Spalpeen

burning paper from the last 10 years of my life by The Shifted Librarian on Flickr

Some commentary on David Carr’s article, United, Newspapers May (Could, Possibly, Might, Will Hopefully, With Crutches) Stand. I’d like to rename it “United, Newspapers Will (More Likely) Fall.”

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Back when I was a young media reporter fueled by indignation and suspicion, I often pictured the dark overlords of the newspaper industry gathering at a secret location to collude over cigars and Cognac, deciding how to set prices and the news agenda at the same time.

It probably never happened, but now that I fear for the future of the world that they made, I’m hoping that meeting takes place. I’ll even buy the cigars.

Got news for ya’ David, even the non-smoking newspaper men ain’t meeting anymore.

Even casual followers of the newspaper industry could rattle off the doomsday tick-tock: a digitally enabled free fall in ads and audience now has burly guys circling major daily newspapers with plywood and nail guns. The Rocky Mountain News is gone, The San Francisco Chronicle is on the bubble, and dozens of others are limping along on the endangered list.

Including the very paper that this column appears in.

Magazine and newspaper editors have canceled their annual conferences (good idea: let’s not talk to one another). But perhaps someone can blow a secret whistle and the publishers and editors could all meet at an undisclosed location.

Alright, so you saw that link about the newspaper people not meeting. My bad. Maybe for your proposed secret meeting they could try emailing each other?

My fantasy meeting goes something like this: a rump caucus could form where the newspaper industry would decide to hold hands and jump off the following cliffs together on the following actions.

No more free content. The Web has become the primary delivery mechanism for quality newsrooms across the country, and consumers will have to participate in financing the newsgathering process if it is to continue. Setting the price point at free — the newspaper analyst Alan D. Mutter called it the “original sin” — has brought the industry millions of eyeballs and a return that doesn’t cover the coffee budget of some newsrooms.

Unfortunately printing information on paper don’t seem to be selling either. And as far as I can tell, internet articles behind paywalls don’t seem to sell either.

The big threat would be that newspapers could lose the readers they have, lots of them. The mitigating factor is that a lot of those readers aren’t paying anyway. And keep in mind that people are already paying for quality content all over the Web: The Wall Street Journal, Consumer Reports, The Arkansas Gazette. Tiered Web access — from a bare-bones free product to a rich, customized subscription — could be among the solutions.

Isn’t part of the problem that newspapers seem only want to churn out one-product-fits-all? Since when have newspapers cared about who the hell I am? This article doesn’t even allow comments. How are they going to customise anything to suit my needs? (by the way, any information that does get revealed through these “customized subscriptions” will end up being free anyway.) [insert something about the internet destroying boundaries to information/mp3s/movies]

No more free ride to aggregators. Google announced that it would begin selling ads against Google News, with almost no financial accommodation to the organizations that generate that news. The book industry — of all Luddites — has extracted cash from Google, as did the wire services. Google, The Huffington Post and Newser have built their audiences and brands on other people’s labors. Continue Reading »

 
Image credit: Flat Earth News by Scleroplex on Flickr

I’ve been listening to the City University’s massively informative series of talks from the Centre for Investigative Journalism, and you should too. I liked Nick Davies’ talk so much, that I decided to paraphrase/transcribe some of it, and added some of my own thoughts.

Don’t bother reading all the newspapers, watching all the TV news shows, listening to all the radio broadcasts.

Why? Because if you’re constantly listening to everyone else to find your news, and all everyone else is doing is constantly listening to everyone else to find their news, then you get a shallow echo chamber where everyone is reporting the same small set of stories and everyone reports on the small small set of stories in the same manner.

Objectivity sucks

Davies cites Martin Bell’s reporting of the war in former Yugoslavia. Some stories have such an inherent emotional content that you are distorting the story if you don’t express it deliberately and overtly. In this war, one side was literally raping the other. If you stand there and coldly report the story while people are being raped and pillaged, you’re distorting what’s happening. It is utterly impossible to objectively report on events. The objective story doesn’t exist. Continue Reading »

Clay, what really tipped you over the edge? Was it the eight trillionth biased, irrelevant, spammed, or purchased link on the homepage of Digg.com that made you lose faith? Or was it the fact that every politician who has successfully utilised the internet, has cynically used it to raise money for their existing political platforms? Perhaps the continuing utter insignificance of Creative Commons in relation to greater society, and the prevalence (and success) of DRM?

