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.

Anonymity: the Big Web Issue Everyone Keeps Missing

In all the trainings I've done over the last couple of years, the one hot-button issue guaranteed to touch off a passionate debate, even amongst the most detached, sit-on-their-hands group is the reader comments section.

See, journalists just hate them damn comments.

Yeah, yeah, notable exceptions abound, and some people "get it" that we're supposed to include our readers/users in our little game of "Hey lookee here! I done found out sumthin' kewl!" But by and large, newspaper reporters & editors have grown accustomed to their comfy positions as The Voice Of God That Brooks No Disagreement.

So when I start talking about some of the measure that newspapers around the world have taken to try to moderate & impose order on the chaotic forums, comment sections, trackbacks, etc., the journalists fairly leap out of their chairs, eyes alight, as they tick off all the awful insults and calumnies they have been forced to endure by the damn intertubes propellorheads. They talk about how their readers are crazy people who write horrible insults and lies about the reporters, and who get crafty to avoid all the various moderation/banning mechanisms.

In Chile, in Argentina, Russia, Mexico, Colombia, Ukraine ... the trolls know no boundaries. In each place, the reporters and editors go on and on at great length about how they can't stand looking at the comments under their stories, because they know that some persistent readers that have an axe to grind against them are going to show up there and start yammering and flinging virtual monkey poo.

I've actually found this subject to be a godsend - when my voice is wearing out and I need a few minutes to chug water and compose myself, I toss this little conversational grenade in the room, and let the journalists vent for a while before moving on to possible solutions.

It's stunning to me that there appears to be international norms and predictable patterns to troll behavior. Vulgar sex-based insults, thread hijacking, escalating to physical threats. There's a great gallery of Flame Warriors here - I highly recommend that you check it out. If you've spent any time whatsoever in the comments sections, having conversations online, you will laugh, cry and grit your teeth in rage as you recognize the archetypes. Is there some special international brotherhood of the troll that you have to join? Do the entrance exams call for you to drive a netizen into such a frenzy of rage that he smashes his computer monitor with his fist? Hey ... that'd made a cool YouTube movie...

Anyway.

There's an interesting case coming out of the Yale Law School that might put an end to all this. How?

By making people responsible for what they say online.

At the risk of cheapening my training message, here's John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, put far more elegantly in a simple chalkboard drawing than I could with multiple 2,000 word posts: 

So yeah. The reason socially retarded dimwits, 15-year-olds off their Ritalin and drunk dormrats stink up forums and comment boards is because they aren't going to have to pay the price for their actions.

The Yale lawsuit seeks to change that.

From Wired:

AK-47 was one of a handful of students heaping misogynist scorn on
women attending the nations' top law schools in 2007, in posts so vile
they spurred a national debate on the limits of online anonymity, and
an unprecedented federal lawsuit aimed at unmasking and punishing the
posters.

...lawyers for two female Yale Law School students have ascertained
AK-47's real identity, along with the identities of other AutoAdmit
posters, who all now face the likely publication of their names in
court records -- potentially marking a death sentence for the comment
trolls' budding legal careers even before the case has gone to trial.

The unmasking of the posters marks a milestone in a rare legal
challenge to the norms of online commenting, where arguments live on
for years in search-engine results and where reputations can be sullied
nearly irreparably by anyone with a grudge, a laptop and a WiFi
connection.

We keep dancing around this problem on the internet, mainly because nobody has really found a workable solution yet. On the one hand, unfettered speech leads to such chaos that the signal-to-noise ratio becomes unworkable - my best example of this is the Yahoo News message boards. They've been down for more than a year and a half. If you ever went there, you know why.

The boards were taken over by a hard-core group of trolls with apparently limitless time, energy and hatred. No subject was too off-topic for them to use to spew their anger, obscenities and insults at ... well, it wasn't really at each other. It was basically the digital equivalent of a grubby guy in tattered clothes in a bus station screaming "AAAAAHHHHGGG! AHHHGGG!" at his socks. Even the most innocuous subjects - a story on flower arrangement or dogs, f'rinstance, would attract the trolls within about 10 posts.

The other extreme, of course, are the limp & lifeless forums & comment spaces, where moderation is imposed to such an extent that the audience just migrates elsewhere to talk to each other.

Now then.

One of the key things that helps keep internet users sociable is imposing some kind of accountability for their actions. Which is what registration is all about - trying to attach a real human identity to the screenname. The fight for newspapers has been trying to raise the hurdles for commenters to a level where it's tough enough to establish an identity so that you don't do it casually (no shelling out to create a free Hotmail, Gmail or Yahoo account on the spot to establish a handy sock puppet), but not so hard that users start feeling like they're applying for a home equity line of credit a Business Visa from the Russian Consulate.

Now that there appears to be a clear legal precedent for peeling back the layers of anonymity to hold trolls accountable for their poo-flinging, I find myself of two minds about this. I have been roughed up by a fairly good cross-section of trolls over the years, and it'd be nice to be able to expose them as the pathetic, mommy's basement-dwelling loser subcreatures my wounded ego insists they must be. On the other hand ... some of my responses to said trolls (hey! I was provoked! Honest, they started it!) may have been a bit ... intemperate. So I have to wonder if there are perhaps some other sad, wounded egos out there. And, where would it stop? If you can bring an action for something someone said in a chat room, or Second Life, or the forums at AngryJournalist, well, we better just pave over the downtown areas of every major city in the U.S. and turn it all into one giant courthouse, because we're gonna need the space.

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