(With pretext.)

"What people never, ever do is wake up thinking, “Today I need to do something civic,”..."

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 01:34:12 +0100

“What people never, ever do is wake up thinking, “Today I need to do something civic,” or, “Today I will explore some interesting data via an attractive visualisation.””

- How to create sustainable open data projects with purpose - O'Reilly Radar (On the money; the hard part is understanding what people want and how we can give it to them. Only once we’ve done that can we get the toychest out…)

Data as process

Fri, 26 Aug 2011 14:11:00 +0100

When you start a university physics course, the first subject you learn is classical mechanics. Mechanics comes in two flavours: statics, matter at rest, and dynamics, matter in motion.

One of the Internet’s preoccupations recently — at least in the parts I frequent, which admittedly probably aren’t that representative — has been the physics, if you like, of data. There’s a lot of writing out there, much of it (like this piece from Tom Armitage) excellent, about treating data as a material; understanding it as a physical thing with seams, grains, symmetry and cleavage planes. This is true, but I’m beginning to suspect that it’s incomplete. Data’s not solely a static thing. It bounces, usually somewhere behind your eyeballs.

I don’t want to get unnecessarily tree-in-the-forest about this, but if no-one sees a piece of data, it doesn’t exist. Data only exists inasmuch as it supports either communication or decision-making. When it’s not being looked at, whether by a person or a process, it’s as if it had never been at all. So if it’s a material, it’s a profoundly weird one. It’s not even as material as fields are; anything with mass bends space-time. Unobserved data is truly weightless.

So right now, I prefer not to think of data as, primarily, a material. In fact, I prefer not to think of data as having any independent existence at all. Instead, I think about processes. How do people make decisions? How do they communicate and support their viewpoints? These processes are supported by technology, but they’re rooted in psychology and economics. When you view data mining this way, it looks a lot less like physical mining and a lot more like the newer, nerdier brother of user-experience design. User experience design is, loosely speaking, applying the lessons of graphic design to the design of intellectual processes. Data science is, loosely speaking, the application of mathematical and information-theoretic ideas to the design of intellectual processes. They’re both part of a wider field; that of service design.

Half the battle’s already won; people, like me, with science backgrounds are reading the design literature and trying to follow along. We’re waiting in the middle. When recently-graduated designers start talking about dimensionality reduction, though: well, then we’ll really be moving.

Visualization: handle with care. (Quite happy with this one....

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 20:13:00 +0100

Visualization: handle with care. (Quite happy with this one. Less happy with the hair. I’ve fixed the hair now, at least.)

Filmed by Steve Allen at sameAs.

"When I arrived at Nokia, the folks down the road at NRC were very proud of something they’d ginned..."

Sun, 20 Feb 2011 00:36:46 +0000

“

When I arrived at Nokia, the folks down the road at NRC were very proud of something they’d ginned up: an NFC-equipped, but otherwise entirely conventional, vending machine. At last!, I thought, here’s a concrete step toward the future of everyday transactions.

[…]

I was given an NFC phone, and told to tap it against the item I wanted from the vending machine. This is what happened next: the vending machine teeped, and the phone teeped, and six or seven seconds later a notification popped up on its screen. It was an incoming text message, which had been sent by the vending machine at the moment I tapped my phone against it. I had to respond “Y” to this text to complete the transaction. The experience was clumsy and joyless and not in any conceivable way an improvement over pumping coins into the soda machine just the way I did quarters into Defender at the age of twelve. It’s not that the NFC-based, phone-to-object interaction didn’t work. Of course it did: it had been engineered perfectly. But what it hadn’t been was designed. Those responsible for imagining the interaction apparently wanted to protect users against the (edge case!) contingency of someone making off with their phones and running up a huge vending-machine tab. They failed to understand that, for low-value transactions like this, at least, the touch gesture is a useful proxy for consent — and that if someone’s got physical possession of my phone, I’m likely to have bigger problems than whether or not they order a few cans of Coke with it. A designer committed to the user and the quality of that user’s experience gets this in a way only the rarest engineer seems to. Designers are also, by training and predilection, inclined to design for the usual, where engineers are taught a kind of rigor that compels them to account for, and overweight, low-probability events.

