Sips from the Firehose


Jan 01

HDR Photo Expermiments

Posted: under HDR Photography, Marin County, Multimedia.
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The landscape up here is so beautiful, and the light has been amazing.  I’ve taken to experimenting with combining multiple exposures into HDR photos.

Here’s a view from atop Mt. Vision. This one needs a bit more adjusting - the fog clouds look pretty good, but the highlights of the sky & clouds in the upper left need to be processed a bit better.  Still this was a beautiful, amazing scene. (This was done with the HDR functions of Adobe Photoshop CS3)

Next, here’s that same scene, as handled by Photomatix:

You can clearly see the difference - in the Photomatix version, the color in the foreground pops out, without sacrificing the contrast & color in the fog banks in the background. I’ll be posting a video of the fog drifting in through the trees later…

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Jan 01

AsianWeek Kills Print Edition: A Growing Trend?

Posted: under Digital Migration, Newspaper Deathwatch, Newspapers, Webconomics.

First day of the new year, reading through the S.F. Chronicle, ho-hum. Governator Arnie’s got a plan, despite being holed up in Sun Valley skiing, the local sports columnist wonders if Barry Bonds might make it back into the major leagues, despite facing Federal prison for allegedly lying under oath, and the fog obscured the New Year’s Eve fireworks (a personal bummer, since we expended much energy to ensure we had a good view of the Bay).

What’s this?

AsianWeek, an influential force politically and culturally for San
Francisco Asian Americans for 30 years, will publish its final print
edition on Friday, another victim in the shrinking newspaper industry.

AsianWeek will continue to publish online, at www.asianweek.com,
and produce special editions about Asian American business,
professional development, heritage and other issues and will still host
events, but the print edition is going away because of economic
realities, Ted Fang, editor and publisher, said in an interview
Wednesday.

AsianWeek Front Page: No mention here that the print edition is dead.

Oh, great. It’s a new year, and the first day in, and already I’m getting hit with more news about the newspaper crisis. I just spent the last week masticating the implications of the death of big-market dailies.  I’m editing stories over the break that are all about the moves that papers should make, tools that they should use to reinvent themselves.  And still…?

“There are fewer major newspapers, fewer newspaper readers and fewer
newspaper advertisers than ever before,” Fang and his brother, James
Fang, the president of the company, write in a letter to readers
published in Friday’s final edition. “A faltering economy has
accelerated the decline,” they write.

This is particularly troubling for me, because on the surface, this paper would seem to have a lot of the attributes that a Print 2.0 operation going into the future should have - that is, tightly focused on a well-defined niche market that’s under-served. The potential audience is affluent, and there are many local sponsors that should be anxious to reach them.  So why’d the Fangs kill it?

I’m not going to point the finger at the ownership, although many in the Bay Area are already pointing to earlier misadventures with the Examiner. Even taking that disaster into consideration, there remains the fact that the Fangs had started out with AsianWeek, and that they surely would protect the basis of their family fortune.  Having jackasses for owners has never seemed to hurt the profitability of many, many other narrowly focused niche publications. Well, unless they were criminally incompetent & kleptomaniacal.

So what was it? Was the audience too assimilated to really crave a niche publication? Was the content strategy wrong and in need of adjustment? Did the ad sales staff do its job right? Despite the announcement, the website is still accepting subscription money (and quite pricey subscriptions they are, too).


I find it interesting that they are still maintaining the web presence. So either they feel that the audience in tech-savvy San Francisco & its environs has all migrated online … or they’re just doing this as a stopgap measure while they prepare to let the paper just fade away.  Looking at their website, it’s hard to imagine that they’re really making a lot from it - the ads are pretty sparse and there doesn’t seem to be that much inventory.  If they’re preparing some master stroke, some game-changing niche multimedia play, I’d love to see it.  The columnist for the paper wrote a fiery epic about what having an independent voice dedicated to an overlooked ethnic group meant to the Asian community.

But if that’s true, then why did the paper fail?

It’ll be interesting in the next couple of months to see which papers manage to survive and which decide to follow the growing lead, and kill the print edition entirely and move to the web.

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Dec 30

Merry Christmas, News Industry! Nice Knowin’ Ya! Good Luck with that 50-80% Ad Revenue Decline for 2009!

Posted: under Dead Cat Bounce, Denial of Reality, Digital Migration, Newspaper Deathwatch, monetizing mobile content.

