27 Print Dollars for $1 Digital; Social News; Papers in Trouble; Kodak v. Fuji I posted this picture via Twitpic earlier today, and my digital brethren quickly chimed in on how much they felt like this in their daily lives. And I get it. Working in the media industry these days is far, far different [...] [...more]
27 Print Dollars for $1 Digital; Social News; Papers in Trouble; Kodak v. Fuji
I posted this picture via Twitpic earlier today, and my digital brethren quickly chimed in on how much they felt like this in their daily lives. And I get it. Working in the media industry these days is far, far different from the way it was when the journalists of my generation got into the biz. Looking back at recordings from the early 90s, I am struck by how much free time we all seem to have had back then – these days, you feel like you can’t take your eyes off your Twitter feed for even a second, lest you miss the Next Big Meme and are thus branded as a digital troglodyte who “just doesn’t get it.”
Strung out and exhausted, journalists are wondering when this migration ends, or even when they might run across a handy signpost telling them which way to go. (click to embiggen)
So yeah, if you feel like you’re lost in the desert and that the only future involves your bones bleaching in the sun next to a steer skull … well, maybe it’s because most newsrooms these days evoke the feeling you get when wandering through any of the weathered ghost towns that dot the arid landscape in Arizona and Nevada, left behind when the seams of gold and silver petered out.
OK, I’ll admit it. I’m as guilty of assigning myself a made-up title as anyone. But c’mon – “Digital Alchemist” is pretty cool. And it’s a nice shorthand for what I do – which is to research, study, broadcast via social media, write case studies, write blog posts, take still photos, work on mobile web [...] [...more]
OK, I’ll admit it. I’m as guilty of assigning myself a made-up title as anyone.
But c’mon – “Digital Alchemist” is pretty cool. And it’s a nice shorthand for what I do – which is to research, study, broadcast via social media, write case studies, write blog posts, take still photos, work on mobile web designs, shoot video, compose music tracks, publish to the web, craft a monetization strategy … and then travel the world teaching other people to do as I do. And at least the basic idea is there in the two words: Digital. Alchemist. I take existing media forms and I transfer them to the web medium, and in the process transmute the experience to something that is (in theory, at least) greater than the sum of the parts.
Janitors are the guys who aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty. School janitors are the longsuffering guys who come in with their gray, tattered mops and buckets of cloying sawdust to clean up in the lunchroom after some poor kid yarfs up the spoiled Mystery Meatloaf. Social Media Janitors are the guys who patiently answer the n00b questions while keep the message threads clear of trolls, and soothing hurt feelings after flame wars.
Janitors are willing to put in long, hard days at work. The school janitors are there in the mornings, chipping away at the ice on the sidewalk, and there at the end of the day, checking the mousetraps in the crawlspaces. Social Media Janitors are always on, either with their butts at their workstations, creating content, or setting alerts to go to their cellphones 24/7, just to make certain nothing is blowing up on the message boards.
Janitors always have lots of keys. The school janitor has one of those shiny metal belt ziplines that holds enough metal to make a Studebaker engine block. He can be trusted to always open the doors that need opening, get you into your locker when you forget the com, and move quietly and unobtrusively around the building, going about his business. Social Media Janitors are the ones opening the doors to new users, making sure they are directed to the content they need, and who keep all the passwords secure for you.
Janitors don’t grandstand; they just quietly go about the task of spiffing the school up a bit before they leave, making sure that the doors and windows are cleaned and closed, and that nobody left a fire burning in a garbage can. Social Media Janitors keep all the various social media presences on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, etc., up to date, without making it all about them.
A good Social Media Janitor understands that it’s not about her. It’s about the audience, the users. Maybe there’s some time for fun here and there – goofing with the users, enjoying the give and take of a good conversation.
So here we see Matt Meeks, one of the smarter users of social media in the LA area, at the Los Angeles Web Professionals Group meeting, talking about how to pick which platform to use to put out your social media messaging … or just to have some fun.