”

- Adam Greenfield

More than skin-deep: what comes after newspapers, part two

Wed, 29 Dec 2010 18:15:43 +0000

(Part 2 in an ongoing series.)

Let’s try a thought experiment. The current newspaper business model is beyond fixing. What happens next? A bunch of companies need to find something people want. We’ve got companies like that: lots of talent, some capital, no business model. They’re startups. Here, newspapers now have more in common with three guys in a back bedroom than the company they’ve been keeping up to now. They’ve got some unique issues, too, like huge and inappropriate cost and capital structures, but they have the nucleus of really strong teams and they’ve got fantastically strong brands, public goodwill and link equity. What can you make from that? What will people pay for?

Whatever it is, it’s likely to be something new. How do we know what’s fundamentally new and what’s just cosmetically different, though? Sometimes they’re hard to distinguish. Take tablets, for example. The Times is betting heavily on the iPad. Ever since Christmas Day, ads for their app have been showing up in every other break on Sky TV. It looks… alright, I guess. Pretty nice. Similar to the WSJ app I’m trialling.

I’m an iPad-toting media junkie. I can’t be bothered to even download the Times app. That’s not promising for team Murdoch. Actually, I’m finding it hard to see how it can work at all. Simply put: after the novelty wears off, who are the customers who are going to pay for this thing?

At Timetric, my bluntness sometimes stresses my colleagues out. I’m not exactly a model of diplomacy. However, I believe the alternative, when you’re talking strategy, is worse; woolliness is at best a sign of magical thinking and most likely one of full-on self-delusion. If you can’t state your customer proposition simply and clearly, explaining who gets what benefit and how and why they’ll pay for it, and back that up with actual people who confirm your hypotheses, then you’re spinning yourself a yarn.

In the last post in this series, I talked about selling benefits. The benefit of reading the content the WSJ pushes to me — and the WSJ, like the Times, is branch of News Corporation — is straightforward: it helps me understand economic issues I need to understand in my professional life. Delivery to my iPad is convenient and a nice gesture, but it’s a fringe benefit; a reason to pick the WSJ over another source of market intelligence. In other words, I had a need which I previously filled in other ways. It’s competing against CityAM and forbes.com and FT Alphaville, not a vacuum. However, I’m willing to pay for the WSJ content package, because that package could make me more successful, because parts of it are genuinely unique and because the package itself is assembled by experts. I trust it as information I can act on.

It’s straightforward tactics. If the WSJ app switches enough people like me — consumers of economic and business news — away from Fortune or Bloomberg Radio or CNBC, or if it reduces subscriber churn enough, then it’s likely to justify the development cost and to be a smart move.

In comparison, the Times apps on iPad, and indeed most newspaper apps, and indeed most newspapers, are harder for me to make sense of. The commercial team at News Corp are smart, so I’m probably missing something, but…

They look innovative; possibly part of their value, internally, is that they’ll make it look like you’re doing something when you have to justify your worsening bottom line. But as an effective business strategy, I’m not so sure. The iPad is, above all, a great web browser, so any iPad news app is competing against every site on the Web, as well as every other app in the store. Even comparing like with like — as with the WSJ, apps are usually a little bit nicer than websites — what distinctive advantage does the Times app provide to me over, say, the BBC News app, plus Twitter, plus Flipboard pointed at Pitchfork, ESPN and Serious Eats, plus timeshifting long articles through Instapaper? Very little. I’d say the Flipboard/Instapaper pairing’s probably better. And while the Times has fine journalists covering mainstream news, so does the BBC or CNN or the Telegraph. The Times isn’t politically distinctive, it doesn’t have an instructive, characteristic worldview, and it definitely doesn’t have high-value exclusive information I can act on. Its sports and entertainment coverage aren’t typically as in-depth or compelling as the specialists. The Times’ proposition is a convenient and entertaining package of basic information on politics, economics, news and sport. You can get that almost anywhere for free. Therefore, the Times, alongside most other newspapers, is competing on style, not relevance or substance.

(Incidentally, this is one of the reasons why, long term, I think the US will wind up with around four to six newspaper-like organisations. There are only so many styles with mass appeal and winner takes all. I’ll come back to that in the future.)