Michael Arrington apparently wants my morning coffee to wind up on the keyboard.

Display advertising revenue is going to fall of a cliff in January
according to a number of content sites I’ve spoken with who rely on
advertising for revenue. “Sales through December were mostly strong as advertisers used up their marketing budgets,” said one sales exec. But, he added, “there are few buyers for this next fiscal quarter, and those few that are buying are looking for steep discounts.”

Just how bad will it be? I’ve heard estimates of 30%-80% revenue
drops over the next three months from companies that serve a variety of
content (games sites, tech news, celebrity news, political news, etc.).
The median pessimism point is around 50%. The people I’ve spoken with
work at large public companies and small one-person blog shops.
Absolutely no one I spoke with said they expect an up quarter.

Translation: If you work at any sort of media outlet, there’s about a 50-50 shot that the next few months will involve putting the little plastic baggies on your hands and trudging to work down at Quizno’s to make sammiches.

According to Ad Age, the meltdown that started in newspapers (article headline: “Media Jobs? Depressing)…

U.S. media have cut 196,200 or 18.6% of jobs since employment in that sector peaked in the 2000 dot-com bubble. More than half the cuts (109,700) came from newspapers. Media employment fell by 3.1% (27,600 jobs) from the start of the recession in December 2007 through October 2008.

…is about to hit the ad agencies in a big, big way:

More cuts are likely; Omnicom Group did major cuts in December. While economists guess the recession will end in the second half of 2009, the U.S. job market — including the agency sector — could get stuck in another extended “jobless recovery.”

Investors have soured on the agency sector. Combined market capitalization of the Big Four agency firms — Omnicom, WPP, Interpublic Group of Cos., Publicis Groupe — in December 2008 was $23.4 billion, not dramatically above the June 2007 market cap of WPP alone ($18.3 billion).

Looked at this way, the newspaper contractions have been the “canaries in the coalmine” in the media industry, and the next 9 months or so are going to see a lot of other people sharing the fate of the ink-stained wretches. Which is not good news for newspaper people who are getting downsized, and who haven’t given a lot of thought as to what they can do next.  All the prescriptions & nostrums that have been offered thus far - start up your own hyper-local news website & start selling ads to local merchants - are not going to be possible when said local merchants are closing their doors and/or eliminating their discretionary ad budgets. 

I’m sure the coming months will hear wails & howls from the ad folks like those we’ve been hearing from the news side. However - like in the news business - those advertising professionals who are on top of the latest trends, and who have trained themselves to have multiple skills - they will survive.

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Dec 27

Obama’s an “Evil Illegal Alien”? Really?

Posted: under Conspiracy Theories, Denial of Reality, Politics & New Media.

I threw up a little in my mouth when I read this:

Southern Baptist Pastor Wiley Drake bashed Saddleback Church Pastor Rick Warren this week, saying “God will punish” Warren
for agreeing to give the invocation at President-elect Barack Obama’s inauguration next month.

“I pray He is kind to you in this punishment that is coming,” Drake wrote in a widely-released e-mail. In it, the First Southern BaptistChurch of Buena Park pastor criticizes Warren’s “recent plan to invokethe presence of almighty God on this evil illegal alien,” a referenceto Obama.

The fact that such obviously insane people are allowed to walk the streets of Our Fair Nation is the most searing indictment of the
long-term effects of the Reagan revolution on our mental-health safety net.  The minute the parishoners stop the gravy train for this lunatic is the day he begins his downward slide to wandering the streets of the South Bay area with a matted beard, visible body odor and cardboard boxes tied to his feet. 

This is some industrial-strength crazy hatin’.

In early 2008, while he was the pastor for the First Southern Baptist Church of Buena Park, Reverend Drake was a vocal supporter of Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee’s presidential campaign. He sent out a letter personally endorsing Huckabee. However, the letter was on church stationery; thus, to the Internal Revenue Service, Rev. Drake was endorsing a political candidate as a church leader and endangering his church’s tax-exempt status.

Rev. Drake’s violation of federal tax law was reported to the IRS by an advocacy group called Americans United for Separation of Church and State (AU), which had warned him for endorsing Dick Mountjoy for a U.S. Senate race with a Southern Baptist Convention letterhead.Rev. Drake asked his parishioners and others to pray for revenge using an imprecatory prayer for the punishment, shame, and even deaths of AU officials.

And For. The. Win.

