Nieman Journalism Lab |
- When a stream is just a trickle: Last Great Thing is one item a day, no archives
- On World Press Freedom Day, the spread of mobile and publishing technology shifts the playing field
- The newsonomics of Pricing 101
| When a stream is just a trickle: Last Great Thing is one item a day, no archives Posted: 03 May 2012 10:30 AM PDT
Ever wish you could reduce the fire hose to a stream? The stream to a trickle?
On Monday, Clay Shirky shared a video; I forgot to grab the link, so you can’t watch it. On Tuesday, Hilary Mason shared this video of a smoking robot at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Yesterday, Khoi Vinh shares an article about “impostor syndrome,” whereby creative types often feel like frauds waiting to be exposed. Today, a Ry Cooder performance from The Old Grey Whistle Test, from Craig Mod. (Ex-Nieman Labber Zach Seward’s up tomorrow.) The site is inspired in part by Robin Sloan’s Fish app, which urges us to love, not just like, and in part by The Listserve, a giant mailing list that accepts one submission per day. “We criticize Twitter for not having any memories and for failing at being a place where you can find things after they’ve rushed past you,” said Jake Levine, the general manager of News.me. “If we don’t want to be that, then we might want to include an archive, but as soon as we include an archive, we make this less about everyone experiencing this in the moment.” Last Great Thing is itself a contradiction, a comment on the ephemeral nature of social networks and a study of our info-anxiety. Levine hacked up the site with designer Justin Van Slembrouck. (They are proud to have made it without help from a developer.) They hope to observe usage patterns that might inform changes to their products (iPad app, iPhone app, and daily newsletter). Levine and Van Slembrouck are technologists, not journalists, and the project forces them to think editorially. There are no algorithms here. News.me proper (which we’ve covered before) uses algorithms to help surface the most interesting content in users’ social streams. “People in the same breath will tell us there’s too much stuff and not enough stuff coming through their News.me stream,” Levine told me. “They’re kind of unsatisfied with the volume of content — but they’re feeling overwhelmed. That’s at the core of our challenge over the next six to 12 months.” Last Great Thing, like Twitter, is ephemeral. Unlike Twitter, it’s slow. Real slow. Tweet. Tweet. “We’re trying to see what’s the minimum presentation that we can do here to make something compelling. We’ve been kind of wrestling with this archive thing. We’ll see how long we can withstand the pressure,” Van Slembrouck said. (Don’t give in, I say.) “We got an email from one of our friends saying, ‘What the hell? Where’s Clay Shirky’s video? I didn’t have a chance to watch it yesterday, and now it’s gone!’” Levine said. “We’re trying to figure out: Okay, do we solve his quote-unquote problem by adding an archive? Or do we kind of let those anxieties surface a bit more so we can understand them better?” (By the way, you can kind of cheat by subscribing to the Last Great Thing daily email.) |
| On World Press Freedom Day, the spread of mobile and publishing technology shifts the playing field Posted: 03 May 2012 09:40 AM PDT
It’s World Press Freedom Day, when we set aside time to think about journalists around the world who struggle under repressive conditions to report and tell the truth. With 44 journalists killed so far this year, 2012 is on track to be the deadliest year for journalists since the International Press Institute began tracking such deaths in 1997. (The exact toll depends on how you count. Reporters Without Borders, for example, puts the count at 22. It only includes deaths that are “clearly established” to have been caused because of someone’s activities as a journalist.) Both counts increased by one overnight with the murder of Somali radio reporter Farhan James Abdulle. He’s the fifth journalist to be killed in Somalia this year, which Reporters Without Borders ranks 164th in the world in press freedom. But while we honor those working journalists who continue to battle their governments, it’s also worth noting how technology is shifting the playing field of press freedom. The boundaries of the press are expanding — and yet working to guarantee press freedom requires the notoriously slippery undertaking of defining what it is that makes someone a journalist. NPR’s Andy Carvin, who famously tweeted (and retweeted) the Arab Spring, is a professional journalist. But what about all of the citizens on the ground — some professional journalists, many not — who helped populate his Twitter feed with information about what was going on? Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT, has given these kinds of questions a lot of thought over the years. In 2005, he founded Global Voices, a network of hundreds of bloggers around the world who work to redress “inequities in media attention by leveraging the power of citizens’ media.” “It’s really hard to organize a campaign for every blogger who gets in trouble with the law,” Zuckerman told me this week. “In part because often you don’t get arrested for blogging, you get arrested for something else.” Working on a global scale, and without the formal backing of a news institution, it can become very difficult to determine whether such an arrest was motivated by the person’s journalistic behavior or by some other alleged activity. Increasingly, there are groups willing to fight for the person being silenced — regardless of whether she’s a professional journalist, and regardless of whether she’s communicating “on paper, by broadcasting, or writing in bytes,” Zuckerman said. As the power to publish spreads, World Press Freedom Day becomes about more than just “the press” as we’ve traditionally defined it. Zuckerman suggests it’s time to update the way we characterize what we’re trying to protect. Okay, so his alternative might need a bit of marketing polish, but he’s thinking something like “World Digital Public Sphere Freedom Day” or “World Network Public Sphere Freedom Day.” “This notion of ‘the press’ holds onto this notion that there’s this specialized professional class to inform us about things,” Zuckerman said. “That institution is expanding to the