by David Burn | May 8, 2007 | Media
Walter E. Hussman Jr., publisher of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette wrote an editorial for The Wall Street Journal (paid sub. req.) that probes the newspaper industry’s standard practice of giving away their product for free online.
It is time for newspapers to reconsider the ultimate costs and consequences of free news.
News has become ubiquitous, free, and as a result, a commodity. Anytime you are trying to sell something that becomes a commodity, you have lost much of the value in providing that product or service.
Not many years ago if someone wanted to find out what was in the newspaper they had to buy one. But not anymore. Now you can just go to the newspaper’s Web site and get that same information for free.
All of this would be fine if newspapers generated lots of additional revenues from offering free news. But the fact is newspapers generate most of their online revenues from classified advertising, not from news.
The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in Little Rock does not offer news for free on their website. They offer free headlines and in some cases a few free paragraphs, designed to get people to read the paper. They also offer free classifieds.
I’m not sure that the genie can be put back in the bottle, but there are certain papers like The Wall Street Journal that are worth paying for (I am one of their 900,000 plus online subscribers). Local news may also be worth paying for, but the audience willing to do so will most likely be a fraction of paid circulation.
by David Burn | Apr 29, 2007 | Media, The Environment
Arnie Cooper spoke with award-winning investigative journalist Greg Palast recently for The Sun Magazine. The text is not online, but Palast makes some major assertions that I’d like to share. First he debunks the entire idea of peak oil. He says it’s a myth invented by Shell Oil in 1956 in order to keep oil prices high.
We’re not running out of crude, dude. We’ve got plenty. The question is “At what price?” At twenty dollars a barrel, we’re dead out. At a hundred dollars a barrel? We’ve got all the oil you want.
Cooper then asks him about the need to turn to alternative energy. Palast is for it, but says it’s important to get the argument right. He says the “we’re running out of oil” argument leads directly to nuclear, while sustaining artificially high oil prices.
We won’t get green technology by telling people we’re running out of oil. Oil went up to seventy-five bucks a barrel, and I did not see one solar panel go up in New York City. Not one. We have to stop pumping carbon-based fuels into the air, not because we’re running out of carbon-based fuels, but because carbon will kill us. And it makes us political hostages to bloodthirsty maniacs.
As for the mainstream environmental movement, Palast pulls no punches.
The environmentalists like to talk about “win-win” scenarios. You know: corporations can make money by going green. What a crock of shit. Forget it. If they could do that, they would’ve done it already. Environmentalist Amory Lovins, who’s made millions of dollars working for big corporations, goes around saying, “Everyone wins.” Well, if everyone wins, then how come the skies are black and people in China are dying of arsenic poisoning? It’s bullshit. The only way we can get anything done is by limiting consumption by law and through a national commitment to use less carbon-based fuel. Let’s stop goosing around and clean up the planet.
I like the challenges presented by Palast, but I’m not ready to say business won’t soon profit from green technologies. Ted Turner, for one, believes sustainable energy and other green businesses will deliver wealth akin to what we’re seeing today in communications technology. I agree with Turner, and I agree with Palast’s point that we need to create and enforce much tougher environmental laws. A problem this big needs multiple answers. No single approach will do.
by David Burn | Apr 8, 2007 | Media
photo courtesy of Flickr user, Suw Charman
Danah Boyd is a smart lady with fabulous hats. She is a PhD candidate at the School of Information (SIMS) at the University of California – Berkeley and a Fellow at the University of Southern California Annenberg Center for Communications. Her dissertation looks at how youth engage with networked publics like MySpace, LiveJournal, Xanga and YouTube. She is interested in how the architectural differences between unmediated and mediated publics affect sociality, identity and culture. Ergo, the following riff on the myth of meritocracy and the unreality of reality TV is her intellectual sweet spot.
American individualism (and self-esteem education) have allowed us to uphold a myth of meritocracy. We sell young people the idea that anyone can succeed, anyone can be president. We ignore the fact that working class kids get working class jobs. This, of course, has been exacerbated in recent years. There used to be meaningful working class labor that young people were excited to be a part of. It was primarily masculine labor and it was rewarded through set hierarchies and unions helped maintain that structure. The unions crumpled in the 1980s and by the time the 1987 recession hit, there was a teenage wasteland No longer were young people being socialized into meaningful working class labor; the only path out was the “lottery” (aka becoming a famous rock star, athlete, etc.).
