viewers. We’re not customers and we’re certainly not consumers. We’re users. We don’t consume content, we use it, and mostly what we use it for is to support our conversations with one another, because we’re media outlets now too. When I am talking about some event that just happened, whether it’s an earthquake or a basketball game, whether the conversation is in email or Facebook or Twitter, I want to link to what I’m talking about, and I want my friends to be able to read it easily, and to share it with their friends.
This is superdistribution — content moving from friend to friend through the social network, far from the original source of the story. Superdistribution, despite its unweildy name, matters to users. It matters a lot. It matters so much, in fact, that we will routinely prefer a shareable amateur source to a professional source that requires us to keep the content a secret on pain of lawsuit. (Wikipedia’s historical advantage over Britannica in one sentence.)
From Mark Anderson.
The first, and most important issue is Steve’s actual health condition. What was last described as a “hormonal imbalance” or something like it, now looks a good deal like liver cancer.
If Steve has / had liver cancer, it opens a new vista of medical questions which he should be discussing now, as CEO. So should the media, so, get with it, kids.
Second, on the legal side: I have never heard so much BS in my life, as has been written in the last week about why it was perhaps OK for Apple’s board not to share this information with shareholders and the public.
The test, according to the SEC, is simple: if information would affect an investor’s decision to purchase (or sell) shares, it is material and should be disclosed.
Since anyone who went through the non-Steve Apple years knows that there simply is no Apple without Steve, the fact of his liver transplant, and if so, of his new cancer, are life- and company-threatening. There is no fancy dancing about taking a leave that would remove the obligation to tell investors that the only person who could run the company at length was in jeopardy.
The Apple board has now broken the law, twice: first, over the options deal with Steve; and now, this.
While Steve is great at making products, this board, and this company, suck at obeying the law, and at modern governance. They have put their shareholders at unknown risk, and themselves personally.
Yep. Couldn’t have put it better myself.
LATER: Warren Buffett takes much the same line:
“Certainly Steve Jobs is important to Apple,” Buffett, chairman and chief executive officer of Omaha, Nebraska-based Berkshire Hathaway Inc. said in an interview today on CNBC. “Whether he is facing serious surgery or not is a material fact.”
[…]
“If I have any serious illness, or something coming up of an important nature, an operation or anything like that, I think the thing to do is just tell — the Berkshire shareholders about it. I work for them,” said Buffett, 78. “They’re going to find out about it anyway, so I don’t see a big privacy issue or anything of the sort.”
From today’s NYTimes…
The Obama administration lodged a formal protest on Wednesday with the Chinese government over its plan to force all computers sold in China to come with software that blocks access to certain Web sites.
Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and Ron Kirk, the trade representative, sent a letter to officials in two Chinese ministries asking them to rescind a rule about the software that is set to take effect on July 1.
Chinese officials have said that the filtering software, known as Green Dam-Youth Escort, is meant to block pornography and other “unhealthy information.”
In part, the American officials’ complaint framed this as a trade issue, objecting to the burden put on computer makers to install the software with little notice. But it also raised broader questions about whether the software would lead to more censorship of the Internet in China and restrict freedom of expression.
“China is putting companies in an untenable position by requiring them, with virtually no public notice, to pre-install software that appears to have broad-based censorship implications and network security issues,” Mr. Locke said in a news release. The government did not release the text of the letter…
Hmmm… It’s good news that the US government is beginning to take a real interest in this. But I wonder how it will play out.
FOOTNOTE: The research report on Green Dam by Scott Wolchok, Randy Yao, and J. Alex Halderman is here. The Abstract reads:
We have discovered remotely-exploitable vulnerabilities in Green Dam, the censorship software reportedly mandated by the Chinese government. Any web site a Green Dam user visits can take control of the PC.
According to press reports, China will soon require all PCs sold in the country to include Green Dam. This software monitors web sites visited and other activity on the computer and blocks adult content as well as politically sensitive material.
We examined the Green Dam software and found that it contains serious security vulnerabilities due to programming errors. Once Green Dam is installed, any web site the user visits can exploit these problems to take control of the computer. This could allow malicious sites to steal private data, send spam, or enlist the computer in a botnet. In addition, we found vulnerabilities in the way Green Dam processes blacklist updates that could allow the software makers or others to install malicious code during the update process.
We found these problems with less than 12 hours of testing, and we believe they may be only the tip of the iceberg. Green Dam makes frequent use of unsafe and outdated programming practices that likely introduce numerous other vulnerabilities. Correcting these problems will require extensive changes to the software and careful retesting. In the meantime, we recommend that users protect themselves by uninstalling Green Dam immediately.
In other words, this isn’t just about the Chinese government’s repressive Internet policy. It potentially affects every Internet user because Green Dam could make it possible to turn the Chinese Internet into a gigantic botnet.
