Digital Media Web 2.0

Demand Media is trying to censor blogs that record its suckiness* - Forbes :

There’s something perversely flattering about having an entire website devoted to your supposed terribleness. But Demand Media is evidently not enjoying the attention from Demand Studios Sucks, a blog maintained by refugees, malcontents and other critics of the so-called content farm. This week, as Demand’s market capitalization fell below $1 billion for the first time since it went public in January, the company’s lawyers sent a cease-and-desist letter to the proprietors of Demand Studio Sucks, and temporarily succeeded in getting its internet service provider to take down some internal documents it didn’t want posted.

We thought the Demand Media business model sucked pre IPO, and still do, but its nice to see these sort of shark practice businesses get their own remora-blogs.

One of the lessons of the New Media is your critics are always with you......... and like remoras,they won't go away easily.

*Suckiness - a business that sucks at sucking suckers'

This week I had a client engagement in Wales, about 3 hrs from Broadsight's London base. Got there and, with sinking feeling, realised I had left my laptop back in London. Presentation to client COO early the next day, lots of last minute work to do.

Why is this significant? Well, the sinking feeling was from remembrance of times past - I've done this sort of high stress "forget the laptop" once about every 10 years - here is how it went:

1991 - Arrived at hotel near client (in Wales) at c 12pm, had a few final touches to make, no problems as meeting is at 10 am next morning but then found I had left correct "luggable" computer (with the files on) at office - in those days you didn't have your own laptop. I got up at 3am, drove 3 hours back to office, got computer, drove 4 hours back to client (more traffic by then) and then rushed into meeting and present without final touches. There was early Internet in the UK (I used it) but virtually no companies were on it, and as for storing files in the "cloud"...

1999 - Arrive in Kuala Lumpur in afternoon, meeting next morning, PC dies. Borrow another PC, spend all night desperately trying to download 2Gb of stuff we needed over a PSTN line, colleague in London and I took about 5 hours trying email, FTP etc etc - big files and PSTN modems do not get on well! Finally done, walk into key presentation with no sleep and jetlagged.

2011 - The solution? Simple, the hotel gave me one of their desks and a PC, I pulled the files I wanted off our Internet server, used the Excel and Powerpoint on their computer, updated them, emailed it to my colleague and client for the morning. Hotel even have a Costa Coffee in the foyer so I could keep my caffeine habit going. Sorted. (A shout out to the Hilton Hotel in Newport, Wales here - they were magnificent in my hours of need)

Of course, you know the end don't you - the meeting was postponed till next week .

Now, in about 1993 I wrote an article in Management Today stating that the impact of this new fangled Internet would be to replace physical travel with digital travel. It hasn't done that yet, but it has replaced the sinking feeling with a sympathetic latte from the hotel staff.
One wonders what will happen in 2021 - will laptops be disposable commodities (5 more cycles of Moore's Law means a £300 machine today will be a tenner by then) or will my laptop be hardwired into my brain, so it cannot be forgotten unless I forget my head!

Bit of free time, so writing up my notes from Morning 2 of the Financial Times Digital Media & Broadcasting conference 2 weeks ago. Big takeaway is that everyone expects the near past to look like the near future:

Firstly, that old chestnut, Books - Engaging readers in the digital age had Chris Cleave, New York Times #1 bestselling novelist; John Makinson, Chairman and CEO, Penguin Group and Richard Palk, General Manager at Digital Reading Business Europe, Sony on teh panel. My notes abiut Things I had not heard before are:

- iPad adoption speed incredible, no one is sure what it eans but unlikely to be bale to charge silly prices like you can on e-Readers. 70% margisn are going to come off Amazon/Kindle.
- Stormclouds are gatehering for current eBook pricing model, as free downloads start to take off.
- DRM is not the answer
- iPad creates a new media cohesiveness that Kindle, laptop cannot match easily
- Increasingly not enough for author to write have to pre-market, post market, engage with audience
- the "Novel" is a recent phenomenon - Dickens was serialised for example (yes, you knew that) but everyone thinks the serial lends itself better to interactive media.
- Music is different, in that songs are different to chapters, but not different to short stories - but people don't really go for short stories - but if properly written would read instead of newspaper on way to work

Then came the obligatory New markets, new models session - with Tony Chambers, General Manager, Emerging Markets, The Walt Disney Company, EMEA; Mark Read, Director of Strategy, WPP and Caleb Weinstein, Senior Vice President, Discovery Networks, Emerging Markets. New Points noted are:

- Where is the growth? - not BRICS et al, they can't pay western prices so piracy is endemic - long term game. ROI > 5 years
- US, Europe has people and money in next 5 years
- We will see lots of "wiggling" of business models

Then comes the even more obligatory "Next-generation advertising and marketing" featuring Jeff Levick, President of Global Advertising and Strategy, AOL; William Eccleshare, President & CEO, Clear Channel International; Matt Brittin , Managing Director, Google UK and Guy Hayward, CEO, JWT UK Group. New points made:

- There has been very little innovation in Display ads over last 10 yaers, the system was built by technologists in dotcom era but marketers are starting to change it now
- Digital outdoor media is something to watch over next 5 years
- Smart clients are using mixed media
- Mobile - still small, growth potential probably overstated - needs further smartphone penetration and single standard - also a good payment device (estimated 2-5 years out).
- 1 in 3 use location on mobile vs 1 in 5 on web.
- Still darned hard to work out what happens with Social Media - to quote:

"Advertising that interrups people when they don't want to be interrupted doesn't work"

The Google chap said that they had not given up with Google TV, but will iterate from what they have learned.

My summary - After 2 days at the conference, I think apart from the more rapid growth of the iPad, and the entrance of a 2nd wave of "adventure capital" into Video, the heavy duty work we did in this space in 2008 stands up pretty well - ie it was all largely predictable. I sat down this morning with my notes trying to scry trends and threads and connections just "below the surface", or anything that looks truly disruptive. I know wveryone want to believe in "mobile", but I just don't see it in the short term as the essential economic limits in the mobile broadband value chain - too much variety, too few standards, cr*p cost structure - just haven't changed much since 2005 when we first looked at this area. What will happen is "Big Smart Mobiles" - ie Tablets - will take the broadband media content load (and payola) as quite simply a mobile screen is just too darned small.