point where the press is really the network public sphere or the digital public sphere. It’s incredibly important that we talk about the ability of journalists to do their jobs safely and without government harassment…But when we think about whether a country has a free press, under my definition, it’s what are the constraints on journalists? What are the constraints on nonofficial journalists [like] bloggers and activists? What are the constraints on the tools people use to discuss the issues of the day?” Issues of Internet freedom are often framed around information consumption — whether someone in a country can get access to a given website, say. But it’s also about freedom to publish, a capacity that technology continues to spread. “There’s an enormous amount of common ground between the Internet freedom folks and the press freedom folks — and in many cases we’re looking at the same people,” Zuckerman said. And then there’s mobile. As phones get smarter, the line between Internet users and mobile users blurs. According to the International Telecommunications Union, there were 2 billion people using the Internet at the start of last year. At the same time, there were 5.3 billion mobile phone subscriptions. “It is absolutely unbelievable how rural a village you can be in, and the only things for sale will be yams, ground nuts, and phone cards,” Zuckerman said. “This is bringing in hundreds of millions of people who were not online previously. It’s a really crazy change, and what I think all of us are sort of predicting is, in the next five years, the distinction between those numbers — are you online or are you on the phone? — it’s just going to disappear. It’s going to be an irrelevant number.” What’s good from a connectivity standpoint is not always good from a digital freedom standpoint, and this discrepancy goes to how the very structure of the Internet differs from how mobile networks are built. “The Internet has this incredibly radically decentralized architecture where there are points of potential control, but there are a lot more of them, and it’s often possible to evade that control,” Zuckerman said. “On the mobile phone network, that’s a very different story. They tended to be built with the ability to wiretap and eavesdrop.” When two Western journalists were killed with rockets in Syria earlier this year, The Telegraph reported that the Syrian military had tracked them down using their cell phone signals. In countries with weak legal systems and strong governments, mobile networks very quickly become a tool for government intelligence, so being an independent reporter “becomes a very difficult thing to do,” Zuckerman said.
“The approach that people are taking right now is just trying to get people to understand these networks much more thoroughly: ‘Here are ways you might be safe or might be unsafe,’” Zuckerman said. “The problem is, we often end up saying, ‘You shouldn’t use that.’ But that’s crazy thing to say because for most people, that’s their main information device.” Photo by Superstrikertwo used under a Creative Commons license. |
| The newsonomics of Pricing 101 Posted: 03 May 2012 07:55 AM PDT
When the price of your digital product is zero, that’s about how much you learn about customer pricing. Now, both the pricing and the learning is on the upswing. The pay-for-digital content revolution is now fully upon us. Five years ago, only the music business had seen much rationalization, with Apple’s iTunes having bulled ahead with its new 99-cent order. Now, movies, TV shows, newspapers, and magazines are all embracing paid digital models, charging for single copies, pay-per-views, and subscriptions. From Hulu Plus to Netflix to Next Issue Media to Ongo to Press+ to The New York Times to Google Play to Amazon to Apple to Microsoft (buying into Nook this week), the move to paid media content is profound. The imperative to charge is clear, especially as legacy news and magazines see their share of the rapidly growing digital advertising pie (with that industry growing another 20 percent this year) actually decline. Yes, it’s in part a 99-cent new world order as I wrote about last week (“The newsonomics of 99-cent media”), but there are wider lessons — some curiously counterintuitive — to be learned in the publishing world. Let’s call it the newsonomics of Pricing 101. The lessons here, gleaned from many conversations, are not definitive ones. In fact, they’re just pointers — with rich “how to” lessons found deeper in each. Let’s not make any mistake this week, as the Audit Bureau of Circulation’s new numbers rolled out and confounded most everyone. Those ABC numbers wowed some with their high percentage growth rates. Let’s keep in mind that those growth numbers come on the heels of some of the worst newspaper quarterly reports issued in awhile. Not only is print advertising in a deepening tailspin, but digital advertising growth is stalled. Take all the ABC numbers you want and tell the world “We have astounding reach” — but if the audience can’t be monetized both with advertising and significant new circulation revenues, the numbers will be meaningless. When it comes to dollars and sense, pricing matters a lot. Let’s start with this basic principle: People won’t pay you for content if you don’t ask them to. That’s an inside-the-industry joke, but one with too much reality to sustain much laughter. It took the industry a long time to start testing offers and price points, as The Wall Street Journal and Walter Hussman’s Arkansas Democrat-Gazette provided lone wolf examples. The corollary to that principle? If you don’t start to charge consumers — Warren Buffett on newspaper pricing: “You shouldn’t be giving away a product that you’re trying to sell.” — then you can’t learn how consumers respond to pricing. Once you start pricing, you can start learning, and adjust. We can pick out at least nine emerging data points:
Overall, this is a revolution in more than pricing. It’s a revolution in thinking and, really, publisher identity. The Boston Globe’s Jeff Moriarty sums it up well, as his company aims (as has the Financial Times before it: “The newsonomics of the FT as an internet retailer”) to emulate a little digital-first company called Amazon:
Photo by Jessica Wilson used under a Creative Commons license. |
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