(With pretext.)

The phase-space of news

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 00:01:00 +0100

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:

Facts vs. analysis: do you comment or report?
Quantitative vs. descriptive: do you favour reportage or data?
Generic vs. personalised: do you ship the same product to everyone, or a product shaped to an individual’s interests, friends and behaviour?
Bundled vs unbundled: do you cover everything, some subjects in detail, or one subject in obsessive detail and let your readers assemble their news portfolio?
Mass market vs. exclusive: as many readers as possible or make a virtue of aiming to a tight demographic?

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...

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 18:47:42 +0100

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...

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 18:33:54 +0100

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...

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 20:28:00 +0100

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...

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 07:45:00 +0100

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...

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 16:58:18 +0100

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

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 14:59:06 +0100

ALT/1977: WE ARE NOT TIME TRAVELERS on the Behance Network:

There’s an entire novel in this design conceit, I’m sure.

On canaries and the journalist coalface

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 15:15:45 +0100

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.

"Let’s start by looking at the very premise that you pay for a newspaper anyway in the first place...."

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 13:41:03 +0100

“

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..."

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 16:54:35 +0100

““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

"The iPhone is the first computer in a long time that doesn’t make people afraid. It affords..."

Sun, 30 May 2010 19:53:26 +0100

“The iPhone is the first computer in a long time that doesn’t make people afraid. It affords regular people the same sense of control and deep-seated psychological satisfaction that, on past platforms (even the Mac), required years of learning and acclimation to acquire.”

- Dan Grover » Indie Developers and Crossing the App Store Chasm. (This is a big deal for web applications too. Using a computer feels like a highwire act; you’re always one click away from destroying everything. Good web apps - GMail does an amazing job of this - get rid of that fear.)

"And that is what I missed in my first day with the iPad. It feels less like a computer than any..."

Thu, 27 May 2010 14:41:18 +0100

“And that is what I missed in my first day with the iPad. It feels less like a computer than any computing device I’ve owned.”

- I’ve Changed My Mind About The iPad. Sure, computers are dull. Computing is still massively relevant. Fixation on the “computer” form-factor is confusing means and ends.

“The statistics were not merely inadequate; they lied. And...

Sun, 23 May 2010 18:25:21 +0100

“The statistics were not merely inadequate; they lied. And the lies they told led the people who ran Major League Baseball teams to misjudge their players, and mismanage their games. (Bill) James later reduced his complaint to a sentence: fielding statistics made sense only as numbers, not as language. Language, not numbers, is what interested him. Words, and the meaning they were designed to convey.” - Michael Lewis, ‘Moneyball’

"Like Amazon, Google makes the vast majority of its revenue from users who are looking to make an..."

Sat, 22 May 2010 19:50:25 +0100

“Like Amazon, Google makes the vast majority of its revenue from users who are looking to make an online purchase. Other query types – searches related to news, blog posts, funny videos, etc. – are mostly a loss leaders for Google. The key risk for Google is that they are heavily dependent on online purchasing being a two-stage process: the user does a search on Google, and then clicks on an ad to buy something on another site. As long as the e-commerce world is sufficiently fragmented, users will prefer an intermediary like Google to help them find the right product or merchant. But as Amazon increasingly dominates the e-commerce market, this fragmentation could go away along with users’ need for an intermediary.”

- While Google fights on the edges, Amazon is attacking their core cdixon.org – chris dixon’s blog. Once again: follow the money.

"Nonetheless, the Age of Curation (see? anyone can coin a catchphrase) began long before today’s..."

Mon, 17 May 2010 13:28:00 +0100

“Nonetheless, the Age of Curation (see? anyone can coin a catchphrase) began long before today’s conversation about curated computing. In this Age of Digital Excess (oops, there I go again), we’re surrounded by too much music, too much software, too many websites, too many feeds, too many people, too many of their opinions and so on. Curation is already fundamental to the way in which we view the world these days, and the iPad is hardly the first technology to recognize this.”

- Overwhelmed? Welcome the Age of Curation | Epicenter | Wired.com
Let’s say your time is worth £50 an hour. How much do you “spend” on Google? (Anyone thinking about businesses work, and where value is, without thinking in terms of the flow of information is seriously missing out, I reckon.)

psd: giorney: Cold War: diagram of possible massive attack on...

Mon, 17 May 2010 11:05:14 +0100

psd:

giorney:

Cold War: diagram of possible massive attack on Soviet Russia, Fortune 1954

This is really quite something for about thirty seconds: then you work out what it’s actually saying.

Fifty-one percent

Wed, 05 May 2010 10:53:03 +0100

Eileen Burbidge on women in technology over at Techcrunch;

All of these guys (and others that I know and work with) would love to work with more women. […] They’re not opposed to hiring women and some would prefer evenly-qualified female candidates to male ones, but they (and I) don’t often see enough to choose from.

About half of my technology/business role models are women. Let’s start with my mum: she’s the person who taught me to program. She was doing things I’ll never understand, with military systems which I’d never want to get near to, at Ferranti in the 1970s. Thanks to her, I’ve never thought of computers as something only men did. Another’s Eileen: while we’ve beating our business into shape, she’s always been there to call us out on what we’ve been missing. I could go through the whole list, and the people on it know who they are, but you get the point.

