OK, it's a given that journalists have something of a Messiah Complex. You have to have something else going on psychologically to get into this low-pay high-stress field. But this is really crossing the line. And making an unfortunate conflation between the newspaper industry and good journalism - yes, it gets done at newspapers, and there are some magnificent examples of this. But the industry is asphyxiating itself, and dumping wads of cash on it will not solve the underlying problems.
Government intervention here would create more problems than it would solve. [...more]
While the concept of a bailout for newspapers (and allegedly for good journalism) seems attractive at first blush, I fear that in practice, the billions in bailout funds would suffer the same fate as the billions bestowed upon the banking industry.
That is, they would be swiftly pocketed in the form of “well-earned bonuses,” and only a few crumbs would make it down to the level where the money would actually do any good. While I’m not in the “burn baby, burn” camp the way many other digital triumphalists have been (and there’s at least a faint whiff of that hereabouts), I think that dumping fat stacks on media conglomerates will not solve the underlying problems of the crumbling of business models.
Now then – a Manhattan Project (of sorts) to build solid business models to support quality journalism? That would = the hoary “teaching a man to fish” paradigm.
I know faith in The Invisible Hand is in short supply these days (and where it can be found, it’s usually being in the stocks in the town square, being pelted by posters on Angryjournalist.com), but the fact is that there is a demand for something to perform the function of information dissemination that newspapers do/have done. If the Drug Wars have taught us anything, it is that where there is a demand, and money is attached to that demand, there will correspondingly be a supply.
This is all growing out an essay on the op-ed page of the NY Times and chittering in the Twiterverse, as the nervous journalists see the vultures staring downward, and big guy in the hood with the scythe striding through the newsroom.
By endowing our most valued sources of news we would free them from the strictures of an obsolete business model and offer them a permanent place in society, like that of America’s colleges and universities. Endowments would transform newspapers into unshakable fixtures of American life, with greater stability and enhanced independence that would allow them to serve the public good more effectively.
Well, allow me to respond to that one.
Not to get all Reagan on you, but that is complete and utter madness. Newspapers are so important, so crucial to our lives, that it is the duty & obligation of the government to preserve them?
Wow.
OK, it’s a given that journalists have something of a Messiah Complex. You have to have something else going on psychologically to get into this low-pay high-stress field. But this is really crossing the line. And making an unfortunate conflation between the newspaper industry and good journalism – yes, it gets done at newspapers, and there are some magnificent examples of this. But the industry is asphyxiating itself, and dumping wads of cash on it will not solve the underlying problems.
Government intervention here would create more problems than it would solve. Allison Fine is onto this issue:
So, the fundamental premise of the need to endow newspapers and preserve them at public expense is that false information exists on the Internet? Of course it does, as it does on TV, on the radio (should we also consider endowing Rush?) in magazines, and in many, many newspapers. Which media would the authors like to choose as being least likely to contain false information? And which medium do they think did the best job of bringing the lies and corruption of the Bush Administration to light — hint, don’t look at newspapers, Josh Micah Marshall and his Talking Points Memo website would be a much better bet.
So, the fundamental premise that only newspapers can hold government accountable is specious. But that isn’t my biggest issue with the article. It is the naive assumption from those outside of the nonprofit sphere that 1) nonprofit status is intended for companies that don’t have a viable business model, and 2) raising billions of dollars in endowment funds is doable, particularly in today’s economy.
If anything, the effect of billions spent on preserving the newspaper format as it is, without any changes, will mean that we’ll all be getting print products dumped on our doors that are increasingly ad-free. Yeah, there will be a number of advertisers who will still be there because the eyeballs are there. But the trends of readership of mass print products are not heading up (niche and community newspapers are another story).
Worst of all, the preservation of a business model that is clearly no longer functional will suck the oxygen out of the room for the products that should (and are, in some cases) being developed to do the job that newspapers have done. Artificially propping up newspapers in their current form will stifle the innovation in the marketplace, and long-term, only make the inevitable collapse worse.