It feels like the Times is making a big, simple, bold gamble; that there’s a mass market, at least the size of their print readership, who can wither be transitioned from print to online/tablet (without them bleeding away to a free competitor like BBC News) or who are neophilic enough to own an iPad yet neophobic enough to be persuaded by a combo of the Times brand and the convenience of not having to stop at a newsagent in the morning. The Times on iPad is the Times on paper in techno trousers. Betting the farm on that is risking a lot on basically cosmetic innovation. At least people with an iPad likely have disposable income, and no doubt the Times have done their research, but fundamentally I just don’t like, or believe in, that bet. The Times doesn’t have a form problem: it has a content problem. I don’t care about its content nearly enough to pay. I didn’t care enough when it was free, and now it’s trying to charge me money in a saturated market for an inferior experience. Short of the industry bullying the legal system into creating an artificial monopoly, I can’t ever see myself paying.

Put another way, tablets are always-on, tactile, completely reconfigurable, great-looking, permanently jacked into the Internet plumbing, and you’re using them to make skeumorphic newspaper clones? When there are thousands of new, more direct, more usable, more valuable experiences you could build using the same technical and journalistic skills, and when you’ve already established I wasn’t willing to pay for your paper in the first place?

Seriously: what the hell are you thinking?

If I care enough about your content, you can give it to me on stone tablets in cuneiform and I’ll find a way to use it. If I care a bit, I’ll go where it’s the right combination of easy, affordable and reliable. (But: if you want me to pay, I’d better be making money or having fun somehow.) If I don’t care at all, there is nothing you can do, not even really nice swipe effects, which will make me care. Come back when you’ve fixed the content. Come back when you can show me a new perspective. Come back when you make me faster or smarter. Come back with fundamental, not cosmetic, innovation. We’ll talk then.

(And that’s the intro of this little series done! In part 3, I want to get back to principles and start thinking about that fundamental innovation. Weigh in in the comments below.)

What comes after newspapers (part one of...)

Sat, 25 Dec 2010 01:50:00 +0000

So, News Foo Camp. There’s been a lot of writing, as you’d expect for a conference full of news junkies; most of it linked in Alex Howard’s article on O'Reilly Radar, all of it excellent.

Still, after the conference, what do I feel? Anxious. A bit conflicted, really. Thinking hard about something Alex Hillman wrote:

I wasn’t in the room to know the context of this quote, but the most important word I see in it ISN’T courage, as some might expect. It’s just.
I spent the last 48 hours outside of my comfort zone being exposed to the current outcomes of those philosophies and values, and the sad reality is, that I don’t know how much longer those philosophies and values are going to be able to be sustained the way they are being funded.

In the same article, he quotes an off-the-cuff remark I made while we were chatting by the conference schedule:

…while journalism deserves a right to exist, the business of journalism doesn’t have that same right.

I regret that quip, a little, for two reasons. Firstly, it goes way too far: secondly, it doesn’t go nearly far enough. I love news and newspapers; a lot of my happiest memories as a kid are of reading my Mum’s paper, even though it was bigger than I was. As a teenager, it was the NME, and the one time I got my byline in there — writing some of the Cambridge student guide one year, of all things — meant, means, a hell of a lot to me. I love how newsprint feels and how it smells. Newspapers are fantastic.

But I rarely, if ever, buy one. Newspapers aren’t useful, or at least not as useful as other services. The centre cannot hold.

Too far and not far enough. Too far: no business has a right to exist if it can’t pay its way, however nostalgic it makes us. Not far enough: what is the business of journalism? Without defining that, it’s just an elegantly hollow turn of phrase. That’s what’s been bothering me since News Foo. What’s the social function of journalism? If newspapers die, what do we lose?

What’s really at stake here?

That’s an ethical and economic question. Ethical in a Reithian sense: the duty to educate, inform, entertain. That’s newspapers as a pillar of democracy, as the fifth estate. But, instead, to the Gradgrind school newspapers are nothing more than a bundle of facts and opinions wrapped up entertainingly and subsidised by advertising. They exist to make money for themselves, at least in theory, and they supply information to readers who can then use that information to make, or save, money.

