Matthew Creamer of Ad Age is contemplating the future of news and wondering if it’s an aggregated cluster fuck.
With the expensive pursuit of professional content failing to jibe with profitability, media entrepreneurship looks to be reduced to a meta role of repackaging what’s already out there.
Welcome to the era of the aggregator.
For reporters, editors and publishers this is an unwelcome welcoming, at best.
Creamer shares some of the collective doubt hanging on his peers like stale smoke.
If aggregating is becoming the best way to make money from content, who’s going to undertake the costly business of creating that content?
Great question. And without original reporting, there won’t be much for the aggregators to aggregate.
Q. You made a name as an independent artist. How does it feel to be signed now?
A. I just see it as I’m me. Lost Highway’s been great and I’m really excited about the potential they give me, but at the end of the day it’s not about labels or publicists. You’ve gotta have the songs. If you don’t have the songs it’ll dry up at some point. Obviously, I work hard at my career and try to stay afloat, but I’ve always focused on that. At the end of the day, I’m a songwriter. Delivering on that allows all the other stuff … it just starts and ends with the songs.
I love that answer.
Hayes is solid.
I also like that he calls Adam Carroll, Walt Wilkins and Sam Baker, “true poets.” I’d never heard of these fine gents, but with Hayes recommendation, it took but seconds to click over to iTunes and buy Adam Carroll’s “Far Away Blues.” Wilkins and Baker, you’re next!
Hayes adds at the end of the interview, “In my perfect world, Todd Snider would be a platinum artist, Ray Wylie Hubbard would be winning Grammys and Adam Carroll would be selling out Gruene Hall. But that’s just my taste.”
And my taste, and many others’.
[MP3 Offering] “Drunken Poet’s Dream” by Hayes Carll (live at Waterloo Records, 4/8/08). Ray Wylie Hubbard co-wrote this song.
Newseum, “the interactive museum of news,” which opens today in Washington, DC, kindly displays front pages from hundreds of newspapers around the country, at the museum and online (only about 80 front pages are displayed at the museum).
In person, the gallery — featuring a spectacular view of the U.S. Capitol — provides the perfect setting for visitors contemplating the relationship between press and democracy. Online, the overview of front pages is accompanied each weekday by an analysis, comparing and contrasting coverage of national, international and local news by examining headlines, design, photographs and the placement of stories.
The Newseum is located at Pennsylvania Avenue and Sixth Street, N.W., Washington, DC. Admission is $20 for adults, $18 for seniors, $13 for kids aged seven to 12 and free for kids under six.
I’m listening to Hayes Carll’s new release, Trouble In Mind, out today on Lost Highway. It’s bound to be big in honky tonks from Odessa to Beaumont, for Carll drips Texas from every pour in his body. In a good way.
Another Texan I’m listening to these days is Jimmy LaFave. Pop Matters reviewed his 2007 release, Cimarron Manifesto, a record I have in my collection. Here’s a passage from the article:
LaFave’s sound is much more Red Dirt than Red State, although geographically speaking, it would be easy to assume that, if the media were to be unquestionably believed, it reflects a “Hey! Everything’s alright!” musical mentality. On Cimarron Manifesto, LaFave recognizes that everything is not alright. Picking up the protest song mantle, he delivers the oh-so-Guthrie, “This Land”, combining a folk-based, traveling road song with a subdued sadness and depression regarding the state of the country. Tackling the subjects of poverty and war, the song invokes images of a Steinbeckian dust bowl in a contemporary setting: “I see people / Just stranded by the road / They’re hopeless and forgotten / While the milk and honey flows.”
LaFave moved to Oklahoma during his high school years, and that state also plays into his writing and music. In fact, he put out an album named Texoma in 2001.
Beth Ann Fennelly’s best poems are as noisy as a rat in a coffee can: They twitch, scramble and all but turn themselves inside out on the page. A classier way to put it is that the poems are over-determined, like dreams. Freud observed that dreams have more than one cause, which is what makes them action-packed; the same is true for poetry. In Fennelly’s best work, you get an entire bookful of images in just a page or two.
With vivid language of this sort in a review, I had to find out more about Fennelly’s work. A few Google clicks in, I stumbled upon this poem from her new book Unmentionables:
from The Kudzu Chronicles – Oxford, Mississippi
by Beth Ann Fennelly
1.
Kudzu sallies into the gully
like a man pulling up a chair
where a woman was happily dining alone.
Kudzu sees a field of cotton,
wants to be its better half.
Pities the red clay, leaps across
the color wheel to tourniquet.
Sees every glass half full,
pours itself in. Then over the brim.
Scribbles in every margin
with its green highlighter. Is begging
to be measured. Is pleased
to make acquaintance with
your garden, which it is pleased to name
Place Where I Am Not.
Yet. Breeds its own welcome mat.
2.
Why fret
if all it wants
is to lay one heart—
shaped palm
on your sleeping back?
Why fright
when the ice
machine dumps its
armload of diamonds?
If you have an extremely popular blog, other media makers might be willing to bet on you. That’s the idea forwarded in today’s Sunday Styles.
image of the white guy likin’ a dog, courtesy of Flickr user, PancakeJess
At the center of the piece is Christian Lander, an Internet copywriter who launched Stuff White People Like last January. The blog has since entertained millions of visitors with things white people like. Some of those things are: Having Gay Friends, Dinner Parties, Book Deals, Graduate School and The Idea of Soccer.
One of the intriguing aspects to this story is how literary agents have swooped in to scour the net for talent.
One of the first literary agents to troll the Web for talent was Kate Lee, who in 2003 was an assistant at International Creative Management, the sprawling talent agency, looking for a way to make her name.