We’re kinda seeing that take place in the real estate and credit markets right now. The government artificially propped up the economy for eight years with crazy spending and stupid low interest rates. Instead of hard work & ingenuity to produce real growth, it was Free Money Day Every Day, as real-estate speculation in areas like Scottsdale, Las Vegas, Miami & L.A. led to the “$30,000-a-year millionaire” who made $10,000 in arcane mortgage kickbacks every time he/she signed his/her name to a loan document. The results of that are the global economic meltdown we see occurring right now.
ESPN sees the writing on the wall. In their industry they need strong stories to promote sports and strong sports to drive interest to their stories. A fan that is underserved by his newspaper is less interested in following his team on ESPN. Additionally, there is big advertising money for ESPN if it can become the resource for local sports.
This is a long term proposition, however. Even the mighty ESPN cannot yet afford to hire 30 beat writers to cover each NBA team. Instead it is working towards its goal by teaming with independend bloggers in a win/win/win proposition. The bloggers have a chance at monetizing their efforts, ESPN can become the central resource it wants to become and fans can get the information they want as a new, viable local sports media business model starts to thrive.
I still think that obsessing on the platform that the news comes across on is symptomatic of a severe case of Missing The Point. Let me say it again: viewing the newspaper crisis as being caused just because people don’t like buying paper anymore is akin to a 19th-century horse breeder thinking that people not [...] [...more]
But they don’t want to just be talked at. We want to talk to each other, connect to each other, and share things amongst ourselves without Big Media jamming their irrelevant messages in our faces. If that can take place in an old-school print product – as it does, among weekly newspapers, which are the one segment of the newspaper industry that is maintaining its numbers – then fine. Online, mobile, whatever – as long as it does the job that we want it to do, the People Formerly Known As The Audience will use it (and it might even attract some of that New Marketing money to support it).
Looking at the problem as something that can be solved by employing a magic doohickey is the worst kind of thinking. Like the cynical network president in “Scrooged” insisting on featuring mice on television, because the numbers are coming back that more people are leaving the TV for their pets to watch, and “we don’t want to miss out on this audience demographic.”
Hearst had been looking at flexible screens for its new e-paper, but Plastic Logic spokeswoman Betty Taylor told Crosscut that while her company’s wireless e-reader can operate on flexible material like plastic film or foil, Plastic Logic’s consumer testing shows readers prefer a more rigid display. Plastic Logic’s reader will be about a quarter inch thick and have a considerably larger screen than Amazon’s wireless e-reader, the Kindle. Both devices are wireless and use the same low-power, high-resolution E Ink display technology, which is partly owned by Hearst. While the Kindle shifts screens when users press the sides of the device, Plastic Logic’s screen will be touch sensitive, turning pages with a finger swipe across the screen.
I think that experimenting with e-delivery of a newspaper is certainly a good thing – insofar as the experiments also extend to making it possible for the users to have two-way conversations and to be able to share things amongst themselves that they find interesting and/or useful. Trying to maintain the top-down informational control systems of the traditional media on a new electronic platform will certainly be interesting, but ultimately doomed.
This is the Dark Side of internet fame. You can see it in the message boards, in the comments section on any YouTube video that reaches a certain level of popularity.
Back in 1989, one of the very first celebrity stories I had to cover in Los Angeles, remains one of the saddest & most disturbing stories. The murder of Rebecca Shaeffer, a lovely young actress by obsessed stalker Robert Bardo. I can see some clear parallels between that case, and the way that online attacks are escalating into offline violence. [...more]
I can’t decide if this is one of those “sign of the deteriorating times” type stories, wherein I get to pontificate about how the free-for-all, no insult too depraved, “culture” of the internet has led to yet another sad incident …
…or if it’s a function of the pressures being put on start-ups by the generally shitty global economy, which is starting to incite people into truly depraved acts of violence…
Yesterday as I was leaving the DLD Conference in Munich, Germany someone walked up to me and quite deliberately spat in my face. Before I even understood what was happening, he veered off into the crowd, just another dark head in a dark suit. People around me stared, then looked away and continued their conversation.
(snip)
Something very few people know: last year over the summer an off balance individual threatened to kill me and my family … Seeing my parents fear for their lives and not understand how or why their son was in this position changed me, made me a much less forgiving person in general.
