How media evolve

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One of the case studies I use in lectures about media ecology is how newspapers in the 1950s adapted to the emergence of television. But actually there’s an even better example — which is how newspapers adapted (or failed) to the challenge of radio. The WSJ has a lovely example of this in a piece by L. Gordon Crovitz prompted by a new biography of Barney Kilgore, the editor who transformed the Journal in the 1940s.

As the remaining city newspapers rethink themselves, editors and publishers might consult a road map for how newspapers can live alongside new media that was drawn up more than 50 years ago by Bernard Kilgore, outlined in a new biography by former Journal executive Richard Tofel, Restless Genius: Barney Kilgore, The Wall Street Journal and the Invention of Modern Journalism.

Kilgore had remarkable judgment early about the journalistic issue of our day: how readers use old media, new media and both. When Kilgore became managing editor of the Journal in 1941, he inherited a business model that technology had undermined. Founded in 1889 to provide market news and stock prices to individual investors, the Journal lost half its circulation as this basic information became widely available.

Kilgore observed that then new media such as radio meant market news was available in real time. Some cities had a dozen newspapers that had gained the Journal's once-valuable ability to report share prices.

The Journal had to change. Technology increasingly meant readers would know the basic facts of news as it happened. He announced, “It doesn’t have to have happened yesterday to be news,” and said that people were more interested in what would happen tomorrow. He crafted the front page “What’s News — ” column to summarize what had happened, but focused on explaining what the news meant.

On the morning after Pearl Harbor, other newspapers recounted the facts already known to all the day before through radio. The Journal’s page-one story instead began, “War with Japan means industrial revolution in the United States.” It outlined the implications for the economy, industry and commodity and financial markets.

If you wanted an illustration of the mindset newspapers need to cope with the challenge of the Internet, then that Pearl Harbor story is it in a nutshell.

Email 101

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From the Nicci French Blog.

Although email has the word ‘mail’ in it, it’s not like a letter and although it’s sent over a telephone line, it’s not like a telephone call. What it’s more like is the postcard you send from holiday that you send to someone in the office which they then pin up on the wall. You don’t free-associate on a postcard about kneecapping your enemies. You don’t spread vicious gossip about close friends on a postcard. There are more appropriate channels for such things.

My own rule about my own emails is this: if there is anything that embarrass me if it were printed out, put on a giant poster and pasted up in Piccadilly Cirucs, then I cut it out.

Yep.

Larry Summers & Harvard’s endowment (contd.)

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Well, well. Dave Boyle pointed me to this story from the April 3 edition of Boston.com:

Back in 2002, a new employee of Harvard University’s endowment manager named Iris Mack wrote a letter to the school’s president, Lawrence Summers, that would ultimately get her fired.

In the letter, dated May 12 of that year, Mack told Summers that she was “deeply troubled and surprised” by things she had seen in her new job as a quantitative analyst at Harvard Management Co.

She would go on to say, in later e-mails and conversations, that she felt the endowment was taking on too much risk in derivatives investments, and that she suspected some of her colleagues were engaging in insider trading, according to a separate letter written by her lawyer that summarized the correspondence.

On July 2 Mack was fired. But six years later, the kinds of investments she allegedly warned about did blow up on Harvard. The endowment plunged 22 percent last summer, in part due to the collapse of the credit markets. As a result, the school is cutting costs and under criticism that it took on too much risk in its investment portfolio.

Mack, who holds a doctorate in mathematics from Harvard, had been with Harvard Management for just four months when she approached Summers. She asked him to keep her communications confidential, or risk making her life “a living hell.”

But on July 1, Mack was called into a meeting by her boss, Jack Meyer, then the chief of Harvard Management.

The next day Meyer fired her, according to the letter from her attorney, Jonathan Margolis, a copy of which was obtained by the Globe. Meyer told Mack that she was fired for making “baseless allegations against HMC to individuals outside of HMC,” according to the Margolis letter…

What’s going on in your browser window?

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If you want a measure of how far we’ve moved from the days of simple HTML, then just install the NoScript add-on for Firefox. It detects every script that a site is running within the page and asks you to make a decision about whether to allow it or not. It’s an eye-opener. The image shows what happened when I opened a normal page from the Wall Street Journal.

The sad fact is that there’s so much AJAX-like stuff out there that running NoScript is a bit of a pain. The old adage about the price of liberty being eternal vigilance needs updating. The price of online security is endless hassle.

1,001 uses for Twitter

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The New York Times discovers Twitter.”Taken collectively”, it says,

“the stream of messages can turn Twitter into a surprisingly useful tool for solving problems and providing insights into the digital mood. By tapping into the world’s collective brain, researchers of all kinds have found that if they make the effort to dig through the mundane comments, the live conversations offer an early glimpse into public sentiment — and even help them shape it”.

Wow! You don’t say.

Orwellianism on the instalment plan

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Charles Arthur has written a terrific piece in Media Guardian about the implications for journalism of the new data-retention legislation.

Want to be an investigative journalist of the future? You’ll need a pen and paper, pay-as-you-go phone, and a motorbike. We’ll explain the motorbike later. But you may be an endangered species. New regulations that came into force last week – requiring telephone and internet companies to keep logs of what numbers are called, and which websites and email services and internet telephony contacts are made – have left some wondering if investigative journalism, with its need to protect sources (and its sources’ need, often, for protection), has been dealt a killer blow.

Worries focus on the fact that every government department, local council and even quango can access this telephone and internet data, given a judge’s clearance. What will they use it for? To investigate everything from treason to flytipping. Might it also be used to find out who has been tipping off a journalist on a local paper about the misdeeds of local councillors? That’s the concern.

