Dana Blankenhorn

Internet is the New Radio

Michael Wolff believes that “TV is the new TV.” Jeff Jarvis insists that a paper’s decision to go all-digital is not a death sentence.

Both, in the current economic environment, are fundamentally wrong.

You will find the answer when you turn on your TV. What you will find there is not action, and not news. You will find talking heads. Talking heads are cheap and draw audiences. This was true 50 years ago, when talk radio was first invented, and it is just as true today. TV is not the new TV, it’s the new radio.

A web site budget consists of three kinds of costs:

• Capital costs, the Web site and tools needed to create content on it
• Bandwidth costs, which have been falling over time
• Labor costs, which have been rising over time. These include the management costs needed to define and oversee the site’s mission.

A typewriter and word processing software are one kind of capital cost, but it takes a lot of labor to create things with them. A TV camera and studio set up are another kind of capital cost, but they take much less labor to create things with them.

Anyone with “the gift of the gab,” as Salman Rushdie wrote, can create an hour of TV or radio content in about an hour. But even the best writer (especially the best writer) may take many days to create an hour’s worth of reading material.

A New Model for Journalism

Ever since the Web was spun, 21 years ago now, I have continually asked publishers a single, simple question.

How hungry are you? (Gee, we were all so young then...)

The fact is that journalists have never been very hungry. An ad is just an empty billboard. The buyer has to fill it with a message that will drive people down the sales funnel. Traditional journalists haven’t bothered themselves with such things.

Publishers had to. A publisher’s job is to define a market – a place, an industry, a lifestyle – and bring buyers together with copy that he can then sell ads against. Publishers are businessmen. They are not subject to the “ethics” of journalists. They’re subject to the laws and the rules of business. They should be focused on market making. That is their job. For 20 years they have failed to do that job, and journalism as a whole has suffered.

Here’s how hungry you can get.

Newspaper Armageddon And What Comes Next

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 32 of the newsletter I have written weekly since March, 1997. Enjoy.

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As I've noted before, when I was a journalism student at Northwestern University, 35 years ago now, I engaged in debates with my teachers about the coming of the online world.

They were upset about it. I was optimistic. I insisted the news business could adapt to a cheaper means of delivering more product, and the result would be more jobs for journalists. They insisted the world was coming to an end.

We were both right.

I deliberately sought a career in the new media, and from the time I joined Newsbytes, in 1985, I looked for new means through which to get news to people and make a living. I tried an online newsletter as early as 1989. My Interactive Age Daily was the first online publication to launch alongside a print counterpart, in 1994. I treated what became A-Clue.com, from which this blog post descends, as an online newsletter starting in 1997.

Mark Twain, Tech Writer

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 20 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Mark Twain's been gone for over a century now, but his work still leaves a mark.

He was considered America's premier writer for much of his life, and remains our most famous. He worked from the unusual position of humor, but produced some of the most profound classics of the American page.

It's well-known that he liked technology. He wrote “Huckleberry Finn” on a typewriter, which was technology in the 1870s. He lost a fortune on a typesetting machine, which was the minicomputer of the 1880s. He ran his own publishing house and pioneered the selling of books by subscription. And he wasn't shy about any of it, which is a lesson more writers should take to heart.

But what I didn't realize until reading his autobiography  recently was just how much of a technophile he really was.

News Sites Play Hide the Pickle

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 16 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Throughout the Web, the information with the highest cost and lowest return is news.

For me to appear at an event in person, I have to get dressed, get there, stay there, and get back home. It's a full day production. It keeps me from doing anything else.

The problem is that all this effort doesn't bring me any more page views than I'd get from just picking the story off the wire and commenting on it. Less, because I'm not a major news player.

The problem I face is exponentially greater for the major news player. Everyone links to the first person with the story, sometimes with credit but more often not, and the number of page views the first-mover gets may be relatively small. This isn't all bad. Often, the best story is the one that is well-considered, that brings in other facts, that's researched with links and thought through before it's published.