Technology is not innately “good.”

People split the atom, they use it to build bombs that can millions, and to provide power for millions.

People make a site that can allow anyone to vote for stories, they use it to help other people discover “10 Famous People Saved By The Heimlich“, as well as the latest obscure political development.

Crowds are not wise. They are mobs.

Clay now thinks of the internet as “just another implementation layer for special interest groups” - this didn’t have to be the case! But that’s what happens when people just invent a piece of technology and give it to millions with no guidance. There will always be a need for editorial control.

Frankly, the kind of wide eyed optimism that many people have about the internet is really unhelpful. Theories aren’t enough. Just putting it out there isn’t enough. It’ll take a lot of hard work to make the internet even a shade of the amazing place that people like Clay like to imagine. People want money and power, and the internet is just another tool to get it.

Rebecca Elvin is a Print Journalism student at The University of Huddersfield, and she’s writing a dissertation on ‘the changing role of the freelancer.’ She contacted me to see if I could answer some questions about joining the NUJ as the first “full time blogger.” Here they are, along with my answers.

So you have had your application for membership at the NUJ approved as a full-time freelance professional blogger. What is the difference between you and the thousands of other people that blog?

I applied to join the NUJ as a full-time blogger for Engadget.com, a very popular consumer technology blog (public numbers put it at somewhere around 4 million unique users per month: during one conference last year the site got 6.4 million page views in one hour. That’s traffic that rivals national newspaper websites).

What most people don’t see with Engadget is the extremely tight editorial control on the site. Behind the scenes, you have a team of editors who are constantly maintaining the unique voice of the site, and making sure that the high ethical standards for the site are being met. That’s what sets Engadget and other professional blogs apart from the huge majority of blogs out there. The internal ethical guidelines for Engadget are as strict as The New York Times.

What made you apply to the NUJ?

I applied to the NUJ for two reasons:

1) I read an editorial by The Guardian’s Roy Greenslade responding to an article by the NUJ’s Donnacha DeLong about how he had decided to leave the NUJ because in his view, it had failed to represent him as a journalist. Seeing that, I thought that leaving the NUJ was hardly going to help the situation. So I decided to join partially out of the principle that it’s easier to improve something if you get directly involved with its operation.

2) Because I felt that my compensation at Engadget wasn’t satisfactory. I was being paid in dollars (while living in the UK, when the currency rate was $2:£1), and although these matters were known by the editor at the time (Ryan Block) and he had offered to increase my pay to offset this, and had mentioned the possibility of a full-time salaried position at the site, I felt that I needed to get some advice. Engadget.com is owned by Weblogs, Inc., which is in turned by AOL, which should have been paying its writers a lot more than it did at the time. Note that was mid-2007. I have no idea how much writers get paid at Weblogs, Inc. now. 

What do you think the benefits on joining the NUJ will be?

So far the main benefit I’ve received has come from the publicity around my application. It’s also quite something to be able to put on your CV that you were the first blogger to join one of the most established unions for journalists. In the future, I consider my NUJ membership as a form of insurance policy. Hopefully I won’t have any trouble with employers in the future, but I take comfort from the fact that I’ll have someone to call in case an employer is late sending a freelance cheque, or worse.

What direction do you think the future of online journalism is heading?

More collaboration between writers and readers. More and better quality video. More and larger images. A greater number of smaller, faster and more flexible publications beating bigger, slower and inflexible publications to the punch. New technologies that push out the old technologies, and the publications that continue to cling to them. I’d like to think that mainstream media sites will learn how to link properly (i.e. often, and to the sources they cite), and that the process of journalism carried out by the MSM will become a little bit more transparent.

Do you think there could be any conflicting factors between the traditional media and bloggers?

The real conflict is between traditional methods of presenting information on the web, and newer methods of presenting information on the web. I see no reason to read Ben Goldacre’s column at Guardian.co.uk, because his blog, Bad Science, gives me the same content, plus a whole lot more (it’s easier to find, it features all his other posts in one location, it features the stuff The Guardian edited out). There’s no reason for me to read his column (traditional media) because the blog (newer media) gives me more. It really is as simple as that.

Pitting “bloggers” in conflict against mainstream media is misguided, because as you see in the example above, Ben Goldacre is both a producer of traditional media *and* a blogger. The same person publishing content on newer online publishing formats beats the same person publishing content on traditional online publishing formats. It’s time that newspapers figured this out!