Splitting the difference, and looking at this like a marketer, what are some of the benefits of reading a newspaper?

Directly actionable, useful information
Social context — making sure you don’t look like you just fell off the turnip truck
Entertainment
Tribal identity and political affirmation

Of course, different papers have emphasised different things. The FT and WSJ push economically-useful information so heavily that they’re virtually the financial trade press; the tabloids are about being entertaining, often through writing about entertainment, and that sports and entertainment news is in itself what you need to know to talk to your mates — assuming you’re in the paper’s core demographic.

Let’s look at those benefits again. Actionable information: Bloomberg (or, to declare my own interest, Timetric). Social context — Facebook or Twitter. Need something more specialised? Gawker Media will be happy to help: just name your niche. Entertainment: TMZ, Pitchfork, or to pick another Newsfoo delegate’s baby, the Cheezburger Network (which is “and finally” gone metastatic). Tribal identity: political blogs, sports blogs, forums and chatrooms. (And Facebook, again.)

None of the consumer benefits of newspapers are unique to newspapers anymore. For none of them is the newspaper the cheapest choice.

I believe that talking about “saving journalism” or “saving newspapers” is a category error. Newspapers don’t exist by themselves, so there’s nothing there to save; they’re a part of a much larger ecosystem of infotainment services, within which newspapers do a bundle of things adequately-to-well. That worked when there was no competition in the same niches, but now there are a bunch of services which do just one thing, but do it exceptionally well. What’s more, papers’ rivals aren’t saddled with newspapers’ cost structures or pricing policies. Bloomberg can charge $1500 per month per terminal and no-one blinks, because the information’s worth more that to the person buying. At the other extreme, Demand Media can arbitrage AdWords and AdSense and trim its content costs to fit.

In that spirit, “saving newspapers” is confusing means with ends. Our problem isn’t saving newspapers. It’s protecting the social mission that journalists have taken on, and saving (or creating) jobs for the people, including journalists, who work in newspaper companies. The papers, as they exist now, are a distraction!

Take, as an example, the Postcode Paper. It was printed by a startup called Newspaper Club. They let you print your own newspapers; taking a newspaper company and throwing away everything but the printing operation: taking a chunk of a vertically integrated news organisation and making it a platform. This shows that you can back out the printing operation from a newspaper and get something interesting. What about the reverse — if you took a newspaper company and threw the newspaper away entirely?

Newspaper companies have strong brands, talented staffs, huge customer loyalty (even now), excellent link equity. Startups would kill for those assets. But while these businesses continue to think of themselves as newspaper companies, they’re tying themselves to a model which no longer looks fixable.

That’s what I want to dig into and what I’m planning to write more about for the next few weeks. I’d love it if you joined me.

Affect and effect

Wed, 08 Dec 2010 20:07:54 +0000

I’ve just got back from News Foo Camp, an event built around trying to imagine new futures for journalism. It was fantastic. The next few posts on here are going to be little shards of things I’ve been thinking about since.

Here’s the first of those. American newspapers are terribly proud of their objectivity and impartiality. They’ve elevated it to a creed. But is this virtue actually a weakness?

At the conference, one session compered by Howard Weaver on the nature of “fact” in journalism digressed into a discussion of ethics and objectivity in news organisations. I’ve got to admit that for a few moments I was perplexed. Growing up with the British media landscape, even the idea of an unbiased newspaper seems quaint. Our newspapers despise each other, even as writers move between them; the Guardian thinks the Telegraph’s cryptofascist, the Telegraph thinks the Guardian simple-minded, and everyone thinks the FT is looking down on them (which it is). What you might miss, however, is that this means they leave political space for each other — each has something unique to offer the reader.

By contrast, American papers have often felt flat and affectless to me, sanctimonious and dull. It’s not the writers or the culture: some American political bloggers from all ideologies are as smart, sharp, witty and aggressive as the very best British political writers. The arts and sports coverage, where personality and taste shine through, are likewise as good in American papers as anywhere else. So, for the formerly-print media, it’s not “can’t”, it’s “won’t”.

