It isn’t newspapers that need saving. It’s journalism. To put it more exactly, what needs to be preserved is the public service journalists provide by using a particular set of ethical methodologies to gather, assess and report information people need to function effectively as human beings and citizens in a free society.
Journalism Ethics > Feature Articles > How can we save journalism?
Everyone’s fixating on the Times paywall and whether this means that “people won’t pay for journalism”. In the comments here, SK wrote:
I guess my question is: do you not think that there is a minimum price for quality content, and do you not think that it’s higher than can be supported by distribution-model pricing — that if you’re going to be able to produce content, people have to learn to pay for that content, not simply for distribution or access?
And though it’s cheating, I’m going to reject the premise. There’s no price for content other than what the market will bear. I don’t believe people will, or ever have, paid for content - in most markets, recorded music and DVD being maybe the exceptions, they’ve always paid part of the cost, with the remainder being met by advertising (newsprint), ancillaries (the cinema), and the like. It’s always been about multiple revenue streams.
The problem for the mass print media is that two ways they got paid, built around control over the advertising channel and the ability to extract extra revenue at the logistical interface created by having to ship huge piles of paper around the place, disappeared at the same time. So everyone fixates on trying to put one of these back. But there are a bunch of other variables you can tweak, and it seems to me that those are much more potentially interesting.
If you haven’t seen EPIC 2015…
… it’s kind of a totem for me.
Here’s the thing: the news space isn’t one-dimensional, it’s not “paid” vs “unpaid”: it’s way more complex than that. “The newspaper” is only one possible point in the space of information services we’re going to spend the rest of our lives navigating. Off the top of my head, here are some other axes:
On this, the Guardian mixes analysis and facts, is clearly bundled, and slants highbrow; but it’s also generic, rather than specific, and favours description over quantitative data. But its blogs - like the Data Blog - fill in niches. They’re unbundling themselves and turning themselves into a portfolio of sources, not a single source, which can be monetized by a portfolio of approaches.
That doesn’t make nearly as good a soundbite as “paywall good!” or “paywall bad!”, but it feels much more like the truth. I’m not making a moral argument here, because ultimately the morality of the situation isn’t here or there: what will happen is what we can make work financially and economically. If we’re blind to the flexibility we have and the true constraints we’re inventing within, though, we’re never going to get the outcome we’re all hoping for: a powerful, accurate, honest and free exchange of facts and opinion.
That doesn’t have to come from a newspaper. It just has to come from somewhere.
Because news is newsier if you have five copies. (Civic Center in San Francisco yesterday. )
Telegraph Hill’s big on birds. It’s not every day you get divebombed by a flock of parrots, put it that way.
I’d never seen a hummingbird in action. They’re almost too fast to see, but I got lucky, I guess. They’re amazing little creatures.
So this was from the Caltrain the other day, riding into Mountain View. On the way back into San Francisco, I was listening to the Hold Steady’s new record. The Hold Steady are a really hypertexty band. If you’re the kind of person who likes to unpick things, and I am, there’s a lot of thread for you to pull on. Craig Finn’s the kind of lyricist who comes with a concordance. If you’re the kind of person who nicks quotes to say what you mean, because you never have the words unless someone else has uttered them first, then you’ll really, really like them. I’m a big fan.
Anyway, their most recent one, Heaven is Whenever, pivots round a track called “We Can Get Together”; Heaven is whenever we can get together, sit down on your floor and listen to your records.. Every indie geek gets that one. For some reason, though — well, I’ve been busy — I’d only skimmed the most recent album, I hadn’t really listened to it. I hadn’t clocked the references to Heavenly, an eighties Oxford indie band. They were twee, and romantic, and joyful. And the drummer took his own life, and as Craig Finn sings: he wasn’t just the drummer, he was the singer’s younger brother; now, I still play that single, but that song don’t sound so simple any more.
I listened to that song on loop for the rest of the journey.