The New York Times paywall learns about work-arounds the hard way - Nieman Labs:

The paywall is costing the newspaper $40-$50 million to design and construct, Bloomberg has reported.

And it can be defeated through four lines of Javascript.

......

Canadian coder David Hayes has just released NYTClean, a bookmarklet that, in one click, tears down the Times’ paywall.

“Released” is probably even a little strong — it makes it sound like there was an extended development process. All NYTClean does is call four measly lines of Javascript that hide a couple

s and turn page scrolling back on. It barely even qualifies as a hack. But it allows you access to any New York Times story, even when you’re past the monthly limit. (I just tested it out with a Canadian proxy server — works just like it says.)

I met Arthur Sulzberger at the FT Digital Media conference a few weeks back*, and pointed out that I read he NYT online from the UK as its too bl**dy hard to find never mind buy the paper here, and so I read it online, but for me to pay for it I have to know that I can't get it free more easily. (We have done a lot of research into free vs paid-for online services recently, and a big thing coming back at us is that if Paying was less hassle (and prices more reasonable), more people would do it - but only if others don't get a free ride of course). As Nieman labs points out:

Imagine a Venn diagram with two circles. One represents all the people on the Internet who might be convinced to pay for nytimes.com. The other represents all the people on the Internet who (a) know how to install a bookmarklet or (b) have read a Cory Doctorow novel. Do you really see a big overlap between the two? If someone is absolutely certain to never pay for the NYT, then it makes sense to squeeze a little extra advertising revenue out of them on the rare occasions when a link sends them to nytimes.com.

The problem with that model, though, is that it assumes inefficiency. It assumes that the happy-to-pay crowd (or the grudgingly-will-pay crowd) never find out about the workarounds — or at least that the workarounds remain complicated enough that they won’t want to bother. One click, though, ain’t all that complicated.

Now that was predictable. Back to the drawing board, chaps......

* I realise now that if I had known what they were up to, I could have spent 5 minutes and saved him a fortune - virtual impact, eh

Interesting essay by Rolf Dobelli on the behavioural issues with news, especially in the light of the "future of quality news" angst I heard at the Financial Times conference this week. Essentially he argues that News is to the mind what sugar is to the body, and that our human conditioning to react to Scary! Now! is the opposite of what the world needs now, but news is sugar for our cave-brains, feeding us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don’t really concern our lives and don’t require thinking. He argues that unlike reading books and long, deep magazine articles (which requires thinking), we can "swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, like bright-colored candies for the mind." He argues that the following are the main problems (I have summarised for you short-attention spanned news junkies....):

No 1 – News misleads us systematically
News reports do not represent the real world. Our brains are wired to pay attention to visible, large, scandalous, sensational, shocking, people-related, story-formatted, fast changing, loud, graphic onslaughts of stimuli. Our brains have limited attention to spend on more subtle pieces of intelligence that are small, abstract, ambivalent, complex, slow to develop and quiet, much less silent. News organizations systematically exploit this bias. News media outlets, by and large, focus on the highly visible. They display whatever information they can convey with gripping stories and lurid pictures, and they systematically ignore the subtle and insidious, even if that material is more important. News grabs our attention; that’s how its business model works. Even if the advertising model didn’t exist, we would still soak up news pieces because they are easy to digest and superficially quite tasty.


No 2 – News is irrelevant
Out of the approximately 10,000 news stories you have read in the last 12 months, name one that – because you consumed it – allowed you to make a better decision about a serious matter affecting your life, your career, your business – compared to what you would have known if you hadn’t swallowed that morsel of news. The point is: the consumption of news is irrelevant to the forces that really matter in your life. At its best, it is entertaining, but it is still irrelevant.


No 3 – News limits understanding
News has no explanatory power. News items are little bubbles popping on the surface of a deeper world. News organizations pride themselves on correctly reporting the facts, but the facts that they prize are just epiphenomena of deeper causes. Both news organizations and news consumers mistake knowing a litany of facts for understanding the world. It’s not “news facts” that are important, but the threads that connect them. What we really want is
to understand the underlying processes, how things happen..... ....[But this is] complex, non-linear and hard for our (and the journalists’) brains to digest. Why do news organizations go for the light stuff, the anecdotes, scandals, people-stories and pictures? The answer is simple: because they are cheap to produce.


No 4 – News is toxic to your body
News constantly triggers the limbic system. Panicky stories spur the release of cascades of glucocordicoid (cortisol). This deregulates your immune system and inhibits the release of growth hormones. In other words, your body finds itself in a state of chronic stress. High glucocordicoid levels cause impaired digestion, lack of growth (cell, hair, bone), nervousness and susceptibility to infections. News consumers risk impairing their physical health. The other potential side effects of news include fear, aggression, tunnel-vision and desensitization.


No 5 – News massively increases cognitive errors
News feeds the mother of all cognitive errors: confirmation bias. We automatically, systematically filter out evidence that contradicts our preconceptions in favor of evidence that confirms our beliefs. In the words of Warren Buffett: “What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.” That is the confirmation bias. News consumption, especially customized news intake, exacerbates this human flaw. The result is that we walk around in a cloud of seemingly confirming data – even when our theories about the world and ourselves may be wrong. We become prone to overconfidence, take stupid risks and misjudge opportunities. News not only feeds the confirmation bias, it exacerbates another cognitive error: the story bias. Our brains crave stories that “make sense” – even if they don’t correspond to reality. And news organizations are happy to deliver those fake stories.

No 6 – News inhibits thinking
Thinking requires concentration. Concentration requires uninterrupted time. News items are like free-floating radicals that interfere with clear thinking. News pieces are specifically engineered to interrupt you. They are like viruses that steal attention for their own purposes. This is not about stealing time (see reason 8 ). This is about the inability to think clearly because you have opened yourself up to the disruptive factoid stream.
News makes us shallow thinkers.


No 7 – News changes the structure of your brain
News works like a drug. As stories develop, we naturally want to know how they continue. With hundreds of arbitrary story lines in our heads, this craving is increasingly compelling and hard to ignore.
Why is news addictive? Once you get into the habit of checking the news, you are driven to check it even more often. Your attention is set on fast-breaking events, so you hunger for more data about them. This has to do with a process called “long-term potentiation” (LTP) and the reward circuits in your brain.

