Circling the Drain
The Washington Post, august institution that it is, has seen fit to cut Bill Griffith's comic strip Zippy the Pinhead. They've been cutting or shrinking their comics for some time now. The comics are becoming a nano-form. But really, cutting Zippy to save Judge Parker or Peanuts redux? That's telltale. Zippy is the one comic I'd take to my single-palm desert island on the half-shell. As "Canderville" pointed out the other week the comics started as a carnival barker attraction for papers. The yellow kid put the original yellow into journalism, don't mistake that.. Scaling them back now in a fight to regain readers is non-intuitive thinking, like taking the sweet and cold out of ice cream. This is part of their advanced program of containing costs by curtailing service and product. Towards this end they have been collapsing and reworking sections all spring. They eliminated Book-world their premier Sunday tab sized book-review outright; distributing its book reviews and commentary throughout the rest of the paper and rest of the week. Business was eliminated as a free standing section and merged to the daily A section. The Opinion and Editorial pages no longer rate a separate section on Sunday and remain on the end of the A section as they are any Monday through Saturday. The Sunday Outlook section, OpEd's former home, has been refashioned to be a half-lobotomy Style section. Allowing Style to complete its transformation into a celebrity addled lowlife entertainment device. Out of all this, the elimination and dispersal of Book-world especially seemed a move that can be read as de-emphasing and de-privileging the power of the printed word. None of it, where-ever it lands, could have the thematic force and literary power it had in its own section. A dubious strategy for a newspaper, but likely deliberate as the Washington Post joins the late race to some imagined future post-word world. The American Journalism Review has a story in their latest issue
concerning the current practice of many newspapers to cut cost by
eliminating copy-editor positions
The Quality-Control Quandary. This they note is sure eventually to
impact on quality control, but quality is scarcely the point these days
and I'm sure that's a bus the Post will try to jump on if they haven't
already.
While the Washington Post, and what other newspapers are still around (my beloved Boston Globe, newspaper of my youth), are complaining about the changes forced upon them. Others talk of a citizens army of technological sharers. Dave Winer, the person originally behind for the Radio Userland web logging software, particularly has the idea that Twitter (or whatever twitter like product he favors at the moment can "replace" journalism. A significant point because his concept of Journalism, as an entrepreneur and silicon valley gadfly, is a thing that will submit to his PR blandishments. When they don't, when they do their job, he says they don't get it, and can be done away with. Weakening institutional or professional journalism will place news gathering and an informed public at significant disadvantage against increasing and professionally capable public relations teams. It is the aim of these to replace a balanced and informed populace, with a narrowly aware and emotionally beholden one.
Moreover; relying on Tweets or blogs to become the news and information gatherers places them in complex difficult and even dangerous positions without requisite professional knowledge or sensibility. As immediate sources they cannot be as effective, as secondary sources they cannot be as authoritative. Husker Du once pointed out "it don't mean a thing." Aside from that; though, I feel no need to carry the banner of Twitter backlash
News Industry on Twitter: Full of Crazies, Not Reliable - O'Reilly Broadcast.
This is part of the technological upheaval of standard model. Those that have demonstrated that information once deposited onto the internet can be aggregated automatically, believe that further applications of technology can overcome limitations of the original source. A discussion on a Diane Rehm show brought up a point from the first round of aggregation. Full text vs partial text. This leads into questions on how the aggregation occurs: through RSS, manual or extracted. And what is presented: all, summaries, leds, decks etc. A primary example might be Google news vs yahoo's news (scrape, rss respectively). And in presentation Dave Winers river-of-news RSS readers vs Google reader and all other similar 3 panel readers. I never had the idea that RSS or scrapping was intended to deliver the whole article to a user. I saw it as a thing that arranged headlines with a scope note. I don't even use RSS to read other weblogs. To the degree it was ever a choice by news providers, allowing RSS to transfer the entire text of a piece of writing was a strategic error. There was no overwhelming need for it, and it cut the basic connection to the information's originating source.