The Internet is the greatest revolution in democratic practice since popular suffrage. Everyone knows that, and I am just as dependent onthe Internet as anyone else. In the wake of a democratic revolution like that, there’s both an enormous explosion of information and expression, much of it useful or fun, and also an explosion of pent-up rage, social anguish, resentment, bilious, other-annihilating nastiness, prejudice and all the rest of the dark side. If that stuff is destroying conversation threads, screwing up people’s…
…reputations, spreading around unchecked rumor or just snark, it’s worth pointing to it and saying, “Stop lousing up my revolution.” The point of the book is to protect the best kind of humor by criticizing the worst.
Still, the larger point here is one that is important. In all my stops as a New Media consultant in the last few years, the one issue that animates the local reporters/editors the most is the attacks on them by anonymous internet trolls.
Arrington says that:
On any given day, when I care to look, dozens of highly negative comments are made about me, TechCrunch or one of our employees in our
comments, on Twitter, or on blogs or other sites. Some of these are appropriately critical comments on things we can be doing better. But
the majority of comments are among the more horrible things I can imagine a human being say.
Actress Rebecca Schaeffer was murdered by an obsessed fan who tracked her down, showed up at her doorstep, and shot her in the heart.
Even a cursory search confirms that Arrington takes his shots. This is the Dark Side of internet fame. You can see it in the message boards, in the comments section on any YouTube video that reaches a certain level of popularity.
Back in 1989, one of the very first celebrity stories I had to cover in Los Angeles, remains one of the saddest & most disturbing stories. The murder of Rebecca Shaeffer, a lovely young actress by obsessed stalker Robert Bardo. I can see some clear parallels between that case, and the way that online attacks are escalating into offline violence.
This was a murder that really changed things in Los Angeles; the DMV rules were changed so that you could no longer get someone’s address by merely doing a search on DMV records to get the address off their driver’s license. And the Threat Assessment Department of the LAPD was formed, at least in part, in response to this murder.
One of the things that I learned from covering that case (other than that it sucks to be a reporter tasked to go to a funeral and try to get quotes from sobbing family members), is that wackos and obsessed fans follow an escalating behavior pattern. They start making threats, at first rather timidly. As the response to their threats fails to completely shut them down or punish them enough, they then begin to escalate their attack patterns.
The next stage – the one that Arrington is at, I fear – is what the LAPD shrinks called, “the humiliating encounter.” Basically, the stalker has an encounter with the person they are harassing that results in humiliation – either for the victim (they spit on their face) or the stalker (the studio security guards grab him, handcuff him, and frogmarch him off the lot).
In any case, this encounter then becomes the focus of whirling obsession for the next interval. The stalker sits and broods, going over the encounter in his head, over and over again, fantasizing about what he would have done differently, inventing a whole new encounter … only this next one will be far darker, far more violent.
There is going to have to be a fundamental shift in the way conversations are conducted on the internet. If a tech blogger – not someone in the political sphere, where the contentious nature is well-known – has to take a month off & flee to a beach to be able to deal, then clearly, the writing is on the wall.
This paragraph is probably going to become much more important in the years to come:
In California, under the stalking laws passed after this attach, a stalker is defined as “someone who willfully, maliciously and repeatedly follows or harasses another victim and who makes a credible threat with the intent to place the victim or victim’s immediate family in fear of their safety.” There must be at least two incidents to constitute the crime and show a “continuity of purpose” or credible threat.
UPDATE:
Paul Boutin, over at The Industry Standard, says that the hating has been growing for quite a while:
The most common accusation was that TechCrunch sold endorsements of startups, either in exchange for advertising buys on the site, or for outright cash payments.
This is important: None of these claims ever checked out. Sources would claim to know someone who knew something, but these mystery witnesses never showed up to tell their stories to a reporter. Arrington’s success, both as a blog-era publisher/writer and a startup businessman, inflames less successful entrepreneurs and journalists with off-the-scale envy. How does he do that?