No 8 – News is costly
News wastes time. It exacts exorbitant costs. News taxes productivity three ways.

- First, count the consumption-time that news demands. That’s the time you actually waste reading, listening to or watching the news.
- Second, tally up the refocusing time – or switching cost. That’s the time you waste trying to get back to what you were doing before the news interrupted you. You have to collect your thoughts. What were you about to do? Every time you disrupt your work to check the news, reorienting yourself wastes more time.
- Third, news distracts us even hours after we’ve digested today’s hot items. News stories and images may pop into your mind hours, sometimes days later, constantly interrupting your train of thought. Why would you want to do that to yourself?

No 9 – News sunders the relationship between reputation and achievement
Reputation affects how people cooperate in society. In our ancestral past, a person’s reputation was directly linked to his or her achievements. You saw that your fellow tribe member killed a tiger single handedly and you spread word of his bravery. With the advent of mass-produced news, the strange concept of “fame” entered our society. Fame is misleading because generally people become famous for reasons that have little relevance to our lives. The media grants fame to movie stars and news anchors for scant reason. News sunders the relationship between reputation and achievement. The tragedy is that pop notoriety crowds out the achievements of those who make more substantive contributions.


No 10 – News is produced by journalists
Good professional journalists take time with their stories, authenticate their facts and try to think things through. But like any profession, journalism has some incompetent, unfair practitioners who don’t have the time – or the capacity – for deep analysis. You might not be able to tell the difference between a polished professional report and a rushed, glib, paid-by-the-piece article by a writer with an ax to grind. It all looks like news. My estimate: fewer than 10% of the news stories are original. Less than 1% are truly investigative. And only once every 50 years do journalists uncover a Watergate


No 11 – Reported facts are sometimes wrong, forecasts always
Sometimes, reported facts are simply mistaken. With reduced editorial budgets at major publications, fact checking may be an endangered step in the news process. The New Yorker magazine is legendary for its fact checking. The story goes that when an article mentioned the Empire State Building, someone from the fact-checking department would go out and visually verify that, in fact, the building was still standing. I don’t know if the story is true, but it highlights a point. Today, the fact checker is an endangered species at most news companies (though still alive and well at The New Yorker). Many news stories include predictions, but accurately predicting anything in a complex world is impossible. Overwhelming evidence indicates that forecasts by journalists and by experts in finance, social development, global conflicts and technology are almost always completely wrong. So, why consume that junk?


No 12 – News is manipulative
Our evolutionary past has equipped us with a good bullshit detector for face-to-face interactions. We automatically use many clues to detect manipulation, clues that go beyond the verbal message and include gesture, facial expression, and signs of nervousness such as sweaty palms, blushing and body odor. Living in small bands of people, we almost always knew the background of the messenger. Information always came with a rich set of meta-data. Today, even conscientious readers find that distinguishing even-handed news stories from ones that have a private agenda is difficult and energy consuming. Why go through that?
Stories are selected or slanted to please advertisers (advertising bias) or the owners of the media (corporate bias), and each media outlet has a tendency to report what everyone else is reporting, and to avoid stories that will offend anyone (mainstream bias).


No 13 – News makes us passive
News stories are overwhelmingly about things you cannot influence. This sets readers up to have a fatalistic outlook on the world. Compare this with our ancestral past, where you could act upon practically every bit of news. Our evolutionary past prepared us to act on information, but the daily repetition of news about things we can’t act upon makes us passive. It saps our energy. It grinds us down until we adopt a worldview that is pessimistic, desensitized, sarcastic and fatalistic.


14 – News gives us the illusion of caring
Kathleen Norris (even if I don’t share most of her ideas) said it best: “We may want to believe that we are still concerned, as our eyes drift from a news anchor announcing the latest atrocity to the NBA scores and stock market quotes streaming across the bottom of the screen. But the ceaseless bombardment of image and verbiage makes us impervious to caring.”


No 15 – News kills creativity
Things we already know limit our creativity. This is one reason that mathematicians, novelists, composers and entrepreneurs often produce their most creative works at a young age. They are oblivious to much that has been tried before. Their brains enjoy a wide, uninhabited space that emboldens them to come up with and pursue novel ideas.

He notes that The public relations (PR) industry is as large as the news reporting industry – the best proof that journalists and news organizations can be manipulated, or at least influenced or swayed, and also writes that "I don’t know a single truly creative mind who is a news junkie – not a writer, not a composer, mathematician, physician, scientist, musician, designer, architect or painter. On the other hand, I know a whole bunch of viciously uncreative minds who consume news like drugs."

So What to do - how do you wean yourself off News? Dobrell suggests the best approach is Do Without, go without news, go cold turkey. However he relents a bit, and suggests a methadone method:

If you want to keep the illusion of “not missing anything important”, I suggest you glance through the summary page of the Economist once a week. Don’t spend more than five minutes on it.
Read magazines and books which explain the world – Science, Nature, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly. Go for magazines that connect the dots and don’t shy away from presenting the complexities of life – or from purely entertaining you. The world is complicated, and we can do nothing about it. So, you must read longish and deep articles and books that represent its complexity. Try reading a book a week. Better two or three. History is good. Biology. Psychology. That way you’ll learn to understand the underlying mechanisms of the world. Go deep instead of broad. Enjoy material that truly interests you. Have fun reading.

And as with all changes of diet, the first week is the hardest, but persevere:

Deciding not to check the news while you are thinking, writing or reading takes discipline. You are fighting your brain’s built-in tendency. Initially, you will feel out of touch or even socially isolated. Every day you will be tempted to check your favorite news Web site. Go 30 days without news. After 30 days, you will have a more relaxed attitude toward the news. You will find that you have more time, more concentration and a better understanding of the world.

And the Good News?

Society needs journalism – but in a different way. Investigative journalism is relevant in any society. We need more hard-core journalists digging into meaningful stories. We need reporting that polices our society and uncovers the truth. The best example is Watergate. But important findings don’t have to arrive in the form of news. Often, reporting is not time sensitive. Long journal articles and in-depth books are fine forums for investigative journalism – and now that you’ve gone cold turkey on the news, you’ll have time to read them.