But why? That decision looks strategically indefensible to me: you just commoditized yourself. The facts of any news story are available almost anywhere, for free, immediately. Your facts aren’t factier than another paper’s, you probably won’t scoop CNN, and you definitely won’t scoop Twitter. (Could this be why is investigative journalism is so lionised in the US? It’s the only way to own facts, and hence a story, at least temporarily). So any business value in that content is marginal and temporary at best.

To expand on that, it’s because you’re squeezed on both sides: Demand Media and friends have better SEO than you and will best you on the long tail search terms. What’s more, mass-production data-distribution platforms - like Bloomberg or Timetric - are even flatter and more affectless than the newspapers: through that, though, we’re less biased, and through our economies of scale we can do whole classes of facts faster and cheaper than newspapers can. Taking technology firms like us on at our own game seems, well, brave.

There’s an alternative, though, and the British press points to it. Why not try taking a side? It’s got some real virtues. It gives you clear strategic space: imagine a Republican and Democratic pair of national papers scrapping it out. Reading one becomes a statement of identity, and that gives the readers a sense of belonging. The debate’s sharpened, the media overall represents all viewpoints, or at least all the viewpoints of the economically-significant parts of society, and two papers might be able to coexist in one metro without fighting to death.

It’s a huge change in style, though, and one which might be a bit much to ask. Still, it’s hard to dismiss out of hand.

Funding and journalism

Wed, 13 Oct 2010 23:15:41 +0100

I saw a very interesting post from Suw Charman-Anderson today. She’s working on a new journalism startup called NoThirty, and struggling with working out how to fund it:

I certainly don’t want to generalise about the motivations of angels and VCs, but generally speaking I don’t think that they have the stomach for the kind of long-term investment and support that news ventures are going to need. Private equity investors seem to prefer start-ups with simple concepts, potential for mass market adoption and a quick route to profitability.

Journalism innovation certainly isn’t simple – all the simple stuff has been done already. It’s not mass market either – the fragmentation of the market is one of the key problems that any start-up would have to overcome. The fact that audiences are time- and attention-poor and have a myriad options to choose from when it comes to how they spend that time and attention has pretty much destroyed the ‘monetise eyeballs’ business model, so any new model has to depend on niche markets. And as for profitability, given the potential need for extensive research, experimentation and change, I don’t think that many journalism start-ups will find profitability within three years, and it’ll probably be more like five. How many VCs would be happy to fund a start-up that is complex, niche, and slow to profitability?

I’m not a news insider — I’m, I guess, an entrepreneur, so the VC part is all I’m (semi-)qualified to comment on. However, before I get into that, let’s take it as read that we all agree on how important a free press is. The whole situation around news makes me feel dreadful. But I keep coming back to one business question which I can’t find an answer for.

Is there such a thing as a “journalism business” per se, any more than (as a former academic) there’s an “academic research” business?

I don’t mean to play semantic games here. There’s a “newspaper” business and a “scientific journals” business, but they’re ways of exploiting the content produced by journalists and by academics. Through that lens, journalism’s a method and a community of practice, not a business in itself. The revenue lives in three places – selling information, selling entertainment, or aggregating an audience you can sell to advertisers.

I think the simplicity argument is something of a red herring. Venture investors want outsize returns. To get those, they’re willing to cope with complex business models, as long as the entrepreneur can point to exactly where the money is made. They can be patient: a five year exit horizon won’t faze a VC fund. And they’ll deal with niches, as long as they’re lucrative enough. But there needs to be enough “there” there; it has to be possible to build a really large business. Is there a billion-dollar market which can be tapped through the techniques of journalism? As Suw alludes to, in journalism, fragmentation of the audience makes the revenue model really unclear. Worse still, even when you build an audience, you might not be able to sell your ad inventory. Bad news stops people buying things.

In summary, I really want there to be a billion-dollar market addressable through journalism, but I don’t think anyone’s worked out where it is yet. Without that, it’s difficult to prove that the business could scale, and without that proof, it’ll always be hard to raise money.