Since the late 80s, the lottery system has become more magnificent and corporatized. While there’s nothing meritocratic about reality TV or the Spice Girls, the myth of meritocracy remains. Over and over, working class kids tell me that they’re a better singer than anyone on American Idol and that this is why they’re going to get to be on the show. This makes me sigh. Do i burst their bubble by explaining that American Idol is another version of Jerry Springer where hegemonic society can mock wannabes? Or does their dream have value?
As for her rhetorical question at the end, I’m inclined to say all dreams are valuable. However, I don’t think Boyd is talking about dreams, nor even aspirations. She’s talking about delusions that are created by, and daily reinforced by, our media-centric culture.
There is a meritocracy in America. But it’s not sexy. “Success” takes hard work, plus discipline in school and later in the workforce. It requires decades of untold sacrifices, with no hope of wealth nor fame in one’s future. Instead, the struggle toward something like being the best history teacher, city planner, or bus driver one can be, leads to a greater civic good. And with any luck the inner satisfaction of a job well done.
But who is holding up these true American values today? Who is motivating youth to act on them? My hope is lots of great parents, aunts, uncles, coaches, teachers and other mentors who laregely go unheralded.
by David Burn | Mar 31, 2007 | Digital culture, Media
Editor & Publisher picked up a Poynter study on media consumption.
In a surprise finding, online readers finish news stories more often than those who read in print, according to the Poynter Institute’s Eyetrack study released Wednesday at the American Society of Newspaper Editors conference here.
When readers chose to read an online story, they usually read an average of 77% of the story, compared to 62% in broadsheets and 57% in tabloids.
In addition, nearly two-thirds of online readers read all of the text of a particular story once they began to read it, the survey revealed. In print, 68% of tabloid readers continued reading a specific story through the jump to another page, while 59% did so in broadsheet reading.
by David Burn | Mar 2, 2007 | Media
I’m loving Frontline’s “News War” multipart documentary. Watching a 90-minute installment the other night on my local PBS station afforded me the opportunity to hear from John Carroll. Carroll, now at Harvard, was the editor of the Los Angeles Times and prior to that, the Baltimore Sun. The way he speaks about newspapers really resonates with me.
Here’s a small slice of his interview, care of the PBS website:
I estimate that roughly 85 percent of the original reporting that gets done in America gets done by newspapers. They’re the people who are going out and knocking on doors and rummaging through records and covering events and so on. And most of the other media that provide news to people are really recycling news that’s gathered by newspapers.
It is very evident that the new media, the media that are coming along with the Web, are investing almost nothing in original reporting. If newspapers fall by the wayside, who’s going to do the reporting? What will we know? Who will stand up [against] the government when the government, for example, nullifies a couple of generations of law and secretly decides to wiretap us? Who will go to the courthouse? Who will go the police station in all the towns across America and make sure that things are being done properly? Who will examine all the people who seek to become political officeholders in the United States?
On why people go into journalism in the first place:
I think journalists — good journalists — have always looked upon themselves as public servants. … I don’t know why they want to go into it. I don’t think it’s really the money. The money’s pretty bad unless you become a superstar. I think it’s a combination of things. For a certain type of person, … it’s just an exciting way to make a living. It’s an exciting job. It’s fun. It gives you an excuse to satisfy your curiosity, gives you a reason to ask people questions and talk with interesting people and see interesting things, … and you get paid for it. … Just the sheer entertainment and satisfaction of crafting a story and seeing it in the paper, that in itself is a reason to go into it.
Then when you sit back and you think, well, is there a larger purpose to it? Yes. I’ve been involved in stories that have actually done some good for people. You have, too, stories that may have saved lives, stories that have increased the quality of justice in America, stories that have enlightened the public in helping to exercise their vote with more pertinent information.
So in the reflective moments, you can say not only am I entertaining myself; I’m actually doing some good.
