I loathe the state of TV news today. The American public is fed such a distorted view of events, filtered as they are by bought-and-paid-for pundits, not reporters.
Clearly, this sad state of affairs calls for a response, and The White House, for one, has one.
Since April of 2010, White House videographer Arun Chaudhary and Deputy Press Secretary Josh Earnest have been creating West Wing Week, a newsreel-like recap of the President’s week.
I know it’s PR, but it’s so much better than the news. On the news, it’s all vitriol all the time, which limits our idea about what government is. On TV, government is nothing more than a game to be won or lost, like football. But online, we see it’s much more than that and we get a much better feel for who this President is.
I do not agree with many of the things Obama does, or all that he stands for. He’s much too conservative for me. Yet, I like knowing that he’s a smart and charming guy busy working on our problems.
As the field of right wing contenders narrows down, and an alternate to Obama is offered, it will be all the more important for the President to showcase his looser digital self, not just online but on TV, as well. The challenger is going to be a starched suit, we know that much, but the contrast between the two needs to be magnified in order for the Dems to hold the executive branch.
“It isn’t the consumers’ job to know what they want.†-Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs passed away from a rare form of cancer last week at the age of 56. Since then, I’ve read a handful of articles about the man and the impact he made on modern culture. Maybe you have too.
The one article that stands out for me is by Christopher Bonanos, an editor at New York magazine. He helps us understand Jobs by revealing the connection between Jobs and Edwin H. Land, the “genius domus” of Polaroid Corporation and inventor of instant photography.
Land, in his time, was nearly as visible as Jobs was in his. In 1972, he made the covers of both Time and Life magazines, probably the only chemist ever to do so…
Both built multibillion-dollar corporations on inventions that were guarded by relentless patent enforcement. (That also kept the competition at bay, and the profit margins up.) Both were autodidacts, college dropouts (Land from Harvard, Jobs from Reed) who more than made up for their lapsed educations by cultivating extremely refined taste.
Land, like Jobs, was a perfectionist-aesthete, exhaustively obsessive about product design. The amount he spent on research and development, on buffing out flaws, sometimes left Wall Street analysts discouraging the purchase of Polaroid stock, because they thought the company wasn’t paying enough attention to the bottom line. (When a shareholder once buttonholed Land about that, he responded, “The bottom line is in heaven.â€)
In other words, both men were difficult to work with, which is something corporate culture seriously frowns upon.
I also took note of some articles where Jobs is not saluted for his singular vision, work style nor his enormous contributions. Free software advocate, Richard Stallman, wrote, “Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died.” Clearly, Stallman has another, more radical, vision for the advance of digital culture, and it’s a vision where sharing is central to the enterprise.
Michael Wolff of Adweek also has some bite in his eulogy.
The rebel and poet and romantic figure, was, too, an authoritarian and despot. Microsoft, heretofore the gold standard in corporate hegemony, was left looking like a disorganized and mealy mouth liberal regime next to Apple’s ultimate dictatorship.
The irony of Jay Chiat’s “1984” Big Brother Apple ad was most of all that Big Brother turned out to have a great sense of style.
Dictatorship seems like a poor word choice, as I believe Apple employees are free to quit their jobs whenever they feel like it. Wolff also says he argued with Jobs when he met him years ago. Why anyone other than Wolff would care, I can’t say.
On a more positive note, Jobs’ friend, the great ad man Lee Clow, wrote in a memo to staff at TBWAChiatDay (Apple’s long-standing ad agency), “He was the most amazing person I have ever known. He was a genius. He was an innovator. He was the best client we ever had.”
The man’s legacy will no doubt be discussed casually and seriously for years to come. Some will insist Jobs was a humanitarian, others will only see the draconian nature of the corporation he led to unquestionable greatness.
In 1985, Jobs said about his hero, Edwin Land, “The man is a national treasure. I don’t understand why people like that can’t be held up as models: This is the most incredible thing to be — not an astronaut, not a football player — but this.†It’s a great point. We need American inventors like Land and Jobs to inspire millions of others to pursue their own dreams and to make things that deliver utility and beauty. We do not need them to coddle the press, or cut corners on the path to perfecting their offerings.
Last night a friend visiting from Seattle said, “We don’t really listen to music anymore.” He’s right, the emphasis today is on portability, not audio quality, and that’s one reason we don’t listen like we once did. When you’re proud of your record collection and your stereo system, you take time to experience the music. And that act makes the music important.