I must say this resonates quite a bit with my experience (and practice) - I hardly bother with "daily" news unless something major (like the once - in - a century events in the Arab world) is happening, and have drastically curtailed the blogs and real time stuff I read, and focussing on the more strategic writers. I think it isn't practical to totally cut it off though, so I tend to scan Twitter a few times a day (typically over a caffeine-filled beverage) and Techmeme and Hacker News likewise, as they are efficient aggregators of news with (some) less bias than curated news. I do find blogging about something forces me to focus on my thoughts about it, rather than just consuming it.

The irony though is that a blog like this probably counts as a "News" blog - but I hope that, by always trying to get to the "why" and the underlying the trends/threads/twists of the things I write about, is more than a simple news-mash regurgitation

(From Broadsight's ever-thoughtful Paul Lancefield)

Last week I got the new Sunday Times app on the iPad. The subscription is £2 per week for six days of The Times and the Sunday Times, as you would expect, on Sunday. The operative concept is that it is a news magazine. They are offering 1 month for free to new subscribers. The overall experience is really very good. Much better than I was expecting actually.

Having been using New's International's The Times app and from last week, their Sunday Times application, I'm going to make a prediction about the future of online news. My verdict is, though it may take time to grow, Murdoch's venture onto tablets and paid for news is going to win out. 100% it will. Just as before the iPad launch I was thinking "yep I'd love one, but will it really work for most people as a product" and after it's launch I realised "yep it 100% works as a distinct product category in it's own right and it will really take off", so now I'm feeling the same degree of conviction regarding paid versus free news gathering.

Actually I'm feeling also, strangely, a little relieved. It's giving me much more what I want as a consumer and I have been wondering for some time how quality news would be gathered without it all degenerating into the news equivalent of the free tourist city guide books found on every desk in a hotel bedroom.

Of course some avid users of Twitter and advocates of Open data initiatives may not like the implications of my reasoning on this, so I will state upfront, I am not saying paid for news is the only show in town, nor am I taking a political stance. A rich news ecosystem will remain with paid and commercial free and web2.0 free and up to the minute. It's just that I'm now feel sure paid-for news can survive and thrive whereas before there was a big question mark over the sustainability of the model. Now there is a mechanism where investment can be rewarded and, low and behold, investment has been made and the result is really gratifying. The increase in value returned for my money, for me, far exceeds the £2 per week subscription cost (which gets me The Times and The Sunday Times).

Now my primary concern is how long it will take the Telegraph and The Guardian (in the UK) to follow suite. They risk being left for dead because currently they are facing an ever reducing budget for producing quality editorial. There is going to be steady growth in this as word gets out and as customers get the opportunity to try it on friend's devices and realise they also want news this way. Tablets have made the Free News situation a whole lot worse. Since I got my 3G enabled iPad, I haven't bought a single paper newspaper. Why would I? It would be interesting to check the impact of a tablet computer purchase on revenues from the customer. I wouldn't be surprised if for every Telegraph or Guardian reader who buys an iPad, paper sales revenues are decreased by at least 50% or more (and will decrease yet further over time). I would dearly love to know if there have been any studies yet that confirm this.

Now my fear is (and this is not healthy for the news industry), Twitter is going to end up being much more of a threat to commercial purveyors of free news (e.g. commercial companies funded by ad revenues) than paid for news. Free news has to maintain critical mass and compete with Web2.0, where paid-for news will be able to establish a virtuous circle with subscribers and real substantial subscription revenue with which to grow and improve a value product justifying the subscription.

You have to hand it to Murdoch that he invested big in Satellite at just the right time. But can the world afford for him to repeat the same trick with tablet hypermedia publishing? Of course he won't be able to monopolise the means in the same way as he managed with Sky but now he does have the rather distinct advantage of being able to leverage his paper publishing and TV operations all together.

I can't fully put my finger on why the The Sunday times app should be so much better than content accessed via a web browser.

- Partly it is due to the fact HTML5 isn't yet being used to it's full potential - you should be able to have the same on screen experience via open web technologies if it were. Part of the reason (following on from the last point) is because so much effort has been invested in the iPad version to ensure the full range of content is available. Partly also because, once a news/magazine producer has gathered all the material they have (e.g. the stories, the photo's, the live footage) that is gathered as part of the news day and edited it and prepared it for slick media presentation, it has the opportunity to become so much more than the same material in a static paper.

- The wealth of photographs alone and the high quality is quite something. Being able to touch almost every photo and instantly see it smoothly scale up to the high res version and being able to swipe between each photo in a story is truly a revelation. In traditional newspapers and magazines you get the large photo and then many small ones. On a tablet, they can all be large and colourful and add the kind of quality feel only previously found in dedicated photo-journals, only now that feel is mixed in with everyday news and magazine stories. And yes, video is also getting mixed in there in a much more intimate way, with the start and stop and scaling full screen or leaving it playing in-situ on the page and scrolling it off page all instantly and smoothly accessed. That browsing is a seamless uninterrupted experience without any of the pauses http entails is much more powerful and a more significant than I expected.

- And lastly of course, the most essential ingredient is that tablet computing provides a genuinely more intimate experience where smooth and natural operation is near-as-damn-it 100% of the time. None tablet form factors simply can't match it (it also underlines Google have to seriously work on the offline capabilities of Chrome OS if they are to maximise inroads on Apple and Microsoft - HTML5 should help here again of course).

I'm also realising something here about news gathering. We have this assumption people want up to the minute news. But what does up to the minute really mean for most people? The closer you get to the minute of occurrence, the less value there is for most people and the less value there can be. For nearly all news for nearly all people for nearly all the time there is no real tangible value from being up to the minute. For a start, up to the minute means minute by minute and most of the time we are doing something else and don't want interruption for what is mostly trivia.


Most people want, most of the time, at most, up to the half an hour or up to the hour, because they want someone to actually prepare a story for them. Most news stories don't affect them, their lives or their careers in any way. But they still read the stories. So most news reading is "entertainment," or "mental stimulation," or "mind expansion" but is almost certainly not for most people about upping personal productivity or getting better at your job (industry journals fill that role). So social media supplements and adds additional layers, nuances and - to a limited extent - competes with paid-for news, but my biggest realisation with the tablet form factor is that social-media surely doesn't replace paid-for news.