The Vice-President’s mansion is once again visible on Google Maps. View Larger Map Does anyone else detect the aroma of Soviet-style “Revisionist History” here? I saw this happen first-hand when I worked as a newspaper editor in Venezuela. It happened on a big government project that was being overseen by the terrifying secretary/concubine Blanca Ibáñez [...] [...more]
Does anyone else detect the aroma of Soviet-style “Revisionist History” here? I saw this happen first-hand when I worked as a newspaper editor in Venezuela. It happened on a big government project that was being overseen by the terrifying secretary/concubineBlanca Ibáñez (she was alleged to be de facto ruler of the country, while dipsomania President Jaime Lusinchi floated like a Manatee in the pool at Miraflores, surrounded by half-empty bottles of Pampero rum). It was called the John Paul II housing complex, situated in the slum of Montalban. It was supposed to be for the workers; they used the pension funds from some union workers to fund the construction. Then, once it was partially completed, it supposedlyl “ran out of money” – even though our digging found that millions more had been allocated to build the complex than would ever logically be needed to complete.
At about that time, we started noticing that the official documents and records had been tampered with. The photos of all the dignitaries on hand for the ground-breaking ceremonies had had several faces (known criminal acquaintances of Blanca) air-brushed out. The names disappeared and reappeared and then disappeared from the lists of Boards of Directors & Project Managers; all, we learned, because behind the scenes, the rats were fighting each other over who would get to feast on the mountains of cash.
In the end, the complex that was supposed to provide safe, secure and stable housing for the workers who had busted their asses for a lifetime, was condemned and then sold for pennies. To developers who quickly turned the whole thing around, finished it, and then sold it for a massive profit as high-end luxury housing.
Now THAT’S a political scandal. Thousands of workers robbed, their money stolen by corrupt politicians in league with criminals masquerading as bankers, and good hardworking people left homeless. Sounds familiar, eh?
Anyway – the disappearance/reappearance of entire structures reminds me of those dark days. Some of the comments over at Wonkette
A vague hologram of the mansion lingered aboveground while the actual dwelling burrowed 666 fathoms below the earth’s crust, coming at last to rest in a den of snakes. All you could see in aerial photos on Google Earth was a bunch of squares and nothingness in the midst of a normal neighborhood of houses and trees.
are beverage-on-monitor funny:
Can you still see the pentagram on the roof or did Jill have it painted over?
When mysterious doors start appearing out of nowhere, leading into horrific hellscapes that defy the physical layout of the house, Google’s gonna wish they kept that place hidden. You wait…
Obviously, if a Vice President of the United States can, by fiat, declare that a piece of the Earth’s crust can no longer be seen from space – or at least, that it no longer show up on maps – what does that mean for the future? If, as the digital triumphalists hold, in the future all ink on paper volumes are replaced by the Exploding Silicon Inevitable, how fluid does reality become? And don’t give me any of that “Wayback Machine” smack. All 1s and 0s are subject to either hacking or strong magnetic fields.
The Vice-President’s mansion is once again visible on Google Maps. View Larger Map Does anyone else detect the aroma of Soviet-style “Revisionist History” here? I saw this happen first-hand when I worked as a newspaper editor in Venezuela. It happened on a big government project that was being overseen by the terrifying secretary/concubine Blanca Ibáñez [...] [...more]
Does anyone else detect the aroma of Soviet-style “Revisionist History” here? I saw this happen first-hand when I worked as a newspaper editor in Venezuela. It happened on a big government project that was being overseen by the terrifying secretary/concubineBlanca Ibáñez (she was alleged to be de facto ruler of the country, while dipsomania President Jaime Lusinchi floated like a Manatee in the pool at Miraflores, surrounded by half-empty bottles of Pampero rum). It was called the John Paul II housing complex, situated in the slum of Montalban. It was supposed to be for the workers; they used the pension funds from some union workers to fund the construction. Then, once it was partially completed, it supposedlyl “ran out of money” – even though our digging found that millions more had been allocated to build the complex than would ever logically be needed to complete.
At about that time, we started noticing that the official documents and records had been tampered with. The photos of all the dignitaries on hand for the ground-breaking ceremonies had had several faces (known criminal acquaintances of Blanca) air-brushed out. The names disappeared and reappeared and then disappeared from the lists of Boards of Directors & Project Managers; all, we learned, because behind the scenes, the rats were fighting each other over who would get to feast on the mountains of cash.
In the end, the complex that was supposed to provide safe, secure and stable housing for the workers who had busted their asses for a lifetime, was condemned and then sold for pennies. To developers who quickly turned the whole thing around, finished it, and then sold it for a massive profit as high-end luxury housing.