At the other extreme, information companies definitely work. Bloomberg do $6bn a year in revenue. In Britain, there’s Markit Group — they raised $250m at a pre-money of $2.75bn this January. They’re a financial information firm, and probably the biggest British startup most people haven’t heard of. The banking crisis of ‘08 and the sovereign debt crisis of now ? The data largely came from Markit. It’s not traditional reportage, but it is new information. It’s the bones of a story. So: I wonder if revenue’s migrating to these kinds of services, to financial data brokers, to intermediaries, and to photo libraries (which are, in many ways, the same business as Bloomberg – sourcing, management and curation of digital assets). If you can find information people need in order to run their businesses or their lives, and then identify ways to get it to them, then you’re in decent fundraising shape.

So here’s a poser: is there an information business, buildable through the techniques of journalism, where the commercial necessities won’t distort that journalism beyond recognition?

Mining for strained metaphor

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 14:29:23 +0100

So, startups then. Way too many pixels get spent on talking about those, not enough on doing them. But when has that stopped me? Here’s another metaphor. I think there might be something in this one:

Prospecting.

The accepted wisdom’s that a startup isn’t a business until it’s hit product-market fit. Instead, it’s a search to find a big unmined seam of customer desire. Once you’ve done that, and you’ve worked out how big the market is, you go and raise money, build your team, and grab as much land as you can. That’s a superficial view, I know, but all the really important elements are there. Startups are mining operations. (I knew everything would come back to minerals sooner or later.)

Let’s push this metaphor all the way to breaking point. When the gamble’s paying off, and prospecting looks easy, you get gold rushes. Maybe we should be calling the 90s bubble the Second California Gold Rush; the economics probably look fairly similar from far enough away. Maybe the lean startup techniques are doing to startups what modern seismology did to fossicking.

I’m probably going too far, but then: what we’re talking about here is risk control, avoiding wasted effort, making expensive processes (like building a product or digging a hole) cheap: and there’s hundreds of years of economic precedent to look at here. There might be something in these hills. Hand me my pickaxe.

Delete as necessary

Sun, 22 Aug 2010 21:25:00 +0100

Yesterday, a friend and I saw Adam Rutherford compere In the Shadow of the Sun, a panel discussion on science and art inspired by the big ball in the sky. It was all pretty great, but Honor Harger’s bit in particularly got to me. Honor spoke about the paradoxical centrality of the Sun in art. Light’s the prerequisite of all visual art, yet you can’t even look at the Sun directly without damaging yourself. You can’t see the sun. You see a painting, or a photo, or something else inferred or glimpsed or mediated through technology. Speaking of which, here’s something she played for us; Semiconductor’s Black Rain, made from satellite data recorded in the space between our home and the Sun.

Black Rain from Semiconductor on Vimeo.

It put me in mind of Autechre’s Gantz Graf. Gantz Graf’s half music, half exploding sculpture. All these interstitial spaces: Anyway, I left with this. Creating something is, after a fashion, subtraction. We take whole light and, through pigment chemistry, we filter out wavelengths. What we see is what’s left. We take white noise and filter out wavelengths until we’re left with music. We take a stone and carve out a sculpture. We pick words out of a dictionary and shunt them together. Every time we talk we’re leaving things out and taking things away. It’s always partial, always incomplete and provisional, always circumscribed. Then it hits the filters of our own preconceptions and obsessions, and we’re left with whatever resonates in the spaces left behind.

The phase-space of news

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 00:01:00 +0100

It isn’t newspapers that need saving. It’s journalism. To put it more exactly, what needs to be preserved is the public service journalists provide by using a particular set of ethical methodologies to gather, assess and report information people need to function effectively as human beings and citizens in a free society.

Journalism Ethics > Feature Articles > How can we save journalism?

Everyone’s fixating on the Times paywall and whether this means that “people won’t pay for journalism”. In the comments here, SK wrote:

I guess my question is: do you not think that there is a minimum price for quality content, and do you not think that it’s higher than can be supported by distribution-model pricing – that if you’re going to be able to produce content, people have to learn to pay for that content, not simply for distribution or access?

And though it’s cheating, I’m going to reject the premise. There’s no price for content other than what the market will bear. I don’t believe people will, or ever have, paid for content - in most markets, recorded music and DVD being maybe the exceptions, they’ve always paid part of the cost, with the remainder being met by advertising (newsprint), ancillaries (the cinema), and the like. It’s always been about multiple revenue streams.