In October 2008, Drake, stating he was still a candidate for vice
president, announced that he had filed a lawsuit seeking to have the
Secretary of State of the State of Washington “de-certify Barack Obama
because he has refused to release proof of being a Natural Born Citizen”

Holy shit! This knucklehead is STILL buying into the unbelievably disgraced and laughably false Obama-hatin’ birth certificate Nigerian Prince scam!

And now he’s even attacking one of the most powerful figures in the Evangelical Christian world for his association with Obama? Damn, man.  When I saw a short notation on the screen of Fox News, talking about the Rick Warren imbroglio, I noted the short sentence, “If Democrats realized how terrified Republicans are of Obama adding Rick Warren to the team, they’d stop opposing this.”

Looks like they were onto something.  This could further the fractures in the Republican base - splitting the reality-aware Evangelicals away from the batshit-crazy Evangelicals like this specimen:

We are seeing the evolution of a truly reality-divergent slice of our population.  The Obama-haters have their “grassy knoll.”  It’s as though the wackos with their conspiracy theories about plastique charges in the WTC or cruise missiles fired into the Pentagon, had an official spokesman.  Someone who has a radio audience and actual political power.  And who says shit like this.

Even if he were born in Hawaii, he was born to an American-citizen
mother and a British-citizen father. That’s a proven fact. According to
these fellows, the constitutional definition is no matter where you are
born, both parents have to be Americans. Even if he were born on U.S.
soil, that’s a moot point because he’s not qualified. Phil Berg’s case
says we have evidence, proof, that he was not born on American soil.
His own paternal grandmother says he was born in Kenya. That’s what got
me turned on. I’m a pastor. I have a tendency to believe people. When I
heard an elderly paternal grandmother—speaking in Swahili, if it was
interpreted right, and I think it was—say that she saw her grandson,
Barack Hussein Obama, come out of his mother here in Kenya, I can’t
imagine why she made that up. There is no motive for lying. In all
honesty, she’s just bragging on her grandson.

Man, even the citizen reporters down in the O.C are getting fired up over this fruitbat & his congregation. (h/t to CNN’s excellent iReport)

Hey - here’s a marketing opportunity for the paranoia-enablers - get the Wiley Drake congregation list and start spamming them with aluminum-foil “Survival Hats” necessary to protect their brains from the inevitable Taliban mind-control rays that are going to start coming outta them internet tubes after Barack Hussein takes power.

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Dec 27

Electrabel Rings in 2009

Posted: under Art, Multimedia, Online Video, new media, visual storytelling.

…and now, as a break from the heavy news about New Media & the near-constant anger & backbiting going on over whether or not civilization as we know it will survive another aggregate circulation decline…

Here’s a reminder that creativity and innovation still exist, and are being used to make beautiful things.  Relax and enjoy:

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Dec 27

Jarvis & Weaver’s $1,000 Bet: Kum-bay-yah in 4, 3, 2 …

Posted: under Catching a Falling Knife, Dead Cat Bounce, Denial of Reality, Digital Migration, Newspaper Deathwatch, Webconomics.

Been a while between posts here - I’ve had writing deadlines, presentation deadlines and a dauntingly ambitious editing task to try to manage. 

Anyway, despite this being the Christmas season, oft-assailed  gadfly & jilted lover of newspapers Jeff Jarvis wrote yet another opinion piece about how the entire newspaper industry is screwed as though it had stood in the way of one of those Martian drilling machines in “Total Recall.” The cheery news was under a headline of “No hope,” and it went downhill from there.

A sampling:

* McClatchy shares hit 60 cents yesterday. As I write this, it’s up to
a big 78 cents. Bubble! Gatehouse hit 4 cents (and I’d still short them
given their current attitude); market cap: $2.3 million. See Alan
Mutter’s excellent analysis of how debt did in papers. I’d say it’s more than that: It was
misplaced optimism in the form and in the incumbents. If these papers
had instead taken on debt to innovate and create or to buy innovates (a
la the New York Times buying About), that might have been productive.
Instead, they bought newspapers, which was only an indication of how
snug their blinders were.

Well, that couldn’t go unchallenged for long, and it wasn’t. Howard Weaver commented and blogged:

I get so fucking tired of correcting you, Jeff. Has it *ever* occurred
to you to do some reporting — like asking questions of those involved —
before pronouncing such apocalyptic conclusions?