As a result, news sites have been engaged in a growing game I call hide the pickle.

Round Two of the Copyright Wars

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 13 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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I have been following the copyright wars since their inception, in 1997. I watched the passage of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) in 1998, and the No Electronic Theft Act.

Both had a similar aim, to keep people from stealing making and re-selling copies of material subject to copyright, now that technology allowed for clean (or nearly clean) copies.

My sympathies here are purely with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and blogs like Boingboing, which hate these laws as attacks on freedom of speech, of association, and the free exchange of ideas.

Time Is Money And Money Is Time

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 12 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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All the talk about the price of content misses the point.

Content has a price, always. Whether you're reading content, listening to it, or watching it on a screen, the price is your time.

Time is the most valuable asset any of us have. Our time is limited. We must spend big hunks of it sleeping, eating, and traveling. We spend a third or more of our time making the money we need to sustain us.

What's left, the time available for content, is thus very precious.

I got a clue on this when I received an Amazon Kindle Fire for Christmas. I'd gotten Amazon Prime for the cheap shipping, thus I suddenly had access to all sorts of “free” content. Lots of TV shows I missed, lots of movies. Too many, it turns out. When I try to catch up on a series I thought I'd like, I find I'm taking time away from reading I could be doing.

The Open Source Thesis Returns

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 48 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Right after this year's election I began looking back at all the stories I've written, since 2006, on political philosophy.

I was looking for patterns, and frankly for an e-book.

My review is far from complete – there are over 200 pages just in the first year I began my work – but what I have found is that my views on political patterns were first informed by my work on open source. I first wrote about what I called the “open source thesis” in 2006 , and I found, even then, that it matched up very well with the political aims of one Barack Obama.

If A Story Isn't Linked To Does It Make a Sound?

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 39 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Since joining TheStreet.com earlier this year, I have been struck by their 1990s' attitude toward links. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

The idea is that, when you link to something, you tell people in the text who you're linking to. Sounds fair, doesn't it?

But what if the story you found on Google News originated with, say, The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times? Further, what if you found the story somewhere else, when it was republished by an affiliate?

Who do you link to?

Publishers Screw Google News, and Google News Screws You

Over the last few years I have come to rely on Google News. It provides the most links to every news story, and scanning the main page gives me a one-minute view of the headlines, not just globally but in my areas of interest.

But lately publishers have been screwing Google News with new policies, and Google News has in turn been screwing its readers.

The reason: paywalls. Publishers think you should pay for reading their stuff. Fine, I won't read my stuff.

But Google doesn't want to piss them off, and still links to it. Worse, it now links without identifying the paywall. This is sometimes because it has made deals with publishers for “publicity” purposes, giving those who link to stories through Google News some access to the actual stuff. (Although if you try to leave that particular page you quickly find you're out of luck.)

It's for this reason that I avoid The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. I can find out what's going on without them, thank you very much. They are not as essential as they think. And if we're forced to pay separately for each newspaper we look at online, how many papers are we going to look at? Exactly.

The purpose of these paywalls isn't so much to make money as to eliminate competition. Make a successful paywall a requirement for competing and there will be a whole lot less competition. 

Worse is what Google is allowing The Financial Times to do. They offer a story on Google News, but if you click on it you don't go to the story. Instead you go to the paper's main page. This is a strategy right out of Murdoch, circa 1998, and it's stupid. I have sometimes found Google adding a preliminary page to this hosing, saying that you're going to some long URL (which savvy readers can identify as the home page, although it includes all sorts of cookie data in it) and you should click here to give permission for the move.

Not good enough.

The old policy made sense. Identify when there's a paywall, or a forced subscription wall. Let me make the choice whether to click or not.

Better yet. Don't offer a link to something you're not letting people link to. (Or charge for the link as you would for an ad, and identify it as such.)