This is where someone like Murdoch has always excelled. He may seem like a dinosaur when you hear him talking about the Internet and Internet technologies. But where you or I might take an intellectual look at the potential for social-media to displace paid-for news, where we might conjecture about wiki style open editorial co-operatives taking over, a grizzled old news-dog like Murdoch comes along and applies his simple understanding of what selling news is all about. His instinct is "the people want news and we will work to give it to them and that doesn't happen for free." So he invests, provides a real news magazine experience and the price, if compared with the value of what you get back, is miniscule. Compare the volume of content of 5 Days of the Times and full content of The Sunday Times to the cost of a paperback to see what I mean. £2 for all that? It's peanuts. Murdoch opining on the Internet may, at times, have sounded like a fool but Murdoch the arch-capitalist selling news to punters is simply untouchable.

(From Broadsight's ever-thoughtful Paul Lancefield)

Last week I got the new Sunday Times app on the iPad. The subscription is £2 per week for six days of The Times and the Sunday Times, as you would expect, on Sunday. The operative concept is that it is a news magazine. They are offering 1 month for free to new subscribers. The overall experience is really very good. Much better than I was expecting actually.

Having been using New's International's The Times app and from last week, their Sunday Times application, I'm going to make a prediction about the future of online news. My verdict is, though it may take time to grow, Murdoch's venture onto tablets and paid for news is going to win out. 100% it will. Just as before the iPad launch I was thinking "yep I'd love one, but will it really work for most people as a product" and after it's launch I realised "yep it 100% works as a distinct product category in it's own right and it will really take off", so now I'm feeling the same degree of conviction regarding paid versus free news gathering.

Actually I'm feeling also, strangely, a little relieved. It's giving me much more what I want as a consumer and I have been wondering for some time how quality news would be gathered without it all degenerating into the news equivalent of the free tourist city guide books found on every desk in a hotel bedroom.

Of course some avid users of Twitter and advocates of Open data initiatives may not like the implications of my reasoning on this, so I will state upfront, I am not saying paid for news is the only show in town, nor am I taking a political stance. A rich news ecosystem will remain with paid and commercial free and web2.0 free and up to the minute. It's just that I'm now feel sure paid-for news can survive and thrive whereas before there was a big question mark over the sustainability of the model. Now there is a mechanism where investment can be rewarded and, low and behold, investment has been made and the result is really gratifying. The increase in value returned for my money, for me, far exceeds the £2 per week subscription cost (which gets me The Times and The Sunday Times).

Now my primary concern is how long it will take the Telegraph and The Guardian (in the UK) to follow suite. They risk being left for dead because currently they are facing an ever reducing budget for producing quality editorial. There is going to be steady growth in this as word gets out and as customers get the opportunity to try it on friend's devices and realise they also want news this way. Tablets have made the Free News situation a whole lot worse. Since I got my 3G enabled iPad, I haven't bought a single paper newspaper. Why would I? It would be interesting to check the impact of a tablet computer purchase on revenues from the customer. I wouldn't be surprised if for every Telegraph or Guardian reader who buys an iPad, paper sales revenues are decreased by at least 50% or more (and will decrease yet further over time). I would dearly love to know if there have been any studies yet that confirm this.

Now my fear is (and this is not healthy for the news industry), Twitter is going to end up being much more of a threat to commercial purveyors of free news (e.g. commercial companies funded by ad revenues) than paid for news. Free news has to maintain critical mass and compete with Web2.0, where paid-for news will be able to establish a virtuous circle with subscribers and real substantial subscription revenue with which to grow and improve a value product justifying the subscription.

You have to hand it to Murdoch that he invested big in Satellite at just the right time. But can the world afford for him to repeat the same trick with tablet hypermedia publishing? Of course he won't be able to monopolise the means in the same way as he managed with Sky but now he does have the rather distinct advantage of being able to leverage his paper publishing and TV operations all together.

I can't fully put my finger on why the The Sunday times app should be so much better than content accessed via a web browser.

- Partly it is due to the fact HTML5 isn't yet being used to it's full potential - you should be able to have the same on screen experience via open web technologies if it were. Part of the reason (following on from the last point) is because so much effort has been invested in the iPad version to ensure the full range of content is available. Partly also because, once a news/magazine producer has gathered all the material they have (e.g. the stories, the photo's, the live footage) that is gathered as part of the news day and edited it and prepared it for slick media presentation, it has the opportunity to become so much more than the same material in a static paper.

- The wealth of photographs alone and the high quality is quite something. Being able to touch almost every photo and instantly see it smoothly scale up to the high res version and being able to swipe between each photo in a story is truly a revelation. In traditional newspapers and magazines you get the large photo and then many small ones. On a tablet, they can all be large and colourful and add the kind of quality feel only previously found in dedicated photo-journals, only now that feel is mixed in with everyday news and magazine stories. And yes, video is also getting mixed in there in a much more intimate way, with the start and stop and scaling full screen or leaving it playing in-situ on the page and scrolling it off page all instantly and smoothly accessed. That browsing is a seamless uninterrupted experience without any of the pauses http entails is much more powerful and a more significant than I expected.

- And lastly of course, the most essential ingredient is that tablet computing provides a genuinely more intimate experience where smooth and natural operation is near-as-damn-it 100% of the time. None tablet form factors simply can't match it (it also underlines Google have to seriously work on the offline capabilities of Chrome OS if they are to maximise inroads on Apple and Microsoft - HTML5 should help here again of course).

I'm also realising something here about news gathering. We have this assumption people want up to the minute news. But what does up to the minute really mean for most people? The closer you get to the minute of occurrence, the less value there is for most people and the less value there can be. For nearly all news for nearly all people for nearly all the time there is no real tangible value from being up to the minute. For a start, up to the minute means minute by minute and most of the time we are doing something else and don't want interruption for what is mostly trivia.


Most people want, most of the time, at most, up to the half an hour or up to the hour, because they want someone to actually prepare a story for them. Most news stories don't affect them, their lives or their careers in any way. But they still read the stories. So most news reading is "entertainment," or "mental stimulation," or "mind expansion" but is almost certainly not for most people about upping personal productivity or getting better at your job (industry journals fill that role). So social media supplements and adds additional layers, nuances and - to a limited extent - competes with paid-for news, but my biggest realisation with the tablet form factor is that social-media surely doesn't replace paid-for news.