This was originally a comment to Robert Niles’ excellent piece on the Online Journalism Review, on whether or not the New York Times should be a “Truth Vigilante”. I’m republishing it here, because it looks like the commenting feature on OJR (always a little hinky) is b0rked again, and this issue is one that touches [...] [...more]
I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge “facts” that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.
(snip)
This message was typical of mail from some readers who, fed up with the distortions and evasions that are common in public life, look to The Times to set the record straight. They worry less about reporters imposing their judgment on what is false and what is true.
Is that the prevailing view? And if so, how can The Times do this in a way that is objective and fair? Is it possible to be objective and fair when the reporter is choosing to correct one fact over another? Are there other problems that The Times would face that I haven’t mentioned here?
It’s interesting to see this issue break out into the open like this. In retrospect, the only thing that’s surprising is that it’s taken this long. Consider: internet sites like Snopes & PolitiFact owe their very existence to the breakdown of trust in our existing news institutions on the part of the audience. We read stuff (often sent via e-mail from the semi-mythical disgruntled conspiracy theorist uncle). Checking our newspaper/TV/radio/whatever, there’s a he-said/she-said story. So we go elsewhere to figure out if what we were originally sent is true or not.
Can’t tell you the number of proposed startups that came through the Knight News Challenge in the last two years aimed at resolving this basic issue – how can we trust what we read? Many of them are seeking to assign some kind of a numeric “reliability score” to the source of the information. Which is interesting in theory – a published climate scientist getting a 99 score, for example, while a Big Oil-funded hack gets a 12.
But in practice, systems like this would probably fall prey to the same phenomenon that plagues Digg or other sites that rely on crowdsourcing to determine importance/credibility — the efforts of a committed radical few to rig the results in their favor. Still, it would be interesting to see a major media outlet start to offer little links in superscript next to attribution, that lead back to a page describing where that quote came from, who the person is, and what their history/agenda is.
We’re all struggling with the effects of the disintermediation taking place because of web technology – that much is evident to just about anybody working in media, advertising or marketing. The problem is that this is taking place at the end of a long, slow movement toward the utter blandification of content. The reasons for that are complex – some of them have to do with the influence of “risk management” thinking at media organizations, where the litigiousness of modern American society has driven deep-pocketed news organizations to water down stories out of fear, in order to evade expensive libel suits. The rest do have to do with the drumbeat these past 40 years of accusations of “liberal bias” in the press, and the attempts to defuse such accusations by applying the aforementioned “he-said/she-said” construction to stories, so that we can say, “Well, at least we gave them a chance to reply.”
Video Everywhere Comes to Our Clothing I guess it was inevitable. Back in the 80s, hip designers realized that consumers were willing to become walking billboards for their product logos, all for the sweet, sweet tradeoff of being able to flaunt our ability to buy outrageously overpriced clothing. Slap a big ol’ logo or even [...] [...more]
Video Everywhere Comes to Our Clothing
I guess it was inevitable.
Back in the 80s, hip designers realized that consumers were willing to become walking billboards for their product logos, all for the sweet, sweet tradeoff of being able to flaunt our ability to buy outrageously overpriced clothing. Slap a big ol’ logo or even just the name onto a t-shirt, mark it up 3000%, and the nouveau riche (but inwardly crippled by insecurity & self-loathing) will fork over fat wads of cash to be able to demonstrate their affluence. And so Guess, Armani, Jordache (remember them?), Dolce & Gabbana and Nike all slapped their logos on otherwise ordinary mass-produced items, and watched their profits soar.
These t-shirts will at least keep the person waiting behind you in line at Starbucks well-informed.
I can see a real use for this kind of thing in places like Egypt, Syria, Russia, China — places where the government not only has censored the TV/radio stations, padlocked the printing plants, but DDoS’d the internet and shut down the cellphone grid. In places like that, just having a few people walk through the crowd as passive human billboards, with the latest information on their bodies, is a helluva tool to spread information.
Upside: It radically boosts your revolutionary chic.
Downside: It makes you a target for camel-riding truncheon-wielders.
Next up is a nifty little device that plays a programmable video loop, and that can be fashioned into clothing or attached to microphones to play sponsor’s messages during interviews before, during, or after big events.
