Hard News, Inc.

Quick Hits: Old Media Loses Trust in France, OC Register May Go Tabloid and Google Only Spys On You For Nine Months Now

Still up in lovely Point Reyes, decompressing and re-imagining our web presence, so the output here has been seriously cramped.  However, these three little items just beg for notice.

1. We've all seen the "MSM sucks, don't believe what it says" meme gain strength the last few years, flourishing in the fertile soil of talk hate radio hosts, and migrating over to the Kos/Firedoglake end of the spectrum.  Meanwhile, in the developing world countries that I've worked in the last few years, the people react with puzzled frowns to the thought that anyone ever would have any sort of uncritical trust in Big Media.  Well, according to the Highway Africa media conference, the 3rd world on the way up countries are starting to really dig the idea of citizen journalists.  Which makes sense, because they have the sad history of governments/revolutionaries, as their first act, seizing the TV/radio stations and firebombing the presses.

...the power of citizen journalism, in its objective and independent approach, is not to be underestimated.

“We need occasions where the actor in society gives us a very good insight
on what is going in communities, where journalists cannot be found. 

2.  Responding to "catastrophic" circulation and ad revenue projections, the OC Register, long known as the dysfunctional family of California journalism (i.e. everyone knows Weird Old Uncle Floyd is not to be trusted around children, but nobody talks about it), is reportedly studying the idea, with intentions of perhaps forming a blue-ribbon committee that will issue non-binding recommendations, of maybe perhaps justalittle changing their format from broadsheet to tabloid.

Will wonders never cease?

Other cost-cutting measure being
considered from the team reviews are Monday and Tuesday papers with
fewer pages and self-service advertising options. Horne also says the
paper may cut back on the number of distribution centers it operates,
noting that it recently reduced the outlets from seven to six.

"Studying it and doing it may be two different
things," Horne stressed about the tabloid change and other moves.
"Every newspaper needs to study driving down costs

3.  And last, for everyone out there who is concerned over those searches that were done ... late at night ... after a few beers ... y'know, just for a hoot ... that could be traced back to their IP address ... 

...well, you only have to worry for nine months rather than 18.  As part of their "Pay no attention to the all-seeing man behind the curtain" campaign, Google is reducing the latency of their caches of your searches.  They are also supposedly working to "anonymize" the userinfo, although how that's supposed to help when all Google search&response data goes thru the big computers at the NSA anyway is beyond me.

(Note to all NSA, FBI, ATF & IRS functionaries now tracking me: Just joking. Heh. Really.  I have nothing to hide.  I'm happy that the government is vigilant against evildoers of all stripes, foreign and domestic. Go Team America!)

Nicole Wong, Google's deputy general counsel, told a meeting of
computer industry privacy experts at Microsoft Corp's Silicon Valley
offices that her company planned to "anonymize" the computer addresses
of its users more quickly.

"We're significantly shortening our previous 18-month retention
policy to address regulatory concerns and to take another step to
improve privacy for our users," Google officials said in a blog post
released Monday night.

(snip)

....until a year-and-a-half ago, Google had kept personally identifiable
information about its Web users on company computers for an indefinite
amount of time.

NBC Throws Audience Measurement Methodologies at Olympics to See What Sticks

Meanwhile, Google whistles nervously, hoping nobody thinks to raise the issue of AdSense clickfraud again...

There's a yawning gulf in New Media. It stretches from the pittance that most media creators get for their ad space to the other side, where the results of those ads sit, filing their nails. In between are the bleached bones of media tracking companies that have tried to draw a connection between the two.

From the LA Times story:

NBC has created TAMI -- the Total Audience Measurement Index -- to better understand how viewers are consuming Olympic content. The system, which Wurtzel has spent the last year assembling, will use technology and old-fashioned focus groups to closely monitor this.

For example, Wurtzel will be able to tell with greater certainty whether viewers are surfing the Web in search of Olympic content. He will be able to determine whether live alerts delivered via cellphones drive fans to television sets or computer screens to catch a record-breaking performance. And he will see how fans use online and VOD replays.

The system also will attempt for the first time to track Olympic watching outside the home via mobile devices created by San Mateo, Calif.-based Integrated Media Measurement Inc. A limited number of people will have the cellphone-like devices designed to monitor every bit of media consumed -- whether in a bar, a movie theater or someone else's house.

NBC Universal also is assembling focus groups to find out how consumers are interacting with what Wurtzel described as "the first 360-degrees Olympics."

This is refreshing. I'd like to see more major media outlets doing this. Why? Because it's pretty much the only way to break Google's stranglehold on ad dollars. See, the problem is that everybody has fallen in love with search advertising, because it seems to offer such great results. Someone clicks on the link, they come to your site, and then it's up to you to get them to convert to sales, right?