This is where someone like Murdoch has always excelled. He may seem like a dinosaur when you hear him talking about the Internet and Internet technologies. But where you or I might take an intellectual look at the potential for social-media to displace paid-for news, where we might conjecture about wiki style open editorial co-operatives taking over, a grizzled old news-dog like Murdoch comes along and applies his simple understanding of what selling news is all about. His instinct is "the people want news and we will work to give it to them and that doesn't happen for free." So he invests, provides a real news magazine experience and the price, if compared with the value of what you get back, is miniscule. Compare the volume of content of 5 Days of the Times and full content of The Sunday Times to the cost of a paperback to see what I mean. £2 for all that? It's peanuts. Murdoch opining on the Internet may, at times, have sounded like a fool but Murdoch the arch-capitalist selling news to punters is simply untouchable.

Readers of this blog will know we have been following the whole Wikileaks saga this week, and my intial annoyance with Wikileaks for (in my view) being too "gung ho" (see here) has been counterbalanced with an annoyance at the "chattering classes" - the Media and Politicians - in their attempts to misinform, misreport, and muzzle by veiled threat rather than legal action (because that they would likely lose a court case).

Misreporting and Misinformation first - I have already highlighted the "hang Anonymous" frenzy and how it is counterpointed with a near zero signal about doing similar to those hackers attacking Wikileaks, but this piece ftrom Techdirt sums up a lot more of what is going on:

While most of the news reports have said that Wikileaks published over 250,000 such cables, that's not exactly true. It has over 250,000 such cables and appears to have passed them on to its media partners, but it's slowly releasing specific cables -- with redactions -- and mostly after the press partners are releasing those same cables. In other words, it appears that Wikileaks is actually being judicious and discriminating in what it's releasing. Or, you could say (and probably should say) that Wikileaks is actually doing much of what a journalist would do in selecting which documents to pass along at this time.

But by trying to claim that Wikileaks is "just" a data dump, it's an effort to make Wikileaks look like it's not a journalistic or media entity -- thereby affording it fewer First Amendment rights. But, it appears that some in the press, such as Time, are being quite misleading in doing so. After Greenwald called them on it, Time issued a "correction," but it's a "correction that's not a correction" in that they basically say that Assange and some others disagree with some of Time's claims. But it makes no attempt to fix the factually incorrect statements.

As Techdirt points out, in fact the Mainstream media is often joining in the attack, and speculates on why.

Of course, this may come back to the view that many have: that certain elements in the press are upset about Wikileaks because it shows what a crappy job they've been doing on their own. If we had a functioning press that actually sought to hold the US government accountable, there would be much less of a need for Wikileaks. Instead, we have a press that focuses on keeping "access" to those in power, and that means not digging too deep at times.

Now you may be tempted to think that this is just another blog sounding off, but today the veteran war reporter John Pilger wrote a damning piece on how the Press went along with giving Messrs Bush & Blair their war - firstly, the powers that be are spending a lot on press carrots:

Never has so much official energy been expended in ensuring journalists collude with the makers of rapacious wars which, say the media-friendly generals, are now "perpetual". In echoing the west's more verbose warlords, such as the waterboarding former US vice-president Dick Cheney, who predicated "50 years of war", they plan a state of permanent conflict wholly dependent on keeping at bay an enemy whose name they dare not speak: the public.

.....

.....in December 1917 between David Lloyd George, Britain's prime minister during much of the first world war, and CP Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian. "If people really knew the truth," the prime minister said, "the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don't know, and can't know."

Looking at teh activities this week, it is not hard to believe that a similar thing is happening here. There is also the stick:

"I am perfectly open to the accusation that we were hoodwinked," said Jeremy Paxman [BBC] , talking about Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction to a group of students last year. "Clearly we were." As a highly paid professional broadcaster, he omitted to say why he was hoodwinked.

Dan Rather, who was the CBS news anchor for 24 years, was less reticent. "There was a fear in every newsroom in America," he told me, "a fear of losing your job . . . the fear of being stuck with some label, unpatriotic or otherwise." Rather says war has made "stenographers out of us" and that had journalists questioned the deceptions that led to the Iraq war, instead of amplifying them, the invasion would not have happened. This is a view now shared by a number of senior journalists I interviewed in the US.

Those who don't toe the line are noted....

...the reason Julian Assange seems to excite such hostility among journalists serving a variety of "lobbies", those whom George Bush's press spokesman once called "complicit enablers", is that WikiLeaks and its truth-telling shames them. Why has the public had to wait for WikiLeaks to find out how great power really operates? As a leaked 2,000-page Ministry of Defence document reveals, the most effective journalists are those who are regarded in places of power not as embedded or clubbable, but as a "threat".

As Pilger (and others such as Flat Earth News author Nick Davies) notes, the fundamental issue has been the failure of the mainstream media to do its job. Some argue that this has been the case since about 2002 - Jay Rosen:

For the portion of the American press that still looks to Watergate and the Pentagon Papers for inspiration, and that considers itself a check on state power, the hour of its greatest humiliation can, I think, be located with some precision: it happened on Sunday, September 8, 2002. On that morning the New York Times published a now notorious story, reported by Michael R. Gordon and Judith Miller, in which nameless Bush Administration officials claimed that Iraq was trying to buy the kind of aluminum tubes necessary to build a nuclear centrifuge.

........

We know from retrospective accounts that the Bush White House had already decided to go to war. We know from the Downing Street Memo that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” We know that the Bush forces had decided to rev up their sales campaign that week because ”from a marketing point of view you don’t introduce new products in August,” as chief of staff Andrew Card brazenly put it. We know that the appearance of the tubes story in the Times is what allowed Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld and Rice to run with it on the Sunday shows, because without that they would have been divulging classified information and flouting their own rules. We also know that the tubes story was wrong: they weren’t for centrifuges. And yet it was coming from the very top of the professional pyramid, the New York Times.

And it's not that the correct information was not known:

While occasionally running articles that questioned administration claims, it [NYT] more often deferred to them. (The Times‘s editorial page was consistently much more skeptical.) Compared to other major papers, the Times placed more credence in defectors, expressed less confidence in inspectors, and paid less attention to dissenters. The September 8 story on the aluminum tubes was especially significant. Not only did it put the Times‘s imprimatur on one of the administration’s chief claims, but it also established a position at the paper that apparently discouraged further investigation into this and related topics.