And here he is speaking to the economics of the newpaper business:
Wall Street and corporations are becoming disillusioned with owning newspapers. … They’re extremely profitable — they make barrels full of money — but they don’t grow much from year to year. Let me illustrate. … A typical newspaper makes a 20 percent operating margin. That’s roughly double what the typical Fortune 500 company makes. They’re very profitable. … This is true at the Los Angeles Times; it’s true at the Baltimore Sun, where I used to be editor; it’s true at the Lexington Herald-Leader in Kentucky, which is a money-making machine. People think of this as a washed-up old business. It’s not.
It makes tons of money. But the owners are under great pressure to increase earning.
To sum up, journalism is a noble profession and the support beams of American democracy. Good reporters seek to reveal the truth and their actions turn a mean buck for the capitalists who organize them and distribute their work.
by David Burn | Feb 25, 2007 | Digital culture, Media, Politics
Anna G. Arutunyan, an editor at the Moscow News, writing about the Russian blogosphere for The Nation, reports that 700,000 LiveJournal users post in Cyrillic, making them second only to English speakers.
The LiveJournal community in Russia is known as Zhivoi Zhurnal, or ZheZhe for short. Arutunyan says Russian bloggers are becoming a lively alternative to mainstream media, and they’re using the site as an online organizing tool for offline protests.
LiveJournal founder Brad Fitzpatrick first visited Moscow last October when his company, Six Apart, announced a partnership with the Russian media company SUP-Fabrik, which would service the enormous Cyrillic sector. What struck him was the social magnitude of ZheZhe and the serious content of its journal entries. In America, “LiveJournal is lots of people writing to ten people [each, and] reading each other,” he told me. In ZheZhe this is magnified into thousands of readers. What for Americans is an electronic diary accessible to a few chosen acquaintances became, for Russians, a platform for forging thousands of interconnected virtual “friends.” And Fitzpatrick believes it has potential as a tool for activism. “I really appreciate what it is as a political platform.”
What ZheZhe seems to illustrate is that a crucial aspect of civil society is not just the freedom to report on what you see but the ability to get people inspired enough to react. Russians are already notorious for their centuries-old communal spirit–or sobornost. ZheZhe might be one of the technologies that will finally get them to act on it.
For additional user-generated content from Russian, check out RuTube.
by David Burn | Feb 11, 2007 | Media, Politics
We attended a fantastic symposium this morning in Savannah, courtesy of Savannah Country Day School. The speakers addressed one of the more pressing topics for our time—sustainability. Featured speaker, Robert Kennedy Jr., a hardcore environmentalist and brilliant speaker, also addressed another critical topic for our time—corporate control of government and media. Kennedy explained the history of the Fairness Doctrine, how it was dismantled by Ronald Reagan and the sorry state we’re in because of it.
Today, five huge corporations — Time Warner, Disney, News Corporation, Bertelsmann, and Viacom own 90% of the TV stations and radio stations in the U.S. This is a dangerous situation for the people of our nation. The founding fathers warned against it, and after WWII and the fall of fascism in Europe, the U.S. Congress legislated against it. According to the Museum of Broadcast Communications, the FCC took the view, in 1949, that station licensees were “public trustees,” and as such had an obligation to afford reasonable opportunity for discussion of contrasting points of view on controversial issues of public importance.
Of course, there are no such safeguards in place today, which is why we have propaganda where news once was. Thankfully, people are waking up from this nightmare and beginning to demand a free and fair press. U.S. Congressman from New York, Maurice Hinchey has introduced a bill that will restore the Fairness Doctrine.
Here’s “Article I” from Hinchey’s bill:
Our airwaves are a precious and limited commodity that belong to the general public. As such, they are regulated by the government. From 1949 to 1987, a keystone of this regulation was the Fairness Doctrine, an assurance that the American audience would be guaranteed sufficiently robust debate on controversial and pressing issues. Despite numerous instances of support from the U.S. Supreme Court, President Reagan’s FCC eliminated the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, and a subsequent bill passed by Congress to place the doctrine into federal law was then vetoed by Reagan.
MORA would amend the 1934 Communications Act to restore the Fairness Doctrine and explicitly require broadcast licensees to provide a reasonable opportunity for the discussion of conflicting views on issues of public importance.
