Rants and raves about the behind-the-scenes stories, photos, video projects and obsessions that impinge on the life of a Los Angeles investigative reporter/documentary filmmaker.
Radiohead gives music away for free - kids prefer to pirate it off BitTorrent anyway
OK, this has got to have a lot of entertainment execs reaching for the Maalox. TechCrunch reports that even though Radiohead, in a much-ballyhooed move, allowed customers to set their own price point for downloading their new album (and yes, one of the options was $0.00), within a week
over 240,000 users got the album from peer to peer BitTorrent networks on the first day of release, according
to Forbes. Since then, the album was downloaded about 100,000 more
times each day, totaling more than 500,000. By comparison, Radiohead
pushed 1.2 million sales of the album through their site, including
pre-orders. File sharing networks are expected to surpass legal
downloads in the coming days.
That's just ugly. Basically, Hollywood, the RIAA and the MPAA have so poisoned the well with the audience that even when they try something innovative to bust through the conventional ripoff business models they have established and are clinging to, the target audience out there is preferring to go to the pirate sites to get the content.
The question that arises is, why? Why would some mook with broadband prefer to navigate to Pirate Bay or TorrentSpy to find the same thing that he could get for free, or for what is absolutely no big amount of cash?
Well, the first thing that occurs to me is that the kids don't trust the music companies, Hollywood or anything remotely resembling authority anymore. The rootkit shit that Sony pulled a while back is still reverberating, and there's a lot of "up yours" attitude for the years of overcharging $15 for a CD that had maybe one decent song on it.
The interesting bits come in the comments on the TechCrunch story, where the commenters basically slammed Radiohead's site for being too crowded to allow downloads for 2-3 days, and complained about the Big Brother feeling of the registration process.
Once again, interface design comes into play - like our recent experience trying to buy a classified ad from the LA Times, which resulted in an entire lost morning (simile alert: "it was like trying to buy something in a store, only the cashier keeps making you go back to the store and fill up your cart and wait in line all over again") and ultimately, no purchase of an ad in the LA Times. They really are stupid over there. When a company makes it difficult for you to give them money, there is nothing but bad news, layoffs and ultimately bankruptcy and extinction in the future for that firm.
The best that can be said from this is that maybe the labels are learning from it, and they might be ready to actually treat their customers like human beings, rather than criminals.
BusinessWeek says out loud what many in newspapers have been wondering: When will the industry just concede defeat and migrate to the web?
Not soon, I think.
All the case studies that I've been doing show that there is life yet in those thin sheets of ink-covered cellulose. As Bob Cauthorn put it years ago, "The problem isn't with the format. If that was the case, the readers would just be going to the online editions. The problem is with the content." In other words, newspapers aren't focusing on giving their readers the news that they want/need - news about things that are relevant to them. Instead, we get the damn Paris Hilton-fest, the John Edwards haircut story, etc. etc. OK, yeah, these stories "pop a number."
But as I pointed out 10 years ago now, this kind of news is empty calories. It's a bowl of Chee-tos, drowning in Mountain Dew, topped off by the cream filling sucked out of a dozen Twinkies for breakfast.
Just like junk food, the junk news has a deleterious effect on the consumer - and now, finally, on the provider. The Paris Hilton-esque stories provide a short-term boost, but in the long term, I think the readers are turned off. They get sick of the spectacle, of the empty hype. How many times have you heard people complain about overblown, overhyped, empty stories in the last decade or so? How many times have you complained yourself?
Contrast this with the case study that I did on the Point Reyes Light, where the local paper really dug into stories that the community cared about, and did it in a way that reflected the community's values. A newspaper that actually prints news about people that you know, or know of ... a newspaper that prints stories about things that happen to people in your community, things that you've heard about ... a newspaper that makes that little bell in your head go "Ding!" every morning, when you see a story that you know that you have to pay attention to because it's happening right down the street ...
That is a newspaper that you go back to.
Because you know that the next time you go back to it, that paper is going to give you something that you can actually use, rather than a story that screams for your attention, and at the end, makes you feel shallow, ashamed and used.
At the risk of overwork the information = food metaphor too much, but I see parallels between the increasing movement to get some sanity back into our Fast-food Nation diets, to try to cut down on the "obesity epidemic" -- such as the announcement today that the sugar-filled food manufacturers won't be aiming as much advertising at kids as they were before. And that Mickey D's is putting apple slices into happy meals, rather than trans-fat soaked french fries ... maybe American news consumers, aka "The People Formerly Known As The Audience," are slowly voting with their eyeballs, their mouse clicks, and their cancellation of ever-cheaper subscriptions, no matter what kinds of special offers the increasingly desperate circulation departments throw at them.