Sadly, it is not just music that we no longer listen to. Thanks to the sound-bite nature of TV news, and the politically toxic environment fueled by right wing radio, we no longer pay much attention to current events.
That’s where video comes in. Digital media, video in particular, allows us to invest in the full story.
Because things haven’t been going President Obama’s way in Washington of late, I came to the flimsy conclusion that he was not properly defending his position and his ideas–ideas which happen to be shared by the millions of Americans who elected the man.
I’m wrong though, the President is forwarding his best ideas, often powerfully, but you have to go to YouTube to hear them. You have to dig a bit, and then sit back and take it in, which isn’t easy to do when Facebook and every other digistraction under the sun is looming a click away.
After investing some of my time to hear from the President in the videos above, I have to say I’m happiest with Obama when he’s in touch with his racial identity, and when he’s making politically incorrect statements and jokes. In other words, when he’s a real person not a packaged tool of the corporate paradigm, I like him.
In the wake of a week of violent protests in Great Britain–spurred, as they were, by the police killing of Mark Duggan–I’m not surprised to see authorities and mainstream media cast blame in any and all directions, including in the direction of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.
I’ve long contended that citizens’ media, at its core, is deeply radical and that it’s just a matter of time before “the powers that be” pull the plug. It appears that “the time” is now.
According to The Guardian, British Prime Minister, David Cameron, said his government is looking at banning people from using social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook if they are thought to be plotting criminal activity.
“Everyone watching these horrific actions will be struck by how they were organised via social media,” said Cameron.
“And when people are using social media for violence we need to stop them. So we are working with the police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality.”
Cameron’s disdain for a media channel he has little control over, led ReadWriteWeb writer Curt Hopkins to claim, “David Cameron joins the long line of powerful men who totally miss the point of social media. What Cameron is pursuing is, in effect, a ban on free speech.”
Of course, some American authorities are walking in lock step with Cameron on this issue. Philadelphia’s mayor is trying to ban “flash mobs”. Yes, flash mobs, those innocent moments of public theater have apparently been co-opted by groups aiming to steal and cause other unlawful disruptions; therefore, they must be stopped.
Also, in Oakland last week, Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) shut-off of subterranean cell phone service in its downtown San Francisco stations in order to prevent a protest.
When people need to assemble and protest they will do so, in free nations and unfree nations. With social media tools, or without. Politicians and their friends in the media business point fingers, deflect blame and fail to ask (much less answer) the tough questions–like why are so many people upset and willing to act out in the first place? And that’s a terrible disservice. Civil society is an agreement between people, not a managed state.
Meanwhile, I think it’s important to ask where the management teams at Facebook and Twitter are on all this. According to Financial Times, Facebook has hundreds of people around the wold tasked with enforcing its ban on co-ordination of violence. The Blog Herald, reports that Facebook has assigned even more people to remove posts that explicitly incite violence, as a reaction to the events in England.
It must be noted that Facebook is partly owned by intelligence interests and radical right investors. For background on this piece of the story, see Tom Hodgkinson’s take down in The Guardian.
Another interesting window into how media works to control the message is on display in this bit from the BBC.
It’s clear from this interview that BBC briefly lost control of the message. “Mr. Howe, we have to wait for the official inquiry,” pretty much says it all. BBC wants to be fair, but a man was murdered. Facts are facts, and the fact is no one wants to report on why these things happen. No one in mainstream media wants to say the police are racist, and the government corrupt. Because they’re school chums who live in the same neighborhoods and belong to the same clubs.
Which brings us back to citizens’ media and the power of push button publishing. Even if you take Facebook and Twitter out of the equation, the internet runs on corporate infrastructure. Sure, you can run your own servers, but the data has to travel over fiber-optic lines owned by AT&T and other telecommunications behemoths.
Communications technology is nothing more than a tool and it can be, and will be, throttled at will. Yet, oppressed people always find a coordinated way to resist. Disarm one tool and another will be instantly adopted. So, let’s stop with the diversions and focus on the problem–lack of economic opportunity is an injustice not only in England, but everywhere. And when lack of opportunity is coupled with police brutality, the powder keg will explode, time and again.
[UPDATE] This is also a topic we discussed during last night’s recording of The BeanCast.
The New York Times just introduced me to Jstor, a not–for–profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive of over one thousand academic journals and other scholarly content.
Jstor is in the news because Aaron Swartz, a 24-year-old agitator for free access to information on the Internet managed to illegally download more than four million articles and reviews from Jstor, which provides content from the most prestigious — and expensive — scientific and literary journals in the world. Swartz’ act of defiance led to his arrest. He now faces 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines for felony counts of wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer and recklessly damaging a protected computer.