…aaaaand the slapfight was on.

They went back & forth over whether or not McClatchy employees were screwed as hard as the Enron employees whose retirements were stuck in suddenly worthless company stock.  Which they apparently were not.  Although Weaver does admit that his own stock options are worth bupkis. Meanwhile, they also attempted to define just what the internet is - if it’s a medium, a delivery system, or the tool with which we will achieve universal brotherhood & peace.

(Wait for it … it’s coming…)

By the time we get to the end of the comments section on Howard’s blog, the two are all but embracing, tears in their eyes, beer slopping from their mugs, pledging blood brotherhood, and singing “Sweet Adeline.”  Off-key. 

My retirement may be a little diminished by the lost value of those options, but I’m confident it will be enriched by watching McClatchy emerge successfully as the model of a new public service journalism company.

Thanks for participating — here and elsewhere.

Right on cue.

Now, I’m not entirely comfortable siding with Jarvis.  He’s been criticized pretty heavily for his downbeat analysis, and for what a lot of people see as poorly disguised schadenfreude over newspaper crisis.  Some of that criticism has elicited an angry response from Jarvis, and then later muttered apologies … which feels familiar to me, since I’ve been guilty of the “Burn, baby burn” attitude myself.  It comes out of real feelings of frustration over opportunities that just keep sliding by.

But it strikes me that when people really don’t want to hear the content of what you have to say, they start focusing in on the tone & tenor, whether you misspelled a word or mangled a phrase. Nitpicking on all the little things, distracts the attention from the Great Big Scary Thing.

So let me make this a little easier. Some of us out here bagged the newspaper gig to go work at start-ups, and this is all starting to feel real, real familiar to us.  The cuts on top of cuts, the constant fear, the daily “Spin the Wheel of Long-term Strategies.”  Freshening up the resume, calling your friends at the competition to see if they know of any secure gigs out there … checking fuckedcompany.com to see if your name is on there …

And then comes the day that you walk into the office and the CEO is puking his guts out into a garbage can, and sobbing “We lost everything! It’s all gone! We’re all dead!”

Those were some real bad times for some of us out here in Digital Land.

‘Member what the reaction was from the newspapers and the rest of Big Media when we started going down in flames?

What’s that?

Sounded like the faint echo of a thousand keyboards pecking out the phrase “Serves you punks right.”

BTW - really do take the time to click through to that last link - it encapsulates perfectly the Old Media thinking at the time that Web 1.0 cratered:

In the 1950s, it was TV that was going to kill the newspaper industry. Now, it’s the Internet. “We’ve heard it all before,” says Morton. “A newspaper is cheap, easy to use, portable, and a great way to get information out to the masses without straining eyes or a budget.” Right now, investors are thinking the worst. Perhaps they should think again.

Tribune Co. at 66. Dow Jones at 83 (now part of News Corp, which is at 9). Gannet described as having a “fat war chest” and looking at hitting 90 (currently below 9). Reads like some kinda fairytale these days, doesn’t it?

Back when our startups were dying, I remember getting laughing calls from print colleagues, reading me the latest “Drillbit Stock” quotes. Was that piling on? Rubbing it in? Probably, although we were all so abashed at the way the bottom had fallen out, we weren’t in a position to protest.

What we did do was suck it up and learn from the disaster.

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Dec 07

Cold Comfort for the (former) Ink-Stained Wretches of the 4th Estate

Posted: under Uncategorized.
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Josh Marshall feels bad about all the cuts in newspapers.  Which is a dangerous thing to express in public, as angry curmudgeons tend to descend in swarms, likely blaming Marshall for their plight … while surreptitiously banging in copies of their resume & writing samples…

In a sense we’re part of this question, since we’re on the other
side of the divide. But in journalism as in life, no one is an island.
And while I’m confident ‘journalism’ will survive this in the medium
run, there’s no getting around the catastrophic dimensions of what’s
happening for a whole generation of journalists. There’s a lot I don’t
know about newspaper financing. But the year over year revenue declines
across the whole industry just seem unsustainable.

No kidding. We used to joke that if the circulation numbers kept up, in 20 years time, there would be only one reader of the LA Times, “but he’ll have a really great newspaper that’s fine-tuned to his interests.”  We’re not laughing anymore about that one.

I hadn’t heard that the Scripps chain is thinking about killing the Rocky Mountain News “as soon as practical.”