But see, that kinda ignores one little point: howinhell did the user know what to search for in the first place? Clairvoyance? Come on.

I think if NBC can start connecting the two sides of the results gulf, they can start showing that ads on TV (and display ads in newspapers, and morning drive-time shout-athons) have a lot bigger effect than what Google has claimed. And that will mean that advertisers will start realizing that buying search ads is not the end-all, be-all of advertising.

Which could be a very, very good thing for all the Old Media giants who are stuck in midair over that yawning gulf, their feet doing the Wile E. Coyote mid-air invisible bicycle pedal...

TILT: Pinball Movie and the Future of Newspapers?

A wildly successful industry is faced with a bold challenge from scrappy digital interlopers and reacts in all the predictable ways...

Stage 1: The industry reacts with disdain - "The new digital stuff is just a fad. Look - our sales are going great. And people love us. They've always loved us. They'll be back in droves when this digital stuff blows over. It's so cheap and shoddy - where's the fun and interest in that?"

Stage 2: The industry's P&L statements can no longer be ignored. The industry reacts by trying to co-opt the new digital technology into its existing product.

2a. The existing designers and producers react with outrage and strong resistance to changing the way that they've done business for decades.

2b. The industry half-heartedly markets the new hybrid product to its existing customers. The distributors don't really understand the appeal of the new digital technology, but they glom onto the idea that the hybrid is the "same thing only different" and try to force the digital product into their same old channels and strategies.

Stage 3: The old guard loyalist customers are turned off by the hybrid product that doesn't function as well as the "pure" version, and inundates the industry with complaints and threats.

3a. The newer customers, who don't have that much loyalty, and who use both regular and digital products, try the new hybrid and find that the experience isn't really all that satisfying. It doesn't do the old thing well, and it doesn't do the new thing well. So they split their time between the new digital and old analog, trending gradually towards the new.

3b. The newest customers, who have been using digital, look at the hybrid and sneer. They don't bother using something that is so obviously lame and half-hearted.

Stage 4: The industry is relegated to a curiosity, maintained only in small niches, and used by nostalgic aficionados.

The story of newspapers? Or of pinball machines? I know, I know - the analogy breaks down at a million kajillion places along the way, but there are some interesting points of reference.

Full disclosure: I was a pinball nerd back in the day. After every big mid-term test, I'd go to the student union, and take out my frustrations and anxieties by banging around Pinbot, Black Knight, Eight Ball, Centaur and others. Sure, there were other video games there, and every once in a while, I'd goof off with one of them to pass the time. But there was something therapeutic about the way that you could actually get physical and bang on a pinball machine to get results - either to get the damn shiny sphere to go down the right ramp, or to get a revenge "Tilt" when the damn thing kept draining on you...

I remember the machines that started appearing that tried to include video games into the back panel. You'd make a shot, and then a short cut scene would come up and you'd have to take your hands off the flippers and yank on the controls for a bit.

The game sucked. The pinball game was shoddy and ugly and didn't really play well. The video game was light-years behind the competition that was specifically designed to be a video game. Worse, it cost far more than either one, and the damn thing was always either out of order, or the arcade owners had its guts all over the floor and were wrenching on it.

In later years, the pinball industry was relegated to producing super-expensive movie tie-in games for Terminator, Lethal Weapon, Addams Family, etc. etc. Meanwhile, the video game industry migrated from the arcades to the game consoles in every living room. The technology kept improving from the simple move-and-shoot games like Asteroids and Space Invaders to the current MMPORPGs like World of Warcraft, City of Heroes, Guild Wars and all the first-person shooters like Halo 3, Resistance: Fall of Man, and whatever iteration of Doom/Quake we're now up to...

Not only have video games far outstripped the wildest dreams of the old arcade makers (who could have ever predicted one-day sales in the hundreds of millions of dollars), but the industry has also spun off all kinds of related industries: cheat codes, bulletin boards, wikipedias, blogs, fansites, contests for best fan art, etc.

The lessons for newspapers here are not clear-cut. But I'd like to believe that it is possible for a whole new thriving economic ecosystem to arise when a new technology invades an existing content space. I've spent the last couple of years staring into the crystal ball, trying to discern hints of what the future info-media-news landscape is going to look like ... all of which may be as futile and doomed to error as it would have been for a Bally or Williams pinball game designer back in 1983 to have predicted that someday, a teenager in a basement could play a 3-D immersive game with other kids from all over the world, and then run his own business connected to said game...