2007 does not look materially kinder than 2006 for any of these papers. One senior executive describes the climate like this: "If you told me 24 months ago that revenues would be declining as much as they are today, I'd say you were smoking dope." Print newspapers require maintaining a costly status quo—paper, presses, trucks, and mail rooms—that, if only through rising gas prices, will only get more expensive.
WHEN, EXACTLY, do you junk something that no longer works? And which major paper should go first—not today, but within the next 18 or 24 months?
San Francisco Chronicle, I'm looking at you.
Killing print requires acknowledging not just that the old mode is dead but also that the future means less revenue and shrunken staffs. This is why it makes sense soonest at a money-losing newspaper already grappling with those realities, and one in a major city that generates enough local ad dollars to support a sizable online business.
They go on to suggest that the Chronicle, in particular, leverage its great sfgate.com site to just boldly make the jump. They say that maybe killing the paper edition and just going gonzo into the web edition, thus saving on paper costs, delivery trucks, printing presses, ink, etc., will save money, and that with the paper basically being the only game in town, advertisers will be forced to follow the paper onto the web-only platform if they still want to reach the Chronicle's readers. And that the paper could also just buy "tons of unsold local ad investory from teh likes of MySpace and Yahoo and then resell it profitably..."
Hmmm. There is a part of me that says that maybe the time has come for making a Big Bold Move. After all, how much worse can it get? The last five years have been disastrous, and the future ain't making me wear shades either. I think that the time is coming when a major - or formerly major - newspaper is going to finally be the first penguin off the glacier. I think that the Chronicle is actually a pretty good candidate for that type of a move - but I think that it's something that's going to have to be handled the way that Apple handled the release of the iPhone. It has to be explained and talked about in advance, it has to be done as though it is going to be a game-changing move, and that way it accrues a sense of being Something You Must Pay Attention To. If the move to the web is seen as being done only out of utter despair, then the audience will turn away.
It's like in Hollywood, where the one thing that nobody can stand is even the faintest whiff of desperation ... if the readers think that the web is something that is being tried only because nothing else the Chronicle has done has worked, well then, what kind of a message does that send to the readers? Does that make the new&improved online edition, into which all remaining resources are about to be poured, look like something great, new and vital? Hell no. It makes the online edition look like the wood shavings curling up under the fingernails of the newspaper, as it scrabbles desperately at the cornice, before falling off into the abyss. Who wants to be associated with that? Certainly not any advertiser.
Ken Brown also has a related, interesting take, in that he sees that journalists have to kick the Messiah Complex habit, and start thinking of themselves as providing a service for the readers ... and that if they don't properly provide that service, well, the customers certainly can, will and have gone elsewhere:
While the distinction may seem semantic, I think the industry's
mistaken impression of itself underlies its fear and loathing of
readers' migration online.
As a product, newspapers are doomed
-- and their demise is coming a lot faster than many of us realize. But
as a service, journalism and the journalism business have unprecedented
opportunity. The sooner journalists start thinking of their business as
a service, the better equipped they'll be for the changes ahead.
The Future is Here: Russia and Estonia are living up to the fantasies of hack sci-fi authors and computer security salesmen. They are engaging in a virtual war.
The reasons for this war are pretty thin - most political insiders in Moscow dismiss this as a shallow and meaningless concoction on the part of Putin, designed mainly to distract the Russian electorate in an election year. It's old and time-worn tactic, but one that still finds favor with politicians that want to play the old magician "nothing up my sleeve" distraction game.
My friend Dave Mitchell devoted the latter part of a column on his blog to this issue, and I've had a front-row seat to some of the events as they have unfolded. In a nutshell, the Estonians took down a gaudy bronze statue of a Soviet soldier a couple weeks before the big May 9 V-E Day celebrations. Putin seized on the action (the Estonians were apparently not getting rid of the statue, just moving it to another place) and branded the Estonians as a bunch of pro-Nazi ingrates who were persecuting the ethnic Russians, yada yada blah blah.
I particularly liked the pictures of the forlorn pro-Russia protesters chasing after the Estonian ambassador's car, as it pulled away from the embassy, on its way to a vacation. The "youth groups" that are making the most noise are widely known to be paid by the Kremlin to feign outrage and generate flashy TV images.