When I was trying to stay sane at the end of my PhD, I’d write music. Sad little electronic ditties. That’s where most of Symbolic comes from. And I’d listen to records, and like I said earlier, I’d pick away at the threads. The personal histories. Ian Curtis and Joy Division, Kurt Cobain and Nirvana, and the accidents; Jeff Buckley, Jimi Hendrix. Even long after I’d submitted, I kept seeing it: Charles Cooper of Telefon Tel Aviv. And while I was writing the thesis, and the record, my friends and I lost someone. Not a musician, but he was a son, and I’m sure he’d have been a great younger brother.
And here’s what I can’t get past: by applauding all this pain, am I culpable?
Symbolic is dedicated to absent friends, but I’d trade that record and all the others for people still being in their friends’ lives. No song is worth that.
Still in San Francisco.
I’ve been meaning to write about a bunch of different things. Inception and suspension of disbelief; The Hold Steady, hypertextuality and culpability; mass customization and deeply personal contexts.
Then I remember that you could just read Snarkmarket, or Robin Sloan (one of the contributors)’s short stories, and you’d get most of what I’ve been trying to say.
You should read Snarkmarket. It’s very good indeed.
Sixteen hours of planes and trains, but dreich is dreich everywhere.
I don’t really expect anyone to agree with me on this, but San Francisco feels a bit like Edinburgh would if the Edinburgh Festival went all year. It’s the port city thing, I reckon: the microclimate.
ALT/1977: WE ARE NOT TIME TRAVELERS on the Behance Network -
There’s an entire novel in this design conceit, I’m sure.
So that quote which went up earlier’s about the news industry, again, and the structural decline in businesses which thought they sold content but actually sold logistics and distribution. That describes, more or less, all of the mass media industries.
On that subject, I’ve recently been preoccupied with a thought-experiment. The basic premise is this: like the quote earlier says, cost-bases are vastly too high across all of the media industries. With those costs as an anchor, there’s no way to make money without the extra margin you got away with thanks to analogue friction. So, you have to cut. However, you’re a big, hairy unionized industry like newsprint, so even if you wanted to, you’re not going to be able to be surgical about it; it’s going to be a long process starting with voluntary redundancy. Ethically I’m right there with them on this, but from a business perspective isn’t that a disaster? Aren’t the people most able to leave likely to be the people best-suited to the new landscape?
My hunch is that voluntary redundancy in the media industries means shedding the people you need and keeping the people who’ll be less able to adapt. You wanted a newsroom of digital natives, but you’re going to keep the people who can’t conceive of anything other than the papers they were brought up on.
Short of blowing the whole thing up, or launching spin-out life-rafts and running down the old businesses, I can’t see how to combat that. The economics are scary, but the brain-drain may be more troubling still.
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Let’s start by looking at the very premise that you pay for a newspaper anyway in the first place. Well, you do, but that’s all you do – you pay for the very paper you hold in your hand. Your 70p goes absolutely nowhere to meeting the full costs of what you’re reading – the journalists’ salaries, the IT and all the other component parts of complex business producing a highly perishable manufactured product. The difference is subsidised by advertising or the depth of a proprietor’s pocket – or both. If consumers were truly ‘buying’ and therefore valuing the journalism itself rather than the means of delivery, they’d happily pay £5 per copy of the Daily Rag. But of course they don’t – and won’t ever - but that’s exactly what paywall fans think will happen online.
With a newspaper, all you’ve bought is the delivery channel – the paper and perhaps the space on the newsagent’s counter. Just as now you’ve paid £700 for your home PC, £30 a month for your broadband connection and perhaps another £30 a month for your smartphone.
” — Marc Reeves: Speaking truth to power: my speech to the CBI“It’s important that nobody gets mad at you for screwing up,” says Lee Unkrich, director of Toy Story 3. “We know screwups are an essential part of making something good. That’s why our goal is to screw up as fast as possible.” — Animating a Blockbuster: How Pixar Built Toy Story 3 | Magazine | Wired.com