The problem for the mass print media is that two ways they got paid, built around control over the advertising channel and the ability to extract extra revenue at the logistical interface created by having to ship huge piles of paper around the place, disappeared at the same time. So everyone fixates on trying to put one of these back. But there are a bunch of other variables you can tweak, and it seems to me that those are much more potentially interesting.

If you haven’t seen EPIC 2015…

… it’s kind of a totem for me.

Here’s the thing: the news space isn’t one-dimensional, it’s not “paid” vs “unpaid”: it’s way more complex than that. “The newspaper” is only one possible point in the space of information services we’re going to spend the rest of our lives navigating. Off the top of my head, here are some other axes:

Facts vs. analysis: do you comment or report?
Quantitative vs. descriptive: do you favour reportage or data?
Generic vs. personalised: do you ship the same product to everyone, or a product shaped to an individual’s interests, friends and behaviour?
Bundled vs unbundled: do you cover everything, some subjects in detail, or one subject in obsessive detail and let your readers assemble their news portfolio?
Mass market vs. exclusive: as many readers as possible or make a virtue of aiming to a tight demographic?

On this, the Guardian mixes analysis and facts, is clearly bundled, and slants highbrow; but it’s also generic, rather than specific, and favours description over quantitative data. But its blogs - like the Data Blog - fill in niches. They’re unbundling themselves and turning themselves into a portfolio of sources, not a single source, which can be monetized by a portfolio of approaches.

That doesn’t make nearly as good a soundbite as “paywall good!” or “paywall bad!”, but it feels much more like the truth. I’m not making a moral argument here, because ultimately the morality of the situation isn’t here or there: what will happen is what we can make work financially and economically. If we’re blind to the flexibility we have and the true constraints we’re inventing within, though, we’re never going to get the outcome we’re all hoping for: a powerful, accurate, honest and free exchange of facts and opinion.

That doesn’t have to come from a newspaper. It just has to come from somewhere.

Because news is newsier if you have five copies. (Civic Center...

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 18:47:42 +0100

Because news is newsier if you have five copies. (Civic Center in San Francisco yesterday. )

Telegraph Hill’s big on birds. It’s not every day...

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 18:33:54 +0100

Telegraph Hill’s big on birds. It’s not every day you get divebombed by a flock of parrots, put it that way.

I’d never seen a hummingbird in action. They’re almost too fast to see, but I got lucky, I guess. They’re amazing little creatures.

So this was from the Caltrain the other day, riding into...

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 20:28:00 +0100

So this was from the Caltrain the other day, riding into Mountain View. On the way back into San Francisco, I was listening to the Hold Steady’s new record. The Hold Steady are a really hypertexty band. If you’re the kind of person who likes to unpick things, and I am, there’s a lot of thread for you to pull on. Craig Finn’s the kind of lyricist who comes with a concordance. If you’re the kind of person who nicks quotes to say what you mean, because you never have the words unless someone else has uttered them first, then you’ll really, really like them. I’m a big fan.

Anyway, their most recent one, Heaven is Whenever, pivots round a track called “We Can Get Together”; Heaven is whenever we can get together, sit down on your floor and listen to your records.. Every indie geek gets that one. For some reason, though — well, I’ve been busy — I’d only skimmed the most recent album, I hadn’t really listened to it. I hadn’t clocked the references to Heavenly, an eighties Oxford indie band. They were twee, and romantic, and joyful. And the drummer took his own life, and as Craig Finn sings: he wasn’t just the drummer, he was the singer’s younger brother; now, I still play that single, but that song don’t sound so simple any more.

I listened to that song on loop for the rest of the journey.

When I was trying to stay sane at the end of my PhD, I’d write music. Sad little electronic ditties. That’s where most of Symbolic comes from. And I’d listen to records, and like I said earlier, I’d pick away at the threads. The personal histories. Ian Curtis and Joy Division, Kurt Cobain and Nirvana, and the accidents; Jeff Buckley, Jimi Hendrix. Even long after I’d submitted, I kept seeing it: Charles Cooper of Telefon Tel Aviv. And while I was writing the thesis, and the record, my friends and I lost someone. Not a musician, but he was a son, and I’m sure he’d have been a great younger brother.