No big deal. But in the last couple of weeks, the conflict has moved to a whole new arena - cyberspace. Estonia's economy is apparently quite web-dependent. Russian hackers have pretty much taken down the Estonian web presence through waves of DDoS attacks. (Quick explanation: DoS is "Denial of Service" which is what happens when a whole bunch of zombie robot slave computers under the control of a hacker all try to access your webservers at the same time. In real-world traffic terms, it's like sending a million cars to jam the drive-thru windows of Mickey D's.) Check out the front page of the Moscow Times, scanned here for your convenience:
This is the story from a couple of weeks ago, when Putin gave a fiery speech during the May 9 parades, denouncing the Estonians.
The latest update from Moscow says that the tactic is starting to spread in the provocation/response pattern so familiar to anyone who's paid attention to, well, just about any of the wars in the last century or so. Viz:
Hackers this year have also attacked the sites of groups as politically
disparate as the ultranationalist Movement Against Illegal Immigration;
the pro-Kremlin youth groups Nashi, Young Russia and Mestniye; and The
Other Russia, the opposition coalition that has organized a series of
Dissenters' Marches this year.
Alexander Kalugin, a spokesman for Young Russia, said
a six-hour DDoS attack on his group's web site in March was likely the
work of Estonian nationalists angered over its protests outside the
Estonian Embassy over plans to relocate a Soviet World War II monument
in central Tallinn that sparked a recent diplomatic dispute.
"We were burning Estonian banners and trampling an effigy of the Estonian president," Kalugin said.
The Movement Against Illegal Immigration had 40 of
its regional web sites struck by DDoS attacks from early February to
early April, said Alexander Belov, the organization's leader.
Belov blamed the security services for carrying out the attacks under the pretext of battling extremism.
I'm tempted to say that any kind of warfare that doesn't involve streets choked with bodies and rubble is an improvement - but I am uneasy. The fact that more and more people are getting hip to the idea that there are cheap and easy ways to hit below the belt; the fact that the web is still very vulnerable to this kind of thing - all that is definitely a blinking red light.
This is a slight experiment in sending content directly to my blog from MS Word. The one step that is of concern to me is the one where it says "Other users may be able to see your password and info – do you want to continue?"
There is something both sad and comforting to drive down the streets of Moscow and see a Sbarro sIgn in Cyrillic
First impressions – there are a lot of signs in English here
–
almost as many as there were in Amsterdam. Despite the old-world concrete
frowning feeling of the Passport Control Center in the basement of the airport,
you can’t feel too intimidated if, while standing in line, you can look up to
see two brand-new Panasonic HDTV plasma screens playing an endless loop of ads
for expensive consumer products.
Apparently, it’s a big deal here to have dirty keys on your
piano – luckily, they have special attachments to the vacuums (courtesy of some
Russian company) designed expressly to clean the keys on your piano.
There were lots of Mercedes and BMWs in the airport parking
lot – alongside a tricked-out Lincoln Navigator with oversize chrome rims. Someone here has been watching MTV.
There are a lot of big car dealerships on the outskirts of
Moscow – it looks a little like Tony Soprano-area New Jersey that way. And the people scurrying around these
environs look a little like extras from the Sopranos as well. Near the airport, the highway is smooth and
new. Closer to Moscow, the streets are
rutted, jammed and potholed & patched.
The radio stations in English play a very eclectic mix –
from The Bangles doing “Eternal Love” to Beyonce and Eminem.
I can’t get over how many international brands there are
lining the big highway into town. Pioneer car stereos, Samsung computer monitors, DHL couriers, even a
Sbarro (although that was the one sign that was in Cyrillic – I just knew it
was Sbarro cheapass pizza from the color and typography of the sign. Now there’s a case study in branding, if
anyone wants to tackle it.)
The river (Volga? Home
of the storied Volga Boatmen? I think I
faintly heard their signature dirgelike chanting…) is sluggish with ice still –
I didn’t want to look too much like a tourist, and take a picture on the way
in. I later overcame my reticence in
this area – only to find that I had neglected to pack the cable to scarf the
pix off my camera – luckily, the Vaio has a nice little slot in the front where
you can click in the fragile little wafer. It kinda clicks in like the glass
doors on stereo cabinets – you know, you push once and it goes “cli-CLICK” and
is kinda recessed, and to remove it you push on it and it goes “CLI-clunk” and
pops out. And the damn thing was only
$14 at Circuit City?