It’s called VideoNameTag, and I took a demo unit with me to Kiev, when I taught a group of journalists and professors at the University of Mohyla’s Institute for the Digital Future of Journalism. You can see them puzzling over how to fit it onto their wrists – although they were certainly interested in the prospect of being able to broadcast the latest news via wireless connection to a couple of people walking through crowds.
They’re gearing up for an especially contentious election season in Ukraine this year; one where the pro-Putin crew is already pulling out all the stops to keep a lid on dissent. Not sure how much something like this could help – but then again, having a person walking through the crowd and playing a loop, such as the famous sequence showing the death of Iranian protestor Neda Soltan – could provide a form of information dissemination that would transcend the attempts at censorship.
The contradictory voices are there. They are presented by voices that mock & disagree with them - in much the same way that newspaper editors, radio hosts and TV anchors did back in the pure human filtration days - but the voices and bits of information are there.
I do agree that there is a serious problem in our society today that a large segment is seemingly living in its own reality, with its own set of facts an interpretations. But this has been true before in our history as well (See: Davis, Jefferson et al.). But this problem predates the web, and is attributable more to talk radio and the removal of the Fairness Doctrine and Equal Time than anything else ... and to the failure of the American educational system to produce large swathes of the citizenry capable of critical thinking. [...more]
Eli Pariser’s TED talk on the dangers of allowing someone else to choose what you see/hear/feel
If I were a weaker man, I’d just fold up my tent and move on.
However, upon closer inspection, I find myself saying “Yahbut …” a lot throughout this FUD screed.
One of my oft-repeated memes for my trainees – and, not coincidentally, the reason behind the very name of this blog – is that as we move further into these uncharted digital waters, what we need more than more information is better filters for the ever-increasing torrent being directed at our frontal lobes. So imagine [...] [...more]
One of my oft-repeated memes for my trainees – and, not coincidentally, the reason behind the very name of this blog – is that as we move further into these uncharted digital waters, what we need more than more information is better filters for the ever-increasing torrent being directed at our frontal lobes.
Way, way back in the early personal computing days, I remember having a conversation with a fellow geek. He was talking about the latest advances in floppy disk technology; and yes, these were still the old 5 1/4″ floppy disks that actually, well … flopped around when you waggled them in your hand. Not that you wanted to do that very much – the thin plastic disk inside was prone to slip around and maybe even crinkle a bit.
Anyway – we were talking about how the amount of data you could store on such a disk was about to increase from the then-standard 360K disks were almost due to an upgrade, so’s they could store 720K.
Wowie-zowie. And then … some day in the near future (his eyes grew distant, focusing on such a massive, magical shift in storage technology) … “You know what comes after that?”
His voice grew hushed. Almost reverent.
“A megabyte!”
At the time, I was writing programs in BASIC to be executed in the 16K space available on our old TRS-80s. I was impressed. With a megabyte of storage … wow. The possibilities were endless.
Skip to this news. With the sheer amount of content streaming down all these here Intertubes:
In terms of pure data center traffic around the world, traffic is
projected to go from 1.1 ZBs in 2010 to an estimated 4.8 ZBs in 2015,
four times the amount. 4.8 ZBs is a hard-to-imagine number, so Cisco has
quantified it to equal 66.7 trillion hours of streaming music at 160
kbps, 15.5 trillion hours of standard-def web conferencing or 4.8
trillion hours of online streaming 720p HD video.
…the need is going to be ever-greater for The People Formerly Known As Journalists to filter that torrent. To use their human judgment to identify what is important and worth paying attention to from that which is not.
Or, as Clay Shirky, so eloquently puts it:
Web 2.0 Expo NY: Clay Shirky (shirky.com) It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure.