"Moral Imperative" for Google to Help Newspapers to Survive

...some might say the train has already left the station on that one...

Not sure what it is that's behind this announcement. Perhaps someone at Google belatedly came to the realization that without newspapers, there's no real fresh content on the web, and thus nothing for Google to sell its ads against? Schmidt was short on specifics as to how it is that Google plans to "help," but this graf has got to make business managers cringe:

Still, he acknowledged the boost probably won't be enough to restore the hefty profit margins that newspaper publishers historically have enjoyed from print advertising.

Interestingly, later in the story, Schmidt continues to bang the drum for its mobile advertising platform, Android. Now, I've been looking into online advertising pretty thoroughly for the last three months, and I gotta say, predicting that Google is going to make more money from mobile than from the web within five years ... well, I want some of what he's been smoking.

Then again, not too many people have made fortunes lately by betting against Google. And yeah, I realize that what he's doing is banging the drum for a very expensive product that Google has poured resources into, in the hopes that the market will catch the hype virus, and start migrating their ads to mobile. If anyone thinks that Google is going to have an easy time recovering their investment from Android, well, check out the ROI numbers (if you can find them) for YouTube. Have they really managed to monetize all the vids there yet? Magic 8-ball says "Answer Cloudy - Ask Again Later."

TV as We Know It is Dead: Shift to Web-based Video Costs Producers 88% of Ad Revenues

Can you say "Doomed"?

Apparently, a report called "And Now for the News," written by Craig Moffett of Bernstein Research, came out this week, and it's got both Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, and, not coincidentally, HDNet, and the pundits at Digital Media Wire all atwitter over the stark economic realities.

Cuban made billions of dollars in the internet video game, and, while he's acted the fool at various Maverick games over the years, nobody has ever accused him of either being stupid or lacking passion. So when he starts winding up the air-raid siren, it gets my attention.

From Cuban's blog:

Starting with the disappointing but expected news that journalism is no
longer a service consumers desire to pay for, he moves on to the
problems facing Internet video.

(snip)

Five years into the video-over-the-Internet revolution, we have learned
two things. First; consumers won't pay for content on the web, so it
will have to be ad supported. And second; it won't be ad supported.

Oh, shit. (*stomach lurches*)

On the web, early evidence suggests that consumers will tune out –
click away – if they are forced to watch more than 30 seconds or so of
advertising up front, and maybe another 90 seconds of advertising over
the next thirty minutes. Hulu.com, for example, which has already been
lionized by many as the future of TV, serves two minutes of advertising
for every 22 minutes of programming(i.e. the programming duration of a
typical half hour show from television). Assuming identical CPMs for
web video and TV, and after accounting for lost affiliate fees, a 30
minute program on the web with two minutes of advertising yields
approximately 1/8th as much revenue per viewer.

Are content producers prepared to reduce production costs...by 88%?

In fact, the actual economics of web-based video are far, far worse than this.

Sweetie, can you get me a hemlock cocktail, please? Easy on the ice. And see if there are any razor blades in the junk drawer?

88%? Are you freakin' kidding me? That kind of revenue restructuring would be in line with what newspapers have experienced since classified ads migrated to the web (i.e. the "Craigslist effect"). And yeah, I know, there are some shellshocked newspaper reporters/editors who will nod wearily, taking schadenfreude satisfaction that the arrogant pacotillos in local TV are about to take the bollocking that print has taken these last 10 years.


Over at Digital Media Wire, Paul Sweeting explains the problem that video producers here in Hollywood face, seeing as how they're making the same goddam mistakes that music labels made when the internet came calling:

There's no reason to believe that video producers' experience will be
any different. Like it or not, the web simply isn't very kind to
publishers, packagers and distributors. It rewards enablers. Search is
an enabling technology--perhaps the ultimate enabling technology. And
as Google shareholders can tell you, it's been rewarded. The challenge
for publishers is not to figure out how to force the web to reward
them. It's to figure out how to capture the value created by enabling
technology.



In that sense, Cuban is right. It may not make sense for the networks
simply to make their schedules available for free on the Internet. That
doesn't really create any new value; it mostly just drains value from
linear platforms.



What the networks need is to figure out how to capture the value
created by enabling consumers to access, select, aggregate, transform,
embed and share content--in a word, to use it. Anything else is just TV with buffering.

For scripted TV entertainment, well, I'm not sure what the survival strategy is yet. I do know that there is not much love in the ad world for a CPM rate hike for online video that would bridge that 88% gap. There's just too much other product out there screaming for attention ... not to mention the fact that the scripted TV content (and movie content, for that matter) is a melting sandcastle to the surging broadband tide. Trying to make back a $160 million budget from some exotic cocktail of online subscription, advertising and branded sponsorship ... well, let's just say that I'm glad I'm not writing the checks on that one. I don't know how you can possibly monetize the budgets that Hollywood is used to.