Mr. Swartz is not a run-of-the-mill hacker, says the Times. He has been known for his computer work since he was 14, when he was involved in developing the software behind RSS feeds, which distribute content over the Internet. At the time the investigation began, he was a fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard, though he was later placed on leave. His friends and supporters are now rallying around him–45,000 have signed a petition on his behalf.
The case against Swartz is a big story, and it’s a blow to the free culture movement. But my interest spiked when I learned that institutions pay tens of thousands of dollars for subscriptions to Jstor, which stands for Journal Storage.
Founded in 1995, Jstor started with 10 journals available to a few American universities and has since expanded to include about 325,000 journal issues available at more than 7,000 institutions. In other words, Jstor is a shining example of a thriving paid content model operating online.
Stewart Brand said, “On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”
With Jstor in one corner (and Swartz in legal trouble), paid content is looking like a pretty tough competitor.
For newspapers, the following graphic from Pew Research Center pretty much says it all.
As if declining revenues aren’t enough, Pew also concludes that media businesses are not innovative enough to drive change, nor are they even in the driver’s seat.
In the 20th century, the news media thrived by being the intermediary others needed to reach customers. In the 21st, increasingly there is a new intermediary: Software programmers, content aggregators and device makers control access to the public. The news industry, late to adapt and culturally more tied to content creation than engineering, finds itself more a follower than a leader in shaping its business.
NYU Professor, Clay Shirky, frames the conversation another way. “Outside a relative handful of financial publications, there is no such thing as the news business. There is only the advertising business.”
Shirky also neatly deconstructs what it means to be a newspaper:
Writing about the Dallas Cowboys in order to take money from Ford and give it to the guy on the City Desk never made much sense, but at least it worked. Online, though, the economic and technological rationale for bundling weakens—no monopoly over local advertising, no daily allotment of space to fill, no one-size-fits-all delivery system. Newspapers, as a sheaf of unrelated content glued together with ads, aren’t just being threatened with unprofitability, but incoherence.
The great unbundling is now a matter of record. However, it’s not newspapers that readers crave, but news. And news, when it is not a commodity, is worth paying for. When is it not a commodity in the ever-abundant digital arena? When no one else is covering a particular beat. Or when the beat is shared, but the quality of reporting in one vehicle is noticeably better than the competition.
Shirky claims that “news has to be free, because it has to spread. The few people who care about the news need to be able to share it with one another and, in times of crisis, to sound the alarm for the rest of us.” I think we need to clarify terms. The “news” Shirky describes is currency in a civil society, and even more valuable in an uncivil one. But what do we call the product of reporting and aggregation that isn’t mission critical, but still essential to a niche audience? Do sports writers and business reporters create “information” rather than news?
In my opinion, there’s an audience for all of the above. People will pay their legacy journalism organization for local news because while alternatives do exist, ultimately readers want to know what The Oregonian or Omaha World Herald have to say on a given topic. The same holds for local sports, business and the rest. But like cable TV, subscriber packages need to be unbundled. If you want to subscribe to just the business section of the newspaper, great, you should be able to get it for a fraction of what it otherwise would cost to subscribe the whole paper.
[UPDATE] The Economist believes, “The digital future of news has much in common with its chaotic, ink-stained past.” As the market for media moves from mass to niche, media elites wear no clothes. It’s anyone’s game today, as it was in the days of pamphleteers.
On Sunday night, I launched a crowdfunding campaign on IndieGoGo, a site that provides a platform for small business owners, filmmakers, writers and others looking to launch and manage on online fundraising effort for their project.
It’s been a humbling 48 hours. As you can see from the following screen grab, we have plenty of “crowd,” but no “funding” yet. It stings a bit, but I want to share this stuff because there’s some good learning here that others looking for this kind of funding might benefit from.
This traffic report from IndieGoGo doesn’t indicate where the visitors are coming from, but I assume most of the views are the result of my promoting the “AdPulp Journalism Fund” on Twitter, Facebook and AdPulp.com. So, I have enough influence to drive people to click and consider, but I’m weak when it comes to motivating conversion.
Weak though I may be, I hope to improve and find new ways to go about raising money for AdPulp. One thing that occurs to me at this early stage is the need to go one-to-one with this ask. That means email, letter writing and in-person appeals. Somehow I need to establish a personal connection to the site for our most ardent supporters.