Once again, I’m using the social media-aggregation tool Storify to work up a story using the Twitter feeds of reporters & protesters on the scene. This time, it’s in Tahrir Square, where the confrontations between the police and the citizens (fed up with the emerging military dictatorship) are taking a darker turn. <a href=”http://storify.com/DaveLaFontaine/tahrir-square-nerve-gas-rumors-cause-panic” target=”_blank”>View [...] [...more]
Once again, I’m using the social media-aggregation tool Storify to work up a story using the Twitter feeds of reporters & protesters on the scene. This time, it’s in Tahrir Square, where the confrontations between the police and the citizens (fed up with the emerging military dictatorship) are taking a darker turn.
It turns out that they were perhaps using some kind of new tear gas – one that is invisible, but that still stings like a sonofabitch. If you’ve clicked the link above, you were taken to a page of clinical data from autopsies of British soldiers killed by gas in WWI. Grim, grim reading. Basically, the gas causes chemical burns all over your body, and you die from choking on the ragged, torn-up lung tissue that you cough up as you drown in your own blood.
Yeah. Fun times. There’s a reason we as a species have reacted with horror at anyone using these kinds of chemical weapons ever since.
Anyway, the rumor mills flew into hyperspeed on Twitter & social media, and you could see the rise and fall of the meme (fostered by a Twitter account purportedly belonging to Mohamed El Baradei) of chemical weapons use.
Norwegian company Norli Libris introduces nonsensical “eBook” publishing model Quick Hit: Saw this on BoingBoing, followed it over to Applied Abstractions, and just couldn’t resist commenting on it, for 1) the benefit of my international students, who might wonder WTF is up with this and 2) to keep me from yanking out my own hair [...] [...more]
Norwegian company Norli Libris introduces nonsensical “eBook” publishing model
Quick Hit: Saw this on BoingBoing, followed it over to Applied Abstractions, and just couldn’t resist commenting on it, for 1) the benefit of my international students, who might wonder WTF is up with this and 2) to keep me from yanking out my own hair by the fistful. The idea is that consumers will have to buy digital books not as downloadable files, but on cards called Digi Short, which will be inserted into the back of customized (i.e. DRM’d to death) Kibano Digi Readers.
Apparently, the one advantage would be that said “books” would thus be exempt from VAT in Norway, although the list price will be the same as a download.
Nut graf:
The Norwegian publishing and bookselling industry, an astonishingly
backward group of companies when it comes to anything digital, yesterday
introduced a new concept for e-books that, even for them, is rather
harebrained. They want to sell e-book tablets where you can buy books
not as downloads (well, you can do that, too) but as files loaded on
small plastic memory cards, to be inserted into the reader [article in Norwegian].
This preserves their business model (though they can probably stop
using trucks and start using bicycles for distribution). According to
their not very convincing market analysis, this is aimed at the segment
of the book buying market who do not want to download books from the net
(but, for some reason, seem to want to read books electronically.)
This is such an awful, awful, CueCat-level thinking approach to digital distribution. The whole point of having a mobile device like the iPad or Kindle or Nook is so that you can do instant purchases & consumption of content. You walk past a poster advertising the new blockbuster action movie, now available as a Blu-Ray or for download – you know you’re going to have an hour to kill on the commuter train on the way home, and you missed the movie in theaters, to you decide to splurge. Out comes the tablet, button is pushed, movie is set to download in the background as you continue walking to the train station/subway/hovercraft depot.
Hint: You want to ENCOURAGE your customers to make impulse buys of your content, rather than make it tougher for them & thus allow time for second thoughts to creep in.
Making the public buy, collect, sort & carry with them little plastic cards with books on them? Good God. It displays the desperate attempt to keep the content all within the walled garden; if we can’t sell dead-tree editions or shiny little discs (goes the thinking), well, maybe if we just shrink it all down to credit-card size, we can keep people having to pay us for physical objects. And as long as the Big Publishing controls distribution, pricing & availability of a physical object, well then, all the old rules still apply.
People will not carry around little cards with books as data on them, slotting them in and out of a tablet reader. And even if (via some alien mind-control ray that bathes the Earth in Luddite Stupidity) they do, a thriving business will soon spring up, dealing in the blank pieces of plastic that can then be filled with the data.