Some argue now this was one of a number of management missteps rather then technological inevitability, in the shepherding of journalistic content. Giving it away, free is not a revenue stream. The Associated Presses decision to license its content to Internet portals is one of the sorest points for newspapers and is the subject also of a critical article in the American Journalism Review. From the AP's perspective the article relates once before the wire service tried to withhold content/product, from new technology; from radio in the 1920s and 30s (AP wire is a creature of the newspaper industry). UPI stepped in and gained significant market share, by 1941 AP had given in. It is reasonable that the AP wire be a hosted services by design. That their product appear on a hosting newspaper, radio, or TV station's web site, whatever the page or link the user was on or followed. Portals who buy or turn around the wire service for news dangle rights, the scrapes and RSS blocks that make them an attractive service, then provide copy on pages that generate ad revenue back to them, cut newspapers out and made them superfluous. The AFP seems to have an attempted solution in place. They don't dump their news feed directly to the Internet. Google Yahoo etc can only provide a link from a subscribed host which then gets eyeballs on their own ads and traffic to their site. These practices form what is known as structured content:
[AP president Tom] Curley can foresee someday offering varied levels of access to AP content. While some stories or news videos would remain universally available, others could be coded to provide intermediate access, giving a viewer a brief synopsis. And still other kinds of content could be fully protected, offering perhaps no more than a headline for free. ... The idea is beset by a number of questions, most pointedly: How much would advertising revenue suffer when only paying customers are allowed to enter a site and traffic inevitably falls?
A Costly Mistake? | American Journalism Review.
From my perspective as an end user if structured content rules the day and content successfully retreats into walled gardens, accessible by payments additionally to an immediate right to read a story, a subscription or micro-payment ought to gain the user a gifting URL. An email/blog this story URL, allowing the user to share and create a dialog on an article. They could even charge extra for this, differentiated between business and non business users, if they feel the need to. Newspapers would rather all dialog occur on their own comment sections, but that is not going to happen. Nor, I'm sure they will allow, will the best conversations take place there. Interest communities today are increasingly, because they can be, non geo-specific (several years ago I attended a talk where a Prof. Langdon Winner made this specific point 17Nov05). Focus comes to a story in graduated fashion and from around.
There is another notion about that news appetite now demands immediate reporting and the technological and distribution means that support this. The 24-hr News Cycle. Call it the campaign for realtime. This means the Internet, it means news aggregation. Even TV and radio which can distribute in real-time, need this to gather news in realtime. The recent Senate hearings on the future of journalism had pronouncements of this sort:
"[P]aper and ink have become obsolete, eclipsed by the power, efficiency and technological elegance of the Internet...Most experts believe that what we are seeing happen to newspapers is just the beginning - soon, perhaps in a matter of a few years, television and radio will experience what newspapers are experiencing now." Senator John Kerry, Chairman of the Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet : U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, & Transportation
Through much of the commentary on the state of newspapers in the press recently especially when newspapers weigh in on themselves is the idea that something unfair has happened to (print) journalism. That we (the buying public and government) ought adapt ourselves to the relief of their needs and traditions. At this point I recall that the news, the fourth estate, has gotten many nearly all major "ground" stories of last decade wrong. The warning voices on Iraq, WMD, Al Qaeda connections, the ease of certain glorious and useful victory were drowned out by voices repeating political assurances and urging us forward. A similar story on the financial crisis can be told, by the late spring of 2007 the Post and other papers were running stories on the the potential for a wave of foreclosures and questioning parts of the mortgage market, but if they were aware of its potential to bring the financial markets of the world to a virtual stand still they kept that well hidden. Mostly they were content to remain cheerleaders of feverish bull. The Press no longer operates in public interest but as adjunct to and explainer of power. As even Post writer Howard Kurtz relates most people believe that newspapers problems are of their own making
Under Weight of Its Mistakes, Newspaper Industry Staggers. An unoriginal tale of failure to engage with a changing world. Most people are content to allow newspapers to fall by the wayside and see what comes next Media Notes: Can Newspapers Be Saved? Believing that in this it is not the papers nor even the model of journalism embodied by print. Rather only a more abstract idea of free flowing information as disengaged from institutional interest s as possible that matters.
One of the remedies I've heard repeatedly pushed is to allow a relaxation of media cross ownership rules Washington Help Ailing Newspaper Industry? : NPR. This, it is always stressed, will allow great economies of scale as the owners of radio, tv, and newspapers can field a single army of reporters. I remain open, but dubious here. A distinction between in-market and inter-market concentration needs to be made. A distinction between, combining and pooling new-gathering activities perhaps an efficient economy, and concentration of ownership which is a media concentration of voice and view. The ultimate value of news, the endeavor of the fourth estate is as a stop against power opposed to a mere flogger of ephemeral information-like content; ball scores (Nats lose, and repeat) and movie times. Can it affect the behavior of those with power over our lives? Power they gain from us. If it cannot, if restrictions on the way it can be used and shared particularize and reduce its ability to create a informed modern citizenry to confront power. Then it does not have value and ought not claim its worth to society, or the price they would set on it. The dialog, the conversation and assessments that occur alongside realtime news and the 24-hr news cycle, needs to occur with the same velocity and liquidity. In any case it needs to occur with the same velocity as power is exercised over our lives. What will be valued and paid for is what can do that.
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