It’s a real worry IMHO. When the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act was being pushed through Parilament in 1999, some of us were concerned — and warned — about its almost infinite extensibility. And in due course we found that it was being used not just to monitor alleged terrorists, but by a local authority to spy on parents suspected of giving a false address in order to get their kids into a particular school.

The new data retention laws will make it impossible to protect journalistic sources — unless totally non-electronic channels are used. And, even then, widespread use of car number-plate recognition software will make it risky to travel to a meeting in a car. So, as Charles says, use only snail mail, unlocked SIM-cards bought with cash and travel to meetings with confidential sources on a bike.

We’re building an Orwellian state on the instalment plan.

The new market for software

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Fascinating Ars Technica piece on hos the market for software is changing as the iPhone consolidates its strangelhold on the smartphone market.

In addition to giving away some nice swag to celebrate the countdown to one billion App Store downloads, Apple also created a list of top 20 paid and and top 20 free applications. The list gave us a good idea of what iPhone users like and what they are willing to pay for en masse (the lists appear to be region specific, so many of you will be looking at the US list).

To make the list a bit more interesting, however, MacRumors has collected sales numbers for some of the apps from a variety of different sources. While none of the numbers are 100 percent up to date, they are a reasonable approximation.

Since not all developers are open with their sales numbers, the article only talks about four of the top 20 applications numbers. The number-two application, Koi Pond by the Blimp Pilots, has made an estimated $623,000 (after Apple’s cut) from about 900,000 downloads. Number three, Pangea’s Enigmo, is harder to pinpoint because it has fluctuated in price over its App Store lifespan. With an estimated 810,000 copies sold, however, Pangea has made at least $561,330 on the one application alone. PocketGod, number 12 on the list, has earned an impressive $350,000 since its release in January with somewhere around 500,000 sales. The last application with any numbers is iShoot, which at number 19 on Apple’s list has reportedly made the author $800,000 in just five months.

While the numbers are in no way indicative of the whole, it makes it quite clear that it is possible to make a comfortable living developing solely for the iPhone. Even with mildly popular applications, we would estimate that a developer could squeak out a living if they were any good…

LATER: Nice email from a reader with a link to an Irish Times story about one of his students, Steven Troughton-Smith, who “has emerged as Ireland’s most successful software developer for Apple’s iPhone, generating revenues of up to $1,000 a day.”

Obama’s ethical Houdini

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I always thought that Larry Summers was an idiotic choice for President of Harvard — and that Obama was crazy to choose him as a senior economic adviser, but it turns out we didn’t know the half of it. Here’s an excerpt from a wonderful column by Frank Rich which explores the extent to which Summers is ethically challenged:

On the same Friday that the Labor Department reported the latest jobless numbers, the White House released (in the evening, after the network news) some other telling figures on the financial disclosure forms of its top officials. From those we learned more about how much the bubble’s culture permeated this administration.

We discovered, for instance, that Lawrence Summers, the president’s chief economic adviser, made $5.2 million in 2008 from a hedge fund, D. E. Shaw, for a one-day-a-week job. He also earned $2.7 million in speaking fees from the likes of Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. Those institutions are not merely the beneficiaries of taxpayers’ bailouts since the crash. They also benefited during the boom from government favors: the Wall Street deregulation that both Summers and Robert Rubin, his mentor and predecessor as Treasury secretary, championed in the Clinton administration. This dynamic duo’s innovative gift to their country was banks “too big to fail.”

Some spoilsports raise the conflict-of-interest question about Summers: Can he be a fair broker of the bailout when he so recently received lavish compensation from some of its present and, no doubt, future players? This question can be answered only when every transaction in the new “public-private investment plan” to buy the banks’ toxic assets is made transparent. We need verification that this deal is not, as the economist Joseph Stiglitz has warned, a Rube Goldberg contraption contrived to facilitate “huge transfers of wealth to the financial markets” from taxpayers.

But perhaps I’ve become numb to the perennial and bipartisan revolving-door incestuousness of Washington and Wall Street. I was less shocked by the White House’s disclosure of Summers’s recent paydays than by a bit of reporting that appeared deep down in the Times follow-up article on that initial news. The reporter Louise Story wrote that Summers had done consulting work for another hedge fund, Taconic Capital Advisors, from 2004 to 2006, while still president of Harvard. [emphasis added]

That the highly paid leader of arguably America’s most esteemed educational institution (disclosure: I went there) would simultaneously freelance as a hedge-fund guy might stand as a symbol for the values of our time. At the start of his stormy and short-lived presidency, Summers picked a fight with Cornel West for allegedly neglecting his professorial duties by taking on such extracurricular tasks as cutting a spoken-word CD. Yet Summers saw no conflict with moonlighting in the money racket while running the entire university. The students didn’t even get a CD for his efforts — and Harvard’s deflated endowment, now in a daunting liquidity crisis, didn’t exactly benefit either.

Summers’s dual portfolio in Cambridge has already led to one potential intermingling of private business and public policy in his new White House post. He tried — and, mercifully, failed — to install the co-founder of Taconic in the job of running the TARP bailouts. But again, Summers’s potential conflicts of interest seem less telling than the conflict of values that his Harvard double-résumé exemplifies…

Interesting footnote: As I observed a while back, Harvard’s endowment (which pays for a third of the university’s operating costs) is in deep, deep trouble. Partly this is due to the collapse in the stock market. But it is made worse, as the New York Times reported, because — on the advice of its President — “it had invested more than its assets, a leveraging strategy that can magnify results, both good and bad. It also had invested heavily in private equity and related deals, which not only lock up existing cash but require investors to put up more capital over time.”

The truth is that Summers is a creature of the monster he is now charged with nursing back to health. Why should anyone believe that he is capable of acting impartially — or even ethically — given his record?