Cincinnati-based Scripps said in a news release that if no acceptable
offers emerge by mid-January, it will “examine its other options.” It
gave no details.

An internal Denver Post memo, authored by
publisher Dean Singleton, read in part, “an announced sale is usually
the first step leading to a failing newspaper’s closure.”

(snip)

Boehne says the problem is not getting people to read the paper, it’s that the advertising dollars that aren’t there anymore.

“In
the last couple of years it’s gotten tougher. Classified ads have moved
from our pages onto our Web site. We still have the classifieds, but
it’s not as profitable on the Internet as it is in print,” he said.

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Dec 04

Obama-Haters Won’t Give Up, File Suits Over Birth Certificate

Posted: under Conspiracy Theories, Denial of Reality, Politics & New Media.
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I hesitate to even blog this, but apparently some people have their hands over their ears & are screaming like an F-18 engine on takeoff, desperate to avoid the news or any other hint of reality penetrating their Anti-Reality Extra-Stoopid Force Field…

Lawsuits filed in Hawaii to force disclosure of Obama birth records

The new challenge is an outgrowth of a legal suit filed in Mississippi,
which questioned whether Obama is a “natural born citizen” of the U.S.

Plaintiffs in that suit subpoenaed a copy of the birth certificate Nov.
26 from the Hawai’i Health Department. The plaintiffs include
conservative political activist and failed presidential candidate Alan
Keyes, who lost to Obama in the 2004 U.S. Senate race in Illinois.

Oh good grief.

This is like a rube taken in by P.T. Barnum’s “Fiji Mermaid”   filing suit because they had subcontracted with one of Barnum’s gin-soaked roustabouts to have the mermaid do deep cenote diving in search of the Inca Gold of the Seven Cities of Cibola, and the dingdang critter never showed up for the steamship ride.

UPDATE:  Aaagh! It doesn’t stop!

It looks like the Barack Obama citizenship issue will not die until he is inaugurated. It probably will not end even then.

Now the U.S. Supreme Court will discuss the matter in private because one justice decided it was worthy. Before
fingering the member of our highest court, I will give a little
background information on the case. If you do not think too hard about
it, you can probably guess which Supreme Court Justice is responsible.

PEOPLE.  THIS WAS A HOAX.  A NOT-TRUE THING.

SCAM ARTISTS ARE TAKING YOU FOR A RIDE. STOP FALLING FOR THIS.

…oh, what’s the use…

 

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Dec 04

“Cloud Journalism” and Newspaper Panic

Posted: under Digital Migration, Newspaper Deathwatch, Webconomics, new media.

Apropos of the continuing thread here aka “Whither journalism” aka “Let’s all run around in circles and scream” …

This week, there have been a number of really meaty, interesting articles & posts about the emerging model&shape of What Comes Next.  It’s some pretty big stuff to wrap your head around, but an interesting structure for the future of professional media is starting to emerge from the chaos.

First, the foundation - why do we even need journalists, or what they essentially do, at all? Here’s a bit, explaining how even the vaunted multitasking abilities of the cyberyouth are crumbling before the relentless onslaught of all the information blasting at us, 24/7/365, wherever we go.

Media Overload from CJR:

Meanwhile, the massive increase in information production and the
negligible cost of distributing and storing information online have
caused it to lose value. Eli Noam, director of the Columbia Institute
for Tele-Information, explains that this price deflation is only partly
offset by an increase in demand in the digital age, since the time we
have to consume information is finite. “On the whole—on the per-minute,
per-line, per-word basis—information has continuously declined in
price,” says Noam. “The deflation makes it very difficult for many
companies to stay in business for a long time.”

Thus, we come to the heart of journalism’s challenge in an attention
economy: in order to preserve their vital public-service function—not
to mention survive—news organizations need to reevaluate their role in
the information landscape and reinvent themselves to better serve their
consumers. They need to raise the value of the information they
present, rather than diminish it. As it stands now, they often do the
opposite.

So - thinking in a deconstructionist manner, this gets to the heart of what a journalist is: a filter.

Ex: A reporter goes to a City Council meeting, sits there for six hours, soaking up all that’s said & done.  That’s information uptake.

The reporter correlate all that to his internal memory of what’s happened before, who the players are, and what their motivations are.  That’s adding context.