The reporters working on the story strongly disagree. That the tubes were intended for centrifuges “was the dominant view of the US intelligence community,” Michael Gordon told me. “It looks like it’s the wrong view. But the story captured what was and still is the majority view of the intelligence community—whether right or wrong”…

When challenged, Miller said that reporting the truth wasn't in her job description:

Asked about this, Miller said that as an investigative reporter in the intelligence area, “my job isn’t to assess the government’s information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought about Iraq’s arsenal.”

That’s not getting the story wrong. That’s redefining the job as: reflecting what the government thinks.

This was the nadir. This was when the watchdog press fell completely apart: On that Sunday when Bush Administration officials peddling bad information anonymously put the imprimatur of the New York Times on a story that allowed other Bush Administration officials to dissemble about the tubes and manipulate fears of a nuclear nightmare on television, even as they knew they were going to war anyway.

There was a rather interesting paper today called "The Economics of Repression" which outlines the way states strong arm their media, and which has uncomfortable parallels with the Wikileaks issue:

Professor Jorge Castañeda—later better known as Mexico’s foreign minister under Vicente Fox—used to speak with grudging admiration about the “Economy of Repression” practiced by the long-reigning Partido Revolucionario Institucional. He used the phrase in a dual sense: It was repression carried out by economic means, as papers that strayed too far from the PRI line would suddenly find their lucrative government advertising revenue drying up, state-controlled suppliers jacking up prices, and PRI-linked union workers threatening strike. But it was also an economical (that is, a parsimonious)means of repression, operating indirectly and relatively invisibly, and allowing more heavy-handed mechanisms—the censor’s pen and the truncheon—to be used more sparingly.

That author concludes that:

It’s a sobering validation of Friedrich Hayek’s famous dictum that to be controlled in our economic pursuits—perhaps now more than ever—means to be controlled in everything. Whatever you think of Wikileaks, the idea that a controversial speaker can be so effectively attacked quite outside the bounds of any direct legal process, thanks to the enormous leverage our government exerts on global telecommunications and finance firms, ought to provoke immense concern for the future of free expression online.

So, we have established why the mainstream media is largely unable to do the job the public wants it to do (there is more - as .... pointed out on BBC 1 last night, politicians and media all tend to go to the same schools, universities etc etc). Enter Wikileaks - as Jay Rosen wrote:

One of the consequences of that is the appeal of radical transparency today.

Simon Jenkins got at some of this in a Guardian column on Wikileaks: “Accountability can only default to disclosure. As Jefferson remarked, the press is the last best hope when democratic oversight fails.” But at the nadir the last best hope failed, too. When that happens accountability defaults to extreme disclosure, which is where we are today. The institutional press isn’t driving it; the wilds of the Internet are. To understand Julian Assange and the weird reactions to him in the American press we need to tell a story that starts with Judy Miller and ends with Wikileaks

I'd put it more that Wikileaks only exists because the mainstream media has largely failed (and, reading the coverage of the Wikileaks affaire, is largely still failing). No doubt there will now be a lot of effort to crush the Open Net - as political scientist Henry Farrell, among other scholars, has observed:

[A] small group of privileged private actors can become “points of control”–states can use them to exert control over a much broader group of other private actors. This is because the former private actors control chokepoints in the information infrastructure or in other key networks of resources. They can block or control flows of data or of other valuable resources among a wide variety of other private actors.

I think Clay Shirky is on the money here:

Over the long haul, we will need new checks and balances for newly increased transparency — Wikileaks shouldn’t be able to operate as a law unto itself anymore than the US should be able to. In the short haul, though, Wikileaks is our Amsterdam*. Whatever restrictions we eventually end up enacting, we need to keep Wikileaks alive today, while we work through the process democracies always go through to react to change. If it’s OK for a democracy to just decide to run someone off the internet for doing something they wouldn’t prosecute a newspaper for doing, the idea of an internet that further democratizes the public sphere will have taken a mortal blow.

Lesson though, for those who muzzled the MSM, is be careful what you wish for.... unintended consequences and all that.

*The Catholic Church tried to muzzle use of the new fangled printing press, the printers of Amsterdam rebelled.

On Thursday the London Future City series of lectures is looking at the impact of Technology in re-innovating and reshaping London. The aim of the debate is interesting:

London has historically been the home of great innovations, and now the potential is even greater than ever with the development of digital technology. But can we recognise the real innovations hidden around us or are we distracted and dazzled by the short-term allure of shiny new technologies? Does London have the ambition and vision to use innovation to transform the city or will we stick with the status quo?

That bit about the ephemera vs the real innovations caught my eye (and that fellow S. African and Big Pototo Norman Lewis is speaking), as it is something we often puzzle over at Broadsight, to wit:

- Which are the real, lasting innovations and how do you see them early

- Why do so many people seem to be lured by the ephemera, even when they are fairly obviously snake oil.

So, as a way of getting my non-talk in first, as it were, here are some takes:


How do you tell lasting Inovation early on?


Over the last 5 years at Broadsight we have been doing quite a lot of this sort of work, either for startups, VCs, or large organisations wishing to understand or launch or defend in a market space, and we have over that time developed an approach which seems to be quite useful.

Firstly, our experience leads us to believe that any Innovative technology will only have impact if it can drive some form of arbitrage on what exists today. In other words you have to look at its economic impact.

Secondly, this economic impact is dynamic - ie it is not enough to say "X gives Y benefit" as the other players in the space will then react to it, and thus any modelling has to be dynamic not a simple linear progression

Thirdly, even if there is a potential economic arbitrage, it does not follow that there will be uptake unless there are social vectors that will drive it (Porn being a fairly frequent early social vector for new media formats for example)

Fourthly, even if there is a social vector, there are often legal or regulatory barriers that can come into play (for example, the "digitisation" of the legal servies industry is far harder than in other professional services as it has a lot of arcane regulations around licencing, secure documents etc)

For a bigger example, take Location Based Services. Our research into Generation One services, done about 3 years ago, predicted that they would largely fail as there was just not a sufficient economic arbitrage from the technology at the time, nor a large enough social vector (aka "jumping the chasm" in their case) for them to prosper on. They by and large failed. What is thus interesting is that the 2nd generation have used Gaming mechanisms to create a different social vector, and by and large are using prize-fuelled datamining to create a bigger economic arbitrage. So far so good, but our analysis now predicts that they will start to fall foul of regulations around data protection, in Europe at any rate.

