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.

So, then. Why Internet economics and big data and cities? There’s a lot of credit — or blame! — to go round, but a little bit of it has to go to Russell Davies’s conference-planning.

That’s me on the right there. I hadn’t been to any conference quite like Interesting. Still haven’t. More or less every decent idea I’ve had since contains a dash of something I first encountered there.

Here’s Matt Jones, who finished off the day. You know that moment of giddy dislocation you get when one of those Magic Eye drawings kicks in? That’s how I was feeling, and this talk capped it off.

Matt Jones at Interesting2007 from russelldavies on Vimeo.

If that wasn’t enough, not long after Interesting, I took a trip to San Francisco. I wasn’t long out of my graduate studies, and I kept finding myself drifting back to thinking about, well, the kind of things I’m working on now. So that’s one of the ways this story begins.

I trained as a mineral scientist, not as a designer. So when I start to approach these ideas I use what I know, and two of the things mineral physicists think about are ordering and phase transitions. (My thesis even had “disorder” right there in the title.)

Phase transformations happen when symmetries are made and broken. Things melt and recrystallise. How are cities melting and recrystallising?

I can’t really talk about the design issues, but I’m betting that cash and computation will be at the heart of the physics of it. Here’s one thing which which connects the two. Flash memory’s getting seriously cheap very fast. So fast that you’re getting exponentially more storage for your money as time passes — hit the log-scale checkbox on the graph below to see.

Admittedly, cheap storage alone isn’t a story: hard discs are still cheaper per byte, after all. But flash memory has some advantages — it’s lower-power, more robust and smaller. The kicker, though, is that reading data in a random order off flash storage is way, way faster than reading it off a disc. Hard discs aren’t all that far evolved from vinyl records. There’s a motorised read head instead of a stylus, but it hovers over a spinning platter, reading the data off as it hurls past. So if your data doesn’t line up neatly — it’s not contiguous — you’ve got to winch the read head back and forward to read each piece of it in turn, and that’s really slow.

Databases, in particular, have had a lot of logic devoted to laying out data on disc just so. You don’t need to do that at all if you’re writing your data to flash. That lets you focus on different problems instead, like being able to insert data into your database really quickly.

If you’re going to put a sensor in everything, you need to be able to write a lot of data to a database really quickly.

Make faster databases and you can record and query data you couldn’t use before. What’s more, because they’re tiny and can take a beating, flash-backed databases can go wherever environmental sensors go. I’ve got a hunch that smart flash-based storage is the missing part of the whole ubiquitous-computation shtick: cheap flash gives you staging posts for the instrumented street’s data.

Bandwidth, computational power and storage. When you get them in places you haven’t had them before, or when they get a lot faster or a lot cheaper, or when you can combine them in new ways, you break symmetries. That’s where I think the action is.