Now THAT’S a political scandal. Thousands of workers robbed, their money stolen by corrupt politicians in league with criminals masquerading as bankers, and good hardworking people left homeless. Sounds familiar, eh?
Anyway – the disappearance/reappearance of entire structures reminds me of those dark days. Some of the comments over at Wonkette
A vague hologram of the mansion lingered aboveground while the actual
dwelling burrowed 666 fathoms below the earth’s crust, coming at last
to rest in a den of snakes. All you could see in aerial photos on
Google Earth was a bunch of squares and nothingness in the midst of a
normal neighborhood of houses and trees.
are beverage-on-monitor funny:
Can you still see the pentagram on the roof or did Jill have it painted over?
When mysterious doors start appearing out of nowhere, leading into
horrific hellscapes that defy the physical layout of the house,
Google’s gonna wish they kept that place hidden. You wait…
Obviously, if a Vice President of the United States can, by fiat, declare that a piece of the Earth’s crust can no longer be seen from space – or at least, that it no longer show up on maps – what does that mean for the future? If, as the digital triumphalists hold, in the future all ink on paper volumes are replaced by the Exploding Silicon Inevitable, how fluid does reality become? And don’t give me any of that “Wayback Machine” smack. All 1s and 0s are subject to either hacking or strong magnetic fields.
Probably the best way to view this video is with the annoying voiceover turned down. Basically, what is going on here is that researchers at the University of Washington have come up with a way to use high-resolution still photos to provide detail to low-res video. The results are definitely eye-catching. Enhancing and Experiencing Spacetime [...] [...more]
Probably the best way to view this video is with the annoying voiceover turned down.
I’ve noticed the artifacts and “slices” in some morphing footage in the past, and wondered what was up with that.
What this means is that a news reporter can, with Fred Flintstone-esque technology, capture some fantastically detailed footage … say, by duct-taping a 21-megapixel camera to an HD or even SD camera (the closer the lenses are to source point, the less you’ll have to mess about with parallax), and shooting a series of stills to go along with the video footage.
Imagine how good slo-mo footage at a sporting event can be with this. Or how amazing footage of, say, Obama’s inauguration would have been if you’d been able to zoom in from the Washington Monument all the way to a close-up of his hand on the Bible.
They say:
Our algorithm targets the emerging consumer-level hybrid cameras that can simultaneously capture video and high-resolution stills. Our technique produces a high spacetime resolution video using the high-resolution stills for rendering and the low-resolution video to guide the reconstruction and the rendering process.
I say: using one camera is not an optimal solution. Most of the “hybrid” cameras that can capture both hi-res and video suffer from one big flaw: cheap glass. The lenses on these cameras are not really up to the task. Having a second still camera on hand to do the work would mean that you’d get the benefit of a decent lens & its attendant sharpness.
It’ll be fun to see what happens in a few years, when this is commercially available as a plug-in on Final Cut or Premiere…
This cries out for the LOLCat treatment, but I am far too slammed with “New Media” work to come up with something clever. Suggestions, anyone? [...more]
Ravenous cat lunges for the prize.
This cries out for the LOLCat treatment, but I am far too slammed with “New Media” work to come up with something clever. Suggestions, anyone?
As part of my ongoing experiment in coming up with a coherent content strategy, I offer up a week’s worth of fun and/or interesting videos that I’ve come across. It’s been a real rollercoaster of a week: Started out with the fear that Bush would figure out some last, triumphal way of screwing up on [...] [...more]
As part of my ongoing experiment in coming up with a coherent content strategy, I offer up a week’s worth of fun and/or interesting videos that I’ve come across.