Thus, we believe that as private companies, Location Based services are still a risky investment. However, for any Future City project they will clearly be every powerful, so we believe the optimal outcome - for a city like London - is for the city's public services to make some of their data available for innovatve servie providers to build services, and ensure the economic climate is such that datamining is not necessary for these services to succeed as an economic model

Why are most people lured by Snake Oil?

We have done no empirical research on this, but in a way watching the evolution of social media - and the behaviors on social media - allows me to make some hypotheses.

Firstly, just as the devil has all the good songs, most Snake Oil is based around overpromising an impossible dream. The Gartner hype curve describes this in graphical form, and against this the rational, fact based analysis looks boring, hard and stuffy.

Secondly, you cannot fool all the people all the time, but you can fool a significant number for a period of time, and this time period - typically characterised by words such as "New X" during and "Bubble" after the event - is the period in which a fever pitch can be whipped up, excited new entrant fools parted from their dumb money, and those promoting it can make out like Ponzi bandits (Such as appears to be happening in Silicon valley startup valuations right now). "You just don't get it" is the cry to every criticism.

Thirdly and thusly, the Press/PR machine is just not interesed in The Truth during The New X event. The speculative money is going into fuelling the story and no-one likes a grumpy nay-sayer, nor does it shift copy (unless they can do it really well, like Andrew Keen). As an aside, I could name a number of "Tech Journalists" from quality UK newspapers who interviewed us on the fate of Location Based Services in 2007/8, who didn't like our message of caution, and thus didn't even bother to mention our cautionary tale in their breathless praises of Dopplr et al at the time (but I won't, so long as the requisite marked 20 pound notes find their way to Broadstuff Towers )

My point here is that London needs to be careful - there has been, and is, quite a lot of government funding being thrown at "technology innovation" projects right now, and here is a strong risk that they are hijacked by popular snake oil merchants rather than boring, useful and economically viable projects.

So, to the various committees making the innovation spending decisions we would recommend:

(i) Firstly, using some sort of analysis like we do above - what services would create economic arbitarge for Londoners and what do you have to do to drive organic adoption.

(ii) Secondly, if it looks or smells like something ascending a hype curve, run a mile. This is territory for VC investors, not government co-investment.

(iii) Thirdly, make sure your advisory bodies are composed of the grumpies as well as those leading the New X charge from the barricades. If you look round those bodies and can't see the dumb money, its you

Here endeth the lecture Now go to the real lecture.....

Speakers:
Iain Gray, chief executive, Technology Strategy Board
Adam Hart-Davis, writer and broadcaster
Dr Hermann Hauser, co-founder, Amadeus Capital Partners
Dr Norman Lewis, chief innovation officer and managing partner, Open-Knowledge UK
Oliver Morton, Energy and Environment Editor, The Economist and author of Eating the Sun
Chair: David Rowan, editor, Wired UK

Update - to the above point, I see that 4IP has been shuttered..... suffered from buying into a market awash with snake oil and high prices, perversely now is a better time to invest as the game is better understood and the customer base is larger.

Fascinating - 3 Old Media Newspapers are the medium of choice for Afghanistan war wikileaks:

The huge cache of classified papers - described as one of the biggest leaks in US military history - was given to the New York Times, the Guardian and the German news magazine, Der Spiegel.

What is most interesting is why Wikileaks - a Web 2.0 User Generated Content site if there ever was one - chose Mainstream media as its organ of publication and dissemination rather than just getting it out there on the Web. If there is one thing this proves, it is that the role of the Olde Media is far from redundant. The deep throating may now be very 2.0, but the reporting is an interesting combination of Old Hacks drinking from New bottles.

(Update - there is a rather good debate going on in The Atlantic on what this all implies for Journalism)

As to the actual incidents themselves, there will no doubt be a lot of hand wringing from the self-declared sensitive types, but the more prosaic truth about these facts is that this sort of thing was ever thus (Allied exploits in WW2 do not make them out as angels at all, and just ask the average British tankie about US "friendly fire" in the Gulf Wars), its just its all come out in the open this time (A process that started in the Crimea, by the way).

And, no doubt Western generals everywhere will be worrying that they have to fight with one hand tied behind their backs while the enemy have no such limitations. But the more prosaic truth about the leaks is that this sort of leaking will become more common, and that governments and corporates everyhere will now redouble efforts to stop it.

That the best way to prevent corruption is to shine a light into the dark areas is very true, but it is also true that some areas ned to stay dark for the safety of those fighting on "our side". What will be interesting is to see how a "new contract" is formed between States and their people over the next 10 years or so - States will know the stuff wll come out, most of its citizens will realise a State sometimes has to do what it needs to. Ditto with Corporate malfeasance (where the "have to do what we have to do" carries less weight, methinks).

If I were to make a guess, its that most citizens already knew that War is a gory business, that Afghanistan was going far less well than the Governments claimed and the media reported it as going (The mediarati are going into overdrive today, but where were the investigative media before this, one wonders....) and that much of this is news, but not New news. It merely adds detail to already provable hypotheses.

Anyways, the Grauniad's page explaining the data is over here, and here is the Excel spreadsheet (They couldn't put it on Google Docs as it can't handle files that size)

PS - I loved this comment on Slashdot - pretty much sums up my view of the whole sorry episode:

According to the CIA World Fact Book: [cia.gov]

Population: 29,121,286
GDP (Per capita:) $800 (2009 est.)

So now, expenditure over six years (Jan 2004 - Dec 2009) is $300,000,000,000.00 divided by six is around $50,000,000,000.00 per year

Per capita is $1,716.96 or more than double the GDP per capita of the country!

I would think that the US would get better resultsif the money was simply given to each inhabitant, the $800 they already make plus $1,700 from the US, would triple the GDP per capita, no small feat.

Just smile for the camera and show that you have not handled explosives or fired guns in the last week (paraffin test) and you get your weekly expenditure; you don't show up for a week then you lose the privilege, i.e. you knew you couldn't pàss the test.

Who said "You Can Rent an Afghan But Never Buy One"? It would rent the whole lot of them for a long time!