And folks, we know - dammit, we know all too well - how the media megalopalies react to revenue reductions. For a time, they throw money at the problem. And then come the cutbacks. "We have to do more with less."


It comes down to our old friends, supply and demand. If there is
demand for the kind of spectacle that you get in Iron Man or Raiders 4,
or whatever, there will be someone out there that will supply it ...
but at the price point that the people on the demand side set.

Kiss those expense-account lunches at The Ivy goodbye. All the little perks that pampered writers, directors, producers and stars have gotten used to over the years. There is going to be a lot of screaming and whining hereabouts in the next decade or so.

I think that my clients over in newspapers have actually got a significant advantage in this arena. The future of video is going to be like the future of news: disaggregated and hyperlocal. Papers can do this. Papers ARE doing this.

I can't figure out how to take a 2 1/2 hour piece of video - hell, video of any length, from a blipvert to the entire back catalog of the Museum of Radio and TV - and make it pay off a $320 million opening weekend return.

But I can teach you how to monetize short clips shot by reporters that go along with local news stories. That's do-able.
One last thing: in the comments was this gem, sure to be included in my next series of trainings for newspapers migrating to video on the web:

I've never seen ABC.com and the rest put an RSS, Email, or text message subscribe/alert button on their video pages. Instead they want us all to *remember* show schedules, come back, and sit through ads. They're blowing a huge chance to have a relationship with the audience. The sad truth is that TV networks don't want a relationship. They want us all to sit around the glowing box together on *their* schedule as if it were 1966.

June 1 Protest for Photographer's Rights

As someone who has spent much, much more than my share of time being hassled by cops for doing my job, face jammed onto the hot, stinking hood of a patrol car, I felt it necessary just to acknowledge this protest event being held at Hollywood & Highland on June 1.

More and more, I find that the police have been infected by the "well, we're just trying to be cautious" bug, spread by the geeks at Homeland Security that show up every six months with their PowerPoints demonstrating how the eeee-vil Mooslim terr'rists are going to set of a nuke right here in River City if the beat cops slack up even for a second. Sheesh. Mostly, the induced paranoia is nothing more than a fig leaf for some overzealous freaks to throw their weight around.

So yeah, join the group, send some supportive e-mails, whatever it takes. Taking a picture in a public place is not a crime. Should not be a crime. Idiots that want to clamp down on people obeying the law because they feel justified ... that is the bigger danger to our republic.

I particularly liked this question from the comments on the blog: "what if a bunch of art students sat down and sketched a public place? would that be a crime?"





This image of a shirt was posted on Flickr - go there and join the group, even if you don't plan to show up

News Flash to Military: The Media is NOT Your Enemy

All the shallow thinkers seemed to draw from Vietnam was that the brave military could have "won" that war, had not the craven, cowardly, hate-America-first media not stabbed them in the back.

So in our most recent misadventure in Iraq, the military set out from the outset to muzzle, coerce, co-opt and neuter the media. That was Job One, and they spent billions of dollars and millions of man-hours making sure that their talking points were crammed down the throats of any media outlet.  The recent NY Times investigation revealed just how much all the "analysts" were being fed useless, false and ultimately harmful propaganda.  In a recent Miami Herald article, Ed Wasserman convincingly argues that the media is going to have to self-police to rid itself of hacks disguised as objective, independent observers:

Some of the analysts confessed that to avoid displeasing their Pentagon patrons they choked back misgivings they had about administration claims of steady military gains.

One Fox News analyst came back from a trip and told his viewers, ''You can't believe
the progress.'' Actually, he told The Times, ``I saw immediately in 2003 that things were going south.''

The report is based on 8,000 pages of documents that the administration spent two years fighting demands to disclose. It describes a cozy arrangement involving more than 75 retired military who consulted for Fox News, NBC, CNN and other networks with round-the-clock cable operations. Few of those operations made much effort to find out whether their analysts were benefiting from the policies they zealously defended.

It's true, as Glenn Greenwald wrote on Salon, that ``news organizations were hardly unaware that these retired generals were mindlessly reciting the administration
line on the war and related matters. To the contrary, that's precisely
why our news organizations turned to them in the first place.''

Here's a line of thinking - I hesitate to use the word "fact," since the Pentagon and the current administration have so discredited even the concept of "facts" - that I hope some of the brighter minds in the military arrive at:  all the relentless bright & happy talk, the insistence on "progress is being made," the demands to blindly support our troops, the devotion to this vision of the U.S. military as an "Ever-Victorious Army," wreathed in golden glory, incapable of making a mistake ...