I want the campaign to work, and I want to learn what works and what does not. I also would love to see my paid email newsletter, “Hungry for Gumbo” take off. Right now, I have nine paid subscribers to the email. As you can see, it’s tough going, this path to the paid content mountaintop.
I’ve been invited to speak on the topic at GeekEnd in Boston in October. The title of my talk is “The Honeymoon Is Over And The Bill Is Due: Paid Content in 2012 And Beyond.” I’d like to be able to share a few personal success stories at that time, but I’m going to need to roll out some innovative new approaches in order to do that.
Host Courtenay Hameister’s conversation with Harvard-educated Rauch was, for me, the best part of the show. Rauch is an impressive man doing unbelievable work in Ashland. I’ve only been to one play in Ashland thus far, but I’m motivated to go back for many more. Rauch spoke eloquently about the need to support the arts and he’s right. Art creates culture. He also provided some perspective on the uniqueness of Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which annually produces eleven plays on three stages during a season that lasts from February to October. OSF is the largest company of actors in the U.S. and Rauch reminded the audience that all classic plays were once new plays given birth in the nurturing environment of repertory theater. OSF is committed to the production of new plays under Rauch’s guidance and I’m excited to know that the power of live theater is alive and well in Southern Oregon (and that the ripples made there reach far out to other lands).
Here’s a look at Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s 2011 season:
To download past episodes of Live Wire! Radio, visit the show’s iTunes podcast catalog.
By the way, members of the audience are asked to submit haikus on pre-determined topics and the cast then chooses a handful of them to read aloud during the performance. Darby’s haiku was not chosen, but she’s got a talent for the short form.
Geek Love invites us
to hula hoops and freak shows
Please show me your tail
I did not turn a haiku on a given topic in to one of the designated haiku hotties, but maybe I can make up for it here.
I’m starting a new email newsletter for paid subscribers. No, I have not gone mad, I’m merely inspired to pursue various strategies that pay me to write, edit and publish.
Why would you want to invite me into your inbox like this? And why would I bother to charge for the content and effort needed to create it?
My hope is you’ll invite me in and pay me to return again and again because you, like me, like to have a finger on the cultural pulse, a.k.a. the zeitgeist (and you want it served up in an easy-to-carry package that saves you time and the hassle of preparation).
As for the nerve it takes to charge you–even a token like my introductory rate of $1/month–I’m looking forward to the pressure the paid model creates. When you pay me, I owe you more and more kernels of meaning and wit. Simple as that.
My friend and personal ombudsman, Tom Asacker, advised me earlier this week to find what my audience on AdPulp.com is hungry for and feed them. We discussed some good ideas that are currently simmering before being plated. Perhaps I’ll create more paid newsletters that feed those hungers too, but I want to start here, with “Hungry for Gumbo,” because I’m more than a marketer who serves a highly defined audience hungry for one thing like steak, or fish, or whatever.
I’m a writer and I like gumbo, literally and figuratively.
Interestingly, the email format also lends itself to a more intimate relationship with readers. Email is digital content that can be shared/spread, but it’s provided in a private, one-on-one setting. In other words it can be a place for “loose talk,” in a way that a Web site with comments is not.
Rich says he wants to go long, that he no longer wants to feel the strain of shortening his thoughts to column length. Okay, but I’m more interested in what leads a man to write a column in the first place. Rich shares his thoughts on the matter:
For me, anyway, the point of opinion writing is less to try to shape events, a presumptuous and foolhardy ambition at best, than to help stimulate debate and, from my particular perspective, try to explain why things got the way they are and what they might mean and where they might lead. My own idiosyncratic bent as a writer, no doubt a legacy of my years spent in the theater, is to look for a narrative in the many competing dramas unfolding on the national stage. I do have strong political views, but opinions are cheap. Anyone could be a critic of the Bush administration. The challenge as a writer was to try to figure out why it governed the way it did — and how it got away with it for so long — and, dare I say it, to have fun chronicling each new outrage.
I can relate, as I too like to “stimulate debate” and “look for narrative in the many competing dramas unfolding on the national stage.” That stage at present is full tilt. Japan’s nuclear plants are melting down; gas prices are on the rise at a time when Americans can least afford it; we’re waging two wars for Empire that we will not win; class warfare is spilling into the streets and state houses of the land; our drinking water is being poisoned by natural gas drilling; kids are dropping out of high school at alarming rates, and so on.
The kind of challenges we’re facing demand that we stand together to meet them. Will we?
Rich says it is foolhardy for an opinion writer to try to shape events. I don’t know. Someone’s got to shape events.