I’ve been in a lot of discussions recently about the ‘death’ of (print) newspapers. What strikes me most about the print perspective is its almost childish impatience for immediate results. Faced with the reality of Marshall McLuhan’s observation that the future emerges more slowly than the past dissolves, print journalists decry the online future as a revenue-free chimera. Because online news doesn’t make money at the moment, they think it’s a hopeless prospect. (Another problem is that they are obsessed with the continuation of a particular output format — the newspaper — rather than the function that it performs, which is journalism. But that’s another story.)
I can understand their angst as a treasured way of working becomes unviable, but the idea that we could instantly switch from an industry built on, and shaped by, 19th-century technology into one based on networked technology is historically naive. In my Oxford seminar I used the example of what happened when broadcast radio arrived in the US in the 1920s. Entrepreneurs were as puzzled by how to make money from radio then as newspapers owners are by the Web. It took at least a decade to figure out to figure out a business model that would work for broadcast radio — and the solution was eventually found by a detergent manufacturer, Proctor and Gamble — which is how we got the soap opera. But in that decade lots of companies went bust trying to make money from the new medium. Yet, in the end, radio was the medium that changed the world, because it created the modern mass market. For the first time, people across the continental United States could have the same media experience at the same time — and advertisers could address a mass market.
Much the same is happening now. Nobody yet has a clear idea of a business model that will support journalism in a networked age. But I have absolutely no doubt that models will be found — in time. That’s the lesson of history.
Another lesson of history that grief-stricken print journalists ignore is that the modern print newspaper did not spring, ready-made, from its cradle. In fact it took a long time to evolve. This was the point made in an admirable post by Howard Owens on his blog.
For more than a decade, we expected to build online news organizations that could support a super structure of the modern newspaper newsroom — with the all the reporters and editors and big story packages (look at all the emphasis we put on big Flash multimedia productions) and that we could keep doing journalism just the way we always did it.
While we bemoaned shovelware (taking the same exact print story and repurposing it for the Web), we took little time to really examine what might might be different about online publishing that should change the way news is gathered and presented.
That’s why we were slow to embrace blogging, slow to recognize the power of social networking, and why, even today, most newspapers treat reader interaction (re: comments on stories) as a nuisance rather than an essential part of the business.
The Big Worry of the print culture is that in the networked world nobody will do Real Journalism — all that laudable, high-end, socially-responsible, investigative, speaking-truth-to-power stuff which makes journalists feel good about themselves and their role in society. Howard Owens reminds us that the celebrated pioneers of American newspaper culture didn’t do too much of that high-minded stuff. Au contraire.
The early giants of journalism got much wrong and got much right, but little that they did would resemble journalism of the past 60 or 70 years.
They didn’t, for example, do much in the way of investigative journalism. Nelly Bly worked for the New York World, but even her greatest public service reporting — locking herself in an insane asylum — isn’t what many of today’s newsroom pundits mean by high-cost investigative journalism. it was a stunt, just like her most expensive adventure, going around the world in 80 days. That really brought down a president, didn’t it?
Most of the other muckrakers who set the stage for investigative journalism didn’t even work for newspapers. They wrote for magazines and published books.
It took a long time for newspapers to build the cash flow to afford big time, expensive investigative journalism, and for publishers to recognize its value (and some of them still aren’t convinced) in helping to retain readers.
So if it took newspapers more than 100 years to build the business and content models that we all now cherish, why do we expect a fully formed online model to emerge in just 10 years?
Exactly. So the moral of the story is: patience. Journalism will continue even if print newspapers decline or even die. The world doesn’t end here.
.
I am baffled by the power-structure in Iran — all those councils of ‘experts’ and ‘guardians’ and the so-called ‘supreme leader’ (the title Private Eye shrewdly assigned to Gordon Brown, incidentally). “What I need”, I said to an Iranian friend, “is a diagram” (for I am but an humble engineer and long words trouble me). She immediately emailed a link to this helpful clickable BBC chart.
Looks clear, doesn’t it? But then you find that the Guardian Council, which appears to be way down the pecking order, is apparently
the most influential body in Iran and is currently controlled by conservatives. It consists of six theologians appointed by the leader and six jurists nominated by the judiciary and approved by parliament. The council has to approve all bills passed by parliament and make sure they conform to the constitution and Islamic law. The council also has the power to veto candidates in elections to parliament, local councils, the presidency and the Assembly of Experts. President Khatami is attempting to remove this power.
The Assembly of Experts, for its part, is
made up of 96 clerics, is comparable to the College of Cardinals which chooses the Pope. The assembly is elected directly by the electorate every eight years. Its functions are to appoint, oversee and if necessary dismiss the Supreme Leader. It meets twice a year to review the performance of the Supreme Leader.
“The current assembly”, the BBC chart helpfully reveals, “was elected in 1998 for an eight-year term”. Er, 1998 plus 8 equals 2006. It is now 2009. Well, it is here in the Junior Satanic Kingdom of Britain anyway. In the governing circles in Iran it’s probably about 1456.
On the other hand… Just think if the College of Cardinals met twice-yearly to review the performance of the Pope. That’d soften the old boy’s cough, as my mother used to say. Keep him up to the mark.