...all that propaganda and denial of tough examination of exactly what was going on, where we were headed ...

... that effort to castrate the media and control the message is what is going to ultimately going to be responsible for the disaster in Iraq.  I talked last night to a formerly wild-eyed right-winger, who works with/for/in the military, and he admitted that it's just a matter of time before we have the helicopters taking off from the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, just like Saigon in '75.  

If the military had acknowledged in the years 2003-2006 that perhaps things were not quite going exactly according to plan, that there were flaws in the Great Sacred Rumsfeld's Master Plan, then perhaps, hmmm, I dunno, adjustments could have been made to that plan.  Adjustments that have since been made. 

Adjustments that would have saved American lives. Adjustments that would have stemmed or even reversed the disintegration of Iraqi society that has led us to the dead end where we now find ourselves.

Truthful reports in the media would have put pressure on the politicians above to change the plan rather than the insistence on "staying the course" despite the (OK, I'll say it) fact that course was heading right straight off the cliff.

Here's a last quote, ringing out from the lessons that should have been learned - were learned by Colin Powell, since he was in Vietnam, ignored by Cheney and Bush since they were not:

The armed forces contributed to their own defeat in Vietnam ''by fighting the war they wanted to fight rather than the one at hand.''

(snip)

In the end it all boils down to one question: Could we have won a military victory in Vietnam? Record's answer is: Yes, but not at any price even remotely acceptable to the American people.

One thoughtful former infantry battalion commander told me he had reflected long and
hard about what would have resulted from unlimited war, including an invasion of North Vietnam: ''We could have won a military victory without question. But today my sons and yours would still be garrisoning Vietnam and fighting and dying in an unending guerrilla
war.'' The war was ours to lose, and we did; it was for the South Vietnamese to win, and they could not.

Great Use of a Mash-up to Tell a Story

Where has Hillary really been, and under what circumstance? Check out this use of the Google map-customization features...

In the wake of the "Platoon coming into a hot LZ" story that Hillary floated last week - and that rose up to bite her in the ass, and make her a reliable butt of jokes for a few news cycles - comes this bit of multimedia storytelling.

It kinda threw me for a loop, at first - I was trying to see what message it was that the map was trying to tell me.  And then, I realized that this was a more sophisticated use of the web than the traditional use of infographics, that normally serve to cram complex information at you in as short a time as possible. 

No, this is use of multimedia that is far more demanding - it demands that you have the time, patience and attention to really browse through all the data collected here, and that you arrive at a conclusion on your own (should you so wish).

And also, should you also not wish. Because if you were only interested in a few segments of the story (such as, what the hell was Hillary doing in Dakar? GIving away a trophy to some dust-caked winner of the Paris-to-Dakar rally?) - well then, you can just skim & browse over the map and pick out the bits of information that you are interested in and that are relevant to you.  A more trenchant hypothetical would be if you're a foreign minister of one of these countries, and you want to see how long it's been since the Clintons swung by on an official visit.

Anyway - brilliant use of non-linear storytelling techniques, and the possibilities offered by the web.  This is an infographic that works on a lot of levels, from the most sophisticated, to the most casual interest.  And yeah, it kinda sucks you in after a bit - you want to keep mousing over all the points and trying to imagine from the sparse description what the hell was going on during that visit back in the '90s.

Leaving Colombia

Our training sessions are finally done, we got great reviews from all the newspapers we visited, and we've learned tons about Colombia and all the changes that have taken place here.  The last six years have seen a sea change in the security situation - and the fact that you can now actually drive between cities, that you can go out at night without worrying about having a burlap sack stuffed over your head - has meant that business and society here have managed to rebuild. 

Yesterday, talking with our driver, he told us stories about the 500 cabdrivers/informants that Pablo Escobar used to have roaming the streets of Medellin, the Hiroshima-like mushroom cloud that hovered over the chief of police's house after 1,000 pounds of dynamite went off, the solid gold chess set given to a favored underling, and on and on ... I'll write more about those sad subjects later.  But the point is that The Bad Old Days are something that people take great pains to point out are far, far in the past.

So here is a photo from the Minas de Colombia, a kind of wholesale emerald, art and golden artifacts store.  I'd like to write something about how my joking around with the fuse to the dynamite is symbolic of the changes that we tried to make down here with the newspapers, of the way that we went around trying to tell them to blow up their old business models - but that might be abusing a metaphor too much even for me. 

Demonstracion en Monteria

Este es una demonstracion de cual facil es escribir algo nuevo en un blog.