It’s been a real rollercoaster of a week:
Started out with the fear that Bush would figure out some last, triumphal way of screwing up on his last day in office
Felt pride, relief, hope and a growing sense of “what the hell just happened to us all?” during the Inauguration
Felt sick in the aftermath as it turned out the economic meltdown wasn’t going to give us a break, no matter what
Even sicker when Xeni Jardin championed a documentary about how the U.S. tortured innocent people through depraved intermediaries
Anyway. Here’s a couple of things to lighten things up -
OK, this is childish, and an advertisement to boot, but the only other thing I saw like this was Jim Carrey’s dancing eyebrows in “Me, Myself & Irene”:
This gem from the Vancouver Film School that shows off 1) the 3D animation-fu of the creator, and 2) a deep-seated psychological fear of uncontrolled facial hair
Next, this is a movie trailer for a film being distributed by Ted Perkins, a friend of mine. It’s not a chucklefest, but the photography is beautiful, and I gotta give Ted a shout-out:
This is kind of a rip-off of the famous scene from “Fisher King,” but I love it anyway. The thing to pay attention to is how many people are using their cellphone cams to take pix or video of the flashmob. In the future, we’re all going to be self-contained news gatherers – in much the way that Twitter has turned us all into terse Telegram-style news alert generators, the coming 4G phones will make us all part of a constant info-web.
Next, this somewhat creepy talking baby shows us all the outtakes from the Super Bowl adstravaganzas that we AREN’T going to see this year … and more in future blog posts about the coming ad meltdown that is coming into focus…
aaaand finally, the winner of the week, with almost 700,000 views since Tuesday:
I bow & grovel in the shadow of such lovely invective as this, which appeared just yesterday on Sadly, No! In terms of art, it ought to be said that the greatness of a Pastor Swank, of a Mark Noonan or a John Hinderaker — the quality which raises them above the howling roil of [...] [...more]
In terms of art, it ought to be said that the greatness of a Pastor
Swank, of a Mark Noonan or a John Hinderaker — the quality which raises
them above the howling roil of right-wing authoritarians, of spite
retailers, blowhards, closeted gay ministers, cranks, Bible lickers, of
nerds-gone-bad, of flag humpers, pseudo-intellectuals, chair-based
saucer investigators, of stern-bodiced rape fantasists, of
millennarians, Know-Nothings, Free Silver enthusiasts, jingoes, Oreos,
Foursquare McPhersonites, splinter Baptists, pseudo-Methodists,
Pentecostal highway parishioners, of cynical purveyors of
purpose-driven things and of AMWAY, of Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable
Compound, Graham’s miracle flour, Kellogg’s abstinence-promoting Corn
Flake Cereal, or other products unevaluated by the FDA that are not
intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease; of Goldwater
idolators, ‘Scoop Jackson liberals,’ McCarthyites, Yankees fans,
Likudniks, the mean of spirit, dupes, chumps, Dartmouth grads,
shysters, four-flushers, dog-kickers, self-dealers, Professors of X at
James Madison University, wingnut welfare skillet-lickers and
beak-wetters; of wingnut welfare high-rollers, pimps, queens,
bathroom-stall fellators, and generational dependents; of certain
former or current WWF/WWE personalities and/or karate movie stars
and/or minor Baldwin brothers, convicted Watergate felons, washed-up
Red Sox pitchers, and/or 1970s Detroit-area rock musicians, as well as unnh and gaah, not to mention hunnh — isn’t solely in making up things that aren’t true, but often in fact in forgetting things that are.
Like Bluto Blutarsky at the beginning of Act 3, it doesn’t make any sense, but you don’t want to stop them when they’re on a roll…
Obama as Cyrus… can you dig it!! Glad the inauguration didn’t turn out the way this scene did. I couldn’t watch this in real-time. I was too nervous that the Klan or Michigan Militia or Arizona Vipers or whatever ding-har yar-yar group would smuggle a TOW missile into the reflecting pool. Amazing how much traffic [...] [...more]
Obama as Cyrus… can you dig it!!
Glad the inauguration didn’t turn out the way this scene did. I couldn’t watch this in real-time. I was too nervous that the Klan or Michigan Militia or Arizona Vipers or whatever ding-har yar-yar group would smuggle a TOW missile into the reflecting pool.
Amazing how much traffic on Twitter is dedicated to the inauguration.
And yeah, I kinda wish Obama had ended the speech with a rousing, “Can … you … DIG IT??”
Because surfing the Internet is like drinking from a firehose, David LaFontaine braves the torrent to tell you what trends and technologies to gulp down, swirl in your mouth, or spit out.
Well, allow me to respond to that one.
It ain’t about the pony! 
while 
The larger issue here is, what happens when a malignant governmental entity manages to take control of 