What does your job involve?

Currently I’m a student in my final year at Hull University, studying History and Politics. I’m soon to start working for Catch21 Productions, which produces online video and arranges events across the country on a theme of getting young people involved with politics. It was founded by ex-Hull students, and I’m very excited about helping out there!

My work at Engadget primarily involved writing ~200-word blog posts on consumer technology topics. Secondary to that was finding things to write about, which involves searching through a ridiculously huge index of RSS feeds, a rapidly updated tips box for readers to send in news, and live coverage of news events (keynotes, product reviews). The second task was shared out amongst the writers of the site, so at some point during your shift you’d be “on duty” and singly devoted to finding and dishing out news items to other writers.

Have you trained as a journalist?

I’ve had no formal training as a journalist. Everything I know about journalism comes from looking at how established journalists and news organisations do things, and attempting to do it better.

How do make a living out of blogging?

Currently I don’t earn a living from blogging, but through Weblogs, Inc. I received a cheque every month for writing a certain number of blog posts every month. In my case, I wouldn’t call it a living, but it was enough for me to justify spending time on something I enjoyed doing.

Would there be an option to work as a staffed blogger or have you actively chosen to be freelance? If so, why.

Yes, I had been offered the option of potentially becoming a staff blogger at Engadget. The harder I worked, the quicker I could have achieved that. I never achieved it due to other pressures (being a full time student) and the fact that I enjoyed the level I was working at. I did it primarily for fun, to make contacts and to hone my skills as a writer/reporter. I eventually left to go work on Mahalo Daily for a year, which was also about having fun and honing my skills - in that case through producing video.

The Guardian redesigned its website’s front page the other week. I wrote about how tabloidy it is, but Jeff Jarvis in his Media column put the view across much more effectively today. He talks about news being more of a feed than any other format. Instead of having a homepage with some big, large image pointing to the biggest issue of the day, Jeff suggests that they should redesign around a feed format. Allow people to customize what they see on the homepage. Add video, audio, and text commentary from other sources on the web to add context. Make it collaborative. He cites figures where only 20% of readers come to the front page of the site sites. The rest all read The Guardian through links that were originally collated through feeds and deeper linking on other sites, using RSS or otherwise.

These are all nice ideas, but it’ll take a significant culture change within a paper like The Guardian in order to effect a move away from what editors have always understood: a front page, with a leading story. Unfortunately for newspapers, the days where the newspapers get to decide this story are coming to an end. What makes it all the more depressing is that “All this can be done today. And doesn’t that make the notion of the home page, the web site, and the site sound antiquated and quaint like, oh, a newspaper?”

Jeff’s got it right. The real change that has to come at newspapers is cultural, so it’s rather strange that Jeff’s voice comes from within The Guardian. I hope the old hands on the front page read his articles.

I’m currently filling in my public consult of the iPlayer on-demand service for the BBC. Please, if you live in the UK and pay a license fee, fill this in and congratulate the trust on recognising the need for a DRM-free solution, whilst also criticising them for not setting out procedures for opening up the entire BBC archive for viewing online. My questions and answers below:

Do you agree with the BBC Trust’s proposal to approve the new BBC on-demand services, subject to the modifications outlined in the Trust’s report of its provisional conclusions?

Yes, I absolutely agree with the approval of the BBC’s on-demand services: it will significantly add to the value of the BBC’s content. The ratio of costs to benefits makes it a complete no-brainer that the BBC should be persuing a video on-demand service. However, I have reservations with some aspects of the proposal.

The concession for a mere 7-day catch up service is insane. Why should British license payers have to settle for this solution? We’ve paid for the content to be produced, so therefore we should have access to the content regardless of when we want to access it! Eventually I’d expect to see a complete archive of ALL the BBC’s content online at no cost to license payers. The 7-day solution cripples the solution by tying users to a specific time frame in order to watch content (i.e. it’s only a slightly improvement over the convenience of normal TV!)

I’m very encouraged by the report’s approval of a non-DRM solution! This is completely, 100% essential. DRM would completely cripple the BBC’s solution. This is an extremely encouraging development in the report. This HAS to be part of the final iPlayer.

In a market in which most broadcasters are expected to be offering on-demand services, would you agree that it is a priority for the BBC to be investing in this area?