The reporter then goes back to the office (or, if she’s a MoJo, to her battered car in the parking lot, where her laptop is draining her Sears Die-Hard battery through the cigarette lighter), and writes a story.  Said story, in traditional inverted-pyramid fashion, starts with a paragraph that explains in a single sentence, the most important and interesting fact to come out of the night’s festivities.

And that’s filtration.

If you’ve ever dredged through a “slush pile” of unsolicited material, or fast-forwarded through a long amateur tape to find the moment when Aunt Kizzy punches Uncle Slorvin in the trachea … well, you know the essential difference between amateur-level content, and what most people would consider “professional.” 

Amateurs tell stories in long, boring, circuitous ways, with frequent stopoffs & asides.  Most of the time, by the time you get to the end, you are praying for a relatively quick & painless death, because you’ve come to realize that there is no point to the story. Or you got the point within the first 15 seconds, and the subsequent 45 minutes are a waste of your span on this planet that you will never get back.

Continuing on.

Poynter’s Paul Bradshaw writes about how the action of committing journalism and why some behaviors of journalists occur in the ways that they do.  Basically, he looks at a journalist the same way that a business analyst looks at a corporation … or a biologist looks at a simple single-cell organism. (Not a slime mold. That would be the legal profession.)

Anyway - Bradshaw looks at the behaviors exhibited by journalists and tries to track them back to discover the hidden incentives & disincentives that cause such things as “pack journalism” and why Fox News drops everything to focus on the latest missing blonde girl.

“Journalists can be described as rational actors seeking to promote
their own interests, reacting to material and non-material incentives
and rewards, calculating risks and benefits,” they wrote. “They seek to
maximize attention for their work, they try to minimize costs of
investigation and research, to use their sources to their greatest
professional benefit, and so forth.”

For example, “pack journalism” can be considered a type of “free riding,” and thus the
tragedy of the commons: “hot news” (such as the Lewinsky story) gets
overused. James Hamilton wrote about this phenomenon in All the News that’s Fit to Sell:
“The fixed costs of learning … tips the balance in story selection
toward continuous coverage of a given event rather than undertaking new
investigations.”

If, at some level, we’re already acting like self-contained corporations, how much of a leap is it to the “Everyone is a Permanent Freelancer” future?

Well, quite a lot, actually. 

It’s nice for left-leaning academic types to puff on their metaphorical pipes and talk about some idealized future where journalism is committed by a self-organizing information collective … whiffs of the utopian thinking of Paris’ communards permeate this vision …  somehow, mankind (or at least the learned journalistic revolutionary vanguard) is going to at last free itself from the Murdochian chains and all work together, each according to his measure, to produce the kind of useful, relevant information that will enlighten the public & save us all from the tentacles of authoritarian government.

Back in the really real world, E&P reported today that “several cities” could have no daily paper within a year. 

And my long experience in a variety of newsrooms leaves me with something stronger than a suspicion that hoping that a group of cynical, angry journalists, desperate because they’ve seen any hope of drawing a steady paycheck, are not the most fertile ground for a spontaneous flowering of philanthropic self-sacrifice for the greater common good.

Still, if the future does look like this “Cloud Journalism,” where each reporter is a trusted voice in his/her community, who has aggregated an audience of listeners/deputies, and who acts as an information filter/clearinghouse … well, we’re going to need a vision of what behavioral rules (beyond page traffic meters & checks from AdSense) should be adhered to.

I kinda like this list from Jim Lehrer, one of the silverback Grand Old Men of Journalism.  After he won an award, he talked about the enduring rules that all who hope to commit journalism should keep in mind:

“Do nothing I cannot defend.

“Cover, write and present every story with the care I would want if the story were about me.

“Assume there is at least one other side or version to every story.

“Assume the viewer is as smart and caring and good a person as I am.

“Assume the same about all people on whom I report.

“Assume personal lives are a private matter until a legitimate turn in the story absolutely mandates otherwise.

“Carefully separate opinion and analysis from straight news stories, and clear label everything.

“Do not use anonymous sources or blind quotes except on rare and
monumental occasions. No one should ever be allowed to attack another
anonymously.

“And finally, I am not in the entertainment business.”

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Nov 21

Further Thoughts on Obama-Hating Scam

Posted: under Community, Digital Migration, Politics & New Media, journalism, new media.

LA Times - No Shit, Sherlock?

LA Times - No Shit, Sherlock?