Timetric’s based in White Bear Yard: I’m one of the “these guys” Eileen writes about above. Now, favouring either male or female candidates really isn’t on, but we’re trying to build a company where you’d want to work. The kind of people I want to work alongside enjoy learning, and we work at getting better at what we do. How can you do that if you surround yourself with people who are all exactly the same and exactly like you? What can you learn from them?

Startups are the ultimate in contrarian strategies. If we were typical we wouldn’t be doing it, and if we’re going to make it work, it’s not going to be by doing what everyone else does. Being open-minded and flexible’s one of our biggest structural advantages over our larger rivals. So, when I read comments like these, soaked in fear and so closed-minded, it makes me sad.

"People won’t buy a product if they can’t understand it immediately. They can’t understand it..."

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 16:53:09 +0100

“

People won’t buy a product if they can’t understand it immediately. They can’t understand it immediately if their worldview doesn’t already have a readymade place for it. And their worldview won’t have a readymade place for it, if they’ve never seen anything like it before.

Steve expertly wields the powerful tool that is the feeling of recognition.

That feeling tells us, hey, I’ve been here before, and good things happened, and people were nice to me. Recognition is a poor man’s wisdom. It helps people decide whether to buy. Without recognition, they won’t even entertain the question.

”

- The iPad, and the Staggering Work of Obviousness : Cheerful. Being too clever-clever is as bad as not being clever enough.

What's left?

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 23:06:57 +0100

I’m fascinated by the unfolding general election campaign.

The big narrative of the election is the ongoing trauma in the Labour party - or, if you’re less negative, massive upheaval in how voters of the centre and Left see themselves. Okay, it’s mostly about unpopular leaders, and the way any government accumulates so much bad karma after three parliaments that they’re doomed anyway. Still, I’ve got a hunch that it’s still a little bit about ideology and a little bit about power structures.

Except when parties are infected by radicals — like Thatcher and the Tories, and Blair and Labour — they have centres of gravity they orbit around. The Conservatives have the good fortune that their orbit takes them through somewhere electable. That’s because parties of the moderate Right have always, by default, stood for the continuing power of those currently in power; for keeping things as they are. Even if you hate it, it’s coherent. If they’re devils, they’re ones you know. Their support structures are strong, too, because they’re by definition successful and have power; financial and social capital. The funny thing is that as the Labour party have moved away from Blairism, the Tories have become Blairite, because Blairite structures have been in the ascendancy. In the absence of a galvanising force like a Thatcher, the Conservatives are magnetically drawn to orthodoxy.

By contrast, the Left stands up for people who want to change things. It’s harder to homogenise that. Everyone wants to change something different. In that light, it’s almost a historical accident that Labour wound up being the party of the left. What does Labour orbit around, really? Historically, the unions. They’re the party of organised labour. Without organised labour, and the industry you need to support it, then there’s a problem. The structures led the political theory, once Labour broke with Marxism in the early 20th century, rather than the other way around. So when Thatcher demolished the union scaffolding, what’s left other than either woolly niceness — not that there’s anything wrong with niceness, but nice never got anyone to run through a wall, and elections are about that kind of crazed intensity — or naked lust for power?

Like I say, maybe it’s a post-Thatcherite thing. Once Britain was dragged away from industry, then the conditions which bred a strong Labour party just didn’t exist any more. Labour was still, fundamentally, big on hierarchy, though. One way of interpreting what we’ve seen in Labour since the 80s is a big hierarchy responding to evolve-or-die time. What happens if it doesn’t make it? Blair’s tried the lust-for-power idea and it didn’t work out long-term.

So what would a new party of the Left stand for if you were starting over? The Labour Party was about defending the employee from the employer through collective action; working class vs bourgeoisie. But we don’t need defence from employers in the same way any more. Instead, you can imagine a new Leftist goal of defending the individual, or small, economic actor from the large one; not about challenging the existence of the market, but instead about correcting market failures — softening the impact of big corporations’ power, pricing in externalities like the environment, and maximising liberty that way.

The employer vs. employee analysis was, to be fair, the biggest bit of this during the reign of big industry. It made sense at the time. From this perspective — and it is just a perspective, there’s no absolute truth here, but it’s an interesting lens — then it’s down to it being you versus the corporations now, and that’s a different power struggle.

Through this looking-glass, the opposite of the conservative instinct is to emphasise effective, individual, liberty. A new party of the left would be anti-authoritarian: respect for people’s agency would be at the heart of it: so, internationalism so you can go and live where you want with who you want, enabled by free markets. It’d back that up with strong, free education, healthcare and welfare, to support the social mobility which belongs with physical mobility. It’d be about making sure everyone who can is able to participate in those free markets and everyone who can’t is as free as they can be. It’d be reflexively anti-censorship, and it’d be a little suspicious of anything, like copyright or patent law, which looks like censorship. It’d look something like modern liberalism.

Maybe I’m overthinking this and everyone’s just sick of Gordon Brown and doesn’t quite trust David Cameron. I’d love to believe that there might be more to it than that. Regardless of what you or I might stand for, I’d hate to think we were post-politics.

Hipstamatic (http://hipstamaticapp.com/) is a lot of fun.

Sat, 10 Apr 2010 12:44:21 +0100

Hipstamatic (http://hipstamaticapp.com/) is a lot of fun.