Anyway, back to the ride into Moscow. There are still the
big high-density apartment buildings lining the roads – but not as many nor as
dense as I had been led to believe. Which is no big deal, really.
It’s weird to see these fearsome Red Army soldiers in full
battle rattle on the street, getting yelled at for knocking over a ladder.
I can quite connect what I’m seeing on the streets to the
world I saw in the movies or on TV. Can any of these be the snow-choked streets
that the Bolsheviks marched down in 1917?
This city just sprawls – block after block of frowning brick
buildings, with Westernized ads and signs; some in the process of being spruced
up. How much blood and history took
place on these streets? Is history ever
done with us? Or are we all making history right now, every second of the day,
without really being cognizant of it? Freaking out and thinking all the while
that we’re desperately improvising and that at any minute the whole house of
cards is going to collapse on us. Meanwhile, the past seems to have so much clarity. There's a lesson here for those wondering about what to do about the digital revoiution...
In about 12 hours, I get on a KLM jet for 15 hours of confinement (broken up by one short layover - just enough to get the blood clots in the femoral arteries moving) on my way to Moscow to start the new consulting gig for Innovation. I'll be experimenting with posting to this blog from there - it has been way, way too busy these last two weeks to post the way that I've wanted to ... and the failures of TypePad in South America are the subject of an "Open Ticket" with my beloved bloghosts.
In the meanwhile, here are a couple of pics from Chile and Argentina to take up some space on this blog and make it look lively.
This first shot is of a canyon that I did the zipline/canopy tour down, zig-zagging back and forth, whilst trying to take some kind of video. In fact, I do have a short video of this, which I will also try to post in the next week or so. God willing and the creek don't rise...
After 15 hours of agony on the American Airlines flights back from Buenos Aires, I am back in L.A., and working hard already on trying to arrange for the next big international webmedia trip - this one to Moscow. The forms that the Russian Consulate requires travelers to fill out to get a visa are absolutely amazing in the amount of detail that they demand. It's worse than filling out a job application - at least there, you don't have to mail them your passport, and hope to Christ that they send it back to you before your flight takes off...
Anyway, I have tons of postings and photos that I have to put up in this space, along with links to pages that I'm putting up at the main Hard News site - my PowerPoint presentation is already up there at www.hardnewsinc.com/chile if you want to take a look at it. I will also be posting my list of sites that I think are interesting, and the reasons I think so, along with a list of all the tech toys that I use/recommend.
Tops on my list of new fave technologies has to be Skype. Folks, Skype saved my ass. Free calls of whatever length to anyone else with a Skype account? Man, you just can't beat it. If you haven't gotten a Skype account yet, go to www.skype.com and sign up.
Me? I gotta go back to applying for travel health insurance (apparently, the Rooskies won't let you in the country unless you have some sort of health policy).
Well, my first multimedia presentation in Chile was probably the hardest, but the gathering seemed energized by what I was saying. I wasn't sure before I started if what I was going to talk about would be too simple and obvious, but apparently the assembled managers and directors found at least some meaning and originality to what I had to say.
I challenged the journalists there to come up with one way to encourage and incentivize conversations; and I have to say that for a group that was thrown into the deep end of a pool, and asked to come up with something on the spot, they did rather well. More than that, I think that the process of getting together and talking about what they think the future of newspapers and radio stations could or should be can't be bad.
Now on to more presentations here in Santiago and in Concepcion. I'll post more when I finally get some time in my hotel, they're keeping me busy here.
I have arrived in Santiago, Chile to find that it is one of the
cleanest big cities I think I've ever seen. Especially in South
America. I mean, this place couldn't be MORE different from the Caracas
that I remember, where there were massive random holes in the sidewalks
that would break your ankles if you didn't constantly keep your head
down to watch where you
were walking. Where on Thursday nights on
Avenidas Fuerzas Armadas, the textile shops and restaurants would their
trash out into the streets, and the stinking rotting piles would be
swarming with filthy, slimy sewer rats by the time I got off work and
staggered to the subway.
No, this place reminds me, if anything, of Calgary. There are shiny new
avant-garde looking skyscrapers all over the place, and even more
cranes dotting the landscape, erecting more. The streets are smooth and
well-maintained. The cars are shiny and well-maintained.
The quibbles that I do have are that it was a drag getting into the
airport this morning at 5 a.m., after flying for 15 hours, to find that
after waiting in the long immigration line, I had to get out, walk all
the way across the terminal to get to a window where I had to pay a
$100 "reciprocity" fee to enter the country. The Canucks get slammed
for $167, so I don't feel so bad.