And here’s what I can’t get past: by applauding all this pain, am I culpable?

Symbolic is dedicated to absent friends, but I’d trade that record and all the others for people still being in their friends’ lives. No song is worth that.

Still in San Francisco. I’ve been meaning to write about...

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 07:45:00 +0100

Still in San Francisco.

I’ve been meaning to write about a bunch of different things. Inception and suspension of disbelief; The Hold Steady, hypertextuality and culpability; mass customization and deeply personal contexts.

Then I remember that you could just read Snarkmarket, or Robin Sloan (one of the contributors)’s short stories, and you’d get most of what I’ve been trying to say.

You should read Snarkmarket. It’s very good indeed.

Sixteen hours of planes and trains, but dreich is dreich...

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 16:58:18 +0100

Sixteen hours of planes and trains, but dreich is dreich everywhere.

I don’t really expect anyone to agree with me on this, but San Francisco feels a bit like Edinburgh would if the Edinburgh Festival went all year. It’s the port city thing, I reckon: the microclimate.

ALT/1977: WE ARE NOT TIME TRAVELERS on the Behance Network

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 14:59:06 +0100

ALT/1977: WE ARE NOT TIME TRAVELERS on the Behance Network:

There’s an entire novel in this design conceit, I’m sure.

On canaries and the journalist coalface

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 15:15:45 +0100

So that quote which went up earlier’s about the news industry, again, and the structural decline in businesses which thought they sold content but actually sold logistics and distribution. That describes, more or less, all of the mass media industries.

On that subject, I’ve recently been preoccupied with a thought-experiment. The basic premise is this: like the quote earlier says, cost-bases are vastly too high across all of the media industries. With those costs as an anchor, there’s no way to make money without the extra margin you got away with thanks to analogue friction. So, you have to cut. However, you’re a big, hairy unionized industry like newsprint, so even if you wanted to, you’re not going to be able to be surgical about it; it’s going to be a long process starting with voluntary redundancy. Ethically I’m right there with them on this, but from a business perspective isn’t that a disaster? Aren’t the people most able to leave likely to be the people best-suited to the new landscape?

My hunch is that voluntary redundancy in the media industries means shedding the people you need and keeping the people who’ll be less able to adapt. You wanted a newsroom of digital natives, but you’re going to keep the people who can’t conceive of anything other than the papers they were brought up on.

Short of blowing the whole thing up, or launching spin-out life-rafts and running down the old businesses, I can’t see how to combat that. The economics are scary, but the brain-drain may be more troubling still.

"Let’s start by looking at the very premise that you pay for a newspaper anyway in the first place...."

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 13:41:03 +0100

“

Let’s start by looking at the very premise that you pay for a newspaper anyway in the first place. Well, you do, but that’s all you do – you pay for the very paper you hold in your hand. Your 70p goes absolutely nowhere to meeting the full costs of what you’re reading – the journalists’ salaries, the IT and all the other component parts of complex business producing a highly perishable manufactured product. The difference is subsidised by advertising or the depth of a proprietor’s pocket – or both. If consumers were truly ‘buying’ and therefore valuing the journalism itself rather than the means of delivery, they’d happily pay £5 per copy of the Daily Rag. But of course they don’t – and won’t ever - but that’s exactly what paywall fans think will happen online.

With a newspaper, all you’ve bought is the delivery channel – the paper and perhaps the space on the newsagent’s counter. Just as now you’ve paid £700 for your home PC, £30 a month for your broadband connection and perhaps another £30 a month for your smartphone.

”

- Marc Reeves: Speaking truth to power: my speech to the CBI

"It’s important that nobody gets mad at you for screwing up,” says Lee Unkrich, director of Toy Story..."

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 16:54:35 +0100

““It’s important that nobody gets mad at you for screwing up,” says Lee Unkrich, director of Toy Story 3. “We know screwups are an essential part of making something good. That’s why our goal is to screw up as fast as possible.””

- Animating a Blockbuster: How Pixar Built Toy Story 3 | Magazine | Wired.com