This came in through the comment threads, and is thoughtful enough that it merits more attention:

It sounds like both media channels worked as I would expect them too. The mainstream media sticks with the low risk stories that are easy to substantiate and defend while New Media takes risks on radical story ideas, digest the story in the public forum, shares the discoveries with its readers and lets the readers decide when it is time to move on to other issues.

Very true, and a very good observation. However - my worry is that as the mainstream media increasingly dissolves, their filters grow ever weaker.  Evidence of this can be seen in the big bounce in the amount of glaring errors in print editions - this last week, I noted big, bad spelling errors on the front page of the LA Times.  The jump pages aren’t where they’re supposed to be.  The same paragraph gets printed twice.

Apparently, the editorial guidlines have changed at the LA Times... or, to put it more colloquially, "the shit has loosened up."

Apparently, the editorial guidlines have changed at the LA Times... or, to put it more colloquially, "the shit has loosened up."

Basically, the cuts in editorial positions have left the papers so stressed that they are vulnerable to the kinds of errors that would previously have been unthinkable.  And if papers can screw up on something so simple as whether or not the word “Shit” should be put in a headline for a book review (as it was today), then a complex story that demands that reporters and editors pay close attention and follow a thread to its logical conclusion - well, that capability may not longer be in the traditional newsroom.

I have hopes (perhaps naive & unwarranted) that there will be a disaggregated Newsroom of the Future, where reporters and The People Formerly Known As The Audience all work together to separate truth from spin.  The Look&Feel of this Newsroom of the Future is being chiseled out of the raw WebChaos on sites like TPM, Firedoglake, ProPublica, Publish2, RedState, and even on Michelle Malkin (hey - she called the “B on the face” girl out as a fraud).

It looks kinda like the same model that’s been in existence for hundreds (maybe even thousands) of years:

  1. The reporter/blogger/town crier/social media collective identifies a trend or event as significant, and communicates that to the people in their circle of influence (make up a term - audience, listeners, readers, lurkers, etc.)
  2. Those people take in that message and react. In the traditional media models, a positive reaction would be to buy more papers, tell their friends to tune in to the next newscast, and discuss it around the watercooler.
  3. Positive feedback means the originator keeps doing more - that is, follow-up stories, sidebars, looking for more stories like that.
  4. In the online world, positive feedback can mean that the audience self-deputizes and starts haring off on their own, trying to add their efforts to expand the narrative.
  5. Negative feedback - the audience not caring about or responding to the story - means that the reporter/blogger/town crier moves on to the next story

The only change is that the web makes all this happen much faster, and allows the audience to get much more involved than was possible before.

And yeah, I know, this kind of thinking is hardly original.  But we’re seeing the dissolution of the traditional media happen much quicker than we had anticipated.  And yeah, I’m aware that history is replete with examples of traditional media being used to perpetrate Big Lies & Big Mistakes - from the Spanish-American War of 1898, waged because newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst wanted a cause to boost circulation (where we get the famous quote “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war”) to the yellowcake uranium and 18 words in the State of the Union address.

The point is, that as it is now easier for smaller & less powerful groups to take on the mantle of the MSM, it is also increasingly possible for smaller & less powerful groups to drill into the national narrative for their own purposes…

I’ll leave you with this, from the Hearst link above:

Hearst upped his circulation by producing a new kind of paper, one with mass- market appeal. His papers used lots of pictures and illustrations, large headlines, and the like. Reducing the cost of a paper to as little as a single cent a copy, Hearst made his newspapers accessible to nearly everyone. Because he controlled so much of the market for newspapers, a market that was rapidly growing because of his newspapers, Hearst could practically dictate what the country would think the next day.
The whole point of yellow journalism was to produce exciting, sensational stories, even if the truth had to be stretched or a story had to be made up. These stories would boost sales, something very important in this period, when newspapers and magazines were battling for circulation numbers. In regard to the situation in Cuba in the mid-1890s, yellow journalism sought to exploit the atrocities in Cuba to sell more magazines and newspapers.
The papers depicted Spanish behavior as exaggeratedly bad, and political cartoons depicted “Spain” as a nearly subhuman and brutal monster, while “Cuba” was usually depicted as a pretty white girl being pushed around by the Spanish monster. Once US opinions were inflamed over Cuba, Hearst in particular tried to do everything he could to whip the public into such a frenzy that a war would start. Once the country was at war, Hearst had little doubt his papers would have no end of interesting and sensational articles to publish.
Plus ça change, eh?

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