My guess is that this is close kin to the fees and fingerprinting and
other indignities that the Brazilians have implemented for gringoes -
but only for gringoes - as a result of the parade of stupidity that
Homeland Security has foisted on foreign travelers trying to get into
the U.S. in the last six years.
Anyway, the other thing that blew me away was how much the airport in
Lima has changed. When I was first through there, the whole place
resembled some 3rd tier airport - something that you might find in
Podunk, Texas. These days the floor are spotless shiny marble. There
is a Peruvian flute band playing on the concourse. The stores are all
new and look like gift shops that you find at LACMA or next to Ceasar's
Palace in Vegas. I almost bought an amazingly soft Alpaca blanket just
because it felt so inviting.
Anyway, here are a couple of shots out the
window of the hotel room,
and of the room itself. The Hotel Novo here is obviously designed for
Japanese visitors - the furnishings, the height of the tables and
toilets and the small space are reminiscent of the small hotels that
starting springing up in the early 90s in Hawaii, specifically to cater
to the Japanese tourist trade.
Now all I have to do is to pull two 90-minute presentations out of my
ass (complete with funny and penetratingly wise slides) by 11 a.m.
tomorrow. Did I mention that I am sick and my back is in agony from 15
hours confined on the flight?
I did want to be challenged more in this new career/life...
Almost unnoticed, the paradigm shifts and the fate of the "ostriches," the media companies that still cling desperately to the notion that the internet is just a fad, is sealed.
I'm still preparing for the trip to Chile - and God, I needed this week off just to take care of all the other ticky-tacky stuff before I head down - but I had to jump out of prepping my speech(es) to note this otherwise ignored bit.
According to Hitwise, that low-level grinding noise that you can hear, if you have just the right kind of ears, was the massive entertainment-consumption paradigm ponderously shifting in favor of online entertainment. Remember, this data is for a site that barely existed two years ago, and was created using what was basically the equivalent of the money spent on doughnuts for the Teamsters on your average Jerry Bruckheimer shoot:
During the week of February 3, YouTube's traffic surged
above the combined traffic to all of the television network websites.* This is
a landmark event in the changing face of web traffic and entertainment
consumption, now that entertainment seekers are now more likely to go to
YouTube than any other television network or gaming website. The custom
category of 56 television cable and broadcast network sites received 0.4865% of
all US Internet traffic for the week ending
2/17/07
, while YouTube received 0.6031%.
Blaaahhh! Head ... exploding ... moving ... too ... fast ...
[bonks head repeatedly against desk]
(phew!) That's better.
Way back in '99 when I started getting involved in streaming video, we all knew that watching and, more to the point, interacting with entertainment media via your computer was the Wave of The Future. Still, the thought was that movie and TV studios and producers would be smart enough and nimble enough to get out in front of this wave, and that in the future, we'd see Mel Gibson and Julia Roberts and Sharon Stone (remember - this was the late 90s - these people were still relevant) all doing their thing in an interactive streaming video environment.
What we underestimated was the tenacity with which the hidebound bureaucratic studios and production companies would cling to their outmoded business models, when the future could so clearly be seen. To be fair, when Web 1.0 imploded and everyone standing near the impact craters (such as yours truly) lost their shirts, the closets the shirts had been stored in and the houses that contained the closets, it gave the mossbacked reactionaries a perfect "I told you so" moment. Since then, the future has arrived like the swelling of the wave pictured above. The flailing attempts of media companies to kill YouTube have only made it stronger - viz the whole reasonit got big in the first place.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out what happens from here on out. It may not be YouTube that winds up the eventual winner - in fact, I don't think that the strictures of Web 2.0 allow for such thing as an "eventual winner." There will be constant churn. And that's OK. The reign of the "Big 3" networks and the Sony/Warner/Viacom/Fox megaliths will continue. For a while, at least. If by no other means then by using their enormous cash reserves to buy up New Media properties and attempt to co-opt them into their orbits. Hell, even YouTube is owned by Google.
But these megaliths are all rooted in shifting sands. The fact that a snot-nosed startup can beat them up on the playground and take their lunch money, AFTER said megaliths have spent the last 15 years throwing billions and untold man-hours of labor attempting to encircle and capture the New Media market proves just how incompetent and short-sighted the management structures of these companies are.
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