Raw Story reports that concerns about monopolies and fears of a possible “fascist” takeover of the US media prompted the bill. Hinchey said, “This is a critical moment in history that may determine the future of our country…maybe forever.”
Hinchey blames the media for reporting false information that it is fed by the administration. “What lies will they tell in the future to jeopardize this democratic republic or even end this democratic republic? That is the objective of many of those involved.â€
by David Burn | Dec 24, 2006 | Media
Peter Kann made a list of 10 disturbing trends in mass media today. Kann is chairman of Dow Jones, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal.
Here are two that stand out for me:
- The blurring of lines between news and opinion. Newspapers have a format that helps maintain the distinction. The Internet, TV and most magazines have neither that format nor that tradition. The result is a blending of news and views. The two are not ingredients to mix together for a tastier meal, they are different courses. Part of the problem here lies in fashionable new philosophies that argue there are no basic values of right and wrong, that news is merely a matter of views. It’s a dangerous philosophy for our society and a dagger at the heart of genuine journalism.
- The blending of news and advertising, sponsorships or other commercial relationships. The resulting porridges may be called “advertorials” or “infomercials”; they may be special sections masquerading as news, news pages driven by commercial interests, or Web pages where everything somehow is selling something. Without clear distinctions between news and advertising, readers or viewers lose confidence in the veracity of a news medium. And advertisers lose the business benefit of an environment of trust.
Clearly, Mr. Kann is a purist. And there aren’t many of those left in our mashup culture.
by David Burn | Dec 1, 2006 | Media, Politics
I don’t often link to the National Review (in fact, I never have), but I’m compelled to do so today.
According to Think Progress, right-wing radio host Dennis Prager wrote a column earlier this week bitching about U.S. Representative-elect Keith Ellison’s (D-MN) intent to take his oath of office not on the Bible, but on the Koran. Ellison is the first Muslim ever elected to Congress. Prager claimed this “act undermines American civilization,” and compared it to being sworn in with a copy of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.”
Thankfully, Eugene Volokh, Professor of Law at UCLA, has a much more measured approach to the subject.
The U.S. Constitution is a multiculturalist document. Not in all senses, of course: It tries to forge a common national culture as well as tolerating other cultures. But it is indeed multiculturalist in important ways.
The Constitution expressly authorizes people not to swear at all, but to affirm, without reference to God or to a sacred work. Atheists and agnostics are thus protected, as well as members of certain Christian groups (like Quakers, who don’t believe in swearing oaths). Why would Muslims and others not be equally protected from having to perform a religious ritual that expressly invokes a religion in which they do not believe? Under the Constitution, all of them “are incapable of taking an oath on that book,” whether because they are Quakers, atheists, agnostics, or Muslims. Yet all remain entirely free to “serve in Congress.”
Presidents Franklin Pierce and Herbert Hoover (a Quaker) didn’t swear at all, but rather affirmed.
Clearly, knowledge of American history and the U.S. Constitution are not prerequisites for being a radio talk show host.
Maybe we can change that.
by David Burn | Nov 27, 2006 | Lowcountry, Media
WWVV-FM, a.k.a. Wave 104.9, Hilton Head’s adult album alternative station is no more.
According to Wikipedia:
On Tuesday, November 21st, 2006 the station began playing Christmas music as “104.9 John FM” with a new callsign, WWJN-FM. A male on-air voice could be heard in between songs stating “104.9 is John FM. John tells us what to play. Right now John wants to hear Christmas music so that’s what we’re playing. 104.9 John FM”. It is unknown at this point what format will show up on WWVV after the holidays, although the on-air statements make it seem as though Adult Hits might be likely even though that format is already represented in the area by WGCO-FM and WSGA-FM.
In a larger market, this would be no big deal since radio consumers would have other stations to turn to. Here, the loss is decidedly more papable. For instance, Wave 104.9’s Sunday evening programming included shows like eTown and Grateful Dead Hour. Will another local station pick up these best-in-class programs?
The genesis of these changes began last spring with the sale of the station by California-based Triad Broadcasting to JB Broadcasting, a small South Carolina company headed by John Broomfield. According to The Island Packet, Triad sold in order to comply with federal regulations. Federal Communications Commission regulations only allow a company to own or operate five FM stations in any one market.