The media business is no longer, and never will again be about, the control of big belching factories that churn out physical copies of stuff that gets trucked from A to B and then put on shelves. It’s about paying attention to every other step that used to lead up to that point. You know, all the stuff that newspapers and TV stations and movie studios and record companies ignored, and is the reason so many of them are in trouble.
That is, concentrating on creating something wonderful. Useful. Delightful.
It makes me sad to see that so many companies are still thinking in terms of how to defeat the digital revolutions, rather than on how we can use the web to do so many totally new, amazing art forms.
UPDATE: The initial reports (see the fact that this was a “Quick Hit”) seemed to indicate that it was Digi.no that was doing this. It turns out that it is a company named Norli Libris, whose attempt at rolling the clock back has elicited comment from other bloggers, as well as the mighty EnGadget. I thus fixed the attribution & links at the top of this post, and added a graf explaining more about Norli Libris. Thanks to @sigvald for pointing this out via Twitter (and to Google Translate for helping me decipher the Norwegian story on this.)
…in the courtyard of the Institute for the Digital Future of Journalism I’ve got great video of everyone having a blast, experimenting with the new guerilla-style video production tactics I’ve been teaching them — I showed them how to use the front and rear-facing cameras on their iPads to shoot video. Here, they are working [...] [...more]
…in the courtyard of the Institute for the Digital Future of Journalism
I’ve got great video of everyone having a blast, experimenting with the new guerilla-style video production tactics I’ve been teaching them — I showed them how to use the front and rear-facing cameras on their iPads to shoot video. Here, they are working on producing “establishing shots” using whatever equipment is available to you at the time; in this case, it means holding the iPad up in front of your face and doing slow 360s, talking to the camera, so the audience can see for themselves what the landscape around you looks like.
They absolutely loved their brand-new iPad 2s. It was like seeing little kids getting handed Magic Mirrors. They were polite enough for most of the day, but about mid-afternoon, I just lost them in the wilds of the App Store. Also - I will never understand how the Ukrainian women manage to walk down these uneven, treacherous ancient cobblestone streets in stiletto heels.
I also taught them the basics of shot selection, framing, the Rule of Thirds, and some basic stuff about editing and shot sequencing as a means to create emotion. It was about a semester’s worth of material crammed into a one-day lecture, but at least I opened them up to what is possible, and where they can go to try to learn more on their own.
This is still a beautiful city, even if the sky in unrelenting slate gray, and the wind from Siberia knifes right through you after the sun goes down…
At night, the streets of Kiev are filled only with the rumble and clatter of Dr. Zhivago trolley cars, and the whistling north wind. The architecture here is like the people; kind of battered, but still full of character. Resilient.
I haven’t gotten to see as much of this city as I would like; I’ve always been working too hard, or pretty much exhausted & creaking from the demented flight schedule it takes to get here from Los Angeles. Still, the little I have been able to discover on my own has been delightful.
This time around, my students arrived in my classes with significant New Media skills. Some of them were already creating infographics, and this girl is already ghost-blogging for big financial companies. As you can see, she is quite determined; meanwhile, behind her, another of my more active and vocal students gasps in horror at the convoluted assignments I have inflicted on the class...
One of the greater joys of this class was seeing my students help each other out. When they got stuck with some of my more technically challenging exercises, they reached out to each other, and shouted advice back and forth across the classroom.
There is no better feeling for me. I am only here for such a very short time; I keep wishing that I had an entire semester to really reach deep into these young people, to help them draw out their skills & refine them. But seeing their willingness to follow me down these strange multimedia pathways, and to help each other out along the way … leads me to believe that they will continue to help each other out after I am gone.
Yet again, I use this blog as something of a mad scientist’s laboratory, to show off how to use the latest social media tools. This time around, it’s the social media aggregator/publisher Storify. [&lt;a href="http://storify.com/DaveLaFontaine/practice-stories-at-mohyla" target="_blank"&gt;View the story "Practice Stories at Mohyla" on Storify&lt;/a&gt;] [...more]
Yet again, I use this blog as something of a mad scientist’s laboratory, to show off how to use the latest social media tools.
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.