When she started contacting bloggers and talking to them about book deals, many were stunned that a real literary agent was interested in their midnight typings. Her roster was so rich with bloggers, including Matt Welch from Hit & Run and Glenn Reynolds from Instapundit, that the New Yorker profiled her in 2004. Two years from now, the magazine noted, “Books by bloggers will be a trend, a cultural phenomenon.â€
And two years after that?
“If I contact someone or someone is put in touch with me, chances are they’ve already been contacted by another agent,†Ms. Lee said. “Or they’ve at least thought about turning their blog into a book or some kind of film or TV project.â€
I found it interesting that Kurt Andersen, a founder of Very Short List, who is represented by the William Morris agency and acts as an adviser to Random House, had a taste maker’s role in taking Stuff White People Like to book form. Lander’s agent asked Anderson to bring it to the attention of Gina Centrello, the president and publisher of Random House, which he did.
Inhabit is encouraging citizens of the world to participate in tonight’s Earth Hour, an idea from World Wildlife Fund that asks us to turn off our lights for an hour (to conserve energy and build awareness for the growing need to do so).
Let’s talk some more about newspapers and their primary challenger, the internet.
Stowe Boyd, a social web application designer and developer, has some provocative things to say about the situation.
I still read the thinner and thinner New York Times regularly, but less of us do that everyday. And online, there is a brave new world, where I am learning more about what’s going on through Twitter, blogs, and an increasingly social web than could ever be confined in a few dozen pages of newsprint.
I left a comment on his site that says I’m shocked. For sure, I “learn” what some pretty smart people are thinking and doing via Twitter and blogs, but the mainstream media, particularly our nation’s best newspapers, helps me learn what’s going on in my community, country and world. Two different types of learning.
Boyd’s comments were made in response to David Carr’s New York Times opinion piece about newspaper owners struggling to cope.
Newspapers continue to gain on the Web in part because they have the best talent, the biggest news hole and the most comprehensive coverage. But that value, which gave many papers their near-monopoly, could be wiped out by a sustained downturn.
Boyd does’t care for Carr’s comments about talent. He says, “it is ridiculous to assert that the folks scribbling madly for the companies that are falling into the abyss right before our eyes are somehow to be judged as ‘the best talent’.” But it’s an interesting question. Take the 1000 best bloggers, whatever best means to you, and compare them to the 1000 best mainstream journalists working today. Which side has more firepower? For me, that’s easy. MSM has the edge. “Real journalists” have the background, the sources, the discipline to fact check and copy edit and the benefit of face-to-face support from their peers in the profession.
If the guy down the proverbial blog street has some news to offer, I’m going to listen. But I’m not going to count on him for that news. Not like I count on a community newspaper. Newspapers need to survive. Maybe they don’t make the margins they came to expect in the past, but they need to be profitable so they can invest in their people and their product. Why do I care? Because a high quality news product, like clean energy or health care for all, is something our nation desperately needs.
None of this is meant to say I don’t prefer reading some blogs over MSM. I do. And I’d like to see these bloggers make a living at what they do best. Hell, I’d like to make a living at what I do best. Who wouldn’t? My point is this: disruption creates opportunity. Where there is destruction, there is rebirth. The media business is struggling to find its way. To me, this means anyone with the necessary skills, the right outlook and some pertinent answers has a chance at a rewarding career in media today. Whether that media is produced in a Manhattan skyscraper or in someone’s spare bedroom doesn’t matter. Quality matters. Transparency matters. Collaboration with the community matters.
I think it’s clear that both sides are learning from one another. MSM does quality better, but social media practitioners are good at transparency and community building. This whole thing boils down to the fact that newspapers, like pro and semi-pro bloggers, need to find a way to make money on the web. Advertising, subscriptions, content licensing and whatever else anyone can think of is what’s needed. We need a professional class of writers, photographers and multimedia makers.
Moving forward, the media business will encompass all. Petty distinctions–like who is a real journalist?–will fade. It’s already happening. MSM is embracing social media and prominent bloggers are fast becoming media company owners. Today, you’re a real journalist if you cover a beat consistently, honestly and professionally.
Greg Kot of Chicago Tribune calls some of the songs on The Raconteurs’ new release, Consolers of the Lonely “White Stripes B-sides.”
I respect Kot, but find this line of reasoning odd, because what I’m thinking is The Raconteurs are better in almost every way than Jack White’s original outfit. Not that I dislike the White Stripes. Maybe, I just need more than a two-piece can provide.
Dispensing with the usual months-long marketing campaign that accompanies a big release on a major record label, the Raconteurs last week announced that they would rush their second album, Consolers of the Lonely (XL/Warner), into stores Tuesday in all formats: digital, CD and even vinyl.
“We wanted to get this record to fans, the press, radio, etc., all at the exact same time so that no one has an upper hand on anyone else regarding [its] availability, reception or perception,” the band said.
It’s the latest indication that bands (and a few record companies) are wising up to the idea that the long lag time between finishing an album and actually releasing it to set up a proper awareness-building campaign is bad business. Now, it’s not unusual for fans on blogs and message boards to share unauthorized files of an album and dissect its contents weeks before its official release date. It’s a world in which a new album is often already old news by the time it shows up for sale on iTunes, Best Buy or the local mom-and-pop store.
After giving the record a couple listens, track four, “Old Enough” stands out. It opens with acoustic instruments and a from-the-hills-of-Tennessee feel. The lyrical setup is also intriguing. “You look pretty in your fancy dress, but I detect unhappiness. You never speak so I have to guess you’re not free.”