Yes, in fact I would argue that competitors should not be taken into account with the iPlayer solution. It is inevitable that all broadcasters will eventually be submitting their content online, so why not offer the best solution now and pioneer the field?

The BBC Trust has proposed setting a limit of 30 days as the amount of time that programmes can be stored on a computer before being viewed. As this is a nascent market, there is currently no clear standard on the length of the storage window. On balance, the Trust thinks 30 days is the right length of time. How long do you think consumers should be able to store BBC programmes on their computers before viewing them?

Indefinitely. There should be absolutely no limits on when or where British license payers can view the content that they have paid for. Doesn’t this go hand-in-hand with the DRM-free aspect of the iPlayer?

If the Trust cannot accept anything other than a 30-day limit at the moment, then they should make plans for when competitors inevitably get rid of these kinds of limits, and set out plans for increasing this limit until it no longer exists. Again, I think the BBC should be the pioneer in this area.

The BBC Trust concluded that public value would be created by allowing series stacking. This would allow viewers to catch-up with all episodes of a series for the duration of its run. The Trust recognised that although it would provide increased opportunities to view BBC programmes, it could also deter people from buying DVDs or using commercial video-on-demand services. Do you consider series stacking to be a useful feature? What kind of series would you expect to be included? Should there be any limitation on the number of episodes of a series made available for catch-up or the length of time for which they can be viewed?

Why it the Trust paranoid over when or where people watch the BBC’s content? Allow people to watch whatever episodes they like in whatever order they like. Allow them to transfer the content to personal media players and mobile phones without restrictions.

Once the practicalities are out of the way, there should be no limitation on what the public can watch.

How important is it that the proposed seven-day catch-up service over the internet is available to consumers who are not using Microsoft software?

This is the most important aspect of the iPlayer service. I cannot stress how important it is that the BBC does not go down the WinXP + Windows Media Player 9/10/11 route that other broadcasters are mistakenly taking.

Using a Microsoft DRM solution would be justifying Microsoft’s monopoly over the computer industry and would inconvenience or cut off the users of milllions of Mac, Linux, or other platforms. Content should be provided in an open format, so that it can be played on any platform.

Should the BBC be allowed to offer book readings from its radio services as audio downloads over the internet?

Yes. All BBC content should be made available online.

The BBC Trust concluded there was fine balance between public value and market impact in deciding whether to allow the BBC to offer audio downloads of classical music. While such downloads could help introduce new listeners to classical music, they could also deter purchases of commercial recordings. What is your view on whether - and to what extent - the BBC should be allowed to offer radio broadcasts of classical music as audio downloads over the internet?

I find it hard to value “market value” when the public are already paying for access to this content. I repeat, all content that the BBC has access to should be made available online!

How important is it to you that the BBC provides some means for parents to control which of its programmes are accessible on-demand to children? Is such a facility necessary or is it more a matter for parents to exercise controls over how children use the internet?

Since the BBC seems concerned with how its competitors do things, I wouldn’t be worried if the BBC’s parental control system emulated its competitors: a simple warning that the content is adult should suffice, although I’m not opposed to a login system for children that parents could control.

What are your views on whether the BBC should offer content from non-BBC providers on the on-demand service on its website?

Why not? I don’t see a problem here. The BBC should be encouraging third parties to submit their content for display on the web. The BBC should also create an “indie zone” for valuable content from individuals that would like an outlet for their work.

What are your views on whether and how the BBC should make available on-demand content on services run by other providers - such as multi-channel services or internet-based audio and video downloading services?

What would be the point? If the BBC’s on-demand solution is fully comprehensive and accessible to all at any time on any platform, then what would be the need to syndicate the content? Saying all that, I don’t have a problem with the BBC syndicating content, as long as it’s readily available on the iPlayer service.

Do the revisions proposed to BBC Service Licences to allow the new services to go ahead seem appropriate?

Yes, absolutely. I’d be willing to pay even more for a complete system as I have outlined in my earlier answers.

Are there any other issues you would like the BBC Trust to consider in relation to the proposed services?

I’d argue that this is the most important issue that the BBC will face over the next decade as distribution for video content switches from TV to the internet. As long as the BBC goes the route of comprehensive and complete access to all its archives with no restrictions on what people can watch, when they can watch it, and on what platforms they can watch it on, the BBC will pioneer a new era of television.